Click here to access 1:11:55 video and transcript by James Corbett from The Corbett Report. (I made some modifications to my commentary at 3:25 PM Seattle time.)
I read most of this transcript recently and found Corbett's grand geopolitical view to be overly "conspiratorial", that is, in my opinion it ascribes too much power to power figures that can influence global political events. The metaphor that he often uses refers to a puppeteer controlling puppets. The puppeteers he has in mind are globalists, mostly bankers, who are intent upon creating a "new world order", and they have been attempting to do this for quite some time, at least since about 1916.
Such people who come up with unconventional explanations of world events are often smeared with the term "conspiracy theorist". I don't wish to smear Corbett for his effort because I think it is an honest effort to understand the world we are living in, but I think his analysis suffers from an over emphasis on the power and omniscience of relatively powerful figures. However, his theory does appear to support an explanation for what I still regard as the inexplicable participation of so many Western countries in China's international banking organizations, particularly the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. (I will address this later.)
In this long podcast essay he draws from a number of sources evidence to support this theory and I don't have the time or desire to confront many of them. He draws a lot from Antony Sutton who, I believe, was also overly impressed with powerful figures acting from behind the scenes of world events and went to extreme lengths to cherry-pick evidence to support his theory. (In the process he did uncover a lot of valuable evidence that bankers played both sides in WWII.)
Yes, there were capitalist funders who did supply some modest amounts of money to Lenin and Trotsky to aid them in getting back to Russia and alter the Russian government. There are always some capitalists who believe in using their money to influence people who they think can shape political events. They do this in an effort to co-opt such people into serving their interests. We have seen this phenomena in recent years here in the US and abroad with capitalist foundations and NGOs funding alternative websites and organizations in order to influence their views. But, they are not omniscient or all powerful--they do make mistakes, and they did so dramatically with Trotsky and Lenin.
Today, we are seeing some people (such as Kissinger) in the ruling capitalist classes who realize the inherent dangers of trying to dominate China, that in this nuclear age a war would be far too devastating to contemplate, and thus they would like to reach an accommodation with Chinese and Russian leaders. Capitalist ruling classes are not monolithic with regard to strategies for enhancing their wealth and power. There are many others, often in the ranks of neoconservatives, who think otherwise. They are pursuing policies of aggressive containment with both Russia and China. From all appearances, I think that they are the dominant faction among the Empire's directors.
Getting back to how his theory accounts for many Western countries participating in China's international investment banks, I think there are other alternative explanations. The most likely one is that they want to influence how the investment banks function so that they do not collide with the interests of the Empire. Or global-elitist factions in these countries see this as a step to reach an accommodation with Chinese leaders in pursuit of something like a collusion of elite interests, or something like a "new world order". Or some combination of these motives. But I don't yet have a definitive answer. I'm still looking.
