“Elites vs. Populists”

The fall of Arif Naqvi, accused of stealing Bill Gates’s money and yours, exposed more corruption than just his own.

… The book implies that Trump doomed Abraaj by making anti-globalization fashionable. “Trying to raise money from the pension funds and money pots of the Western world, Trump’s isolationism was becoming a real threat to [Naqvi’s] vision and his marketing pitch,” Clark and Louch write. “As Trump established himself in power, opportunities diminished for globalists who believed in win-win outcomes,” even though “Arif took every opportunity to preach globalization to America in a bid to drown out the president’s words in the ears of the people he needed most.”

That’s nonsense. Trump’s words never counted for much with the people Naqvi was courting. They believed in globalization before 2016 and still believe in it today. Their minds didn’t change, only their access to power. If The Key Man is right and Abraaj came crashing down not because the music stopped the way it does in any Ponzi scheme but because the firm’s political allies lost the 2016 presidential election, then the corruption it exposed was something much bigger than Naqvi’s peculations—and Trump’s victory was a bigger blow against our crooked global elite than we realized.

If you ever doubted that the country was in the hands of some very stupid and corrupt people, this week should have thoroughly disabused you of that fantasy. In one fell swoop, the administration left billions of dollars of military equipment in the hands of the barbarous anti-American Taliban; broke the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance by bugging out without warning to its members who were in Afghanistan in support of our mission there; left as many as 50,000 Americans and tens of thousands more of our Afghan allies to the not so tender mercies of the enemy; and on Friday Biden lied about it all.

The architects of the nation-building policies from Afghanistan to Iraq are failures and should be treated with the same disdain reserved for flat earthers or bloodletters.

Days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was initially sold as a necessary pre-emptive effort to secure deadly weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein planned to use against the American people, National Review ran an op-ed by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum attacking everyone on the right who opposed the war as “unpatriotic conservatives.”

It was the party of the year, perhaps even the party of the century. Expensive and exclusive, it came at an inopportune time and received plenty of press coverage—much of it negative. If Barack Obama’s birthday party was a monumental display of nouveau riche vulgarity, it also resembled the Bradley–Martin Ball, a party held in 1897 as the nation recovered from the deep depression that had begun in 1893.

Earlier this year, the Society of Cultural Anthropology (SCA)—a subdivision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—published a series of essays exploring the topic of American Fascism. The project was run under the SCA’s “Hot Spots” category, which editors at the SCA’s journal, Cultural Anthropology, dedicate to writing that “goes beyond the headlines to consider current events and pressing global issues from the perspective of anthropologists and others on the scene.”

Americans need representation that will stop acting like this is a government of, by, and for the corporations.

The quiet part is “I am ripping you off and getting even richer thanks to taxpayers.”

One thing that enrages voters and motivates them to support disruptors like Donald Trump is when they see rampant cronyism in the lobbyist infested swampland of Washington, D.C. But the reality is the swamp is winning and cronyism is worse than ever in Joe Biden’s D.C.

Amazon ranks second on the Fortune 500 list of prosperous and successful companies. Amazon’s founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is now worth over $200 billion and ranks as the wealthiest human on earth. And even though he admits that he is rich because of government subsidies, he still wants more.

We’ve all heard the phrase “power corrupts,” by Lord Acton, a 19th-century British historian.  The full quote — “Power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely” — referred to the absolute power of kings.

Research from 2012 by Katherine A. DeCelles, a University of Toronto professor, concluded that wealth and power don’t affect everyone equally — they just allow existing personality traits to emerge to excess.

A marvelous review in these pages last November inspired me to read a new book by O. Carter Snead, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Human Bioethics.” It was published by Harvard University Press on Oct. 13. Covid-19 had begun its transformation of American life a few months before, and of course the book made no mention of it.

Brexit was fuelled by the disdain of our intelligentsia

“Although after this the little island was no longer called Albion, Neptune still loved it. When he grew old and had no more strength to rule, he gave his sceptre to the islands called Britannia, for we know — Britannia rules the waves.”

Elites move to protect the public from itself.

If, as Bruno Maçães suggests in History Has Begun, American culture has devolved into a Hollywood plot, then we have reached that place in the story when the cattle baron torches the cabins of unwelcome settlers and the Death Star obliterates the pesky rebels’ planet. Having defeated Donald Trump and stumbled on new methods of control during the Covid-19 pandemic, the elites who run our institutions are out for vengeance. The establishment is striking back.