Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 118
Mobocracy

1/ I’ve just re-read Robert Mueller’s 2011 address: “The Evolving Organized Crime Threat”. Google it. I write this on the weekend of GHW Bush's death. Mueller, George Herbert Walker Bush -- how our nation needs honorable Republicans!

2/ The picture dominating yesterday’s media was the joyful high-five between two murderous thugs -- the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia -- as their “made man,” our current Republican President, sulks in the background.

3/ St. Paul warns us in Ephesians 6:12: ” For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

4/ The problem currently threatening our nation is not, contrary to much popular preaching, that too many people are expressing physical affection in ways that offend the preachers....

5/ Our problem -- the one that can bring down American liberty and destroy our children’s future -- is transnational organized crime.

6/ Transnational organized crime is the “cosmic power” over our present darkness.

7/ Our main news sources have failed to investigate it, to explicate it, and to present transnational organized crime as the greatest threat to our liberty, to our children’s lives, and to the life of our planet.

8/ It is the story of our time. MSM are looking straight at it, and they cannot see it. They think “Mob State” is a metaphor. Newsflash -- from Putin to Xi to Erdogan to Trump -- these are actual mobsters.

9/ Our defense against this threat is, so far, pathetic. We spend hundreds of billions on the Pentagon as though we need armed forces to defeat mafia. No country wants to defeat and subdue us by armed combat. Armies win or lose wars.

10/ Armed forces do not and must not battle crimes. Using armed forces to control citizens’ behavior is the definition of autocracy.

11/ Crime has to be dealt with by law, by the Justice institutions of a country.

12/ So our mobbed up president, of course, installs Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General to run the Justice department. Perfect -- an unknown grifter now governs our law enforcement, reporting to the don who is controlled by transnational organized crime.

13/ More & more countries--Russia, Poland, Austria, the Philippines, India, Venezuela, Brazil--have degraded or abandoned democracy, & are now being ruled by gangsters whose goal is personal greed, whose enemy is the rule of law, & whose desire is for limitless violent power.

14/ The greed behind all this mob power is pointless. What possible point is there in personally owning a billion dollars? What a boring, stupid goal! Vlad, leading a poor country, currently has somewhere north of 200 billion for himself, even as flames are licking at his feet.

15/ Putin and the other autocratic goons around the world are nihilists. All their money and power can never bring them to life, not life here, not life in eternity.

16/ These goons are vainly medicating with money the aching power of death growing within themselves. And they are apparently willing to extinguish life on earth as they gorge on yet more billions.

17/ Their lifestyle may be ostentatious, these oligarchs who seize the wealth of nations. But inside, as Jesus says, is another thing altogether: “You are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones rotting.” (Matt 23:27)

18/ Our problem is that millions of us have placed our faith in “the strong man.”

19/ Our solution is to reject the claims of superiority made by the self-promoting, and to embrace instead our common humanity.

20/ Our solution is to receive one another -- especially the poor and the stranger -- as beings containing the image of God, and to turn our attention to the sufferings of earth herself -- or, as a fine liturgy calls her, “this fragile earth, our island home.”