{"id":191982,"date":"2015-10-16T15:36:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T15:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=191982"},"modified":"2015-10-17T14:14:32","modified_gmt":"2015-10-17T14:14:32","slug":"the-saudi-dynasty-key-u-s-ally-tops-the-world-in-barbarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-saudi-dynasty-key-u-s-ally-tops-the-world-in-barbarism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Saudi Dynasty, Key U.S. Ally, Tops the World in Barbarism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

The richest person in the world isn\u2019t anyone in the Forbes<\/i> 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<\/span><\/a>, which owns the world\u2019s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets. Aramco alone is worth \u201canywhere between US$1.25 trillion[7] and US$7 trillion,[8] making it the world’s most valuable company.\u201d<\/span><\/a> The company\u2019s website says: \u201c1980: Saudi Arabian government acquires 100 percent participation interest in Aramco,\u201d<\/span><\/a> most of which it had already owned. The Saud family\u2019s 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<\/span><\/a> (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<\/span><\/a>, at 20.8%. PNC is jointly controlled by<\/span><\/a> 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<\/span><\/a>, simply hide their owners. All of this is called \u2018democracy.\u2019 (Or, at least, it\u2019s \u201ccapitalism\u201d of the fascist sort.)<\/span><\/p>\n

However, King Salman\u2019s 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\u2019s personal wealth is $18 billion, but Forbes<\/i> simply omits including him at all. (Bloomberg\u2019s billionaires-list does likewise.) They don\u2019t 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 \u2013 that accumulation of wealth reflects mainly one\u2019s merit instead of one\u2019s power \u2013 they need to play down wealth that\u2019s been accumulated by crime, or by inheritance; and head-of-state wealth tends strongly to be the product of both.)<\/span><\/p>\n

(NOTE: In an interview published at Fort Russ on 13 October 2015, the Director of the Putin-founded Russian Institute of Strategic Studies said<\/span><\/a>: \u201cI have met people whose names you never see in the Forbes lists. But their fortunes are in the hundreds of billions. Bill Gates is a child compared to them. It is extremely difficult to fight those who are in the shadows.\u201d Not all of them are heads-of-state. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has noted<\/span><\/a> that, \u201cOffshore tax haven abuse has become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the \u2018home\u2019 to more than 18,000 corporations.\u201d Many of those are holding-companies. The extent of wealth-concentration in the world is far higher than the publicly available data indicate<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

On October 14th, Britain\u2019s Guardian<\/i> bannered, \u201cSaudi Arabia: Mother of Saudi man sentenced to crucifixion begs Obama to intervene,\u201d<\/span><\/a> and opened: \u201cThe mother of a Saudi protester sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion has begged Barack Obama to intervene to save her son\u2019s 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 \u2018backwards in the extreme\u2019. \u2026 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. \u2026 Visiting after his arrest, she alleged he had been tortured. \u2018When I visited my son for the first time I didn\u2019t recognise him. I didn\u2019t 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. \u2026[When] I started talking to him [he told me that] during the interrogation [he was] being kicked, slapped, of course his teeth fell out \u2026 For a month he was peeing blood. He said he felt like a mass of pain, his body was no more.\u2019\u201d This was\/is his punishment for participating in a peaceful demonstration. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr\u2019s father \u201cMohammed 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.\u201d<\/span><\/a> The father is similarly pleading for British leader David Cameron to push publicly for his son\u2019s life to be spared. The Guardian<\/i> reported the father on October 8th saying, \u201cMy son is completely innocent.<\/span><\/a> 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is part of a global war between Sunni and Shiia political leaders. America and its vassal-states (including David Cameron\u2019s Britain) are allied with Sunni-run nations, while Russia and its cooperating nations are allied with Shiia-run nations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Saudi royals are the world\u2019s 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<\/span><\/a>, virtually all of Al Qaeda\u2019s 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 \u2013 they were being paid very well by their royal sponsors, to serve as a \u2018volunteer\u2019 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

The official religion of Saudi Arabia is the Wahhabist or Salafist fundamentalist Islamic sect of the Sunni version of Islam<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s 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) \u2013 and, of course, the Saud family (after all their ancient conquests<\/span><\/a>) owns Mecca, in whose direction every Muslim (Sunni or not) is required (according to the standard understanding of the Quran<\/i>, in Surah \u201cThe Cow\u201d or \u201c Al Baqarah,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/span><\/a>) For Obama to issue any such request publicly would get in the way of his (and especially the Sauds\u2019) anti-Shiia \u201cAssad Must Go\u201d<\/span><\/a> campaign. After all, in September 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives issued a report<\/span><\/a> saying that:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201ccaliphate\u201d 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 <\/span>extremists in the conflict zone.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

5,000 foreign Sunni jihadists in Syria came from Tunisia \u2013 it\u2019s 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<\/span><\/a>. But the exodus of 2,275 jihadists from Saudi Arabia can\u2019t enable democracy to emerge in Saudi Arabia, because the Saud family\u2019s own Wahhab faith is based upon supporting jihad. Most of the Saudi population aren\u2019t in favor of extending Wahhabism around the world, but the Sauds are. Conveniently, their war to spread Allah\u2019s power happens to be also a war to spread the Sauds\u2019 power. (It\u2019s not spreading the power of the rest of the Saudi population.) The Sauds believe that Allah is on their family\u2019s side. After all: God (and the pillaging that had enabled the Saud family to conquer the country<\/span><\/a>) gave them 260 billion barrels of oil!<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s ally, Israel). The Syrian Constitution<\/span><\/a> under his Ba\u2019ath Party has always been non-Islamic, and not only<\/i> <\/span>non-jihadist. There is a strict separation of religion from politics. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia, \u201cThe Qur’an is declared to be the constitution of the country, which is governed on the basis of Islamic law (Shari\u2019a).\u201d<\/span><\/a> Furthermore, \u201cNo 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.\u201d (Notice that euphemism \u2018authoritarian.\u2019 <\/span>When we were fighting self-declared fascists in World War II, we used instead the honest term for them, \u201cdictatorships.\u201d The Sauds are dictators.) The Sauds are dictators.) The Economist<\/i> rated Syria the fifth-most \u201cauthoritarian,\u201d but the Economist<\/i> is allied with the Saudi royal family and wants Assad to be overthrown<\/span><\/a>. And, at seventh-worst, Saudi Arabia was actually ranked far worse<\/span><\/a> than any other of the magazine\u2019s listed allies. (The Economist<\/i> is hardly a trustworthy source, more a mouthpiece of the aristocracy.)<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. President Obama has consistently since 2011 argued that, \u201cThe future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way.<\/span><\/a> 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.\u201d How wonderful to know that our President cares so much about \u201cthe Syrian people\u201d as to bomb their government and try to replace it with one more like the Sauds\u2019. The stars-and-stripes waves so proudly around the world. (Actually not \u2013 certainly not now.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama said on 2 October 2015<\/span><\/a>, \u201cThey\u2019ve been propping up a regime that is rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Syrian population because they\u2019ve seen that he has been willing to drop barrel bombs on children and on villages indiscriminately.\u201d He blatantly lied.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s forces, has consistently shown at least 55% support by Syrians for continuation of Assad as being Syria\u2019s leader.<\/a><\/span> There are no such political polls published in Saudi Arabia; its royals don\u2019t allow that; but, if such polls were to be done there, then anyone who might be indicated to threaten continuation of the Sauds\u2019 dictatorship would simply be beheaded anyway. <\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the type of orderly nation the United States can defend. The United States can also support the regime it had installed in a violent<\/span><\/a> February 2014 coup<\/span><\/a> in Ukraine that\u2019s firebombing the residents of the area that refused to accept the coup-government the U.S. had installed<\/span><\/a>. (Firebombs are worse<\/i> than barrel bombs.) For some reason, things like this are not what U.S. politicians and \u2018news\u2019 media talk about, with \u2018our\u2019 \u2018free\u2019 press. So, it\u2019s easy for the U.S. public to be unaware of such realities about the \u2018democracy\u2019 that \u2018they\u2019 \u2018elect.\u2019 Out of sight is out of mind; ignorance is bliss. Under such circumstances as this, it\u2019s more comfortable for the public to be ignorant, and America\u2019s 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 \u201cregime change,\u201d in order, supposedly, to bring there the blessings of \u2018democracy.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

What \u2018blessings of \u2018democracy\u2019 has the United States recently brought to the people in Honduras<\/span><\/a>, 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 \u2018news\u2019 media blame the refugees on the countries that America has destroyed. This, too, helps promote, among the public, the \u2018bliss\u2019 that is ignorance \u2013 or, worse yet, deception \u2013 in these \u2018democracies\u2019: blaming the U.S.-caused refugees for the refugees-problem (both in the U.S. and in Europe).<\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s rot in international affairs is pervasive. Take for example Obama\u2019s 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<\/span><\/a> that:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.\u201d (Yet, even knowing this, Obama continues his drone program.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama was mainly building support there for the Saudi-originated Taliban (they started out as being called the \u201cMujahideen\u201d<\/span><\/a> and were supplied weapons by the U.S.<\/span><\/a>). 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<\/span><\/a> (and another example of that is here<\/span><\/a>). In fact, \u201cRiyadh 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.\u201d<\/span><\/a> 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<\/i> <\/span>Islamic jihadists): that\u2019s to say, against Iran, the leading Shiia power; and especially against Russia, the leading competitor to Saudi Arabia in the oil and gas markets \u2013 and the chief country that\u2019s still holding out against takeover by the U.S. aristocracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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 \u2013 the world-policeman for the imperial Saudi tyrants \u2013 has produced. But it would need to be done before the Sauds acquire nuclear weapons<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

What needs to be changed first is the American government \u2013 its control by an aristocracy that\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019t 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\u2019 positions regarding it, been even so much as mentioned. That can\u2019t possibly reflect a democratic nation \u2013 an authentic democracy.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Continued dishonesty will lead only to catastrophe. If honesty doesn\u2019t start now, it probably won\u2019t start until such a disaster can\u2019t be avoided. Honesty needs to start now. It starts here, or it won\u2019t start at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse The richest person in the world isn\u2019t 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\u2019s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets. Aramco […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":181333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[868,115,30,96,1034,753,524,981,979,980,51,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-191982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-al-qaeda","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-independent-media","13":"tag-police-state","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-saudi","16":"tag-shiite","17":"tag-sunni","18":"tag-torture","19":"tag-ukraine","20":"tag-usa-news","21":"tag-warfare","22":"tag-white-house","23":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}