by Paul Williams…….

The first thing Bernie Sanders has to do as Ringmaster, after he puts down the Bat phone with Putin, is to wrangle the new herd of privatizing Space Monkeys back into line where they belong. It seems the modern replacement units for Morgan, Rockefeller and Ford have decided that, for them, the sky should not be the limit. Teslas are all right on Broadway or the Champs Elysee, but – why just go global when your kids could inherit the whole Universe? If I am Elon Musk, why fool around? Globalism? It’s just the warm up! My Super friends and I can Do the whole Cosmos! Let our Motto Be: “Step by step, Relentlessly.”

Back in 1986, the Challenger crashed on takeoff. Like the Moon Landing, the Assassinations and 911, nearly everyone who is old enough can remember where they were at the time. The Challenger was written off in the popular press as the result of incorrigible U.S. governmental incompetence.

During the Clinton years, an outfit called Loral Space and Communications complained that NASA was just too damned slow to permit their thriving business in space satellite placement to flourish. They wanted to go to less expensive China where they hoped to have greater control. To insure their success, they wanted to take the most sophisticated missile technology in the world with them. Loral’s practical problem was that the Chinese couldn’t hit themselves in the foot with their own missiles, and it would be years before they could get close to Loral’s meticulous “Low Orbit” requirements. That is, if Loral left Chinese technology on its own.

Loral’s not-bashful management decided that if they could pry a super reliable D-5 ballistic missile from the cold wet grip of U.S. Navy Admirals, their new Chinese partners wouldn’t have to develop anything. They could simply take decades worth of top American brain power and billions in Taxpayer investment and put it all to work in the service of a new, “Innovative” and private enterprise.

Since Loral Space’s founder was also Mr. Clinton’s biggest financial supporter, the national super weapons technology transfer went off without a hitch. Public watchdogs like the New York Times didn’t bat an eye. The networks were totally preoccupied. For years, they pursued some allegedly funny business called Whitewater in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas. Plus, they couldn’t get enough of a colorful White House intern called Monica Lewinsky. Thieves were sliding out the bank’s back door with the entire vault in tow as the Networks’ normally taciturn, “Senior Correspondants” breathlessly chatted up the new receptionist.

Meanwhile, the folks at Loral stayed focused on their bottom line. They decided that if the most dangerously accurate missile on earth was good, the super advanced, multiple warhead, carrying device built especially for it would make Loral even stronger. See, just as a “MIRV” warhead package could wipe out ten cities at a clip – Loral could just lose the warheads. With ten satellites into orbit on one economical missile, their bottom line would be solid! American Admirals watched this deal go down, with their jaws slack. The first Pearl Harbor was a surprise, maybe, but Clinton’s blithe contempt for the Navy’s greatest weapon was beyond fiction. The admirals’ stunned foreboding never made the press. They understood clearly what had apparently escaped both their Commander in Chief and his vastly knowledgeable staff: If Loral could use D-5s to put commercial satellites into space, the Chinese Army could use them to hit military targets in the Mid Pacific. The “Chicoms” suddenly had, on a silver platter, the best of the Wrong Stuff: precision W-88 multi vehicles on top of top shelf, long range, missiles. China, in the Clinton years, had progressed straight to the head of the “Global Reach” class – and for free! That was never a hot topic for major news outlets, though.

The Justice Department eventually got its head far enough out of its rectum to investigate Loral. They settled, quietly, way out of Court. They spent only a few million dollars at Justice and no one had to admit any “wrong- doing”. The word “treason” never came up. What a bargain for Loral shareholders! Loral’s founder has just turned 90. Beloved by everyone, he still keeps his strong hand in, G-d bless him, with generous philanthropic efforts.

Today, excitement is building throughout the whole Aerospace community! Google and others are holding a worldwide contest to see which kick starters can think up the coolest new space stuff. People are talking! There’s GREAT ANTICIPATION in all major media outlets! Meanwhile, those Cold War Neanderthals, the former USSR, the US and all other “statist” thugs are being tossed, without ceremony, onto the Ash Heap of History. “Good riddance!” exclaim Manhattan’s fiercely independent Alpha – Pundits, in unison, (They’re like trained seals, at times.)

The most hopeful recent development in the long quest for peace has been a joint space operation that bloomed into Russia’s supplying rocket motors for U.S. spacecraft. The joint space station has meant a giant step away from the Soviet – American, almost lethal deadlock of the Cuban Missile days. Multinational crews on the Space Station had been busy turning swords into plowshares. It seemed to some sentient earthlings that the tribes might finally be putting down their weapons, for good.

Then Russia was said to have behaved badly in Crimea. Mr. Putin was chastened by an array of stern, “Western Leaders” who imposed a freeze on Russia’s international trade. Banning strong Russian cooperation upstairs was gloomy news for certain Living Bible aficionados. For some people, however, no more Russian rocket engines to NASA only meant there will be no more “statist” competition for any recent space invaders from the private sector. The two historically major space forces are being quietly marginalized, and fast. At stores like Space I L and Google, they’re delirious. What they consider to be “The Competition” is vanishing overnight!

If Mr. Sanders doesn’t think he can get the Russians engines put back into American ships, why does he not just stay in Vermont? We cannot obliterate the legal line between the “Tribes” and the “Whiskey Salesmen” and long remain a Tribe. If distinguished, hyper-ambitious members of the private sector prove able to “nudge” Sanders as surreptitiously as they have past administrations, he may as well cut his losses, now. Though he might become President of something still called “The United States”, that title will no longer mean much. America is already ceasing to be a sovereign entity as time goes by. The original job description for the position Mr. Sanders now seeks is therefore ever more obsolete.

Good luck to him, anyway, this fall.
Paul Williams