http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sufM4Km4cc
To the conspiracy-minded: if you've got a mind for finance, get ready to be happy. The Carlyle Group, which may or may not control the world, is thinking about going public. Buy enough shares and you'll discover the hidden funding that determines the contours of geopolitics. Or at least you can tell the internet you did.
Carlyle, a private equity giant – Washingtonian estimated in 2006 that it generated $46 billion in revenues (PDF) – might be prepping for an initial public offering in order to raise money to finance a lot of corporate buyouts. Bloomberg forecasts that the firm will go public by late 2011. Noting the weakness in the private equity market, the Wall Street Journal considers Carlyle's possible public turn "more a sign of weakness than a sign of strength." That would be quite a turnabout for a firm known to the Internet for being something between a shadow government and the Stonecutters.
It's not hard to understand why Carlyle has a reputation as a puppetmaster. The group describes itself as the "leading private equity investor in the aerospace and defense industries" for more than a decade, putting cash into defense firms like ARINC, a communications and aviation company; QinetiQ, which used to be the U.K. Defense Ministry's Darpa-like research branch; the guns-and-armor concern once known as United Defense Industries; and many more. As often happens in the defense sector, the firms Carlyle funds can often receive sketchy government deals, as ARINC did in 2008 when the Pentagon quietly gave it $325 million to sell Russian-made helicopters to the Iraqi military.
Add to that Carlyle's connections to very powerful people. Its advisers have included former President George H.W. Bush; ex-British premier John Major; one-time cabinet secretaries like James Baker and Frank Carlucci; and Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty; to say nothing of a parade of defense-industry rainmakers. But the root of most Carlyle-based conspiracy theories is that from 1994 to shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden's non-terrorist family members were investors as well, and one of bin Laden's half-brothers attended a Carlyle meeting in D.C. the morning of 9/11.
From those data points were launched a million online conspiracy theories, forming the basis for a lot of Bush-knew-about-9/11 paranoia and feeding the view that the Iraq war was about enriching Poppy Bush's company. ConspiracyPlanet.com accuses Carlyle of selling Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction as a "phony casus belli for the phony war on terrorism." (At worst, the U.S. turned a blind eye to Iraq's chemical weapons use in the 1980s, but that was before Carlyle even existed.) Some sites claim the media has suppressed the nefarious Bush-Carlyle-bin Laden nexus even as others seek to document it using mainstream media reports.
Most famously, Michael Moore's 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary intimated there was something untoward about Shawfiq bin Laden meeting with Carlyle on 9/11, even though the two brothers are estranged and Shawfiq has nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Moore included clips of Bradley Fighting Vehicles – made by Carlyle-owned United Defense (as it was then known) – rolling through Baghdad after the Iraq invasion, suggesting that the war was a scam out to line the pockets of politically connected firms.
Obviously, war is lucrative for defense companies, and the WMD-related reasons for invading Iraq were discredited. But if the Bush administration simply wanted to fatten up Carlyle, it wouldn't have canceled the United Defense-manufactured Crusader howitzer in 2002. Indeed, the conspiracies make it hard to understand why the Bush Pentagon didn't just stop dealing with the competitors of Carlyle-held firms altogether. Accordingly, Carlyle's co-founder, David Rubenstein, lamented in 2003 that the firm had "actually replaced the Trilateral Commission" as a grand unified theory of geopolitical maliciousness.
But the expected initial public offering could be a way out. All it takes is for a group of well-heeled conspirators to form an alliance and buy shares, accruing power in the company until it can subject its past business dealings to sunlight. No one would have to take either Moore's word or Rubenstein's for how Carlyle actually behaves. At the very least, Rubenstein might find himself penning the world's most geopolitically intense shareholder disclosure brochure. Everyone wins.
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