Wall Street and Nikki Haley should just get a room already

Wall Street and Nikki Haley should just get a room already

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Establishment big- money donors are reportedly eyeing former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the 2024 U.S. presidential race. What took them so long to pick up on her heavy flirting?

“A number of chief executives, hedge fund investors and corporate dealmakers from both parties have begun gravitating toward Ms. Haley and, in some cases, digging deeper into their pockets to help her,” the New York Times has reported. She even took a call from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who told her to “keep it up,” they added.

The Republican Party’s overwhelming front runner, former President Donald Trump, was never seen by Wall Street as the type who would rob a bank on command and bring back every cent to his handlers. So he’s definitely out. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, ranked behind Trump in the latest polls, also embodies anti-establishment Trumpism — minus Trump. But besides not being Trump or DeSantis, what is it about Haley that establishment big money finds so appealing?

Do Haley’s wannabe Wall Street sugar daddies know that she routinely champions the country, Ukraine, that considers itself a victim of war crimes by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and HSBC? According to one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s economic advisers, Oleg Ustenko, who told the Financial Times last year that by engaging with companies that sell and trade Russian oil or gas or in Russian energy shares, like Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil, and Vitol, he believes that "they are committing war crimes”— and sent them letters to that effect, threatening to pursue the managers of these Wall Street companies personally all the way to the International Criminal Court.

Lucky for Wall Street that the U.S. doesn’t actually recognize The Hague.

Still, it’s hard to find a military-industrial cause that Haley hasn’t promoted — and that’s good for Wall Street’s defense portfolios (although bad for world peace).

In the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, Haley tried to use Gaza as a gateway to Iran, when even U.S. national intelligence officials were pointing out that Hamas’ state-sponsor is Qatar. She then peddled the fallacy that “every dollar Iran gets goes to terrorism,” ostensibly as a means of attempting to use the Gaza conflict to deny Iran revenues from its own oil sales.

But a new European Union audit report found that not even EU aid donated directly to Gaza was used for Hamas terrorism.

But why let the actual facts and details get in the way of a neocon warmonger’s drive to divert the narrative — and more taxpayer funds — into the pockets of cronies with the ultimate goal of getting control of Iran’s massive reserves of black gold?

When Trump decided to cut American losses and pull troops out of the counterproductive war in Syria and stop wasting billions funding jihadists branded as “Syrian rebels” in a failed attempt to overthrow President Bachar al-Assad, Haley spewed the neocon talking point that bringing the troops home would mean leaving allies to die. “The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake. #TurkeyIsNotOurFriend,” she Tweeted, ignoring that NATO ally, Turkey, has a long-standing terrorism problem itself with the armed Syrian Kurdish factions of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), also considered a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. She also conveniently ignored that the fight against ISIS really turned a corner when Russia and Iran started doing the heavy lifting against ISIS at Syria’s behest.

Even when she served as Trump’s a mbassador to the United Nations, Trump himself had to walk back sanctions announced by Haley against Russia for their mere support of Syria in its fight against U.S.-backed “Syrian rebel” jihadists and ISIS. Sanctions mean less global competition for Wall Street.

On the domestic front, Haley surely caught Wall Street’s interest with her recent demand for digital identities. “Every person on social media should be verified by their name. It’s a national security threat,” Haley said during a candidate debate on Fox News. “When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say and it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots.”

By all means, let’s use the scary pretext of countries you don’t like to usher in a dystopian digital panopticon for the average American. Then it’s only one more step to adding a digital wallet for a full-blown Chinese-style social credit system, so the establishment can control your entire life. Since the global financial community of the World Economic Forum is always pushing that, it sounds like something that Wall Street would love.

So why are they wasting any time in getting behind Haley, already? They could even dress her up in their logos, like a race car driver, just so Americans would know who they’d be voting for.