How do you move from one of the world’s most hated, or
disregarded, nations to one of the most popular?
Turns out, the answer to that question is simple. You just indiscriminately blow up as many
billionaires’ luxury yachts: ideally, including the billionaires, their friends
and family, and business associates as possible. Religion, economics, political identities,
race, nationality, and the rest of the usual culprits of polarization all
vanish into mutual agreement when it comes to offing billionaires and blowing
up their stuff. Everyone, but the
billionaires, hates billionaires and loves to see them destroyed. Just ask movie producers since . . . forever
about the popularity of snuffing rich people.
If you started listing the movies and books that were popular because
their basic storyline was about killing rich people you’d have a book, even
without describing the stories or the people.
The world’s clueless billionaires have gone overboard in
squandering hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars on extravagant luxury
ships of all sorts. The only thing these
boats have in common is their arrogant overindulgence. Malaysian “businessman” (aka “mobster”) Robert Kuok’s “History Supreme” is unrivaled
with a $4.8 billion price tag and the ship is more insane extravagance than any
palace in human history. Russian
oligarchs, like Roman Abramovich, and his $1.5 billion “Eclipse” set the
standard for over-priced privacy and tasteless opulence. Any list should include Nepo-baby and Amazon’s
lucky founder Jeff Bezos’ half-billion-dollar, 127 meter-long, luxury yacht, “Koru”
might be the most blatantly arrogant American demonstration of excess wealth
and social irresponsibility. But in
2026, there were hundreds of similar examples of the filthy rich wallowing in floating
excess and greed while more than a billion people on the planet lived in
extreme poverty, many living on less than a dollar-a-day. To a certain group of the unwashed masses,
these billionaires were idolized, but to the majority of the world’s population
they were the most hated people on the planet.
The fall of the American Empire, was headed by Donald Trump,
the Republican Party, and the worst-of-the-worst of so-called “conservatives”
from the politically far right, who had been supported by America’s enemies
since Ronald Reagan’s mindless regime created a power vacuum in the world. After Trump fired every national security and
national criminal justice expert from the CIA, FBI, and the NSA, he trashed the
upper ranks of the US military. In the
end, the world’s most powerful military was brought down to its lowest common
denominator, while club-footed fools and wannabe-tough-boy amateurs like Pete
Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe caused an exodus of talent and
experience from every area of American law enforcement, national defense, and
national security. A two trillion dollar
US military budget was wasted on the remaining men and women who were led by
fools and Russian useful-idiot assets.
The moment was ripe for a new world disorder and as Greek
physicist-philosopher Parmenides argued 2,500 years ago, nature acts quickly to
fill a vacuum. In this case, a huge
power vacuum existed as Russia squandered its attention and economy on Ukraine
and the border states that Putin believed were the property of the Soviet Union
he desperately wanted to reconstruct. The
United States struggled with delusional “enemies within" and had torn the
“United” part into the historic collection of nation-states that the country
had often threatened to become. Russia
has never been useful as an international law-and-order enforcer, but the
United States struggled with determining which nation-states would “own and
control” the military apparatus stationed inside their borders and docked in
their harbors. That left the open seas
to become the Wild West (and East) when it came to piracy and simple sabotage
and revenge killing.
First, the surface pirates in the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans really upped their game, targeting oil tankers by blowing them up and
forcing the shipping companies to pay protection money to dozens of off-shore
accounts. The Singapore and Malacca
Straits became so overrun with a variety of well-financed and armed pirates
that even China considered putting its own navy into the battle for the open
seas. However, China’s precarious
economic situation, hampered by national and internal debt, and Xi Jinping’s
problems with his trade partners, who often sided with the pirates, limited
China’s response.
However, the opening shots of the international class war
were fired in late May, when more than 300 super yachts were found on full
display for the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix. The two events were physically located barely
30 miles apart, with the film festival ending as the Grand Prix began and some
parts of the race visible from where the ships had been anchored for the film
festival.
Well-coordinated renegade submarines crews from Russia,
Iran, North Korea, India, Türkiye, Greece, Egypt, and Algeria teamed up to
field more than 60 submarines armed with 2,000 torpedoes and several hundred
tactical missiles. The French and Monaco Navies usually provided security for
these events, along with support from other EU nations, but right-wing
challenges to the French, German, Spanish, and British democratic governments provided
a substantial multinational distraction for everyone involved. Tourism revenues were drastically down
everywhere in the world as was taxpayer support for the entertainments of the
ostentatiously rich. So, while there was
lip service paid to the security of these two high profile events, the actual
investment was cursory and no attention was paid to action below the surface of
the ocean of the Mediterranean coastline.
On Friday, when Cannes was wrapping up and the Grand Prix
main event was staging, the submarine coalition opened fire on the mega yachts,
sinking more than 200 of them in the first few minutes of the attack, including
all of the largest ships. Because Abramovich’s
“Eclipse” was equipped with a missile defense system and other military-grade
paraphernalia, his ship was targeted by both air and underwater weapons from
three different subs, including two Russian subs that launched their missiles
from the Bay of Biscay, a few hundred miles west of Bordeaux. The collateral damage from that one objective
practically emptied the area around Golfe Juan of any floating vessels:
commercial, recreational, or military.
Port Hercule was another prime target and since Friday was when the rich
and powerful were the overwhelming majority of the race’s audience, the race
itself received a substantial number of tactical missiles and the body count
was almost 20,000 high-rollers and their hangers-on. The attack was an overwhelming success with
every single mega-yacht sunk, hundreds of billionaires and thousands of their
families and “friends” wiped from the face of the earth. Faster than any possible military response
during the best of times, the attackers scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, through
Gibraltar, or back to their home areas in the Mediterranean Sea near Türkiye,
Greece, and the Black Sea.
These were not the best of times. Pete Hegseth was in his usual rage-filled hysteria
and issued dozens of conflicting orders to the Navy and the NSA. The US Navy, having been removed from the
Atlantic and NATO support earlier that year, had no ships capable of a response
within days. The NSA, usually able to
employ spy satellites on a moment’s notice had been crippled by Hegseth’s
brain-draining purges and political in-fighting among the Trump sycophants left
in charge of national security. In the
best of times, the NSA and CIA could have, at least, tracked some of the subs
when they surfaced, but that would have required the kind of department
discipline that had been removed during Musk’s DOGE mass firings, Trump’s
loyalty purges, and Hegseth’s “reorganization” of national defense
“leadership.” Russia, of course, was
totally focused on national survival because Ukraine had received a substantial
weapons upgrade from the sans-USA NATO and had launched ground and air attacks
on Moscow and the Russian military infrastructure.
The coalition of anti-oligarchy submarine commanders were,
for the most part, not even missed from their official duties. The Russian commanders, for example, had been
stationed between Ireland and Portugal and they were able to return to their
assigned territory unnoticed. They
would, later, use up some of their remaining ammunition on unimportant Ukraine
targets to reconcile their inventory when they returned to Russia. The unrest in the Russian military was so
universal and overt that all real controls had been abandoned almost a decade
earlier. Russian officers had been
handing over their equipment in exchange for a ticket out of Ukraine and the
war for years. A returning ship would be
treated like national heroes without examination. One of the many hallmarks of a kleptocracy is
poor, or non-existent, inventory management.
The outcome of the Attack on the Oligarchy was a celebration
almost everywhere but in the bunkers of the once rich-and-powerful. A virtual armada of mega-yachts had been
destroyed. The founders and their
families of hundreds of predatory trusts and vulture capitalist funds were dead
and/or missing. The world financial
system took a huge hit for several days, then bounced back as if nothing
significant had happened.
While none of the submarine commanders had been outed for
their participation, becoming a member of a submarine crew, officer or enlisted
personnel, became the goal of millions of young people around the world. Speculation about where the attack submarines
originated morphed into rebellion myths that turned into actual rebellions in
several of the countries where the submarine fleet originated and the
prevailing regime was most objectionable and vulnerable. India and Pakistan
found common ground in their hatred of their respective oligarchs and they both
blew up their hierarchical cultural and economic structure and experienced a
blossoming of an educated middle class that transformed their countries into
the world’s leading manufacturing economies.
The remaining billionaires learned, some the hard way, that
“with great wealth comes great responsibility." The concept of noblesse oblige had vanished
from the minds of the tech bros, vulture capitalists, and the nepo-babies who
had inherited the world’s wealth.
Suddenly, there were vacancies in the mansions of the filthy rich, all
over the world. The richest of the rich
were all dead and their fortunes were being picked apart by heirs, governments,
and anyone who could make a claim on the remains. Many of the wealthy class had abdicated their
assets and power and had fled to “Doomsday bunkers,” where they not only feared
being discovered and outed by neighbors and the press, but their own security
people who had no reason to service loyalty.
The only way to survive and come out of hiding was by being useful to
society. Of course, most had no idea how
to be useful or even decent. The few who
did, found that, by disposing and donating the bulk of their wealth and making
life more equitable, they could still live exceptionally well without worrying
about being hated, hunted, and in constant mortal danger.
In the oceans, the remaining mega-yachts were being hunted
into extinction. Turning the US military
over the worst and dullest decentralized and democratized military
control. Not wanting to miss out on the
fun, the scattered remains of the US Navy became an actual branch of national
defense, usually to local nation-state interests. In the Southeast, the military forces
remained in service to their traditional ruling elite. However, the available technology was limited
to mostly post-Korean War era. In the
Northeast and Pacific West, state-of-the-art military equipment and industrial
capacity flourished. The Midwest and Far
West states coalesced into semi-organized agrarian areas dependent on the coast
nation-states for access to technology and export markets. The old Century of the United States of
America was history, but the new North American structure made more sense,
economically and culturally.
So, in his usual way, Trump did “Make America Great Again.” “America” now included Central and South
America and Canada, while the bulk of Trump’s supporters were forever mired in
dependence and mediocrity, America flourished.
However, they still had their bitterness to wallow in and “their guns or
religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Now, that frustration was bound by
nation-state borders and they didn’t have to worry about immigrants wanting to
cross into their territory. Nobody,
including MAGA wanted to live in the MAGA-controlled nation-states. The walls they had built to keep immigrants
out became barriers to contain the people stuck inside those boundaries of
mediocrity.
