The richest person in the world isn’t anyone in the Forbes
list, which excludes calculations for any heads-of-state, but is
instead King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions
of dollars. He virtually owns the Saudi Government, which owns the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets. Aramco alone is worth “anywhere between US$1.25 trillion[7] and US$7 trillion,[8] making it the world’s most valuable company.” The company’s website says: “1980: Saudi Arabian government acquires 100 percent participation interest in Aramco,”
most of which it had already owned. The Saud family’s partners since
1933 had been Chevron Corporation, or Standard Oil of California, which
built Aramco. It was a Rockefeller company then; but no one can say who
controls it today. As of 2013
(see p. 56 there), the only two investors that owned more than 0.002 or
.02% of Chevron, each owned around 6% of it: Blackrock, Inc., and State
Street Corp., and they essentially jointly controlled that company,
regarding anything on which the two agreed. But the controlling
stockholder of Blackrock in 2013 was PNC Financial Services, at 20.8%. PNC is jointly controlled by
Wellington Management, Blackrock and the Vanguard Group, each at more
than 5%. Wellington, the main stockholder, is jointly controlled by
Blackrock, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Royce & Associates, T. Rowe
Price, and Wellington Management itself. Some companies, such as Wellington Management, simply hide their owners. All of this is called ‘democracy.’ (Or, at least, it’s “capitalism” of the fascist sort.)
However, King Salman’s ownership of the
Saudi Government is relatively clear, since he controls the Government
as his private fiefdom, and since his Government owns Aramco and other
assets. Individuals such as Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett, and
Amancio Ortega, are each only around 1/20th to 1/50th as rich as is he.
The officially-given-out figure for Salman’s personal wealth is $18
billion, but Forbes simply omits including him at all.
(Bloomberg’s billionaires-list does likewise.) They don’t want to offend
the richest people in the world; and heads-of-state who have become
enormously wealthy from heisting an entire country prefer to keep the
actual size of their heists hidden. (Furthermore, in order to pretend
that the basic capitalist myth is true — that accumulation of wealth
reflects mainly one’s merit instead of one’s power — they need to play
down wealth that’s been accumulated by crime, or by inheritance; and
head-of-state wealth tends strongly to be the product of both.)
On October 14th, Britain’s Guardian bannered, “Saudi Arabia: Mother of Saudi man sentenced to crucifixion begs Obama to intervene,”
and opened: “The mother of a Saudi protester sentenced to death by
beheading and crucifixion has begged Barack Obama to intervene to save
her son’s life. In her first interview with foreign media, Nusra
al-Ahmed, the mother of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, whose case has made
headlines around the world, described the intended punishment as savage
and ‘backwards in the extreme’. … She said her son had been detained
sometime after joining Shia demonstrators in the eastern coastal city of
Qatif seeking equal religious rights in the Sunni-majority country. …
Visiting after his arrest, she alleged he had been tortured. ‘When I
visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognise him. I didn’t know
whether this really was my son Ali or not. I could clearly see a wound
on his forehead. Another wound in his nose. They disfigured it. …[When] I
started talking to him [he told me that] during the interrogation [he
was] being kicked, slapped, of course his teeth fell out … For a month
he was peeing blood. He said he felt like a mass of pain, his body was
no more.’” This was/is his punishment for participating in a peaceful
demonstration.
Ali Mohammed al-Nimr’s father “Mohammed
al-Nimr, said his son is among eight young men facing capital
punishment but insisted that he was completely innocent of the charges
against him.” The father is similarly pleading for British leader David Cameron to push publicly for his son’s life to be spared. The Guardian reported the father on October 8th saying, “My son is completely innocent.
He has denied all accusations against him and said so in court. My son
is a peaceful man. They forced him to sign a confession for a crime he
never committed.”
This is part of a global war between
Sunni and Shiia political leaders. America and its vassal-states
(including David Cameron’s Britain) are allied with Sunni-run nations,
while Russia and its cooperating nations are allied with Shiia-run
nations.
The Saudi royals are the world’s top
Sunni force, and they have long been allied with the United States,
against post-Shah (post-1979) Iran and all other Shiia-ruled countries,
such as Syria, and such as the next-door Yemenese Shiite Houthis, who
are being bombed incessantly by the hard-line Sunni Sauds using their
U.S. weapons. According
to the former bookkeeper of the Sunni organization Al Qaeda, the man
who collected all of the financial donations to that organization,
virtually all of Al Qaeda’s funding consisted of multimillion-dollar
donations, mainly from the Saud family but also from other Sunni Arab
royals; and their followers, the terrorists, were mercenaries in their
pay, almost as much as they were true-believing fundamentalist Sunnis —
they were being paid very well by their royal sponsors, to serve as a
‘volunteer’ army for jihad to bring a globalized version of the ancient
Caliphate, or Sunni Empire. Such terrorism can be quite lucrative for a
jihadist, even if the bigger payoff is promised to come in his
afterlife.
The official religion of Saudi Arabia is the Wahhabist or Salafist fundamentalist Islamic sect of the Sunni version of Islam.
It’s the version of Islam that seeks a return of the ancient Caliphate
or Sunni Empire, but now on a global level (extending at least as far
away from Arabia as Afghanistan and Pakistan) — and, of course, the Saud
family (after all their ancient conquests) owns Mecca, in whose direction every Muslim (Sunni or not) is required (according to the standard understanding of the Quran,
in Surah “The Cow” or “ Al Baqarah,” 142-143) to bow towards in prayer,
every day. So: King Salman controls not only the estimated
quarter-trillion-barrels of oil that Aramco has, but also the Mecca for
all of Islam. And, of course, he also relies upon the decades-long
military backing of the United States Government.
If President Obama, or Prime Minister
Cameron, pleads publicly for King Salman not to behead Ali Mohammed
al-Nimr, then what about the perhaps hundreds of other head-chops that Salman will do (via his hired executioners) this year? (There
are already more than a hundred so far in 2015. You can see a few of
them in secretly-filmed phone-videos that are included on this recent
documentary, which also shows the boy/man Ali Mohammed al-Nimr whose
crime was to seek an end to the systematic discrimination against Shiia
in Saudi Arabia. It also discusses the situation of women, and the
plight of slaves.) For Obama to issue any such request publicly would get in the way of his (and especially the Sauds’) anti-Shiia “Assad Must Go” campaign. After all, in September 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives issued a report saying that:
Today we are witnessing the largest
global convergence of jihadists in history, as individuals from more
than 100 countries have migrated to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq
since 2011. Some initially flew to the region to join opposition groups
seeking to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but most are now
joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), inspired to become a
part of the group’s “caliphate” and to expand its repressive society.
Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield to enlist
with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners.
More than 250 individuals from the United States have also joined or
attempted to fight with extremists in the conflict zone.
5,000 foreign Sunni jihadists in Syria
came from Tunisia — it’s how Tunisia managed to get rid of enough of
them to be able to establish something of a democracy in their own land.
The second-biggest national contingent, 2,275, is from Saudi Arabia
itself, the same country that supplied fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists.
But the exodus of 2,275 jihadists from Saudi Arabia can’t enable
democracy to emerge in Saudi Arabia, because the Saud family’s own
Wahhab faith is based upon supporting jihad. Most of the Saudi
population aren’t in favor of extending Wahhabism around the world, but
the Sauds are. Conveniently, their war to spread Allah’s power happens
to be also a war to spread the Sauds’ power. (It’s not spreading the
power of the rest of the Saudi population.) The Sauds believe that Allah
is on their family’s side. After all: God (and the pillaging that had enabled the Saud family to conquer the country) gave them 260 billion barrels of oil!
These warriors are all doing battle to
oust Bashar al-Assad, the most secular (or non-sectarian) leader in the
Middle East (far more secular, for example, than is America’s ally,
Israel). The Syrian Constitution under his Ba’ath Party has always been non-Islamic, and not only non-jihadist. There is a strict separation of religion from politics. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia, “The Qur’an is declared to be the constitution of the country, which is governed on the basis of Islamic law (Shari’a).”
Furthermore, “No political parties or national elections are
permitted[2] and according to The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, the
Saudi government was the seventh most authoritarian regime from among
the 167 countries rated.” (Notice that euphemism ‘authoritarian.’ When
we were fighting self-declared fascists in World War II, we used
instead the honest term for them, “dictatorships.” The Sauds are
dictators.) The Sauds are dictators.) The Economist rated Syria the fifth-most “authoritarian,” but the Economist is allied with the Saudi royal family and wants Assad to be overthrown. And, at seventh-worst, Saudi Arabia was actually ranked far worse than any other of the magazine’s listed allies. (The Economist is hardly a trustworthy source, more a mouthpiece of the aristocracy.)
U.S. President Obama has consistently since 2011 argued that, “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way.
His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is
imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have
consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition
or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian
people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” How
wonderful to know that our President cares so much about “the Syrian
people” as to bomb their government and try to replace it with one more
like the Sauds’. The stars-and-stripes waves so proudly around the
world. (Actually not — certainly not now.)
Obama said on 2 October 2015,
“They’ve been propping up a regime that is rejected by an overwhelming
majority of the Syrian population because they’ve seen that he has been
willing to drop barrel bombs on children and on villages
indiscriminately.” He blatantly lied.
Polling
in Syria, even by Western polling firms and throughout the period of
the invasion by Saudi and other fighters and the U.S. bombing of Assad’s
forces, has consistently shown at least 55% support by Syrians for
continuation of Assad as being Syria’s leader.
There are no such political polls published in Saudi Arabia; its royals
don’t allow that; but, if such polls were to be done there, then anyone
who might be indicated to threaten continuation of the Sauds’
dictatorship would simply be beheaded anyway.
That’s the type of orderly nation the United States can defend. The United States can also support the regime it had installed in a violent February 2014 coup in Ukraine that’s firebombing the residents of the area that refused to accept the coup-government the U.S. had installed. (Firebombs are worse
than barrel bombs.) For some reason, things like this are not what U.S.
politicians and ‘news’ media talk about, with ‘our’ ‘free’ press. So,
it’s easy for the U.S. public to be unaware of such realities about the
‘democracy’ that ‘they’ ‘elect.’ Out of sight is out of mind; ignorance
is bliss. Under such circumstances as this, it’s more comfortable for
the public to be ignorant, and America’s aristocrats want their public
to be comfortable, at least enough so that the public will vote for the
candidates they finance. Just as George W. Bush wanted his
torture-operation to be done offshore, Barack Obama also wants the
beheadings etc. to besmirch other countries such as Saudi Arabia, not
the U.S., which keeps regimes like that in power while demanding that
Syria, Libya, Russia, etc., must have “regime change,” in order,
supposedly, to bring there the blessings of ‘democracy.’
What ‘blessings of ‘democracy’ has the United States recently brought to the people in Honduras,
or in El Salvador, or in Guatemala? The results have been floods of
refugees from there, just like the floods of refugees from U.S. bombing
campaigns in Libya and in Syria. America and its allies and their ‘news’
media blame the refugees on the countries that America has destroyed.
This, too, helps promote, among the public, the ‘bliss’ that is
ignorance — or, worse yet, deception — in these ‘democracies’: blaming
the U.S.-caused refugees for the refugees-problem (both in the U.S. and
in Europe).
America’s rot in international affairs is
pervasive. Take for example Obama’s drone-warfare program to kill some
Saudi-inspired extremists; it too is full of lies. In a rare example of
honest mainstream U.S. journalistic dissent, Jeremy Scahill at Huffington Post reported on October 15th that:
“The White House and Pentagon boast that
the targeting killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are
minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in
northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January
2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more
than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one
five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly
90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended
targets.” (Yet, even knowing this, Obama continues his drone program.)
Obama was mainly building support there for the Saudi-originated Taliban (they started out as being called the “Mujahideen” and were supplied weapons by the U.S.).
Taliban gain support among villagers whose loss of innocent
family-members on account of these U.S. drone-strikes drives them to
favor the fight against the enemy that has been killing their loved-ones
(i.e., against the U.S.). The Taliban are actually allies of the Sauds,
who sometimes are even brought in to help persuade them to back off (and another example of that is here). In fact, “Riyadh
helped foster the rise of the Taliban beginning in the mid-1990s
largely to serve as a proxy force against Afghanistan’s post-Soviet
leadership. But Saudi Arabia also supported the radical Islamic
militants to counter Iran.” So, at the very same time that
the U.S. Government tries to fool its public that the U.S. military are
focused primarily against the threat from Islamic jihadists (not against
Russia), U.S. policies are actually directed instead against the
enemies of the Sauds (who are behind Islamic
jihadists): that’s to say, against Iran, the leading Shiia power; and
especially against Russia, the leading competitor to Saudi Arabia in the
oil and gas markets — and the chief country that’s still holding out
against takeover by the U.S. aristocracy.
Without continuing U.S. support, the
Sauds would be treated by Saudis even worse than Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam
Hussein, Nicholas II, and Benito Mussolini, were: they’d be treated the
same way they themselves have treated anyone in Saudi Arabia who has
protested their decades-long tyranny. Would the fanatic fundamentalist
clergy that the Sauds have shared power with be treated any better? Even
from the standpoint of moderating Islamism, the results of overthrowing
the Sauds would likely be better than what America — the
world-policeman for the imperial Saudi tyrants — has produced. But it
would need to be done before the Sauds acquire nuclear weapons.
What needs to be changed first is the
American government — its control by an aristocracy that’s firmly wedded
to the Sauds. The American aristocracy (especially its three most
powerful components: petrodollar Wall Street, oil-and-gas billionaires,
and military-industrial-complex billionaires — all of whom benefit from
alliance with the Sauds) needs to be defeated in America. The American
people need to strip the U.S. aristocracy (at least those three elements
of it) of their power over the U.S. Government. It can’t be done unless
the news-media start informing the American people of reality. (For
example, in neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party
Presidential debates has this immense problem, and candidates’ positions
regarding it, been even so much as mentioned. That can’t possibly
reflect a democratic nation — an authentic democracy.)
Continued dishonesty will lead only to
catastrophe. If honesty doesn’t start now, it probably won’t start until
such a disaster can’t be avoided. Honesty needs to start now. It starts
here, or it won’t start at all.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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