Deglobalization and Muslim economic power

This channel was easily the first to characterize the Ukraine war as a US proxy war not against Russia, but against Europe. I've been saying that from the beginning and putting this conflict in the context of the process of deglobalization, the end of the post World War two global order, together with the collapsing demographics of Europe. Now to some extent, this seems to finally be dawning on some EU states as they suffer the disastrous economic consequences of the coordinated sanctions program against Russia and the campaign to isolate Russia from the European economy. Skyrocketing energy prices are crippling companies across Europe, and Europeans can't help but notice that one country is profiting from that, and that's America. Just to give you a small example of what I'm talking about, this week it was announced that Germany signed a fifteen year agreement with Qatar for deliveries of LNG, liquefied natural gas.

Now mind you, they're only going to be getting a fraction of what they actually need, but the details of this agreement are important because this isn't really an agreement between Qatar and Germany. Not really. The way the deal works is that American energy company, ConocoPhillips, will be buying the LNG from Qatar because they are a partner now since, I think, June in a massive field, LNG field for exploration outside of Qatar. And so then now ConocoPhillips will be making that LNG available to Germany at German prices. And German energy prices have risen over 400% over the last year.

So what we actually have here is a deal between Qatar and an American energy company and another deal between ConocoPhillips and Germany at a tremendous profit for ConocoPhillips. Now as I said, companies across Europe are struggling because of the high energy prices, and many are dying. What we are seeing is the deindustrialization of Europe, but there's more. The US is not only sabotaging European manufacturing and production, they're commandeering it. And I think August, The US enacted the inflation reduction act, which provides tax incentives and subsidies to American companies.

Now that gives them a significant advantage over European competitors. But more importantly, that incentivizes European competitors to relocate to America, and many are doing just that. Obviously, for The US, deglobalization means ramping up domestic manufacturing and production and retracting far flung supply chains. So drawing European manufacturers to American soil will kick start that process dramatically. Now I wanna connect this back to a pledge that was made by then candidate Donald Trump in 2016 when he said that he was going to prioritize bringing American companies back to The US from China.

And that's not irrelevant because Biden is president because Biden has more or less followed the same policies and actually pursued them in many cases even more vigorously than Trump did. So what Trump said he wanted to do was to convince American companies that were utilizing Chinese factories to come back to The United States and use American factories. Now I said at that time that what that translates to is that Trump wanted American factories to start more and more to conform to the pay and working conditions present in Chinese factories because that's how you can convince American companies to bring their work and manufacturing back to The United States if they are promised and guaranteed the same advantages in The United States that they get from China. Now when we're talking about Europe, as it stands, the fact of the matter is that American workers have considerably fewer rights than European workers. So with the added incentive provided by the inflation reduction act and the tax incentives and the subsidies, and then you add to that the dismal economic situation in the EU, combined again with the long term demographic decline of Europe, European companies really have no reason not to relocate.

I mean, no government in the world has proved to be more on the side of business, if not in the pocket of business, than the American government. I mean, they are busy impoverishing their population as we speak. Most Americans are maintaining their lifestyle today, The lifestyle of conspicuous consumption as well as just meeting their basic needs. They are sustaining themselves more than anything with credit cards, which leaves them obviously desperately in debt and at the mercy of employers. That makes them perfect for corporate exploitation.

That makes them, in the eyes of corporations, the ideal workforce. And this is what happens when private sector power eclipses state power, when the most powerful individuals and institutions are not loyal to any nation but only to their own class. And this is what happens when wealth and power are so highly concentrated that you can have, for example, 750 companies controlling 80% of the wealth among 43,000 multinational corporations. And this is what happens when wealth and power are so highly concentrated that you can have just the three largest asset management companies controlling over 10,000,000,000,000 worth of assets. And when Vanguard, one of those three asset management companies, Vanguard, the second largest, is the largest shareholder in two thirds of the world's most important corporations.

The West created private sector superpowers, and those superpowers are not nationalistic. They have no ideology apart from wealth accumulation and control. So the obvious question, how are we supposed to confront this? Well, there's actually some good news. Research by the University of Oxford analyzed the assets controlled across religious groups, and they found that Muslims surpass everyone by a huge margin.

Jewish capital totaled $16,000,000,000. Christian aligned capital totaled roughly $260,000,000,000. Dharmic or Hindu related capital equaled roughly $300,000,000,000. So that is a total of roughly $580,000,000,000 controlled by non Muslim religious investment funds. It's a lot of money.

Right? Well, the combined total of Muslim sovereign and private finance capital totals roughly $4,000,000,000,000. That's almost seven times the total of the assets controlled by non Muslim investment funds combined. The sovereign wealth funds of just The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are equal to roughly 2% of the entire global economy. Islamic banking assets are estimated to total just under $2,000,000,000,000.

Now, of course, the biggest sovereign wealth funds are controlled by the Gulf States and by the rulers of the Gulf States. But no matter what you think about them, they're not playing with that money. They are steadily making some very diverse and strategic investments. I mean, did you know that Qatar, for example, helped to finance Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter? And they are investing increasingly in the Muslim world and in the global South.

Now Saudi Arabia has recently brought in BlackRock to help manage their sovereign wealth fund, which is bad. But all of the others, as far as I know, are controlled by their governments. And the Ukraine war, if nothing else, has shown us that these governments are not simply the puppets of the West that many of us thought they were. They are acting with autonomy and with sovereignty. And in many ways, they've really cracked the code in terms of how you deal with the West.

They have understood that there is only one language that the West truly understands, and no, it's not violence. It's money. They know that as long as money is involved, everything else is just noise, whether it's Islamophobic noise or whether it's a virtue signaling noise, it's just noise. I mean, the West may bang the table and shout liberal talking points, but under the table, deals are being conducted. Now many Muslim countries, to one extent or another, did benefit from globalization, but we stand to benefit immeasurably more from deglobalization as long as we can successfully navigate that transition, which means first, we have to understand and recognize that that is what's happening.

And second, we have to not try to hold on to the old global order by kowtowing to the West and basically begging them to keep things as they were. Paradigm is shifting. We have the opportunity now to develop our own industrial strength, build our own companies, secure our own energy and food supply through cooperation, through solidarity, through trade and investment between Muslim countries and across the global South more broadly. I mean, you know that one of the reasons why the GCC has refused to increase oil and LNG shipments to Europe was because they wanted their oil and gas to go to Asia? They were prioritizing their Asian customers.

And did you know that Asia was exempted from the shortages that were caused by OPEC cutting oil production that seriously affected Europe and the West? This is practical solidarity. Yes. It's slow in development, but it's a start. Now one of the things that made America and the West so dominant over the last seven decades or so is because they were interested in expanding their sphere of influence to counter the Soviets.

And they did this both through military power and through transactional deals. With deglobalization, they are less interested in those deals and less inclined towards far flung military adventures. I mean, US active duty servicemen, active duty military overseas across the world is at its lowest level in decades. And again, this is because the owners and controllers of global financialized capital are not nationalistic, and they are the real hegemon of the twenty first century. What I'm saying is the West is no longer going to be the center of gravity, not politically, not economically, and not ideologically.

They can be defied. We don't have to bend over backwards to appease them. We don't have to seek their approval, and we don't have to engage with them on their terms. Of course, this is particularly true of those Muslim countries that possess the largest sovereign wealth funds like The Gulf States and Malaysia. So if these countries, if these nations work in greater concert and direct more of their investment, only towards their own development, which is important, but also towards projects throughout the global South and particularly in poorer Muslim countries.

This will lay the foundation for building greater Muslim political, economic, and cultural sovereignty and influence around the globe. Inshallah. And that will be better for everybody.