Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Saudi Arabia’s Southeast Asia Terror Tour

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 6, 2017

Saudi Arabia’s Southeast Asia Terror Tour

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

Saudi Arabia’s king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has recently undertaken a sweeping tour of Southeast Asia in what the media and analysts are claiming is a bid to firm up economic and political ties with Muslim-majority nations in the region.

However, both the media and analysts are sidestepping or entirely omitting the role Saudi Arabia has played in fueling global terrorism, extraterritorial geopolitical meddling, and even divisive and terroristic activities the notorious state sponsor of terrorism has been implicated in across the planet including within Southeast Asia itself.

Cartalucci cites many examples of the Empire's increasing political use of Saudi Arabia's extreme, fundamentalist sect of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, in Asia as a weapon to contain China.

Saudi Arabia has long been useful to the US. First as a source of petroleum during WWII, and then in 1974 to prop up the dollar as an international reserve currency after Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard in 1971 because of the huge expenditures in the Vietnam War. Kissinger negotiated a deal with the Kingdom in 1974 in which Saudi Arabia promised to sell oil only in US dollars and agreed to buy US Treasury securities and other US investments with their profits in exchange for US protection.