“Instead of a feel-good ‘touting accomplishments’ campaign, Democrats should rip into the GOP with a warning that America’s future is at stake. Because it is.” John Nichols, The Nation May 16-23, 2022
Maybe we need to think of the world as might the late novelist John LeCarre, as an interconnected web of power, relationships, ideologies, and mutual interests, global and individual rivals jousting for advantage, influence, money, and the raw power to order things as they desire. I have many questions and few answers. Who is running the world? Who are the global movers and shakers so wealthy they can hire private security forces, fund their own intelligence-gathering apparatus, murder rivals with impunity, and control the media? The de facto head of the Saudi monarchy, Mohammad bin Salman, gave Jared Kushner $2 billion with few strings attached. Why? In payment or repayment for what? Where do the interests of MBS and Jared Kushner intersect? Where did Donald Trump go on his first official state visit? Saudi Arabia. Illuminated globes and sword dancing, remember?
What did Putin and Trump talk about for ninety minutes in Helsinki in 2018?
Why has MBS been able to evade responsibility for ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi? Why is Julian Assange wasting away in jail, in one of the cruelest instances of state torture I’ve ever lived through. When was Assange, a journalist, last a free citizen?
After the election of 2016 and the unthinkable happened, how many contacts were made between Trump campaign officials and representatives of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Russia? How do those contacts relate to Putin’s decision to launch his Ukraine war this year, the price of oil, and the money laundering Saudi Arabia and the UAE are doing for Russian oligarchs. How is Putin funding his war? We need a bare white wall and a pad of Post-It Notes, like in the detective thrillers, to chart the web of relationships, channels, companies, governments and safe havens. It’s an interconnected world, particularly when money is involved.
The Israeli Defense Forces have murdered a well-known correspondent for Al-Jazeera, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was shot in the neck by an IDF marksman. The US provides the usual amplification of Israeli government denials, and will insure there will be no consequences. That’s how this special relationship works. Total immunity.
When Trump was president he was always boasting about how America had achieved energy independence, producing so much surplus oil and gas that we were exporting it. Where is that independence now, when the price of gasoline hovers around $6 a gallon? Do you think the price is being manipulated? Let me put the question a different way: do you trust Big Oil?
With another spare white wall and additional Post-It Notes, we could chart all the individuals charged with crimes, convicted of crimes, or pardoned who played a role in Trump’s 2016 campaign and his four disastrous years in the White House. This would make for an interesting visual. Trump’s own family members would be heavily represented.
I imagine the funeral of Donald Trump. Who will attend, speak, bow their heads, cry? Will millions of people wait in long lines to view the dead man, as millions did when Juan Peron died in Argentina? Will it be a sea of red hats or only a smattering? How many will rejoice that this privileged, incompetent, and demented scourge has finally departed this earth? I know where I will be, and with whom.
