As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’
agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake
Given
the extraordinary pace of events in America and the world this year, it is not
hard to imagine that a bystander — perhaps a bug-eyed alien who has been
following the series "The Earth" — would be pleased with the dynamics
of the show. But he also would be puzzled at the rapid twists of the
plot. The U.S., for example, enters a 2020 season in all its might
and glory, with the strong economy, where unemployment for everyone is low,
where reduced taxes and regulations promise further growth, and the basic
indices of economic activity spell "victory" for the funny-looking
guy who made it happen. Then — BAM! — a "deadly virus"
hits — eh, unimpressive...the mortality rate would have been much higher for
the sake of the show; 2 percent is a rookie number (would be even lower if the
infected were not placed in the nursing
homes). Nonetheless, America goes into lockdown, losing trillions of
dollars. Unemployment soars. Then — BAM! — massive
protests accompanied by rioting, looting, arson, vandalism, and sheer violence
erupt as a response to the incident of police brutality. The whole
system is declared evil and beyond repair. The crime rate
soars. American flags are burned — not in
Iran or North Korea, but in Washington, D.C. Some parts of the
country that were the envy of the world look like a war zone. Whoa, a startled viewer would
think — what just happened?
What
is happening is that November gets closer, and the country finds itself in a
situation that may be described with a mathematical catastrophe theory used to
study discontinuous processes. An example of a discontinuous process
would be an arched bridge to which more and more weight is added. At
first, little effect is seen as the weight on the bridge is increased — the
bridge begins to bend almost imperceptibly. At a certain point,
however, enough weight is added to the bridge that it collapses. A
sudden change in a discontinuous process is called a catastrophe.
The
American model right now has one active variable, the economic model, and one
active parameter, a necessity to choose one out of two courses of its
development. Speaking scientifically, we have reached a divergence
point that requires a system to follow one of the two possible paths that are
mutually exclusive. At this point, both of them are equally
probable, and the system "freezes" — to land on one of the paths, it
needs a push. It is difficult to accurately prognosticate the
system's behavior at this point, but one can model it. Once the
choice is made, the return to the divergence point is impossible — if you stand
before the abyss, you may either walk around it or take a step into it.
Which
paths lie before America? The first one is presented — and has been
practiced for the last 20 years — by the globalism aimed to secure America's
leading place in monopolar world. The main tools of it
are supranational entities such as international organizations,
multinational corporations, and financial institutions like the IMF and the
World Bank. Even though globalization has been pictured by academia
and media as an endless pool of growth, opportunities, and progress, it has
been marked by substantial shortcomings. For example, under the new
regime of enhanced financial mobility and power, with greater volatility of
financial markets and increased risk, real interest rates have risen substantially. This
has discouraged long-term investment in new plants and equipment and stimulated
spending on the re-equipment of old facilities along with a large volume of
essentially financial transactions — mergers, buybacks of stocks, financial
maneuvers, and speculative activities. This explains why overall
productivity growth in the member-countries of the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development fell. So did
gross fixed investment, and so did GDP growth. But the elites have
done well despite the slackened productivity. Because
globalization has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates,
the upper 5 percent of households have been able to skim off a large fraction
of the reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock
market values to rise rapidly. For the multinational corporations
that shaped foreign policy by
engaging in lobbyism, globalization has also been great. One of
their main objectives that they achieved was cheaper labor
sources. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer
problems, in authoritarian states. Capital moves to such friendly
investment climes, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less
costly locale. (That is why the MNCs have vocally opposed the Trump
administration's escalation of trade tensions, tightening of immigration
restrictions, and disruption of global value chains.)
For
the global majority, globalization has been a whole different
story. Income inequality rose markedly both within and among
countries. In the United States, despite a great increase in
productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose. Underemployment, job
insecurity, benefit loss — all increased.
The
Trump administration disdains globalization and practices a healthy and much
needed protectionism. It withdrew from free trade and other deals
and viciously attacked globalization structures nurtured by the previous
administrations: U.N., NATO, WTO, International Criminal Court, and now WHO,
which proved shockingly unprofessional and frankly hostile to the U.S.
interests.
If
Trump gets four more years as a president, he may get to the holy of holies of
the economic globalism — the IMF and the World Bank — which will undoubtedly
face a debt crisis due to the downfall of the world
economy. Ironically, the COVID-19 hysteria that became an act of
desperation for the Democrats — whether it was a projected event or a natural
crisis that would have been a shame to waste — now plays against the global
financial leviathan and its masters. According to none other than George Soros, the
COVID-19 pandemic is a one-two financial punch for developing
economies. Not only has it put extraordinary pressure on budgets
worldwide, but it has also caused a sharp exodus of capital from emerging
markets. JPMorgan Chase & Co. predicts that 1 in 5
emerging-market countries will default on their debt obligations — meaning that
the core banks may collapse. If some federal reserve banks fail, the
government may nationalize them — but no doubt Trump would not save them, as
Obama did in 2008. That would fatally undermine the economic
foundation of the Democrats for good; that's why Trump's victory is not an
option for them.
If
Biden wins, he, as a true O'Biden-Bama Democrat, will have to save the failing
banking system by unprecedentedly increasing the national debt in a weakened
economy. The previous model that balanced emission with trade deals
would not be possible to execute in a severely damaged global
economy. That is why Biden's victory would lead to a delayed
catastrophe, but with lower chances of surviving it, because the condition of
the country will deteriorate — his leftist policies will make sure of it.
The
choice we as a country will make in November is clear: Trump and patriotism or
Biden and globalism. Development or decline. It is just
that simple.
Image: Fox News via YouTube.
Take for example, the
Clinton Foundation, and the millions of dollars Clinton and her husband collected
from foreign nations while she was secretary of state.
THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly
dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
1. Globalism: Google VP
Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around
the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2. Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s
loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3. Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy
that Google’s executives discussed the most.
The Three Blows to the New
World Order
So much for "the end of history."
May 22, 2020
Bruce Thornton
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David
Horowitz Freedom Center.
Nearly 30 years ago the Cold War ended with the collapse of the
Soviet Empire. Communism, the last challenge to the Western paradigm of liberal
democracy and free trade, disappeared, defeated by the same free-world alliance
that had vanquished earlier totalitarian foes like fascism and Nazism. History
understood not as events but as a tournament of conflicting
socio-politico-economic orders had ended. A “new world order,” over a century
in the making, finally had won.
BLOG: BUSH IS NO ONE’S HERO! HE’S A WAR CRIMINALS AND CON MAN
WHO GOT FILTHY RICH OFF SELLING AMERICAN TO GLOBALIST.
That heady optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in his 1991
State of the Union address. The disintegration of the Soviet Union seemingly
confirmed the triumph of democracy, free markets, and transnational
institutions, or as Bush said, “a new world order, where diverse nations are
drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of
mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”
The Nineties saw several developments that seemingly confirmed
Bush’s optimism about the future: The swift defeat of the brutal dictator
Saddam Hussein, and the ending of revanchist violence in the Balkans by
multinational coalitions; the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia; the
creation of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty, and the welcoming of
communist China into the World Trade Organization. All were signs of history’s
“end.” At the same time, the tech revolution was relentlessly shrinking the
world further, facilitating global trade and global communication through the
World Wide Web, more powerful computers, email, and social media.
Over the last three decades, however, three disruptions have
challenged the assumptions of a Kantian “perpetual peace” based a “rules-based
international order” that reflects a new “harmony of interests” among the
world’s peoples. Each crisis has exposed the flawed assumptions behind the
naïve optimism and arrogant over-confidence of those in the West who have
promoted, built, and managed this paradigm.
9/11: Jihadist Terror
BLOG: DO A SEARCH FOR BUSH AND HIS SAUDIS CRONIES WHO INVADED US
9-11-01.
History returned with a vengeance on September 11, 2001. The
smoking ruins of the World Trade center reminded us that another vision of
socio-politico order, Islam––one that had occupied two-thirds of the old Roman
Empire and serially raided and invaded a nascent Europe for a thousand
years––was not done with history. The “war on terror,” including the Second
Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan, both of which are still not finished,
should have made us rethink our triumphalist assumptions about the inevitability
of democracy and free-trade and peace and human rights.
And it should have chastened us for our arrogance and failure of
imagination. Our continuing inability to create liberal democracies and human
rights among peoples for whom such concepts are alien didn’t lead to a critical
reassessment of the New World Order’s foundational assumptions.
BLOG: BUSH AND HIS FATHER STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ FOR
THEIR SAUDI$ CRONIES. WE ARE STILL IN THEM AND HAVE SQUANDERED TRILLIONS OF
DOLLARS.
Indeed, President George W. Bush, in the 2002 National Security
Strategy, defined the foreign policy of the United States as promoting a
“single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free
enterprise,” for “these values of freedom are right and true for every person,
in every society.” Bush returned to these themes in his inaugural speech in
January 2005––while the failure of remaking Iraq and Afghanistan was still
obvious. He linked U.S. security and global peace to the “force of human freedom”
and the expansion of democracy: “The survival of liberty in our land
increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope
for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
BLOG: THE ‘TERRORIST ATTACKS” WERE BY BUSH-OBAMA SAUDIS CRONIES.
THE SAUDIS BANKROLLED THE BUSH, CLINTON AND OBOMB PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES AND
THE PHONY CLINTON CHARITY FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the expensive, both in troops
and resources, misguided wars abroad repudiated these utopian goals. We failed,
and still fail, to acknowledge that Islam is a 14-centuries-old socio-political
order contrary to the Western liberal “rules-based international order.” The
New World Order’s banishment of religion to the realm of the private was
exposed as a mistake, and its global identity revealed to be an artifact of
Western elites that did not capture even their own peoples’ varied and distinct
identities.
The election of Donald Trump for now has led to a retreat from
policies that reflect this unwarranted and arrogant belief in transforming
Muslim nations into Western liberal democracies. But the foreign policy
establishment, evidenced in its hostility to Trump, still defends this bankrupt
paradigm. They have continually criticized his weakening of the “rules-based
international order,” especially his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, his
pressuring NATO members to live up to their pledge to spend 2% of GDP on
defense, and his “America First” foreign policy principle and frank
nationalism.
Despite Trump’s pushback and the pause in major terror attacks,
Islamic jihadism remains a potent threat. And it threatens the New World Order,
evidenced by Iran’s race to acquire nuclear weapons. Finally, it repudiates the
fundamental assumptions of a common global identity and a “harmony of
interests” underlying that order.
2007-9: The Great Recession
BLOG: THE ‘GREAT RECESSION’ WAS CAUSED BY WALL STREET’S CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS. NO ONE IN AMERICAN HISTORY HAS BEEN IN BED WITH BANKSTERS MORE THAN
OBAMA-BIDEN.
The Great Recession exposed the dangers of a globally integrated
economic system. It began in a feckless government policy in the U.S. that
relaxed standards for home mortgages, particularly interest rates, in order to
increase minority home ownership. A real estate
bubble followed, and Wall Street wolves took advantage by creating risky
financial instruments for marketing these sketchy mortgages. When lending rates
increased and the bubble burst, financial institutions were damaged, infecting
the whole global economy. Unemployment in the U.S. reached over 10%, GM declared bankruptcy,
banks disappeared, and consumer spending slowed. What followed with the
election of Barack Obama was one of the slowest economic recoveries in history,
and economists proclaimed growth of GDP would remain at 2% indefinitely.
In Europe, the sovereign debt crisis and bank failures revealed
fault lines in the EU project. Its economic regulations and the single
currency, managed by Brussels and its elite transnational technocrats, were
exposed as incoherent: A single currency with various economic policies
determined by distinct sovereign nations was always a recipe for disaster.
Particularly in the Mediterranean South, interventions by the EU, the European
Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund were accompanied by demands
for fiscal austerity that the Southern tier felt to be high-handed and
arrogant.
Suddenly the “one Europe” version of the New World Order, in which
national differences were subordinated to a transnational governing elite, was
fissuring. National differences in cultures and mores were still important and
acted as centrifugal forces, straining the bonds of the Union. For all the
global elite’s denigration of nationalism, Germans are still Germans, and
Italians are still Italians, with different historical memories, different
attitudes toward work and leisure, and different expectations of what
governments should do for its citizens.
These divisions have not healed, and indeed were widened by the
2015 crisis of migration from the war-torn Middle East of mostly young male
Muslims, including large numbers of jihadist terrorists. The Schengen Zone of
open travel among European states was now revealed to be dangerous, and many countries
reinstated border controls. Terror attacks increased in frequency and
lethality, and entry states like Italy and Greece resented having to bear the
disorder resulting from migrants transiting through their countries to the
welfare paradises of northern Europe. Eastern European members simply refused
to accept the EU mandated quotas for migrants professing a faith that for a
millennium had attacked, conquered, and occupied their territories.
The Great Recession uncovered deep flaws in the globally integrated
economy, one of which is the dismissal of national identities and cultures. It
seems that Joseph de Maistre was right: “Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’
in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on
. . . . But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.” There are no
“citizens of the world,” nor is there a “global community” beyond the tiny
globalist elite.
2020: The Coronavirus Pandemic
The fracturing of the EU has been worsened by the pandemic. The
divide between the EU North and South has widened even further, as already
strapped economies are nearing collapse, such as Italy’s, the fourth largest in
the EU, with France not far behind. That calamity can be averted only by the
successful northern economies that will pay up or see more countries abandon
the EU as did Great Britain.
BLOG: WE NEED TO PROSECUTE CHINA’S AGENTS INCLUDING JOE BIDEN,
DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND HILLARY CLINTON. THEY MADE MILLIONS SERVICING THE
INTERESTS OF THE COMMUNIST.
More significant is the dysfunctions in the West’s relationship
with China. Like the formation of the EU, bringing China and its totalitarian
communist regime into the World Trade Organization was a milestone in the
expansion and consolidation of the New World Order. China’s role in the
pandemic, particularly in obscuring the origins, scope, and infectability of
the outbreak, and in attempting to blame it on the U.S., confirmed what more
than 25 years of its bad behavior should have taught us: an illiberal,
culturally different country ruled by ruthless autocrats cannot be trusted to
abide by the terms of an institution based on principles and values it does not
share.
Rather, those laws and conditions will be, as Jonathon Swift put
it, “like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break
through.” Since it joined the WTO in the Nineties China has violated
trade agreements, stolen intellectual and technical property, dumped products,
manipulated its currency, and committed other violations to gain an economic
advantage over its rivals, particularly the U.S. Worse yet, in our globalist
delusions about the transformative powers of free trade, we have outsourced
critical industries, such as computer chips and pharmaceuticals, to China,
giving them potent leverage over us. The “rules-based international order” has
merely afforded China the mechanisms and cover for undermining the economies of
the West and increasing China’s global power.
Finally, the virus crisis has stripped the pretensions of the
technocratic foundations of the New World Order, discrediting its progressive
champions and their naïve faith in science as transcending professional
interests, partisan biases, political ideologies, and nationalist loyalties.
Real science and technology work well for understanding and manipulating
the material world, but are less reliable when humans––defined by their
passions and interests, their self-awareness, and their undetermined free
will––become part of the equation. Then certainty and predictability become
rare and transient, lying as they do beyond the “complexity horizon,” as
mathematician John Allen Paulos calls it, “that limit or edge beyond which
social laws, events, and regularities are so complex as to be unfathomable,
seemingly random.”
The past few months have confirmed this assessment. The “experts”
we have relied on to advise our leaders during the crisis have been
inconsistent and sometimes incoherent in their prescriptions, vitiated as they
are by incomplete data, flawed models, questionable assumptions, and political
pressures. As a result, panic, hysteria, and political rent-seeking have
flourished, leading to policies like quarantining the healthy, productive young
and shutting down a thriving economy, throwing the country into a recession on its
way to becoming a depression. As a result, lives have been needlessly lost and
others will be ruined for years to come, while trillions of dollars have been
added to budget deficits and the national debt.
Time to Decide
The Trump administration has made some critical moves towards
realizing that goal of dismantling some of the New World Order, particularly in
terms of China. But as the fierce, relentless domestic and international hatred
of Trump shows, the global managerial elite will fight hard and dirty to
protect its interests.
We will see in the coming months whether the crisis will make us
all rethink our unexamined assumptions about technocratic globalism, the
transnational institutions of the “rules-based international order,” the
one-world delusions about bringing democracy and freedom to cultures
inhospitable to the principles and virtues necessary for those goods, and the
outsized authority and power we reflexively grant to government “experts” to
solve all our problems, even those that lie beyond the ken of science, and
depend on our own common sense, practical wisdom, morals, and virtues.
Or we will watch as our unalienable rights, national sovereignty,
and freedom, already assaulted by government autocrats, are further eroded. The
choice is ours.
Josh Hawley: Bush’s
Globalist ‘New World Order’ Has Made the Elites Rich, Eroded ‘Middle Class Way
of Life’
MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty
Images
JOHN
BINDER
1 Nov 2019500
3:22
President
George H.W. Bush’s plan for a “New World Order” with global integration of the
United States’ economy has made the ruling class richer while eroding “the
middle class way of life” in America, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley described how the long-held
push by both political establishments to massively globalize the American
economy has been at the expense of U.S. workers while the ruling class and
their allies in the donor class have profited.
Hawley said:
If I have to give you a sense of the kind of vision that I think
voters rejected, President Bush … gave a speech to Congress in 1990
where he talked about a ‘New World Order,’ and he was saying this of
the situation in the context with Iraq, but he talked broadly about a
‘New global liberal order’ that of course America would lead, that it would
involve America making the world much more like America and the rest of the
world kind of blending in with America … and there wouldn’t be
the need for hard borders any longer, and we’d have free trade, and
we’d have great multinational cooperation, and we’d have these multinational
corporations that can do business in any country, and it would be a whole new
era. [Emphasis added]
…
Well, as it turns out — first of all, China and Russia didn’t
get the memo on that — secondly, as it turns out, that ‘New World Order’ wasn’t
good for American workers. And as it turned out, it didn’t protect
American middle class values. As it turned out, it undermined the
middle class way of life. [Emphasis added]
Hawley said the ruling class is primarily a “small group of
people” from a “fairly narrow band of colleges and graduate schools” who
largely agree on the most challenging issues facing the nation and oppose the
traditionalism of middle American communities.
“They also tend to be the winners of this global integration.
George Bush’s ‘New World Order,’ the people who have been in charge of the
parties who run the media, who hold commanding heights in our culture; they win
from that agreement,” Hawley said of the ruling class. “They’re doing great;
they are the wealthy in our society. They are the ones who are globally
integrated and global facing.”
Hawley continued:
They also tend to be skeptical of places like Missouri and of
things like home and community. So they say that they value those things, but
you listen to somebody … and somebody says, “I’m not going to move from this
small town even though I’m having trouble finding a job because my family is
here and because this is where we’ve lived for generations and this is where my
friends are and I want to make a life here.” A lot of D.C. elites in both
parties listen to that and they’re like, “That’s crazy.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, free trade has helped
gut working and middle class American jobs and stripped whole middle
American towns of their industries and livelihoods.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed
and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), five million American
manufacturing jobs and more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been
eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of jobs due to
free trade has coincided with an almost 600 percent increase in trade deficits.
In recent years, the
economic recovery from the Great Recession disproportionately benefitted elite zip codes. For
example, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which
is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While
populations have grown in major cities where the wealthiest of Americans live,
rural communities have continued to shrink.
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in
the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New
World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy
that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor
class.
THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH EVERY WAVE
OF WALL STREET PLUNDER FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS.
THEY STARTED TWO WARS TO PROTECT THEIR SAUDIS PAYMASTERS
(WHO DO YOU THINK FUNDED THE BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY?) AND HAVE SABOTAGED OUR
BORDERS AND HOMELAND SECURITY FOR ENDLESS HORDES OF ‘CHEAP’ LABOR.
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in
the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New
World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy
that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor
class.
House of
Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most
Powerful Dynasties Audible Audiobook – Abridged
How did the Bushes, America's most powerful political family, become
gradually seduced by and entangled with their Saudi counterparts?
Why did the
Bush administration approve the secret airlift of 140 Saudis, including two
dozen relatives of Osama bin Laden, just after September 11? Did one of the
Saudi royals on the planes have any advance knowledge of the attacks?
What
specifically chosen words did George W. Bush say on national television during
the 2000 election campaign to trigger Muslim support? How did Saudi-funded
Islamic groups propel Bush to victory in Florida, thus winning him the
presidency?
The answers
to these questions lie in a largely hidden relationship between the House of
Bush and the House of Saud that began in the mid-1970s. An amazing weave of
money, power, and influence, it takes place all over the globe and involves
war, covert operations, and huge deals in oil and defense industries. But, most
horrifyingly of all, the secret liasion between these two great families helped
trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of 9-11.
Reviewed in the United States
Verified Purchase
This book will test you. When you wonder aloud why Congress
doesn’t get anything done, foreign wars continue without reason and deficits
are so high, most are unable to see the cause. Unger doesn’t explain it all but
he explains the relationship between money and power better than any book I’ve
read to date.
The storyline of the book takes you through how the rich Saudi ruling class and really a group of Texan oilmen bonded over business. When you read about the genesis of the relationship in the 70s during the first part of the book, it looked merely like the cozy insider-only type of stuff that is common in the fabric of corporate America and most human relationships.
But the nuance Unger uncovers with his hawk-like ability to pull minutiae from rivers of source material outlines a darker agenda. His fact finding mission lays bare a Saudi elite trying to nudge the levers of power in Washington. And with this insight, Unger explains the nearly invisible pattern in which money buys powers in America. Unger’s work uncovers so many conspicuous connections amongst so many smart, ambitious men that coincidence is ruled out as the cause. Complicity makes the case here as well as any outsider like Unger can.
But the circumstantial nature of this book cannot be completely swept away. Unger has grokked the nefarious nature of this relationship but is missing the proverbial smoking gun. There is no ipso facto ‘A funded B which lead to C relationship’ outlined in the book. The closest we get to this as a reader is when the Bin Laden family and other Saudi royals are ferried out of the country while the FAA has all airspace on lockdown, a fascinating story that makes the TSA’s security theatre we endure at every airport comically irksome.
Recommending this book is easy, but to whom I would make that recommendation is difficult. If you sometimes watch/read the news with an open mind and wonder, “How did we get to this place?”, then I’d put this book on your list. If you’re knowledge of the middle east and current events is low, try paying attention to that news first, watch for the patterns and then read this to learn the connections. Most importantly though, any citizen trying to understand the ways in which money buys power in the modern nation-state needs to read this book.
The storyline of the book takes you through how the rich Saudi ruling class and really a group of Texan oilmen bonded over business. When you read about the genesis of the relationship in the 70s during the first part of the book, it looked merely like the cozy insider-only type of stuff that is common in the fabric of corporate America and most human relationships.
But the nuance Unger uncovers with his hawk-like ability to pull minutiae from rivers of source material outlines a darker agenda. His fact finding mission lays bare a Saudi elite trying to nudge the levers of power in Washington. And with this insight, Unger explains the nearly invisible pattern in which money buys powers in America. Unger’s work uncovers so many conspicuous connections amongst so many smart, ambitious men that coincidence is ruled out as the cause. Complicity makes the case here as well as any outsider like Unger can.
But the circumstantial nature of this book cannot be completely swept away. Unger has grokked the nefarious nature of this relationship but is missing the proverbial smoking gun. There is no ipso facto ‘A funded B which lead to C relationship’ outlined in the book. The closest we get to this as a reader is when the Bin Laden family and other Saudi royals are ferried out of the country while the FAA has all airspace on lockdown, a fascinating story that makes the TSA’s security theatre we endure at every airport comically irksome.
Recommending this book is easy, but to whom I would make that recommendation is difficult. If you sometimes watch/read the news with an open mind and wonder, “How did we get to this place?”, then I’d put this book on your list. If you’re knowledge of the middle east and current events is low, try paying attention to that news first, watch for the patterns and then read this to learn the connections. Most importantly though, any citizen trying to understand the ways in which money buys power in the modern nation-state needs to read this book.
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