Eric Zuesse

On January 2nd, America’s NBC News bannered “Arab Spring Cleric Nimr al-Nimr Among 47 Executed by Saudi Arabia,” and, one-third of the way into their report, showed this tweet:

“Saudi execution of Nimr al-Nimr along w/ al Qaeda members is straight from Assad's playbook - lumping nonviolent activists with terrorists.
— DavidKenner (@DavidKenner) January 2, 2016”

Even when Sunni-Islamic extremists, the Sauds, perpetrate mass-murder, in Saudi Arabia and not only in Yemen and in Syria, the U.S. ‘news’ media find some way to smear their audience’s minds with the demon, “Bashar al-Assad,” as if Assad actually had anything to do with it, and the King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, had nothing to do with it. Salman, who owns Saudi Arabia and everyone in it (and who even allows outright slavery there), wasn’t so much as mentioned by the NBC ‘News’ ‘reporter’ or propagandist. (Assad was mentioned in that ‘news’ report only because Assad allies with the U.S. aristocracy’s super-demon, Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia, who refuses to do the U.S. aristocracy’s bidding, such as his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, much praised by the U.S. aristocracy, had done.)

America’s main ally, and the largest customer for American-made weapons, the royal family that owns and runs Saudi Arabia, had just started out a new year of mass-executions, after their near-record year of 2015: the AP headlined only the day before, on New Year’s Day, “Saudi Beheadings Soar in 2015,” and reported that, “Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the kingdom in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide.” (King Salman wasn’t mentioned in that one, either.)

So, the Sauds, America’s most important ally, and equally passionate enemies of Russia (and their clerics had recently issued fatwas against Russia for coming to Assad’s defense) — the royal Saud family, who recently organized their own 34-nation Sunni-Islamic version of America’s 28-nation European NATO alliance against Russia — are as determined to lead ‘The Free World’ as is the American aristocracy. And, they’re as capable of providing such democratic leadership, after the U.S. assassinated pro-Russian leaders Saddam Hussein in 2003, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and tried to kill Bashar al-Assad starting in 2011. ‘The West’ are such passionate supporters of ‘democracy.’ And, after U.S. President Barack Obama took over Ukraine in February 2014, it’s more corrupt and poorer than ever.

Hypocrisy of the American government and its ‘free press’ seems to know no limits. The Saud family don’t even try to compete with their U.S. counterparts in the hypocrisy-category.

And it’s not a partisan issue within the United States, either: both the ‘liberal’ and the outright conservative wings of the U.S. aristocracy are riddled with corruption, and suck the financial blood of not only their own nation, but of the foreign ones they entice into their grip, by bringing foreign aristocracies into their corrupt operation, to share in the looting and mass-emiseration of publics everywhere. The Saud family are part of that elite club, but they don’t pretend to be ‘democratic.’ They are corrupt as they live and breathe: they ‘earned’ their billions in The Lord’s way: they were born with it. America’s government have to pretend to be democratic.

The essence of aristocracy is corruption. These beheadings are just little decorations of it, by some of America’s fellow-champions of ‘The Free World.’

Corruption isn’t composed merely of things that are illegal, but includes also much that doesn’t violate any laws, because the aristocrats basically write the laws (or their hired agent, called “lobbyists,” do). On top of that immunity which they enjoy from the laws, whenever the international aristocracy don’t like an international agreement that has somehow come into effect but that turns out not to suit them, they simply ignore it; they are above not only their own nation’s laws, but unreachable by all laws, even international ones. (That’s what makes them international aristocrats.) Everyone beneath them can be emiserated or even killed on the spot, but only a revolution could kill the aristocrats — they’re surrounded by bodyguards.

For example, on 22 December 2015, the United Nations headlined, "UN expert calls for fundamental rethink of global trading system,” and reported:

The Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred de Zayas, deplores that developed countries evaded their Doha development commitments at the World Trade Organization's 10th ministerial conference, held in Nairobi from 15 to 19 December 2015. Although a majority of States meeting in Nairobi wanted to have a clear reaffirmation of the Doha Framework, the opposition of some developed countries prevented the adoption of a consensus on this important point. Instead, he says, developed countries tried to pressure the developing world into agreements that undermine the promotion of the right to development and many provisions of human rights treaties.

Murdering labor union organizers in underdeveloped countries enables the aristocrats in developed ones to sell to their own nation’s public the goods that would otherwise be made at a far higher wage-rate in their own countries, and that therefore compete-away those jobs abroad, and so hollow-out the domestic economy, while enabling the developed-world’s aristocracies to extract from their home market the profits that can be derived by so impoverishing the workers both domestically and abroad. The lower the wages the aristocrats must pay, the higher their profits are. And the United States, and its ‘liberal’ “Democratic’ President Barack Obama and his Administration, is the global leader in imposing and making even harsher than it already is, this barbaric international system of exploitation of the public by aristocrats.

And here is an example of how it works at the merely national level:

One of Mr. Obama’s ‘liberal’ supporters and financial backers, Warren Buffett, famously said, on 26 November 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” As a first-class hypocrite himself, who takes advantage of sophisticated opportunities to transfer his tax-obligations quietly onto others while urging publicly that his nation’s tax-laws should demand more of billionaires and less of the general public, Buffett was there verbally attacking, not publicly championing, the Robin-Hood-in-reverse that he sees in his country, and that he here affirmed to be the real “class warfare” in it.

But, more recently, on 26 December 2015, Daniel Wagner of buzzfeed headlined a major investigation, "Warren Buffett’s Company Wants to Sell You a Mobile Home,” and he described a systematic operation by Buffett’s Clayton Homes, and its associated Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance company, to lure new immigrants, and uneducated poor people, and especially poor Blacks, into borrowing to buy mobile homes, with finance charges far higher than were promised by the sales people, so that many of those trailer-homes become repossessed and then resold to other trusting suckers. And the U.S. Federal Housing Administration actually assists this corrupt operation, by saying such things as: "Many people don't realize that FHA loans can help people with bad credit. Need a home mortgage, but concerned about bad credit? You've come to the right place! An FHA mortgage can get you into a new home — even if you have bad credit — because the loans are insured by the federal government.” The FHA thus actually encourages suckers into this system, to become fleeced by operators such as Clayton Homes. While FHA, despite saying that it accepts “bad credit," turns down loan-applicants who actually have bad credit, the gull has thus already become lured into the tiger’s clutches by the time he or she finds out that the only financial option (other than backing out) is Vanderbilt. And, only much later do they recognize that while they’ve been paying all they could for the few years they lived in the trailer, they're thrown out onto the street, after those few years of having paid more per month than they’d have paid if they had merely rented (as the system should have guided them to do — instead of having guided them to become ripped off). Typical for America’s ‘news’ ‘reporting,' no mention at all was made by Mr. Wagner, in his lengthy article, of the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, as presenting a lure, or bait-and-switch come-on, in this way, helping to feed victims to the aristocracy; and, so, the legal framework that empowers and advances the rip-offs that Wagner was describing, was actually ignored. Instead of such an informative aricle, the sales people for Clayton and for Vanderbilt were described, luring victims in, for their fleecing. However, Wagner’s article was merciless against Buffett personally:

"Through a spokesperson earlier this month, Buffett declined to discuss racial issues at Clayton Homes, and a reporter who attempted to contact him at his home was turned away by security. Clayton and Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to numerous requests for interviews with executives, delivered by phone and email, as well as in person at Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters in Omaha. The companies did not answer any of 34 detailed questions about Clayton and its practices. Nor did they respond to an extensive summary of this article’s findings, provided along with an invitation to comment.”

Meanwhile, of course, there are numerous instances, on both the political right and the political ‘left,’ of international scams, such as the LIBOR interest-rate rigging, and the manipulations of the commodity markets, and the hiring of nazis to overthrow, via ‘the Maidan revolution’ coup d’etat, the democratically elected Russia-friendly President of Ukraine, and replace him with fascists. And, of course, Obama practically masterminded the sarin gas attack in Syria that he set up to blame on Assad as an excuse to bomb to produce “regime change in Syria” like George W. Bush’s “regime change in Iraq” had been.

Any member of the public who thinks that these things were done by and for the public, instead of by and for the aristocracy, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell: please contact me in the reader-comments here. (But, I won’t answer. Plenty of other people will be happy to sell it to you.)

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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  Permalink