"Our Rulers are not Good People"

 

I recently stumbled across this observation by one of my favorite writers, Caitlin Johnstone. She said:

 

Our rulers are not good people. They are not wise. They are not compassionate. They aren’t even particularly intelligent. They just happen to be good at winning the capitalism game by moving the circumstances of our society around in such a way that the numbers in their bank accounts grow very large.

 

 

 Johnstone’s observation was in a post mostly about the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame  who, she notes, “exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy.”

This is apt, as Bezos is one of the all-star entrepreneurs and corporations generously ponying up for Donald Trump’s grotesque “ballroom.”

Bezos’s and others’ contributions to this cause, as everyone knows, are not motivated by any love of elegant ballroom dancing.  They are business investments, or, stated more honestly, a form of legalized bribery, a down payment on influence in the affairs of the state.

As Johnstone says, they are not good people.

Another writer I like, Chris Hedges, very recently posted an essay relevant to this topic. It is titled “America is a Banana Republic.”

The opening paragraph reads as follows:

El Presidente Trump is cast in the mold of all tinpot Latin American despots who terrorize their populations, surround themselves with sycophants, goons and crooks, and enrich themselves — Trump and his family have amassed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency — while erecting tawdry monuments to themselves.

 

 

Hedges goes on to point out similarities between Trump and some of the most notorious Latin American dictators of the not-too-distant past.

There was, for instance, Haiti’s “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who eventually spent a full half of the country’s budget on his ICE-like private militia, which violently disposed of 30 to 60 thousand of Baby Doc’s political opponents.

Another Trump prototype was Juan Vicente Gomez, who ruled Venezuela from 1908 to 1935. Gomez, Hedges writes, “looted the nation to make himself the wealthiest man in the country” and fought any efforts to educate the citizens, knowing their ignorance would ensure his continued place in power.

I thought of all this when Trump recently hosted, and fawned over, the Saudi Arabian ruler, Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman has been nicknamed “Bone Saw” in honor of his order to murder journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2019, then saw him into pieces for proper disposal.

When a U.S. reporter asked Bone Saw about this, Trump excoriated the reporter for her bad manners. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” he told the reporter. And besides, Trump added, “things happen” and “a lot of people didn’t like [Khashoggi] anyway.

Bone Saw was later honored with a state dinner attended by an all-star cast of U.S. rulers who, it seems, couldn’t afford NOT to attend a tribute to one of the world’s most psychopathic despots.

The list of conscience-less bigwigs at the dinner was headlined by – you guessed it – Jeff Bezos. Also attending were various ruling elite worth a total of $719 billion, according to Forbes. They included Elon Musk, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and the CEOs of Citigroup, Pfizer, Chevron, and General Motors.

Numerous A.I. and cybercurrency bigwigs made the scene. Also David Ellison, head of Paramount Skydance “ amid reports the Saudi sovereign fund could partly fund his company’s bid to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery.” (The company has denied this, so maybe Ellison was there out of pure admiration for Bone Saw’s work.)

Noticeably absent from the Bone Saw Bash were any representative of Human Rights Watch, the Climate Action Network, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.