At elite gala with ex-Bush official, Obama implores Wall Street to thank him for making them so much money

[grayzoneproject.com]

(On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Baker was at a conference at New York City’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel with Osama bin Laden’s brother, Shafiq. The day before, former president George H. W. Bush visited the hotel for the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group.

The Carlyle Group, a world-leading private equity company based in Washington, DC, is closely linked to Saudi Arabia. Its co-founder, David Rubenstein, quipped in an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2003 that the Carlyle Group “has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world — omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister.”

The bin Laden family invested millions of dollars in the corporation in the Carlyle Group, and James Baker served as its senior counselor, along with George H. W. Bush as an adviser.)

Quite an interesting coincidence, huh?

(In their discussion, both Obama and Baker lamented the decline in US imperial power across the globe. They agreed that the world cannot run smoothly without the United States as an international hegemon.

“People ask me often, John, what surprised me most about the presidency,” Obama said. “It is the degree to which the United States underwrites the international order. It is not always in the obvious ways, but if there’s a problem around the world, people do not call Moscow; they do not call Beijing; they call Washington. Even our adversaries expect us to solve problems and expect us to keep things running.”

“And when you start getting dysfunction in Washington,” Obama continued, “that doesn’t just weaken our influence; it provides opportunities for disorder to start ramping up all around the world.&rdquo

In other words. It's like a mafia organized crime syndicate where one family strong arms over all the other families. If you want to, say, kill someone, you have to persuade the god father of the ruling family for permission. Just replace (someone) with country, or its leader, or a dissident in that government. If another family/country has the present potential means to ends you desire, you strong arm them into a degree of submission and or forced leader/regime change.