MAYBE I'M AMAZED

In 1984, science fiction writer William Gibson published his award-winning novel, NEUROMANCER, in which national governments have largely been replaced (or rendered irrelevant) by mega-corporations and entrepreneurs who operate more or less as they please.  The more I learn about Donald Trump’s connections to Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern princelings, the more prophetic Gibson’s work seems.  This scandal is looking less like Russia vs. America, and more like the maneuvering of a loose coalition of international crime syndicates.  Sometimes they fight among themselves, and sometimes they cooperate.  But their common goal is to loot the entire world, including us.  Especially us.

This observation was sparked by a New York Times report (link below) about the August 3, 2016, meeting between Donald Trump Jr., an Israeli social media specialist, and a man who represented wealthy princes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.  Those seemingly strange bedfellows were called together by a billionaire American mercenary in order to pitch a scheme to help Donald Trump win the election. 

American election law forbids accepting financial assistance (or any other form of aid) from foreign governments or individuals, so of course Don Jr. went straight to the FBI and reported this illegal scheme.  Oh, wait.  No, he didn’t.  Just like he didn’t mention the meeting he had earlier that summer with Russian spies claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

He does deny accepting their help.  He was just being sociable, that’s all.  Nothing to see here, move right along.   

The man who called the meeting was Erik Prince, a man of many parts, none of them good.  He’s the brother of Betsy De Vos, the Secretary of Education whose goal is to destroy public education in the United States.  He’s also the guy who ran the notorious Blackwater mercenaries during the Iraq war. 

Blackwater, you may remember, conducted secret operations (for billions of off-the-books dollars) that were too dirty for the America military.  In Iraq, Prince met a businessman named George Nader, who was tight with those Saudi and Emirati princes.  In a remarkable coincidence, Nader was also tight with a couple of Russian oligarchs.  One of them was Oleg Deripaska, the guy who bankrolled Paul Manafort, Trump’s first campaign manager. 

The other was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the guy who bought a Florida mansion from Donald Trump in 2008.  Trump paid $41 million for it in 2004; Rybolovlev paid $95 million for it four years later.  Trump has sold a lot of property to Russian oligarchs at highly inflated prices.  Either those Russian billionaires are all pretty stupid, or Trump was helping them launder money.  I report, you decide.

But back to George Nader.  He soon became very friendly with Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner.  Flynn’s trail of criminality got him canned early on, so Donald Trump gave the Middle East portfolio to Jared Kushner, a man with no discernable talent except for losing massive amounts of money in bad real estate deals. 

Why would powerful Israelis and powerful Arabs make common cause?  Or to put it another way, what did they want in exchange for helping Trump win the presidency?  They wanted Iran destabilized.  And quid pro quo or not, Trump is doing his best to deliver that result.    

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s twitter feed was particularly hysterical this morning.  “I hereby demand” that the Justice Department investigate my political enemies.  That’s illegal, of course, but who will enforce the law in this case? 

The only positive news in all this is that George Nader is cooperating with Robert Mueller.  That probably means that Don Jr. is in deep doo-doo.  When Trump gets this agitated, it often means he knows that Robert Mueller is about to make a big move.  Let’s hope so.

In the first half of the 20th century, the United States exercised a generally benign influence in world affairs.  But events since the end of World War II tell another story.  American attempts to interfere in the affairs of other countries, from Vietnam to Iraq (and yes, in Iran back in the days of the Shah), have made things worse rather than better.  The refugee crisis in Europe is a direct result of George W. Bush’s foolish mistakes in the Middle East.  Closer to home, our own issues with border security had their origins in Ronald Reagan’s adventurism in Central America, along with our Puritanical drug laws that refuse to acknowledge that a demand will be met with a supply, legal or not.

We think we’re chess masters, moving pieces on the world stage.  But the pawns have ideas of their own, and they’re in it for the long haul, while we have the political equivalent of attention deficit disorder.  Having set things in motion, all Vladimir Putin has to do now is simply relax and watch us trip over our own feet. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/politics/trump-jr-saudi-uae-nader-prince-zamel.html