Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/27/22 Dan Steinbock: How Hawkish Democrats Make Money Pushing War

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Scott is joined by Dan Steinbock to discuss an article he wrote about the network of Democratic organizations running American foreign policy. Steinbock has dug deep into the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and WestExec Advisors, two organizations that have allowed top foreign policy officials to make money cycling between government, think tank and advisory roles. Steinbock also takes a step back and examines how these organizations are connected to weapons companies, Wall Street and technology firms.  Discussed on the show: “The Centre of International Insecurity” (World Financial Review) “Why Bombs Made in America Have Been Killing Civilians in Yemen” (New York Times) Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see DifferenceGroup.net  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. Almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, y'all, introducing Dan Steinbach, he is an internationally recognized

strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China, and America. Institute, USA, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies in China, and the EU Center in Singapore, difference group.net, which is all very interesting and intriguing. I've never heard of any of these things, and yet I read this wonderful piece at worldfinancial review.com. You guys are all going to want to take a look at this. The Center of International Insecurity. Welcome to the show. Dan. How are you, sir? I'm good, fine, thank you.

All right. Well, really appreciate you joining us. So the subhead here is the Biden administration, CNAS, and West Exec, Revolving Doors, Collusion, and Big Defense. Now, of course, longtime listeners to this show know that CNAS is the center for a new American security. That was essentially the Democrats' answer to the project for a new American century in the lead-up to the Barack Obama administration led by John Nagel and Michelle Flournoy and their cronies and their first major project, of course, was pushing for the massive counterinsurgency escalation in Afghanistan, which they got and lost anyway.

And Flournoy was actually Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy overseeing that failure. Don't ever forget that. So that's the background, but they haven't gone away. And the very same characters have this group called West Exec, which we've covered on the show in the past a little bit as well. But I'll let you go ahead and tell the story, Dan, of the background of West Exec and what that has to do with the Biden administration in their foreign policy today. Okay. I think that for me, this is almost like a paradox. There are certain things that happen at the same time. The dots have been identified and verified, but they

haven't been fully connected. You have a very difficult economic situation in the US. You have global macroeconomic conditions that are deteriorating. And there was this situation four years after Trump for the Biden administration to have a historical opportunity to reset American trade policy and geopolitics. And none of these things happened. So it seems to me that the key institutional role in this effort did belong to the thing. Center for National Security or CNAS. It's alumni and the corporate proxies and the world's largest defense contractors

are also just happy to be their donors. The VestEx and how it figures in all of this is in the following manner. CNAS is a think tank. Westexec is an advisory, presumably, although it seems to function as a lobbyist. This is a long-lasting debate that has taken place in D.C., which one it actually is. But having served as Obama's Undersecretary of Defense and military expert,

Lerner, I would believe, wanted to make money the old-fashioned way. So she essentially ended up exploiting the revolving doors between her advisory and the government. She had already been able to capitalize this on her own without the Westexec when she was advising for, it's a possible consulting group, BCG, one of the big global management consultancy is in around 2030 to 16, if I were the call right, the defense contracts of the BCG went up for $1.6 million to $32 million, and this has a lot to do with the Michelle Flourney's advice. Actually, the best exec's original co-founders were two relatively unknown ex-Obama officials,

Sergio Aguirre and Lidit Chada. They came up with the idea, but they knew that their names wouldn't be strong enough to carry. They didn't mark their names. Hence, they went after to recruit Flourney and Anthony Blinken, guided secretary of state. Now, today, Chada himself is best execs. point man in a so-called strategic partnership with Ridgeline, which is a venture capital and a special situation, one focusing on military startups. Here, for his part, used to work for

PHRMA as an associate VP for international advocacy. This organization is notorious for lobbying intensely against Medicare. They had been lobbying to prevent price limits for drugs, given to dark money donations to ultra-hawk, hawkish advocates, working against Obama health care, which seems very strange taking into consideration the democratic objectives in this area. So after Biden's electoral triumph around 2016, Lurley was seen as a very strong candidate for the role of secretary defense. The problem was, as you mentioned earlier in the beginning, in your intro, Kroni was also the person who had been ramping up the Afghanistan war. And this didn't really rhyme with Biden's objective, one of which was to face out

years' presence in the, from Afghanistan. As a result, she had to sort of stay outside. What bothers one when you look at the history of West Exx, and when you look at its role in general, is that the amount of rhetoric. and the kind of rhetoric that's being practiced in order to justify things that perhaps shouldn't be justified. Just one example. Flona made this famous distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, arguing that Saudi Arabia needed patriotic missiles to protect itself in the Yemeni Civil War.

And sure enough, for instance, 2019 Raytheon technology is one of the major global contractors and a major donor behind WestExx had sold Saudi Arabia over $3 million worth of bombs, the defense contractor that was a major WestExact contributor. And the other donors behind CNAs really included the big league of the big defense, maybe Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, that was already mentioned, but also energy giants, Chevron, and Exxon. And Soros's open society foundations that seem to be very much active with, in a lot of areas where you've had regime change

or efforts at destabilization, at least from the point of view of the target countries. Yeah, you know what? It sure does sound like they're putting the cart before the horse here. I wonder if you could convince any of these people that their interests are different than the national interest. I think that is really the problem here, Because if you look at the way that these organizations operate, for instance,

when there's lack of diplomacy, international diplomacy, the results can be very detrimental. And what we've seen now is a big change with the post-9-11 wars as opposed to those that preceded them. In the past, it was, these wars were financed mainly by bond campaigns, and they were targeting low to middle-income populations and direct taxes. So you would really feel the pain of the war. You can debate whether those wars were necessary or not, but they didn't result on the kind of great social inequality that we see today. And the wars that we've seen in the past 20 years have mainly relied on borrowing, domestic borrowing.

And to a degree, even foreign countries that are investing in America are participating in this indirectly. When I started writing this piece, one thing that shook me was the NBC's Meet the press some weeks ago. Aird a segment which imagined a conflict over Taiwan in 2027. It was a war game simulation. It was run by CNAS. And it imagined a situation in which U.S. kind of tensions burst into an open war over Taiwan. I was curious about the number of 2027.

There are a lot of stories about the U.S. China relations and American concerns of what is called assertive China term that did not really originate from China either. But where did this 27 come from? Who was the Chinese politician that talked about it, or was it based on classified information, somehow relying on sources that had verified this kind of the error? I found nothing.

And the reality is that there really was nothing as a basis. Even CNAS was using the public testimony that I think originated. from March 2021 by ex-commander of the US Inter-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who is an old Cold War warrior. And after his retirement joined a Japanese organization operating in the US that was originally founded by an alleged war criminal. So there was no directly with China in case of this number 27 and imagined war. It is this ease of that one uses to talk about events that caused so much devastation in other countries

that captured my attention, not to speak about the Yemen-war or the Yemeni civil war, where perhaps 400,000 people have died because of the bombings, but also because of famine and all kinds of ailments and disease that comes with war. So it was this sort of thing that I was trying to sort of unravel or dissent. with my piece yeah well um actually the reason i was a minute late for our interview is i was just wrapping up one about yemen myself here

and you know i like to refer people to this piece in the new york times where and this was not really a scoop i know they're reporting about donald trump could be unreliable but i'm almost certain they talked to pete navarro the trade uh you know representative or the trade uh czar or whatever in the trump government and he talked about how or you know they had good sourcing on it people would check it out and talked about how you know industry was mad at trump because his tariffs on china had really disrupted a lot of american industry and so navarro wanted to make it up to them by boosting the military industrial complex because that's where the federal

government can just shovel money directly into those types of firms broadly defined, but of course arms manufacturing is not all manufacturing in America, but I guess to the Trump people, this is how to make manufacturers happy. And then even when the House and the Senate passed the War Powers Resolution in 2019, it was Raytheon, the missile maker that lobbied hard for, uh, with Pete Navarro to get Trump to veto that resolution, which is exactly what he did. And according to the times, Raytheon's influence was the single most important part of that decision. I sure wouldn't doubt it the way that it played out at that time. These events that you mentioned are important and critical.

I remember that Maine Navarra first time, I discovered it already maybe 10 years ago. There were all kinds of pieces that he was writing. He clearly was very ambitious. He wanted to be part of the 2012 electoral campaigns and then 2016, obviously. But these connections, particularly with what is known as the military-industrial complex. Even in the case of the Biden administration, one remembers the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore, which is an annual event, presumably to look at the world strategic affairs, but oftentimes looks like marketing for the biggest defense contractors or the big defense.

There was a comment by the General Dynamics CEO, Steve Novakovig, where she said was sort of apprehensive of the fact that, you know, we're making most of our money, the big defense money, in the Middle East. Even today, perhaps 47, 50 percent, is goes to the Middle East, but not in Asia. How can this be? Because Asia is the most dynamic world region. And she acknowledged that it's the growing market for US defense contractors,

but she felt that the big defense could do better in this region, just as it had done in the Middle East. The problem was, to quote him, was to win over unsophisticated buying authorities. So she was advocating upgrades to fight together, should the need arise. But this was not a passive event. It was stimulated that event, and it has been stimulated.

And the CNAS has played a great role in it, not just through its own activities and its donors, but through its strategic partnerships. And lately through its ventures into venture capital and military startups. these are taking these sort of activities to an entirely different level that should be alarming to anybody who is looking into these matters. Right. Now, I'm glad that you mentioned in here that Flournoy did not get the job as Secretary of Defense, and I think it's funny that she could have had the job under Obama, and she made it known that she did not want the job under Obama. much she was going to wait for Hillary and come in and be with the team of ladies doing their thing breaking the glass ceiling and whatever. So due to her arrogance, she lost her chance.

And then here comes Joe Biden and everybody said she's a lock. And yet somehow I think what it was was Biden was actually one of the least worst on the Afghan surge. And he did support some surge, but not what they did. and I think that he got real cross with Florinoid during that time in the fight in 2009 in the fight over weather to surge and how much and all those things and so he held a grudge one thing about that crotchety old fool that I appreciate is he doesn't like her me neither but you know she probably is next in line after Lloyd Austin you know what I mean there's not too many people in the the way that they play the game there it seems like she's more likely

than not to be next, anyway, if he stays in office. Correct. And it ultimately doesn't really matter. I mean, in the sense that CNAS, WestExx, are all involved in this. And you have also other players that come through, you know, friendships, partnerships, and so on and so forth, in the sense that if you look particularly what's going on in Asia, the key person in all of this has been Kurt Campbell. The Asian Tsar of Biden, a person who was already creating this notion of the people to Asia under the Obama administration and who now served as coordinator of the Indo-Pacific Affairs on the National Security Council.

He was the one who introduced this idea, 2019, of an intense competition without catastrophe vis-à-vis China, which would allow America to both challenge and coexist with China. My fear, as somebody who has followed these matters more than two decades, is that this is not competition. This is something very different. It's taking the region that has been most dynamic in the world the past few decades to an edge in so many ways, whether we talk about nuclearization through the U, U.S., or whether we talk about the version of funds that should be for the economic. development into rearmament drives in this critical region. And the impression that's created is that this is a way to ensure American economic

presence in the area. It's a way to ensure the economic presence of the defense contractors in the area, but not really something where the new jobs, the new capital, et cetera, would be prominent. We see some efforts to that direction, and there's nothing bad about that. But when it happens so much with these ideas of containment, as if China was the old Soviet Union, the probability of disaster comes far closer. And let's be real, I mean, even this notion of the Pacific containment that Campbell has been pushing up through not just the administration, but he's, own company, Asia Group. The idea has been to a bit like the 50s, early 50s, to militarize containment and minimize U.S. costs by diversifying risks to allies and property conflicts

to Asia. So if you use the Ukraine example, it's a bit like learning those lessons from Ukraine in the sense that the idea is to fight to the last Asian in the region. And this is based on these revolving door practices that still prevailed and that makes possible the militarization. And let's be honest about something else. This has very little to do with George Kenan and the original containment of doctrine. He did create it and he did push and promote it initially. But by 1948, he took distance. It was his fear precisely that what he called containment will be distorted and militarized.

And as he said later to CNN, I think, in mid-90s, this would lead to 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented protests that we call the Cold War. And there's still something else that I would be concerned about. This whole notion of the Tebowt doctrine that so much relies on security policies, militarization of foreign policy and so on so forth. I'm sorry, sir, the what doctrine did you say? the pivot to Asia by Kurt Campbell, this doctrine. It actually seems to emulate a different doctrine that was created about a century ago

called the geographic or geographical history. That one was authored by Halford McKinder, who was sort of an imperial apologist of British expansion of the British Empire. But he was also the ideological precursor or idol of Karl Haushofer, Hitler's mentor in military expansionism. Hitler himself wanted to expand in order to gain resources. And he had no concerns or fears about enslaving the Eastern European people. That was his objective even prior to the Holocaust. So this kind of thinking of using military expansion as a way to ensure economic primacy,

when the preconditions for economic primacy are done, it's dangerous. And here's why, if I may, think about the situation in 1945 after the Second World War and today, 2022. If you look at the U.S. economy, after 1945, there was perhaps an impetus, a motivation. to think in terms of American century. At least it was understandable because the US economy accounted for half of the world economy. But today it's about 20, 22%. It's fourth, it's important, but it's no longer has the primacy.

Second, at the time, 1945, US was the world factory. It had the surplus of export, manufacturing exports. Everybody wanted to have that. Today, we have the deficit that keeps growing. And U.S. is the major importer. And because the exports remain too high relative to the imports, there is this net gap that has to be financed. And China has to be one of those financiers until recently that may change. Third, the leverage, 1945, U.S. was the one to give money out.

U.S. was the major debtor, now it's the creditor. And at the time also, dollar had the ultimate summary. Today, it remains critical. But the world economy now is multipolar. But it's really governed by the victors of 1945 and the kind of ideas of American exceptionalism. There are many ways to read American exceptionalism, but the kind of ideas that emphasize the role of the military. And that, I think, is very, very dangerous. Give me just a minute here.

Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors. And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office? But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either,

because there's easyship.com. EasyShip.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to Scott Horton.org slash easy ship. Hey, y'all Scott here. You know the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, fools errand, enough already, and the great Ron Paul. Two by our executive editor, Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals

owe to each other. And of course, no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute. coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook edited by Keith Knight a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons

one more collection of essays by Will Grigg and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagonen and Brad Hoff and his co-author Zachary Wingard that's Libertarian Institute.org slash books All right, could you talk for a little bit

about Anthony Blinken our current Secretary of State. I mean, everybody knows. I should have mentioned there when I was blabbing about Lloyd Austin, of course, that he was a Raytheon executive in between his stint as General in Command of Central Command

and as Secretary of Defense. But Anthony Blinken likes to make money when he's not in office, too, right? Right. When people were needed to have a facade for this West Exx. He was the key person, along with the Flourney. And like Jake Sullivan, who operated in macro advisory partners, a secretive firm that was

more based in England, had been run by former execs of MI6. I think Lincoln had his objective really to create a pension for himself or himself or something like that in the sense that he was now co-heading the West Executive Advisors prior to the Biden administration. He had a reputation of somebody who had integrity by his admirers, at least. But there has been a lot of allegations about his conflicts of interests, allegations that became more apparent during his nomination. After 25 years in government jobs, he left for the private structure when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in the 2016 election. Now, Westex, with its kind of tail in defense industry, private equity hedge funds, really has been money from heaven to him.

Recently, Forbes estimated that his wealth would be around $10 million. And when you look at where it comes from, first he made his name through CNAS, it was sort of a marketing vehicle if he used business standards to look at the fake tech. That span of the Westex advisors. And as he started making money, he got a board seat in social capital. That's an internet venture. He's stake, I think, is about $250,000 in that one. It was created by a Sri Lankan, American, Canadian entrepreneur,

Shama Palihapin, whose own personal worth is about $1.2 billion. And through social capital, that's an interesting venture of its own, although it's a small sort of penis for him. it is run by Mark Mesvinsky, that is the husband of Chelsea Clinton, who used to be in charge of a Greek focus fund called Evil Whale about 10 years ago. That was managing maybe $330 million, 90%, which was very quickly lost. Blinken also has more than half a million dollars in equity, Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet, Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on so forth.

So that makes you wonder a little bit how you reconcile this conflicting interest and whose interest really is being represented by the key actors of the Biden administration. Sullivan is no different, perhaps a blander character, but no different in terms of the substance. When he worked for MAP or the macro advisory partners, he was also serving as an intermediary to companies that wanted to enter Iran. Now, in the Obama administration, Sullivan himself, had been negotiating the NACLEAR deal, JCPOA with Iran. In his company, Matt, he used inside knowledge, or what he can determine was inside knowledge to help companies to exploit the expected opening of the Iranian economy, which Trump then shut. He also, which I think is even worse in terms of the democratic ideology, represented the right-fair giant Uber, basically trying to figure out ways how they could work against the unions or labor. And controversially, MAP had a key role in playing with companies, but also state-owned entities,

one of which is Taipei's representative firm in the U.S. TCO. Now, we can show that the U.S. policy, there has been a shift in U.S. policy towards Taiwan and weapon shipments to Taiwan that started with the Trump administration. It has been talked about for quite a long prior to the Trump administration, but it was really made official with that administration. Those onshipments have escalated in parallel with Taipei's big donations, meaning the ECO, to firms and organizations in the U.S., which have been headed by White House heavyways. So there is a question whether these kind of memberships, these kind of clients actually affect your foreign policy and would be foolish to conclude that they don't. All right. And there's so much to go over in your great article, but we've got to stop and talk about John Brennan for a minute here, too, former head of counterterrorism in the White House and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. What's his role in this? John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, joined the best exec relatively recently in April.

There has been inflow of new players. Brennan is one of them. Others are connected to CIA, Homeland Security, and so on and so forth, particularly in the past few months. Perhaps the great role of CNAS as a sort of the center player is part of it. Perhaps, as you mentioned in the very beginning, just like Republicans have their own project for the new. new century Democrats wanted to have theirs and it's working. I think that part of it is also these strategic partnerships that have been created by West Exxat with different players. And

even the role of Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, that has joined West Executive efforts. I think that you can look at the role of Brennan in terms of his personality and what he will bring to West Texas. Their role of CIA, the role of intelligence has been less prominent in the past, perhaps the role of foreign policy, the role of defense, and the military has been very prominent. So they are diversifying, they are expanding, they're consolidating. That's the way I would see it. There's also another phenomenon. This leak with Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google is very important because Google, having less Google, Schmidt, who is the billionaire executive and has been the chairman of the alphabet, the umbrella behind Google, is also the financier of several

democratic campaigns and another client of Westexec. Now, recently, he created a fund called the American Frontier Fund, AFF. It will be headed by Jim and Louis, who is the former CEO of In Q-Tel, and Jordan Clashek, who is the executive of Schmidt Futures. In-Q-Tel is a very important operator in this area, and I think that through Brennan, through AFF, through Schmidt, the objective of the West Executive has been to come up with something that would clone the capabilities of Inquitell in or through Westexec. Founded by Louis and Lockheed Martin's CEO in 1999,

Iniquetel has invested in high-tech companies, presumably, to keep the CIA and other intelligent agencies close to technology frontier. And it has been particularly prominent in ICT information and communication. technology. That's a field that I know fairly well because I used to focus on that in the past writing reports on Nokia, Erickson, Motorola and many other companies. And the objective is to use these companies to gain an edge. That edge is critical because unlike some other countries, including China, but also some European countries in the past, US has not been a major equipment manufacturer in the ICT sector these other countries have.

So how do you control the fish generation platform without manufacturing the equipment that makes the file? That's a problem. That's why I think that the government went after Huawei and other Chinese companies that were very eager to invest in the US about a decade ago. That's why they were those notorious hearings around 2012. And that's why Chinese investment has collapsed. And I think part of it is that unless you have people like Brennan organizations like

EUT or their contemporary forms close to the Westexec, you cannot weaponize ICT. And if your objective is not foreign policy as much as there is military foreign policy, you want to weaponize the ICT. So tell me something that's pretty hard to see from here and judge. I mean, you have this, you know, very interesting chart, figure four in your article here about Incutel and all the other investment groups that they are tied to. And then it's easy to imagine. It's all just a front for the CIA, whichever groups they're majorly involved in, they are the top dog in and suborn the interests of whatever else is going on there in favor of the national government and the intelligent so-called community's interest, right? but then so i wonder like if i'm looking at the solar system and all of the warps in their

gravity field from all the planets floating around there is incutal jupiter in this thing and they're dominant in high tech in silicon valley in so many ways or they're one good slice of it i don't know a sixth or a tenth or some kind of thing or how would you characterize this or if you could help me see it in my mind's eye, how important and influential this group and its other front groups are in terms of just overall the high-tech industry in America? Well, you know, that was the problem I had

trying to figure out how this system works and how these networks operate. And I needed to try to imagine it using some kind of a flowchart, some kind of a universe model to make sense of it. I wouldn't characterize IQT or in QTEL as a kind of a Jupiter necessarily. It's more like a sneaky Jupiter in the sense that it changes the character of basically

civilian industries. In the past, this kind of operations like, you know, CNAAS or Westexec and so on and so forth, they operated sort of in the edges of funds, in the edges of the edges of, venture capital. Now they seem to want to be in the center. Think what it means. If we have monopolistic players that operate both in the government and in the private sector at the same time, they crowd out perhaps players that are more decent, more decent in the sense that they focus on the civilian industries. You can really also ask what does it mean to consumer welfare if the objective of these operations is ultimately military supremacy. That's not the first thing that comes

to mind to ordinary Americans, they look their daily life, when they look at income polarization. These sort of matters are really critical to the military industrial complex in the U.S. And not just in the U.S. to other military industrial complexes everywhere. But they should be subject to civilian overview, not the other way around. The great fear of President Eisenhower seems to have come true in something of a nightmare here. So if you look at the CIA created in QTEL and you start from it, go to the American Frontier Fund, you end up with the best exec advisors. But at the same time, you end up with a bunch of organizations that are not just their corporate alumni or cooperators, partners, but are there strategic partners. So they have a more critical law.

I took a look in those because I was curious how does this thing operate. And you have part of this system, Pine Island Capital Partners, that's operation where also you had Lloyd Austin, the President of Defense Secretary, together with Blinken. You have venture capital firm, Ridgeline. You have a global management consulting, Boston Consulting Group, and you have a global peer advisory to nail. And it looks to me, when you look at these companies, they all bring something to West Executive it didn't have before. It didn't have private equity, hence Pine Island. It wasn't operating venture capital in funding new operations, new companies, new startups.

It wants to be in military startups. It wants to dominate security and so on so forth. So, Ridgeline. It wasn't a global management consulting. B, C, G is one of the biggest players in the area and global PR, Teneo. But by the same token, you actually take a lot of liabilities through these companies. These strategic partners, of course, are profitable, but they're also controversial. In Angola, for instance, BSG operated or cooperated with Isabella Santos, who was notorious for exploiting international resources.

New York Times, I did more than one or two disclosures on that one. In Saudi Arabia, it helped the priest, Muhammad bin Salman, to consolidate power. In Sweden, in the small Sweden, it was particularly notorious and remained so because it was involved with the construction of the Lua-Qadolista University Hospital, and there have a lot of illegal activities associated with that. The same goes for region. And Teneo is perhaps the most notorious of all in that he has, has engaged in illicit and questionable conduct, including even sexual harassment by CEO who

ultimately had to leave. I was stunned to find that Teneo, who plays a central law as a strategic partner, PR partner, or less exact, that they also provide services to oxygotein manufacture per die pharma, which is a key player behind the US opioid epidemic. So with friends like this, I think you really should think twice. And even if you look at the West Exx's own clients who, in one way or another, are involving these venture startups, which are now more and more going towards military and security objectives, it should caution you a little bit that one of the key clients of West Ex was Winworld, an Israeli artificial intelligent venture, which was launched by naval intelligence officers with the country's former chief of staff on the board.

And other windward investors included CIA director, David Petrovus, who you've often talked about, Florida's war comrade from the Afghanistan era. And there was also the lead investor Lee Kachin. Now, there's a joke that every Hong Konger knows that even if you fart in Hong Kong, Lee Kaching will make money on that. He's one of the biggest tycoons in Hong Kong through his VC fund, Origins Ventures. And then if you're a Democrat, I really think, particularly if you're a progressive democrat, you should have a problem with the fact that Pine Island is being led by the John Thane.

Now, he's the person who thanked Merrill Lynch in 2008 while paying himself bonuses along the way. And amid the subprime debacle, he's a person, Thane, who spent $1.2 million. to remodeled his office, which included $35,000 for a gold-plated commode on legs. Now, later, he apologized and reimbursed, but only because he got caught. So when you have French like this, you really start wondering how far this will go. Even if you look at the rapid rise of Lloyd Austin, who had an honorable discharge and has almost like a rag's rich story in the defense. You see even Biden family members being close to him at the time when he is being promoted and so on and so forth. This is not to say anything about him or his psychology or anybody

else is. This is to say that when you have this kind of networks that in which each operator carries a lot of power, corporate, military and otherwise, people tend to promote each other. and is that good for the national interest? I don't think so. It creates more distortions and it tends to actually deepen the income polarization in the country. Yeah. All right.

Well, everybody, you heard the man. Get out there and get yourself a B1 Bomber. It's Dan Steinbach from Difference Group.net. And this one is at World Finance Financial Review.com, the Center of International Insecurity. Thank you so much for your time on the show. Appreciate it.

Thank you. My pleasure, Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.