Globalizing Death: Foreign Investment in US War Machine

Now we are learning what really immobilizes Congress – what deafens them to their electorate.  Because finally a recommended diary by a credible source tells the truth:  the US is owned by her creditors.  This is the gory backside of globalization.

Sometime sooner (or probably later) it will also be announced:  there is heavy foreign “investment” in the US wars/occupations by numerous foreign governments.

We just saw Abu Dhabi buy about 20% of Carlyle, which got nothing but a cheery nod from Congress.  Someone surely is going to say Carlyle is out of the defense business but 1) such enterprises have subsidiaries attached (there are claims that Halliburton has over 70 subsidiaries, many of which are nothing but papers in obscure attorneys’ files) to where the truth of their doings/holdings are an endless shell game to discover; 2) private equity groups/hedge funds and now especially sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are offshore, unregulated and anonymous:

Around the world, a secretive society is emerging of governments flush with foreign assets, some of them petrodollars, that are increasingly calling the shots in international finance. The Blackstone deal is likely to stir others to invest their money even farther away from prying eyes than they do already.

Like China, whose proposed Blackstone stake is part of $300 billion that the government plans to set aside this year for investment purposes, dozens of countries have set up what are now commonly referred to as sovereign-wealth funds. They manage money drawn from reserves, natural-resource payments and the like. China is chiefly concerned to diversify its foreign reserves, but other sovereign-wealth funds own national, as well as international, assets.

The top 12 each have anything from $20 billion to hundreds of billions of dollars to invest
(…)
Some estimates put the size of the funds at $2.5 trillion by the end of this year (in contrast, hedge funds are thought to have a mere $1.6 trillion), with another $450 billion in transfers from reserves being added annually.

About that Blackstone deal, notice it happened the Monday following Congress’ May capitulation on funding the Iraq war – four days later.  I can not believe the timing was coincidence.  My guess is that Congress’ vote had everything to do with bolstering “investor confidence.”

Hypocritical?  Sure.  Foreign powers on the one hand criticize the US war machine yet grasp for profits with the other.

Sure I’m nobody, a yokel from Montana.  But wait.  Pretty soon someone “approved” as a source in the MSM or elsewhere is going to cough it up:  The US war business has been globalized.

I’ll wager this is why Congress is stone mute – that they are far more beholden to their co-investors than to the electorate.  In fact in the rabid push to globalize finance there is a despicable grain of sensibility to their inaction:  probably the profits from the global war machine are so internationally enmeshed that indeed, with the assets/credit bubble as tenuous as it is… stop the war and the globalized international economy might well crash.