The Dark Side - American Oligarchs and American H-Bombs

Will  "Human Decency" 
Limit the Oligarchs' Greed?

Come on. Even if they won,
 they wouldn't do THAT would they?

In the posts of this blog and thousands of others in the U.S. the remarkably untold story of the oligarchic take over of the country is every day, "common currency." This "non-media" coverage "lights up" all sorts of really troubling accounts of the ugly things oligarchs are doing -- their penchant for buying "Citizen United funded" political power, their wealth redistributing Congressional legislative schemes, their massive efforts to deregulate regulations, their efforts to sabotage the election process, their obsession with "  liberating" Wall Street and the hedgies from any inconvenient laws and -- perhaps for comic relief -- their outrageous, bumbling, Dickinsonian class based cracks about their ambitions and other dark dreams for our country.

The US Oligarchy [image source]

It is not "news" to visitors here that the billionaires have been "sorting out" which Republican patsy will offer the best "return on investment" for the piles of cash they intend to "invest" in choosing and electing our next President. After the mid-term elections they have a comfortable grip on the Congress, and it is clear now that their carefully selected Catholic Supremes are not only disgustingly obedient to the domestic billionaires but cordially eager to do their part in the final destruction of the democracy.

None of this litany of complaints should be "anything new" to those who regularly visit this blog, but they are repeated here with a purpose. MenMesa's opinion of oligarchs has been pretty well established in the hundreds of posts at Short Current Essays, and that opinion has been based primarily on the disgusting antics detailed on that list above, but the point of this posting is to add one final complaint -- one which is, quite possibly, the greater threat and outrage than all these other "machinations of greed and avarice."

After the White House Falls to the Oligarchy

The Koch brothers just announced their

 intention to make a $1,000,000,000 down payment.

Purchasing the "launch button" for $5 Tn worth of American H-Bombs for a paltry billion dollars is another one of those addictive, irresistible "return on investments" nightmares.

Another tastelessly extravagant does of an old bird's hyperbolic drama? Dispatch any fleeting hope for that self-comforting bliss which usually returns when a visitor politely chuckles and disregards one of MeanMesa's geriatric intestinal distress episodes. This horror movie is as real as it gets.

Owning the human seated in the Oval Office is already planned as the last, unaccomplished ambition of the American oligarchs. With a solution to that final obstacle in their pocket they will -- in no time -- wind up owning the remaining 30% or so of the country which they don't yet own now, and they will have finally opened up the ultimate "business opportunity" for themselves -- either owning or economically dominating -- the remainder of the world, too.

None of this is news. There is, however, one side to these gruesome Plutocratic antics which MeanMesa holds to be quite "under reported." Owning the Presidency can, obviously, be quite profitable, but there is a quiet, additional trinket in that glitzy, executive, Tiffany bag of electoral bling.

The President of the United States is constantly escorted by an Air Force Colonel carrying a locked brief case securely handcuffed to his wrist.

Just A Wee Bit About Thermo-Nuclear War

Yeh, it's 2015, but all that stuff is still sitting there, ready to rock.

Could this be part of a "business plan?"[source]

The clarion advantage of controlling an H-Bomb arsenal first comes from the capacity to fire them in missiles to vaporize some distant victims. An important "second advantage" comes from the capacity to repel invaders should the need arise, but, aside from deterrence, this "repelling invaders" feature would often come with a high price if it were to involve targets on one's home soil. For example "repelling invaders" has been one of the priority missions of Iran's potential nuclear arsenal. After Bush W.'s oil war adventure in neighboring Iraq, the Ayatollah "could clearly see the writing on the wall."

However, there are other advantages to "owning the button," or in this case, "owning the guy who owns the button."  The prospect of brazenly vaporizing an uncooperative "business partner" or an unruly competitor has a lot of additional, geopolitical consequences -- many of them so obvious that even a reckless billionaires might consider "analyzing the life cycle costs" before "launching" into such a strategy.

The nuclear game in 2015 is one of quiet extortion and nuance. Does anyone think that the Americans are so intent on preventing Iran from developing such a capacity because we fear that the Islamic State would actually attack us or one of our allies? Of course not. Such a provocation would cast the entire region into a Middle Eastern equivalent of the old US-Soviet "Mutually Assured Destruction" [M.A.D. Read more  here.] scenario leaving Tehran a parking lot and millions of Iranians mere human shaped, grisly shadows on otherwise uniformly glassy concrete walls.

Likewise, this is roughly the same case with Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and probably India. The current members of the "nuclear club" are awkwardly reluctant to allow any up and coming "riff-raff" near the members only pool's day bar. However, the American oligarchs perceive themselves to be "wounded tax victims" who have already been coerced into purchasing all these missiles and bombs, that is, so far as they are concerned, they are already members of the nuclear club. [Remember: the oligarchs consider what you consider to be your money to actually be their money, including the money you pay in taxes while they are dodging as much of their part as possible. The same goes with the country. A couple of dozen of them already own nearly 70% of it.]

Not good for oil refineries. [source]

The price of a general nuclear exchange with a well armed enemy such as the Russian Federation or the Peoples Republic of China would include the destruction of plenty of Koch Energy's corporate assets and, as a consequence, an immediate truncation of the brothers' $80 Bn dynastic fortune into something worth a half or a quarter of that -- or less. Such a conflict would probably not do the value of a US dollar much good, either.

However, the mere threat of a smaller, more "contained" exercise of nuclear power -- whether it materialized into an actual nuclear attack or not -- might be quite a different story, at least, it might appear to be quite a different story from the perspective of a "cash crazed" oligarch who could call the President and give such instructions. In some cases raw profit might even become a secondary attraction. Billionaire Sheldon Adelson would slice off his right arm for a chance to nuke Iran with American bombs simply because he loves Israel and hates Arabs.

In fact, the Iranians have habitually drawn the ire of reactionary Presidents. The George W. Bush Administration very delicately "leaked" the plan to use nuclear "bunker busters" on the Iranian centrifuges buried deep in a mountain. This is why, Congressional war mongers not withstanding, we should breathe a sigh of gratitude when we consider the tack that the current President has taken.

MeanMesa was dutifully horrified at such a potential plan at the time, but -- that was then, and this is now. The "W" and his crime family had a penchant for acting like oligarchs because many of them were oligarchs. The grotesque "hangers on" in the immediate background were simply scoundrels fantasizing about also becoming oligarchs just like their masters. Yet, the behavior of the whole bunch serves to illustrate just what we could expect with a puppet in the Oval Office and a crazy billionaire at the other end of the phone call.

Geriatric MeanMesa hyperbole? Form your own opinion.