The World's Richest Crook, Hosni Mubarak, Wasn't A DLC Member... And Now It's Too Late

I knew Hosni Mubarak had appropriated an unconscionable amount of Egypt's national wealth-- for himself, his family and his circle of cronies/enforcers (including, of course so called "vice president" Omar Suleiman)-- including, of course, the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. has been bribing him with to protect Israel. But who knew he was the richest man in the world, richer even than Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mukesh Ambani or Carlos Slim... or even the Koch Bros, currently the chief financiers of the Republican Counter-Revolution? Yesterday's NY Post:

Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak is laughing all the way to the casbank.

The most hated man in Egypt, where anti-government protests raged for a 13th day yesterday, is likely the richest man in the world, a bombshell report reveals.

The teetering tyrant’s family fortune is worth about $70 billion-- stashed away in Swiss and other foreign bank accounts and shadowy real-estate holdings in Manhattan, London and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the Guardian newspaper reports.

That puts the 82-year-old despot comfortably ahead of Mexican business magnate and New York Times sugar daddy Carlos Slim Helu, who’s worth about $53.5 billion, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the richest American with $53 billion, according to a list of the world’s richest men by Forbes.com.

And that golden nest egg has the Arab world seeing red.

“Mubarak! This is not your money. You must return back every penny to Egypt,” a poster named Hassan commented on the Web site of PressTV, a Mideast-based broadcast.

“Leaders in the Arab world are the richest men in the world, while their people are poor and oppressed. The only peace is knowing these people will face justice when they meet Allah,” added Nazir, another poster.

Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and his family managed to make off with over $7 billion that belonged to the Tunisian people, which partially explains why he was so willing to pack up the last of his country's gold reserves and head off to a very sympathetic Saudi Arabia, another Middle Eastern tyrannical kleptocracy. If the Egyptian people thought Mubarak would follow the same trajectory, they hadn't reckoned with the masters of the universe having decided that the slide had to stop in Egypt and not bring down the established order in Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Oman, the Emirates and, ultimately, Saudi Arabia. No one really cares about Mubarak-- even if he is a close and generous family friend of the Clintons-- but the regime had to be stabilized and maintained. Even if he really wanted to get the hell out, the U.S., the Saudis, Israel, et al. could not let that happen until one of their own was in place to keep running the show. The status quo doesn't die off without a fight, and it rarely dies off.

In the U.S., the corporate interests fully own-- "fully" is different from 99%-- one political party, the Republicans, and have made tremendous strides toward taking complete ownership of the other one, the Democratic Party, ostensibly the one that represents ordinary working families but, under the disingenuous guise of a "big tent" has sold its ass to Wall Street and corporate America. 

Just yesterday Digby reassured us that centrism, the polite way of talking about corporate whores in certain circles, is intact despite the retirement from Congress of Blue Dog multimillionaire Jane Harman and the demise of the insidious, corporately funded Democratic Leadership Council. "The truth of the matter," she wrote, "is that the DLC's function has been taken over by Third Way. Nobody needs to fear that the centrists aren't going to be well represented in the Democratic Party. They run the place." 

In fact, "centrist" Heath Shuler (he's actually a C Street extreme-right-wing religionist, a once and future Republican in control of the shriveled-but-far-from-defanged Blue Dog Caucus) has been working overtime to undercut Nancy Pelosi-- and, with a helping hand from conservative ex-Blue Dog Steve Israel, currently chairman of the DCCC, recruit lots of anti-choice, anti-union, anti-gay, anti-equality, anti-consumer conservatives to run in the districts that rejected this same type of "centrist" in November. 

Corporate Central wins no matter who wins when a Blue Dog faces a Republican. And American families lose. I hope you won't consider me too crass for pointing out that Blue America, which helped end the political career of the worst Blue Dog in Congress last year, Bobby Bright (AL), is still fighting Blue Dogs and could sure use some help. $5, $10, $20 contributions will help us go up against the millions corporate America is funneling into Third Way's and Health Shuler's operations. They are counting on making sure Blue Dogs dominate the Democratic primaries next year so that Democratic voters have no choice in November of 2012. We're determined to fight that scenario.