Friday, February 17th., 2017
"...President Donald Trump is not fighting a war on the establishment: he’s fighting a war to protect the establishment from itself, and the rest of us...."
"...Trump’s White House has purged almost the entire senior staff of the State Department, and tested the loyalty of the Department of Homeland Security with its new ‘Muslim ban’ order.
So what is going on? One approach to framing the Trump movement comes from Jordan Greenhall,
who sees it as a conservative (“Red Religion”) Insurgency against the
liberal (“Blue Church”) Globalist establishment (the “Deep State”).
Greenhall suggests, essentially, that Trump is leading a nationalist
coup against corporate neoliberal globalization using new tactics of
“collective intelligence” by which to outsmart and outspeed his liberal
establishment opponents..."
"...The Trump regime is not operating outside the Deep State, but mobilizing elements within it to dominate and strengthen it for a new mission.
The Trump regime is not acting to overturn the establishment, but to consolidate it against a perceived crisis of a wider transnational Deep System.
The Trump regime is not a conservative insurgency against the liberal establishment, but an act of ideologically constructing the current crisis as a conservative-liberal battleground, led by a particularly radicalized white nationalist faction of a global elite.
The
act is a direct product of a global systemic crisis, but is a
short-sighted and ill-conceived reaction, pre-occupied with surface
symptoms of that crisis. Unfortunately, those hoping to resist the Trump
reaction also fail to understand the system dynamics of the crisis..."
How the Trump regime was manufactured by a war inside the Deep State
A systemic crisis in the global Deep System has driven the violent radicalization of a Deep State faction
By Nafeez Ahmed
A special report published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.
President Donald Trump is not fighting a war on the establishment: he’s fighting a war to protect the establishment from itself, and the rest of us.
At
first glance, this isn’t obvious. Among his first actions upon taking
office, Trump vetoed the Trans Pacific Partnership, the controversial
free trade agreement which critics rightly said would lead to US job
losses while giving transnational corporations massive power over
national state policies on health, education and other issues.
Trump
further plans to ditch the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and US, which would have diluted key
state regulations on the activities of transnational corporates on
issues like food safety, the environment and banking; and to renegotiate
NAFTA, potentially heightening tensions with Canada.
Trump
appears to be in conflict with the bulk of the US intelligence
community, and is actively seeking to restructure the government to
minimize checks and balances, and thus consolidate his executive power.
His
White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has restructured the
National Security Council, granting himself and Trump’s Chief of Staff
Richard ‘Reince’ Priebus permanent seats on the NSC’s Principals’
Committee – opening the door to the White House politicization of the
government’s highest national security body.
Trump’s White House has purged almost the entire senior staff of the State Department, and tested the loyalty of the Department of Homeland Security with its new ‘Muslim ban’ order.
So what is going on? One approach to framing the Trump movement comes from Jordan Greenhall,
who sees it as a conservative (“Red Religion”) Insurgency against the
liberal (“Blue Church”) Globalist establishment (the “Deep State”).
Greenhall suggests, essentially, that Trump is leading a nationalist
coup against corporate neoliberal globalization using new tactics of
“collective intelligence” by which to outsmart and outspeed his liberal
establishment opponents.
But at best this is an extremely partial picture.
In reality, Trump has ushered in something far more dangerous:
The Trump regime is not operating outside the Deep State, but mobilizing elements within it to dominate and strengthen it for a new mission.
The Trump regime is not acting to overturn the establishment, but to consolidate it against a perceived crisis of a wider transnational Deep System.
The Trump regime is not a conservative insurgency against the liberal establishment, but an act of ideologically constructing the current crisis as a conservative-liberal battleground, led by a particularly radicalized white nationalist faction of a global elite.
The
act is a direct product of a global systemic crisis, but is a
short-sighted and ill-conceived reaction, pre-occupied with surface
symptoms of that crisis. Unfortunately, those hoping to resist the Trump
reaction also fail to understand the system dynamics of the crisis.
All
this can only be understood when we look at the big picture. That means
the following: we must look a little more closely at the individuals
inside Trump’s administration, the wider social and institutional
networks they represent, and what emerges from their being interlocked
in government; we must contextualize this against two factors, the
escalation of global systemic crisis, and the Trump regime’s ideological
framing(s) of that crisis (both for themselves, and for public
consumption); we must connect this with the impact on the transnational
Deep System, and how that links up with the US Deep State; and we must
then explore what this all means in terms of the scope of actions likely
to be deployed by the Trump regime to pursue its discernable goals.
This
investigation will help to establish a ground state for anyone on which
to build a meaningful strategy of response that accounts for the full
systemic complexity of our Trumpian moment.
So
the first step to diagnosing our Trumpian moment is to see who is
leading it. We’ll begin by looking at a cross-section of some of Trump’s
most prominent nominations and appointments.
1. The Trump regime
Money Monsters
If
all Trump’s appointees are confirmed, his administration will be among
the most business-heavy, corporate-friendly governments in American
history.
Five
of the 15 people nominated by Trump as Cabinet secretaries have no
public sector experience, and have spent their entire careers in the
corporate sector. “That would be more business people with no
public-sector experience than have ever served in the Cabinet at any one
time,”, concludes Pew Research Center.
Betsy DeVos has been nominated for Education Secretary. She’s a billionaire married to the Amway conglomerate.
Andrew Puzder has been nominated as Labor Secretary. He’s a billionaire CEO of fastfood chain owner CKE Restaurants.
Trump’s
nominee for Commerce Secretary is Wall Street veteran Wilbur Ross. He’s
a billionaire financier who invests in buying and selling companies in
distressed industries, and who made his early fortune as a fund manager
at the Rothschild Group.
Steven
Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, is a former partner at the global
investment bank Goldman Sachs, a hedge fund manager and, until his
nomination, a board member of the Fortune 500 financial holding company,
CIT Group. He’s also a member of the Yale University secret society, Skull and Bones.
Vincent
Viola is Trump’s nominee for Army Secretary. He’s a billionaire, former
chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), and current
chairman of Virtu Financial, a high-frequency trading firm.
Linda
McMahon is Trump’s Small Business Administrator. She’s a co-founder and
former CEO of WWE, which is now valued at around $1.5 billion, and
married to billionaire WWE promoter Vincent McMahon.
Gary
Cohn is Trump’s chief economic advisor and Director of the White House
National Economic Council. He just left his previous post as president
and chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs for the job.
Anthony
Scaramucci has served as a senior advisor to Trump on the executive
committee of the Presidential Transition Team. Previously he was
founding co-managing partner of global investment firm SkyBridge
Capital. Like Steve Bannon, he also began his career at Goldman Sachs.
Walter
‘Jay’ Clayton is Trump’s nominee for the Securities & Exchange
Commission (SEC), the financial industry’s top regulatory watchdog. Yet
Clayton himself is a Wall Street lawyer
who has worked on deals for major banks, such as Barclays Capital’s
acquisition of Lehman Brothers’ assets, the sale of Bear Stearns to JP
Morgan Chase, and the US Treasury’s capital investment in Goldman Sachs.
In the same capacity, he has campaigned to reduce restrictions on
foreign public companies, and sought lax enforcement of the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act. His wife, Gretchen Butler, works for Goldman
Sachs as a private wealth advisor.
Trump’s
crack team of money monsters is clearly not planning on acting in the
interests of American workers — they will instead do what they know
best: use the considerable power of the American state to break down as
many regulatory constraints on global banking finance as possible, with a
special view to privilege US banks and corporations.
Fossil Fuel Freaks
Trump’s administration has not just been bought by Wall Street. It’s been bought by the oil, gas and coal industries.
Rex
Tillerson is Trump’s Secretary of State, and former chairman and CEO of
giant oil and gas conglomerate ExxonMobil. As the world’s largest oil
major of all, ExxonMobil is the de facto
king of fossil fuel interests. Tillerson has close business ties with
Russian president Vladimir Putin, and has previously headed up the joint
US-Russian oil company Exxon Neftegas.
Tillerson is a friend of Igor Sechin, who heads up the military security services faction of the Kremlin known as ‘Siloviki’. ExxonMobil also had intimate ties
with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates under Tillerson.
In any case, Trump has richly rewarded Tillerson for services
rendered — 91% of the $1.8 million donated to federal candidates by ExxonMobil’s PAC under Tillerson for this election cycle, went to Republicans.
It’s
well-known that ExxonMobil has funded climate denialism to the tune of
tens of millions of dollars. What’s less well-known is that in the
1970s, ExxonMobil’s own scientific research fully validated
the scientific reality of climate change. Yet company executives made a
self-serving business-decision to suppress these findings, and fund
efforts to discredit climate science.
Rick
Perry, the former governor of Texas, is Trump’s Secretary of Energy.
Perry holds board directorships at Energy Transfer Partners LP and
Sunoco Logistics Partners LP, which jointly developed the Dakota Access
Pipeline project. The CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, Kelcy Warren, donated
$5 million to a super-PAC supportive of Perry. More generally, his two
presidential campaigns received over $2.6 million from the oil and gas
industry.
Scott
Pruitt, former Attorney General in Oklahoma, is the new head of the
Environment Protection Agency. Pruitt has a track record of launching
federal lawsuits to weaken and overturn EPA regulations not just on
carbon emissions, but on all sorts of basic environmental rules on air
and water pollution. The New York Times reports that he and other Republican attorneys general have forged an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with the oil industry.
Congressman
Ryan Zinke is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior. During
Senate confirmation hearings, he refused to admit the accuracy of the
scientific consensus on human activity being the dominant cause of
climate change. Zinke has supported clean energy measures in the past,
but in May 2016, he sponsored a bill for a time limit on Obama’s
moratorium on federal coal leasing. He routinely voted against
environmental protection measures, supporting fossil fuel use, seeking
to minimize public and state involvement in managing public lands, while
opposing protections for endangered species.
Zinke’s philosophy is basically ‘drill, baby, drill’. That’s why he’s taken over $300,000 in campaign donations from oil and gas companies that want to accelerate drilling across public lands.
Mike
Catanzaro is Trump’s nominee for Special Assistant for Energy and the
Environment. He is also a climate-denying lobbyist for the oil and gas
industry, working for Koch Industries, America’s Natural Gas Alliance
(ANGA), Halliburton, Noble Energy, Hess Corporation, and many others.
Early on in his career, he was Deputy Policy Director of the 2004
Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.
The
fossil fuel freaks want to burn all the oil, gas and coal they can, at
any cost — and they are willing to dismantle whatever environmental
protections stand in their way.
Black Ops Brigade
It
would be mistaken to assume that Trump’s conflicts with the US
intelligence community mean he is necessarily at odds with the
military-industrial complex. On the contrary, his defense appointees and
advisors are embedded across the military-industrial complex. Trump’s
education secretary, DeVos, is the sister of Erik Prince, the notorious
founder of disgraced private security firm Blackwater, now known as
Academi, which was outed for slaughtering 17 Iraqi civilians.
A source in Trump’s transition team confirms
that Erik Prince has advised Trump’s team on intelligence and security
issues. Prince now runs another security firm, Frontier Services Group.
He supports Trump’s proposal
for the US military to grab Iraq’s oil and recommends the escalated
deployment of private defense contractors across the Middle East and
North Africa, such as in Libya, to crackdown on refugees.
General
‘Mad Dog’ James Mattis is Trump’s Secretary of Defense. He was also,
until his resignation due to his political appointment, on the board of
directors of General Dynamics, the fifth largest private defense
contractor in the world. Mattis is also on the board of Theranos, a
biotechnology company known for its questionable automated fingerstick
blood test technology.
Lieutenant-General
Mike Flynn was Trump’s National Security Advisor until his resignation
on February 13 over his ties to Russia. He is a former head of the
Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under Obama, and a
longstanding military intelligence and special operations insider.
Previously, he was director of intelligence for the Joint Special
Operations Command; director of intelligence for the US Central Command;
commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance; chair of the Military Intelligence
Board; and Assistant Director of National Intelligence. Flynn also runs
Flynn Intel Group, a private intelligence consulting firm.
Flynn has just co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.
Ledeen is a leading neoconservative defense consultant and former
Reagan administration appointee who was involved in the Iran–Contra
affair as a consultant of then US National Security Advisor, Robert
McFarlane. Currently a Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies (FDD), he was a staunch advocate of the 2003 invasion of
Iraq (he was directly involved with
the Yellowcake forgeries attempting to fabricate a weapons of mass
destruction threat to justify the war) and has campaigned for military
interventions in Syria, Iran and beyond. Ledeen’s aggressive foreign
policy vision was deeply influential in the formation of the Bush administration’s foreign policy strategy.
It’s worth noting how low Ledeen stoops with his political philosophy. In his 2000 book, Tocqueville on American Character,
Ledeen argues that in some situations, “[i]n order to achieve the most
noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’” (p.
90) He even argues that this is sanctioned by the Christian God: “Since
it is the highest good, the defense of the country is one of those
extreme situations in which a leader is justified in committing evil.”
(p. 117)
That sort of thinking has led him to endorse the ‘cauldronization’ of the Middle East. In 2002, he wrote
in support of invading Iraq that: “One can only hope that we turn the
region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region
that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.”
General
John F. Kelly is Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security. He is a
retired United States Marine Corps general who previously served under
Obama as commander of the US Southern Command, responsible for American
military operations in Central America, South America and the Caribbean.
Before that Kelly was the commanding general of the Multi-National
Force-West in Iraq, and the commander of Marine Forces Reserve and
Marine Forces North. Kelly is also a vice chairman
at the Spectrum Group, a defense contractor lobbying firm; and on the
board of directors of two other private Pentagon contractors, Michael
Baker International and Sallyport Global.
James
Woolsey, the former CIA director and neoconservative stalwart — a
former Vice President at NSA-contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and among
Michael Ledeen’s bosses at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies — was an early Trump supporter, and a senior advisor to
Trump on his transition team. He dropped out over reservations with Trump’s plans to restructure the intelligence community.
Lieutenant
General Joseph Keith Kellogg is Chief of Staff and Executive Secretary
of Trump’s White House National Security Council – but has replaced
Flynn as acting National Security Advisor. Kellogg was the US military’s
top information technology official during the Bush administration’s
invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He
went on to become chief operating officer for the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Baghdad, the mechanism for the US occupation of Iraq, from
November 2003 to March 2004 — the period widely recognized as being
particularly corrupt and inept.
In
between, Kellogg had joined the board of directors of US government IT
contractor, GTSI Corp, where he returned as an independent director
after his Iraq stint from 2004 until 2013 — when the firm changed its
name to ‘UNICOM Government Inc.’ in an attempt to distance itself from earlier revelations of misconduct.
Kellogg
later joined the Advisory Board of US defense contractor Raytheon’s
Trusted Computer Solutions Inc., and the Strategic Advisory Board of
RedXDefence, a US military contractor part-owned by Regina Dugan, former
director of the Pentagon’s Defense and Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA).
In 2012, Wired magazine outed
RedXDefense for creating completely rubbish bomb detection technology
under a multi-million dollar DARPA contract during Dugan’s tenure.
Despite its flaws, the tech was purchased widely by the US military, and
numerous allied militaries around the world.
Mike
Pompeo is the icing on the cake. As Trump’s CIA director, this
Republican Congressman has no obvious experience relevant to running a
national intelligence agency, except perhaps for one thing: as Jane
Mayer writes in her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Doubleday
2015), Pompeo is “so closely entwined with the climate-change denying
Koch brothers that he was known as the ‘congressman from Koch.’”
The
Koch brothers, who made their fortune investing in fossil fuels, now
have a direct line to America’s premiere national intelligence agency.
Now that’s what you call a coup.
Ku Klux Klan
Virulent white nationalism is another fundamental defining feature of the Trump regime.
Steve
Bannon was founding executive chair of Breitbart News, “the platform of
the alt-right” according to Bannon himself. Breitbart is widely known
for its publication of “racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic
material.” Bannon himself is also a prolific film producer, and has made
or contributed to a range of xenophobic films.
Before
his rise to media mogul status, though, Bannon spent a brief time as
acting director of the Biosphere 2 experiment, an effort to create a
self-sufficient ‘closed system’ environment survivable by a small group
of people from 1993 to 1995. At the time, Bannon appeared to share and strongly support
the concerns of the Biosphere 2 scientists about the danger of climate
change driven by, in his own words, “the effect of greenhouse gases on
humans, plants and animals.” He later underwent an Exxon-like
about-turn, illustrated by Breitbart’s rampant opposition to the idea
that the burning of fossil fuels by human civilization is intensifying
climate change.
In 2007, Bannon produced a proposal
for a new documentary, ‘Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic
Facism [sic] in America’, which accused various media outlets,
“Universities and the Left”, the “American Jewish Community”, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the CIA, the FBI, the State
Department, and the White House as being “enablers” of a covert mission
to establish an “Islamic Republic in the United States.”
Bannon consulted on the proposal with Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. In 2015, Emerson was described
as a “complete idiot” by then Prime Minister David Cameron for claiming
falsely on Fox News that Britain is full of Muslim “no go zones” (like
the entire city of Birmingham), and that London is run amok by Muslim
religious police who beat and wound people who refuse to dress according
to a Muslim dress code.
Bannon’s
list of interviewees for the proposed film is like a Who’s Who of
far-right bigotry. Two of the most well known names included Walid
Phares, who advised Trump on his national security team during the
presidential campaign, and Robert Spencer. Both are connected to the
Washington DC-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a far-right think
tank run by former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney, where they
appear regularly as guests on CSP’s ‘Secure Freedom’ radio podcast run
by Gaffney. Phares is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracy.
Frank Gaffney’s CSP commissioned the original flawed opinion poll
that was cited by Trump to justify his ‘Muslim ban’ when he first
announced it in late 2015. So it’s clearly no coincidence that Kellyanne
Conway, the pollster who carried out the flawed poll, is now Counselor
to the President.
Gaffney thus has a significant degree of ideological influence on the Trump regime. He has appeared at least 34 times
on Bannon’s Breitbart radio program. His work has also been cited in
speeches by Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor.
Alarmingly, Gaffney has disturbing connections to full-blown neo-Nazi groups across Europe, such as the Danish People’s Party (DPP) and the Vlaams Belang (VB) in Belgium.
But he simultaneously has close ties
to the US military-industrial complex. In 2013, CSP tax records showed
that the CSP had received funding from six of America’s biggest
aerospace and defense contractors, namely Boeing ($25,000); General
Dynamics ($15,000); Lockheed Martin ($15,000); Northrup Grumman
($5,000); Raytheon ($20,000); and General Electric ($5,000). The CSP has
a particularly close relationship with Boeing, the second largest
defense contractor in the world, which still provides Gaffney’s group
with “general support.”
Michael
Reilly, who has been Director of Federal Budget and Program Analysis at
Boeing since 2010, was previously Gaffney’s Vice President for
Operations at the CSP.
These incestuous ties with the US private defense sector comprise one prime reason that fully 22 officers or advisors of Gaffney’s CSP ended up having appointments in the George W. Bush administration.
Senator
Jeff Sessions is Trump’s Attorney General. Gaffney’s CSP awarded
Sessions the annual ‘Keeper of the Flame’ award in 2015. Sessions has
previously expressed sympathies
for the Ku Klux Klan. He has closely associated with far-right
anti-immigrant organizations founded by John Tanton, a driving force in
America’s white nationalist movements. In 1993, Tanton declared: “… for
European-American society and culture to persist requires a
European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” Yet Trump’s new
Attorney General is known for frequently quoting from Tanton’s groups, showing up at their press conferences, and has even received recognition and campaign contributions from them.
The
John Tanton connection opens up a can of worms. Kellyanne Conway,
Trump’s Counsellor, is also connected to Tanton. Her polling firm was previously contracted by Tanton’s anti-immigration platform Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Numerous other officials involved in the Trump team — Lou Barletta, Kris Kobach and Julie Kirchner — have direct organizational ties to Tanton’s FAIR.
But
this connects senior Trump officials to a grim history of neo-Nazi
agitation in the US. Tanton received large sums of early money for FAIR
from the Pioneer Fund, a pro-Nazi grant-giving organization which funded
eugenics — the discredited ‘science’ of ‘racial hygiene’. Tanton’s
various anti-immigrant platforms received money from the Pioneer Fund as
late as 2002. According to a study in the Albany Law Review,
the Pioneer Fund had direct ties to Nazi scientists, and its founding
directors were Nazi sympathizers. One of them had even travelled to
Germany in 1935 to attend a Nazi population conference.
Stephen
Miller is a senior policy advisor to Trump. He previously worked as
communications director for Jeff Sessions in his senator’s office, and
crafted the strategy to defeat a bipartisan immigration reform bill in
2013. During his university days, he worked closely with the neo-Nazi
leader Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alternative Right” as a new way of capturing a movement about white racial identity.
Miller
denies having worked closely with Spencer when they were at university
together as members of the Duke Conservative Union. According to
Spencer, Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an
on-campus debate on immigration policy in 2007. The event featured Peter
Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist website Vdare.com, which
regularly publishes articles by neo-Nazis. Miller’s relationship with
Spencer at this time has been confirmed by email correspondence between Spencer and Brimelow.
It’s
perhaps worth noting that the inspiration for Tanton’s neo-Nazi
sympathies were, ostensibly, environmental concerns. In a recent article
he admits, “my initial interest in curtailing immigration was motivated
by a longstanding concern for the environment.”
From
1971 to 1975, Tanton was chair of the National Population Committee of
one of America’s oldest environmental organizations, the Sierra Club.
His theory was that immigration drives unsustainable population growth,
which then drains resources and harms the environment. The environmental
crisis, from Tanton’s point of view, is a population
problem — specifically, a problem of too many people. Part of dealing
with that means cracking down on immigration — this, ironically, in a
nation founded on immigration.
This
insidious proto-Nazi ideology now appears to have an operating
influence on the White House through Tanton’s ideological surrogates,
many of whom are connected to Gaffney and his acolytes in the Trump
regime.
Guru Gang
The
unifying ideology that lends coherence to these intersecting networks
of influence comes from a variety of people, but the following stand out
in particular.
Michael Anton is a little-known but powerful figure
in the Trump administration, now a senior director of strategic
communications in the White House National Security Council. He launched
his career as a speechwriter and press secretary for New York mayor
Rudy Giuliani, before joining Bush’s White House in 2001 as a
communications aide for the National Security Council. He went on to
become a speechwriter for media mogul Rupert Murdoch at News Corp, then
moved into the financial sector, firstly as director of communications
for Citigroup, then as a managing director at the BlackRock investment
firm.
Anton
has played a major role in attempting to cajole and convince
conservatives, through various anonymous writings in conservative
publications and behind-the-scenes networking, of the necessity of
voting Trump to head off the crisis of conservative decline amidst the
apocalyptic failures of liberalism.
Rupert
Murdoch has a direct line to the Trump White House through Michael
Anton, but it’s one the News Corp owner has gone to pains to build
personally. Murdoch and his wife Jerry Hall were hosted for dinner by Trump at his golf course in Scotland in June 2016. Later Murdoch was seen visiting Trump Tower in November 2016. Murdoch is set to have significant influence on Trump, who reportedly asked the Fox News owner to recommend his top preferred candidates to chair the Federal Communications Commission.
The
Murdoch connection has other alarming ramifications. Since 2010,
Murdoch has been an equity-holding board member of the American energy
firm, Genie Oil & Gas.
He had teamed up with Lord Jacob Rothschild, chairman of Rothschild
Investment Trust (RIT) Capital Partners, to buy a 5.5% stake in the
corporation then worth $11 million.
Murdoch and Rothschild also serve on Genie’s strategic advisory board.
Joining them on the board are Larry Summers, former Director of
President Obama’s National Economic Council; former Trump senior advisor
James Woolsey; Dick Cheney, former Vice-President under George W. Bush;
and Bill Richardson, former Secretary of Energy under Clinton and
Governor of New Mexico.
Genie
Oil & Gas has two main subsidiaries. One of them, Afek Oil &
Gas, operates in Israel and is currently drilling in the Golan Heights,
which under international law is recognized as Syrian territory. The
Golan was captured by Israel from Syria in 1967, and unilaterally
annexed in 1981 with the introduction of Israeli law to the territory.
The other Genie subsidiary, American Shale Oil, is a joint project with
the French major Total SA, and operates in Colorado’s Green River
Formation.