All the Devils Will Be There

The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. Ariel to Prospero, relating what Ferdinand cried out as he plunged into the water from the shipwreck. Ferdinand recognizes the true and evil nature of his father King Alonso and the royal party with whom he traveled. In the full quote, Ariel uses a simile to compare Ferdinand’s hair to reeds: "Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring, – then like reeds, not hair, – Was the first man that leaped; cried, ‘Hell is empty And all the devils are here.’" – William Shakespeare

In their fantastic book describing all of the corporate criminals who caused the Great Recession, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera fully documented the names and crimes that should have resulted in a bunch of equity capitalists handing from telephone poles or being executed in firing squads. Sadly, it only too the election of a black man to President of the United States to distract the Marching Morons from a righteous anger into their usual self-destructive stupid fallback, racism. Even worse, President Barak Obama calmly and competently righted the sinking US financial ship and put in place a collection of safeguards that would, until now, keep the vulture capitalists from blowing up the system again. Even Trump in his first term couldn’t break that lock, but with a MAGA Extreme Court and Congress on his leash it won’t take them long this time.

While the MAGAots will be dreaming that they’ve fucked the liberals on January 20^th, 2025, it won’t be long before they discover they’ve fucked themselves and, very likely, there won’t be a way back to the old “normal” for at least a generation or two, if ever.

The new normal may be very different from the one they might faintly remember; when unions could protect workers, when Unemployment and Workers’ Compensation insurance protected them from workplace cycles and injuries, when the ACA kept insurance companies from gouging them for “pre-existing conditions” (like being fat and diabetic, as in the two wannabe-Russians at left), when Social Security and Medicare kept old people from living in cardboard boxes in rural economic dead-zones, when the FCC, FDC, FTC, FDA, and the rest of the federal bureaucracies kept the country safe from the abuses of the robber barons and fascists. You know, “the good old days when America was great?”

There are roughly 800 billionaires in the US at this moment (and fewer than 3,000 in the world) and 320,000,000 of the rest of us (there are fewer than 3,000 billionaires in the world and 8,000,000,000 of the rest of us). On Monday, January 20^th, 2025 (ironically, also Martin Luther King Day in the US), it’s safe to say that almost all of those 800 billionaires and their spawn will be in Washington, D.C. and all of the country’s problems will be gathered together to celebrate successfully having screwed everyone else. If there was ever a perfect moment to test a small neutron bomb (primarily to save as many precious Washington monuments, museums, and historic buildings as possible) January 20^th, 2025 is it.

A better solution, to minimize collateral damage, might be to deliver a bus-load of lethally-contaminated caviar to the Trump Inaugural Ceremonies. If there was ever a delivery system designed to target the worst-of-the-worst it might be caviar (although Trump and his low-brow ilk probably won’t touch “fishy-stuff” so a basket of poisoned Big Macs would be necessary). There may never be a better moment to put a pause on the  "dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people" that Joe Biden warned us about in his final Presidential address to the nation. This is definitely a moment when “Hell is empty And all the devils are here” and there may not be another like it for a long time.