Libya 2: The Dictator’s Children, and What They Teach

(Now that I have confessed my own failures, let me turn to our national, American elites…)

I am going to argue that our American elites—the bankers, the lawyers, the Wall Streeters, all the rest—should be paying very close attention to Libya. Or, more particularly, to the Children of Colonel.

I confess, I knew almost nothing about Gadhafi’s children prior to the current revolution. I suspect that very few of us did. For a long while, they were sort of invisible. Oh, I’m sure Gadhafi’s sons, daughters, and potential heirs were known in governmental and diplomatic circles, but to the average American they were as little visible as ghosts in the noonday sun. One simply didn’t think of them.

But, they existed all the same. And now, we learn that they’ve been playboying it up around the world for decades. We get stories of champagne parties on Caribbean islands where big name entertainers are paid millions for a song or two. Like the sons of Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein, they have lived the lives of princes, consuming much, and producing little.

And the frightening thing is how familiar they seem. When you look at Gadhafi and his family, and you look past the trappings of revolution, the uniforms, the colorful “native” garb displayed at ceremonies, and all the rest of it…you find they look pretty much like our own privileged classes. You watch them on TV or the net, and they are in the same business suits and corporate casual attire. They have the same fashionable hair cuts. They drive the same expensive cars. They attend the same schools. They party on the same islands and sleep with (or try to, anyway) the same models and movie stars.

They are, we belatedly discover, simply one more variety of the global, international, jet-setting, rootless, world elite.

Something which, by the by, may explain much of how and why it was so easy for our leaders to forgive Gadhafi for so much, so quickly. It explains why a short few years after the Lockerbie massacre, Tony Blair stood smiling beside him, George W. Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to woo him, and our companies and corporations pressed in upon him almost hysterically, like Teenyboppers around a rock star.

It was because they recognized one of their own.

Which brings me to my point …to why I say our elites should be paying very close attention to international affairs.

Gadhafi is falling.

He may not be dead yet. In the end, he may manage to turn Tripoli into a kind of fortress city-state, separate from the rest of Libya. There, he and his heirs might hang on for a while yet.

But, in the end, he’s finished. The expense of holding on to power will vastly exceed his revenues. The very best he can hope for is to be a marginal figure, squatting Hitler-like in his bunker, and watching the empty hours pass.

Why do I stress that? Why do I say that our own privileged classes should note well his passing? Because they should keep in mind that if he can go, they can go.

Of course, no one in America is in Gadhafi’s league. No one has shot protestors recently, nor bombed and strafed innocent civilians. But, still our elites have not behaved well of late. They have done much to bankrupt the nation. They have outsourced and off-shored. They have been indifferent to the fate of their countrymen.

And if they keep on as they have done…laying off and cutting back, reducing men and women to drones and drudges, pretending that they do this only because of the inevitable laws of economics and that they have no choice in the matter … then, ultimately, they, too, will face consequences.

Like Gadhafi, they may survive. But they must ask themselves, now, before it is too late…will accounts received be equal to expenditures? Will it really be profitable to practice repression when a few compromises might defuse the ticking bomb?

Or, to put it another way, how comfortable are they, really…

In the bunker?

Note to the Rich and Powerful

Two questions for the Rich and the Powerful. Plus a comment.

The comment: in case you’ve missed it, there’s a new genre out there…in film, and TV, and books. I call it “Tales of Off-Shoring Blues.”

These are stories of ordinary, average Americans who find themselves without jobs, without hope, and without dignity when suddenly some CEO or corporate executive decides that it will increase his or her bonus by a few cents more if they move the factory or the office to India, or China, or Mexico.

Right now, for instance, there’s a new movie in the theaters. It’s called “Company Men.” It’s all about a bunch of guys who get downsized, and then we watch as they wither, as their self-esteem collapses, their sense of themselves of as men declines, and they struggle to find a place in a new and alien world which holds them in contempt.

It’s supposed to be quite good. The critics all love it. I’m told the men in the story do come to terms with their plights. Or at least some of them do. Sort of. But I don’t think I’ll be able to go see it. It would cut a little close to the bone for me. I’m employed (if somewhat underemployed) at the moment, but I’ve been there. And I know a lot of other people who are there still.

What interests me about this new genre, though, is that it succeeds because it taps into something deep and powerful in the culture. It resonates with people because they know it is saying something true.

Specifically, they know that they are being hurt. They know that they are being stripped of their dignity. They know that their increased rates of suicide and heart attack are not accidental. They know that, in some place, even in middle class suburbs, children are starting to go hungry.

Or, to put it another way, they know they are being murdered. Not with guns and knives. Not quickly. But murdered all the same. Slowly. With a thousand, thousand humiliations and deprivations.

So, now my two questions to the Rich and Powerful.

First, if you continue your present course of action…if you keep downsizing and off-shoring and not making any effort to create jobs for Americans…if you keep letting them die…

What do you think will happen when Americans then quite rationally decide that it is either you or them? That they cannot survive if you continue to rule?

And, second, if that should occur…

How long do you think you can run? How well do you think you can hide?

Just asking.

More on the 2%

While we're at it, here's another fun little news item.

You know how the Fed is bending over backwards (and then some) to make cheap money available to big corporations so that they'll finally start spending and investing and hiring and maybe get Americans back to work?

Well, according to a recent article on Bloomberg, the aforesaid big corporations and are (wanna guess? Huh? Wanna?) investing it outside of the US. The cash is flowing in a major gauge pipe right overseas.

Right.

Is it just me? Or does that feel a little like somebody just shoved a knife between our shoulder blades?

But, of course, it is a well-made knife, with an excellent bone handle, and a blade of the finest Swedish steel.

Nothing but the very best for the 2%.


The article: Not Made in America Prevails as Fed's `Cheap Money' Finds Its Way Overseas