Dig, if you will, a picture.

A man stands at the head of an organization. The organization itself is woven with the dreams and aspirations of ordinary people, from every corner of the earth. The man assumes total power and control, exercises patronage, rubs shoulders with political titans and signs off the blueprints of the financial canals that siphon off a river of hot cash.

He raises petit criminals to grandeur. He promises the moon to undignified, backwoods crooks in far flung forgotten lands. He garners immutability and respect with unswerving loyalty. He is untouchable. Operating outside of the rule of law, he anoints his congregation and produces licenses to print money. He talks of his business as a family, an inbred hodgepodge of ne’er do wells, failed or potential despots, grasping bastards ankle deep in the trough.

Nobody can do anything about it, it would seem.

There are many comparisons that can be made to rotten orchards of history. Some would compare this man to a Pope, or a Dictator. The curious nature of this stateless, untouchable font of glory has the ring of the Catholic Church. The church of the Borgias rather than the Church of Pope Francis. A Robert Mugabe level despot, canny enough to avoid the trappings of full blown Napoleonic Idi Amin madness. The man is akin to the descendant of a Muslin or Mongol warlord, bulldozing his way into the status quo of Asia and Africa, dangling the keys to celestial bliss in one hand and the scythe of unbidden wrath held with subtle threat in the other. He’s an absolute monarch in a hereditary line, his position a means of life support so much as power. He is possibly the greatest of his stock, a Habsburg tree of geriatric fiddlers and takers.

He is the conductor of an orchestra of bad men, the worst men. He’s an old school 18^th century capitalist. He is the scourge of ordinary workers and is a pied piper of death, drawing in the vulnerable to third world countries and working them half a dozen feet into the ground.

True to the tyranny playbook, he silences all opposition. His charisma and candor smear him in WD40. He wriggles and slithers and squirms his way out of seemingly insurmountable traps. He sets up secret courts and bestows extra-legal justice. With a smile and an energetic gesticulation he waves away criticisms, safe in he knowledge that he is beholden only to the will of his electorate. His electorate is the gaggle of thieves and confidence tricksters too dumb and ineffectual to ever make their way in politics proper. Nobody else has a say in whether the man stays or goes. He exists to protect but also to smear. Upon his desk is a box, within it a Santa Claus list of who is naughty or nice, the deeds of evil men writ large in black ink.

The man is emblematic of the stuttering of progress, yet also he is a beacon of growth. He has presided over unimaginable global corruption and siphoning of funds, yet he has also overseen the booming of a global religion. He has not only changed the product which all else relies upon; he has made it.

He is such a benefactor that world leaders entrust the careers of their sons and daughters to his patronage. He brokers deals and stands above and beside global conflict, centuries old antagonism. He soothes the pain of old style colonialism with the medicine of old style colonialism. His lackeys lap it up none the less. They speak in the language of brown envelopes. It is a hypnotic dialect and it blindsides better men. When that will not do the collective force of the organization can bring its influence to bear, its entropic tentacles closing like a vice on enemies ordinary and august.

Such an organization, bound as it is with the glue of dishonesty, ruthless grasping and astonishing bare faced incompetence is a relic of antiquity. It is a monument to Roman politicking of the ailing Republic, a throwback to the oldest rackets of history. His hagiography is real and flaunted with cringing, ancien regime levels of self awareness.

The man divides and conquers his opposition. His bedfellows are evil, unscrupulous and powerful way beyond their merit. Despite this there are millions of voices praying and deifying his every move, sucking and pleading and begging for the right to continue bathing in the waters of influence and affluence.

Despite this, the end times may be upon the man. His choir has been infiltrated and some of the members ensnared by bigger gangsters with a more serious mandate. He will never be removed by his own; he has detailed maps of the killing fields. Let us hope they are out-mobbed.