Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

[GRG55]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

it became clear that the eu was never going to include turkey, while erdogan doubled down on islamism and decided turkey's future lay in leadership of the muslim world and the middle east in particular.

The Saudi Ruling Family has exerted outsized influence in the Arab world because of its wealth and its status as keeper of the two holy places. "Leadership in the Muslim world" means competing with that influence and Erdogan is playing high stakes diplomatic poker with an ace in his hand the Saudis shouldn't have dealt to him.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

The Saudi Ruling Family has exerted outsized influence in the Arab world because of its wealth and its status as keeper of the two holy places. "Leadership in the Muslim world" means competing with that influence and Erdogan is playing high stakes diplomatic poker with an ace in his hand the Saudis shouldn't have dealt to him.

The outrage from the decisively anti Trump tech sector against Trump’s taxis approval of Saudi/MBS was short lived.

I don’t think it was MBS’s recent visit to Silicon Valley and Seattle with all the senior tech royalty.

I think it was the nearly 50% contribution to Softbank’s Vision Fund(with soft promises for another 50% lift) as well as funding Uber, Lyft, WeWork, and other decaunicorns reliant on VC funding.

Perhaps swing capacity(oil) has become swing capital(Tech VC)?

Amateur hour at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Clearly a pre-meditated and sanctioned assassination.

If the Saudis just wanted to kill Khashoggi, they could have just run him over in a non attributable Keystone Cop clown car.

I’m actually surprised they didn’t contract it out to foreign mercenaries.

Perhaps they tried and were just too incompetent to even manage to find and pay infidels to do their dirty work.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

duplicate post

[GRG55]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

The outrage from the decisively anti Trump tech sector against Trump’s taxis approval of Saudi/MBS was short lived.

I don’t think it was MBS’s recent visit to Silicon Valley and Seattle with all the senior tech royalty.

I think it was the nearly 50% contribution to Softbank’s Vision Fund(with soft promises for another 50% lift) as well as funding Uber, Lyft, WeWork, and other decaunicorns reliant on VC funding.

Perhaps swing capacity(oil) has become swing capital(Tech VC)?

Amateur hour at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Clearly a pre-meditated and sanctioned assassination.

If the Saudis just wanted to kill Khashoggi, they could have just run him over in a non attributable Keystone Cop clown car.

I’m actually surprised they didn’t contract it out to foreign mercenaries.

Perhaps they tried and were just too incompetent to even manage to find and pay infidels to do their dirty work.

I doubt there was any attempt to farm it out.

I think the Crown Prince has a wiring problem in the noggin. Worse than his father.

He believes he can lock up prominent citizens, detain and force the resignation of the head of government of another sovereign State, and murder expatriate citizens. He's trying to out-Russian the Russians. Without quite the same finesse.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

This was sort of my thought. Figures he's untouchable. TBTF. Maybe he's right, for the moment at least.

I've tried to explain 100 times that my big problem with billionaires is not sour grapes or wishing them ill, but that they are creeping above the law, and their massive wealth makes it so easy to buy off officials at every level and push an ideology that says this doesn't matter. It's enough to make them crazy. Amazing how much good will, power, and legislation investing a few billion in Silicon Valley and NYC and DC or London will buy you. But on the grandest scale, the Russians and Saudis are playing with chump change. The day will come soon when there will be more than one autocratic state owned enterprise with the capital to buy out any given handful of giant western companies with a 20% premium on the same day without breaking a sweat. And they're generally smarter and more strategic. If anyone willing to sell out their country for a few million from Wall Street or Bay Street gets a better offer from abroad, they probably will not hesitate too much about who's name's on the check.

It's nothing new in recent history for the US to support an autocratic regime for profit's sake. Plenty of examples of that. What is new is that the other players on the board are increasingly wealthier compared to the US and other western countries. Increasingly it will be easy for autocratic rulers, governments, and state owned companies to buy up key assets in the west or otherwise strategically muck up the political process, and not just in some half-assed Russians tweeting nonsense way, but in the same manner that local billionaires do now, only on an even grander scale.

In the meanwhile, the US has either de facto or de jure legalized monopoly (not a single Sherman Act Sec 2 antitrust case started since HW Bush), tax evasion (all estimates point to 10s of trillions uncollected with no plan to stem it or do something about it), bank fraud (largest mortgage fraud in history with no criminal charges), unlimited campaign donations (Citizens United and McCutcheon), and all sorts of other graft and corruption. And I could point out that our current interior secretary has robbed more money than Teapot Dome with a $300 million dollar no-bid contract to repair Puerto Rico's electric grid that he gave to his buddy's 2-employee near-bankrupt firm in the tiny town of Whitefish, Montana, a firm which also employed his son, who he flew out to Miami with for lunch just before the contract went out. Our defense secretary was on the damn board of Theranos. Our last national security advisor's being sentenced next month for taking money from Turkey to do their bidding.

My point is just to point out criminality here, but then partisans would just come up with some other corruption done by the other side instead of attack the root of the rot regardless of party affiliation. Or just take a good look at Musk to get a more apolitical view. Commits obvious, blatant, and super-public market manipulation, gets caught red handed by the SEC, doesn't get so much as a legit slap on the wrist, and before a judge can even agree to the terms of the settlement formally, he's joking about it basically telling the SEC to go screw themselves. Totally lawless, mafia-style behavior. In plain view. And people applaud it. And there are no consequences whatsoever.

All this is to say, MBS might be crazy like a fox, given the dysfunctional state of the west. And so might Putin. And Erdogan. Or whoever else. And they might just be the two-bit players. But expect them to test the waters before the others. If they realize nobody's in a position to bring the hammer down, they might get even more brazen. Entirely possible we'll be seeing a whole lot more blood spilled and people disappearing in coming years, not less. We'll see if any consequences stick. So far, it looks like nobody with power wants to do anything about it.

[touchring]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

I doubt there was any attempt to farm it out.

I think the Crown Prince has a wiring problem in the noggin. Worse than his father.

He believes he can lock up prominent citizens, detain and force the resignation of the head of government of another sovereign State, and murder expatriate citizens. He's trying to out-Russian the Russians. Without quite the same finesse.

I'm just wondering why the King can't control his son? Is the King really that weak?

[Chris Coles]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

I'm just wondering why the King can't control his son? Is the King really that weak?

As I understand it; the King starved two daughters to death some years ago. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-13-years.html
Certainly I have heard no further news since this report.

[jk]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

leona helmsley spilled the beans when she said taxes were only for little people to pay. same thing for all the other laws.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

leona helmsley spilled the beans when she said taxes were only for little people to pay. same thing for all the other laws.

The difference is that in the 80s, no matter how much this type of BS damaged the republic or its ideals, it was mostly contained to domestic (or close allies') ruling class.

Now there's a wild flock of foreign powers with more wealth to play with. And even laxer domestic enforcement.

No nation can simultaneously be a republic and an oligarchy. This is not a new idea. It dates back at least to Plato.

The lemmings are marching toward the cliff wall. And we're closer to the precipice than nearly anyone wants to admit.

This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends.

Not life. Not humanity. Not even democracy. But the current order is probably past the point of no return, as surely as the sea level, and nobody knows or understands just how much pain there will be. Worse still, even if we can't estimate the damage accurately, we know how to mitigate it. But instead we argue about nonsense.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

Make no mistake either, the realignment from an American perspective will not happen without strife. And the soul of America lies in the balance. Not like in the aughts or in the 90s or even in 2012. You could see the train coming then. But it wasn't moving quick. The forced end of apartheid in the south created the current order. The great depression created the one before it. Before that the end of reconstruction. Before that, the Civil War, before that letting propertyless white men vote, and maybe once more when the rural folk told the federalists to stuff it and expanded west with Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase. No shift comes easily. But the train's not just coming anymore. We're in the midst of the cars now. The new order will be built on the foundation of what is laid in the next few years--single digits, not decades. And it can only go one of two ways. It doesn't take a genius to see it. But a few who do call the times for what they are will be heralded as prophets. The rest of us will know we saw it coming, but not all will be lucky enough to live to see what comes. And the stakes are not just local. The world order built after WWII is on the table. The whole world has a stake. We may get something better. But we may not. And either way, the transition will not be clean. There was a possible future where a better-built EU took up the mantle. But that is not happening. And Japan won't do it either. If not the US, then not liberal democracy. And that shit's on life support at home, thanks to greed. The war clouds are gathering overhead.

[jk]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

it can only go one of two ways.

would you spell out how you see those 2 ways?

[Chris Coles]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

"The world order built after WWII is on the table."

It is this that has been the tragedy. While the general public; world wide; were fed a diet of all the wonderful things the US was doing. "leaders of the free world" keeps springing to mind........ that is until one sits down and reads the likes of: Gold Warriors, America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gold-Warrio.../dp/1844675319

And then we have to realise that THE BIG mistake was to turn a blind eye to what was going on in the background. You can fool some of the people some of the time; most of the people most of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. In the background were people acting as if they were completely unaccountable to anyone; to any aspect of leadership of the free world. It has taken a lifetime for me to realise just how sad this is; how much damage has been done to that image, of leadership of the free world. They may have won their individual wars; but in the process they destroyed everything they touched. They very effectively, destroyed the credibility of the United States; as leaders of the free world.

There are no 2 ways; it is way past too late.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

I think about it this way:

I think in many ways the most remarkable thing about the 2016 election was the similarity between the 3 major candidates' platforms. Donald, Hillary & Bernie all had platforms less amicable to free trade than any president in recent decades. Didn't matter if you were a berniebro or a clintonista or a redhat. Your candidate was not as much of a free trader as Obama or the Bushes or Billie-Jeffs. We watched the Washington Consensus break there. Meanwhile the European project probably died with Brexit. It had its problems anyway.

This is how it happens, right? The domestic politics, left, center and right are fed up with international order that was built. And they start tearing it down from within, not from without.

15 or 20 years ago, there were just things many educated people "knew" would never change in our lifetimes. We watched the Battle of Seattle. We saw Rage at the top of the rock charts. We saw Bush and Clinton agree on NAFTA. We knew TAA was a bad joke. We even read Lexus & the Olive Tree and took Tom Friedman seriously. So changing that kind of stuff wasn't just hopeless. It was impossible. Even radicals who would tell anyone willing to listen what was wrong with it would never dare to really try. Almost nobody wants to fight a hopeless battle.

But that is really how I think most people viewed it: A hopeless battle. It was the bipartisan Washington Consensus, after all. And other developed nations followed in suit. Bochum didn't fare much better than Detroit. The idea that we must suffer became a fact of life. Or, as the Baron Von Mises put it, "English and German workers may have to descend to the lowly standard of life of the Hindus and the coolies to compete with them." I would bet that guys like Friedman had more to do with Occupy Wall Street than anyone gave him credit for. It wasn't just the recession. Millions read his book, in which hedge funds ruled the world and olive trees bowed to them as princes in Lexuses sped by and this was the arc towards which history would bend for all time. Of course, this was presented as a good thing. So was "McDonaldization," which I swear I heard people use in real life, not so many years ago, thanks to George Ritzer. But people aren't clueless, and this seemed bad and wrong. People on the left stressed the material injustice of all economic growth going to the very top. People on the right stressed the disgust at the destruction of more culturally traditional ways of life.

The last time the Republican Party had anywhere near this type of overwhelming power was 1928. Today it's the Presidency, House, Senate, Supreme Court, Lower Courts, 66/99 state legislatures by 1,000 more seats out of 7,268, and 33/50 governors. Then it was Presidency, House, Senate, Supreme Court, Lower Courts, 64/95 and 30/48 governors, I believe. So roughly equivalent power levels. Then, too, the US was on the brink of a massive party re-alignment. And the consensus of previous years was broken.

One way or another, that's happening now. The Washington Consensus is broken at home. The old kool aid just doesn't sell anymore. On either the right or the left.

Here's another striking thing: The major party candidates in the 2016 election were both septuagenarians, were each the two least popular candidates in polling history, and each had unfavorable numbers higher than favorables. The two biggest policy acts of the last two administrations, at least thus far, were a deeply unpopular corporate tax cut and a deeply unpopular market-based healthcare reform. This is what the end of a political order looks like.

So it has to break. It will break. The center cannot hold. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion which way it breaks. Things can either get more democratic and policy acts and candidates can become popular again, or things can get less democratic and more and more ways to circumvent popular will might be found. I've never believed, as Dr. King did, that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. I think it can bend toward injustice just as easily.

The point is that the gloves are off now. Everything can be politicized. Even your very right to citizenship itself. If citizenship is on the table, then everything is. Not just all that inevitable globalization narrative stuff "best left to the market" or "best left to the private sector." But even private property itself. If the 14th means nothing, neither does the 5th. If supreme court appointment procedures mean nothing, neither does the number of justices on the court. Harry Reid's nuclear option begets McConnell's nuclear option, will beget some kind of response. If institutions are weaponized against the vote, the existence of the institutions themselves will be politicized. For every call to abolish cabinet departments there will be a call to abolish ICE. Increasingly individual identity will be subsumed into the political. Everything will count. Not just the color of your hat. But the way you cut your hair. The look of your outfit. The food you eat. There will be a "War on Meat" just like there was a "War on Christmas" and it will be prominently featured on Fox News within a year or two. Conservative fad meat only diets will pop up to challenge leftist vegans. Everything becomes a mirror of itself. And the loudest, craziest voices get amplified by internet algorithms and shunted to the top of everyone's newsfeed. Toddlers shooting AR-15s will be contrasted with toddlers changing genders depending on your browsing preferences. Life imitates politics.

But this is what happens. Politics fall apart before they can be reconstructed into a new era. They're falling apart now. I'd bet easily on that much. But just as the Jeffersonian era gave way to Jacksonian Democracy gave way to the Civil War era gave way to Reconstruction gave way to the Progressive era, gave way to the New Deal era, gave way to the Neoliberal era, our Neoliberal era is coming to an end. If you kind of hated both reaganomics/thatcherism and third-way/blairism, that might sound like a good thing.

So, I think the laissez faire, lower tariffs, higher immigration, lower wages, higher profits international consensus idea is out. But there are two alternatives up in the air at the moment. A sort of broad pan-national project to redefine the demos and citizenship along nativist lines, and a sort-of broad pan-national movement to redefine political economy around combating inequality and climate change. I think we can probably have one of these, but not both. I think the US is still in a position to lead and have others follow, and I think there's no turning back. So, I think there are profound implications for the rest of the world, and I think that events in the relatively short-term will give us our answer.

Trump is either Hoover or FDR; either Carter or Reagan; either the end of something old, or the beginning of something new. But I don't think which is necessarily preordained by the fates. It's here, now, that this is being decided. And I think as elites increasingly recognize this, you'll see them realize the danger of fence-sitting, and throw a whole lot more at tilting it the way they want it to go.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

"Life imitates politics. "

I wish I had your confidence; however the facts speak for themselves.

"The total number of offences involving a knife or bladed instrument that have been recorded by cops in the year to March 2018 rose to 40,147, a seven-year-high. There were 1,299 stabbings in London up to the end of April, according to official statistics from the Met Police." https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/525126...t-knife-crime/

Many of these are children copying a nation ruled by the use of force as a way of negotiation. So, to return to the debate about a single man assassinated, presumably by order of a Saudi prince; what we are witnessing today is the people of the world are copying us and that is the truth of it.

[jk]

Re: Meanwhile Back in the Sandbox...

well said, dc. sobering.