There Is No Honor Among Thieves: A Study Into Politics, Blackmail, and Game Theory.

In modern society no one can get elected into public office without a lot of help, even the rich struggle if they try to do it on there own. This means deals must be made. But, there is a problem. People in power do not get power by being honest well-meaning people. Sure they act like they are in speeches and public appearances, but what they do is greatly different. So how can these deals be done when you can not trust the politician not to back out on the deal after the fact since they can profit by doing so. Game theory answers this question and this is very critical to understanding how the real world works and if we have any chance at all at changing things we must understand what is going on at the root level and make the changes there.

So let's go through an example, you’re a group of people that want to get something done. Let us use The Israel Lobby (AIPAC) as an example. They want to get billions of dollars in aid for Israel, now this aid is worth billions but Saudis want that same money to be sent to Saudi Arabia instead. So both are willing to spend $1 million towards the candidate for “campaign donation” to get them this aid. The candidate, let's call him John, is 3 points behind Joan in the race, and will surely lose if he does not get the extra money and support. AIPAC also has a relationship with many media organization and can get John a lot of media exposure and the Saudis can not offer this so John clearly would like to make the deal with AIPAC.

But, here we have a problem. Both John and AIPAC want to get the deal done but they can not make the deal because AIPAC does not trust John to follow through. After John is elected he already has what he wants now the vote for the Aid package is worth 1 million dollars (or more) to the Saudi, so it would be in John’s best interest to now take the offer from the Saudis as he has a net gain of $1 million dollars + he is elected, this is clearly his best case scenario and AIPAC knows this so they won't make the deal and John cannot get elected. The Saudis know this same logic and won't support him either.

So, how does John get the deal done? If John does not get the support he loses and Jane has come out saying she is going to cut all foreign aid and Israel is going to lose a lot of money. So both Israel and John really want the deal done and they need to find a way to bind John to the decision of supporting the Israeli aid package. This is where it gets truly amazing.

In order to bind John to his promise, AIPAC has to have something on John that will cost him more than 1 million dollars if he does not follow through. So John has to GIVE AIPAC blackmail material on him, or he could take a ride on an Israeli Mossad operatives private jet, let's give this guy a random name… how about Jeffery Epstein, and we can call the plane the Lolita express. So John takes a ride on the Lolita Express to Epstein's private island where he rapes underage girls and allows himself to be photographed doing so. Now let us look at how this changes our situation.

Now when John is elected if he tries to give the aid to the Saudis AIPAC has someone release the footage of John raping underage girls and John will lose much more than the million dollars he would gain from the Saudis. So now John and AIPAC can make the deal and John can win the race and AIPAC can get the money it wants.

This is how game theory works and why it's so important to understand. Unless we can remove the need to bind people to their promises in such a fashion there will always be the need for an ambitious politician (or any other person seeking power) to engage in such disgusting behaviors. The larger the deal the larger the blackmail has to be, so you can use your imagination what they have to do at the highest level to be blackmailable enough to get the support needed to get to the highest positions of power, and why those in power at the top seem like nothing but puppets. They are puppets but it is because they have sold out all of their possible decision-making ability in order to get the backing needed to win the election. It does not matter how many “corrupt” politicians or organization we remove the bottom line is that the underlying motivations will always be there and nothing can change until we understand this and figure out a way to change it.

Thanks for reading :)

Oz

(Just a little real-world event that recently happened that might convince a skeptic this is what is indeed really going on. Sheldon Adelson gave trump around $100 million towards getting elected. In early may he came out that he was frustrated that Trump had not moved the embassy to Jerusalem yet. Within 2 weeks Trump had announced he is moving the embassy. This decision further isolates the USA to the rest of the world (esp in the middle east), yet he jumped right after Adelson made it known he was not happy about it. If Trump is worth billions he would not jump because some other billionaire gave him $100 million unless that other billionaire had some dirt on Trump to use as leverage, and more likely than not they had a deal before Trump was elected and this was part of it. This is only one explanation but it is the most likely explanation in my opinion.)