From media monopolies to global finance, Matt Wolfson explores how corporate power is reshaping sovereignty across the US, the Middle East, and beyond.
By Matt Wolfson
Jul 14, 2026
In March of 2026, the longtime Wall Street operator Gerry Cardinale was securing his reputation as arguably Wall Street’s most successful dealmaker via his central role in Paramount Skydance’s generationally significant purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery. Still, Cardinale made time to sit down for an interview with the Financial Times in the cafeteria of the Cardinale-owned Italian football team AC Milan. In the course of this conversation, handsomely garnished with wine and grappa, Cardinale shared his thoughts on commerce near and far. He divulged that, though UK government scrutiny had forced him to withdraw from another of his deals, to buy the British newspaper The Telegraph, “the gamble still paid off: [Cardinale’s investment company] RedBird sold control of the paper to Axel Springer for £575mn, a premium to the roughly £500mn it had paid.” He also divulged that, though “Italians and Brits perceived him as a hard-charging American investor trying to buy a national treasure and running straight into a proud, defiant local culture,” these naysayers were unrealistic, since “the only way you’re going to get change in these very complicated ecosystems is if you embrace a public-private partnership.” And he divulged his future plans in the “public-private partnership” direction: “I would like to get to a point where, if I’ve established enough credibility, I could go to Rome and sit down with [Prime Minister] Meloni or whoever and say: look, let’s have a plan for how we re-underwrite [the professional football league] Serie A. Let’s make Serie A one of Italy’s greatest exports.”
There is a common denominator in all of these references—whether to the corporate house always winning no matter what the state decides to do, or to pesky local cultures mounting ineffective resistance to “change,” or to the “change”-maker’s aim to exercise immediate influence on questions of interest to the nation’s citizens. That denominator is oligarchy: the control of a nation’s interests by a wealthy and, in this case, a global elite. This is a game in which “winning” or “losing,” for the oligarchs, is always relative, since there’s a profit to be made even in a loss (“the gamble still paid off”). It’s also a game in which politicians nominally representing the will of the people are conceived by oligarchs as rotating players (“Meloni or whoever”) there to align the nation’s interests with the global market. And it’s a game that, in the oligarchs’ presentation, is inevitable: go with the market’s “flow” or die. As Cardinale puts it, “there is enormous resistance to evolving. But evolution is unavoidable.”
One striking aspect of Cardinale’s version of oligarchy is how closely it aligns with the rather more unadorned version put into oligarchs’ mouths by their critics. In the 2020 BBC miniseries Roadkill, starring Hugh Laurie and written by the famously Left-wing playwright David Hare, a Tory Prime Minister is forced from office by her most powerful donors, defense contractors, after she briefly blocks their weapons sales when they accidentally kill three British citizens in Yemen. When this PM claims a “duty to represent the citizens of the country,” a contractor/donor responds, “Do you know what your country is? It’s arms manufacturing and pharmaceuticals”: a blunter version of Cardinale’s “public-private partnership.” The politico whom the donors/contractors line up as the new PM believes, in true Cardinale fashion, that “the world is changing so fast” and “the exciting thing is keeping up.” His unironic political motto is “always put the past behind you.” And, much as Cardinale sees politics in terms of “Meloni or whoever,” Hare’s defense contractors ease their new pick into the PM’s office with a warning: “All prime ministers are stopgaps, just so few of them know it.” In other words, we are dealing when we deal with Cardinale with someone who follows the logic of a classic dramatic villain, in this case a rapacious extractor of profit over people. It’s only his anodyne “globalist” language and the endorsement of powerful media outlets that make him look otherwise.
The other striking aspect of Cardinale’s version of oligarchy is how closely his logic aligns with the faith of the avowed nationalist and self-proclaimed dealmaker Donald Trump. Cardinale described Trump to the Financial Times as a kind of fully formed Meloni, exemplifying Cardinale’s aims for what a “public-private partnership” might come to be in Italy. Cardinale claimed to be able to arrange public-private partnerships in America “in my sleep,” and, to the extent that this is the case, Cardinale does this thanks to the support of Trump’s government and the Zionist financial players who largely underwrite it. As I have reported for Al Mayadeen English, the transaction that secured Cardinale’s reputation as Wall Street’s top deal-maker, the 2025 merger of David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Paramount Global, occurred only because relevant players perceived it as matching the interests of first the “state of Israel” and then the Trump Administration. As I have also reported for Al Mayadeen English, the deal that cemented Cardinale’s reputation was Paramount Skydance’s 2026 merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which was waved through by regulators because of Donald Trump’s and key Jewish Zionists’ support. These are not accidents of the political or commercial winds: the false alignments of circumstance. They are signifiers of a broader trend.
This trend is deeply counterintuitive. Despite Donald Trump’s apparent longstanding commitment to nationalism, a self-described “globalist” player like Cardinale is not just a beneficiary of Trump’s second administration. He and his cohort are the people the system is designed to serve. What began in 2015 with Trump’s “America First” presidential campaign, then sharpened over the next ten years into a movement against globalism, has now become a different form of globalism which, ironically enough, calls itself nationalism. In a narrow, superficial sense, this “nationalist” label is accurate. Trump’s agenda deports unauthorized immigrants, diminishes American aid abroad, and encourages countries to pay for their own defense budgets while using tariffs as leverage over trade. But in broader practice, this Globalism 2.0 weakens both “the nation” at issue (in this instance, America) and foreign countries by using financial instruments and military force to diminish sovereignty and expand oligarchy.
These anti-sovereignty/pro-oligarchy operations range from the sales of Paramount and Warner Bros. to foreign investments in AI and energy infrastructure in America; from the remaking of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the reconstitution by force of Lebanon and Palestine; and from the overt globalization of much of Latin America to the stealth globalization of Miami. These operations are executed without consulting the citizens of whatever nation is in question, and they function to dilute political control from these countries’ citizens toward a global financial elite. And they are all executed via the influence of Jewish Zionists who helped fund Trump’s 2024 election campaign; who are deeply connected to the president financially and personally; and who appear to be steering his second-term agenda. In fact, it is these operators who, in many ways, give the key to the larger game being played: the creation of a borderless world which serves the interests of monied players like Cardinale and of one primary nation, Israel. Tracing the actions of this relatively small roster of players, who all know each other and who are all either Jewish Zionists or who rely on those networks for their success, opens the window onto the unprecedented incursions on sovereignty in the Americas and Eurasia in Trump’s second term.
Gerry Cardinale, who is not Jewish, represents a promising place to start tracing this roster of activity, activity which begins in the US but extends far beyond it, because he owes the benefits he has gleaned from his financial incursions to Jewish Zionist networks. As I have reported for Al Mayadeen English, Cardinale started his career with the help of the Harvard lecturer and New Republic publisher Martin Peretz and the Goldman Sachs trader John Lawson Thornton: members of an older and comparatively less overt generation of America’s Jewish and WASP elite. But Cardinale catapulted to the top of the Street off younger and far more powerful Jewish Zionist connections. Judging from interviews, the main inside movers behind Cardinale’s marquee Paramount and Warner Bros. plays are Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent and longtime Cardinale client, who helped corral Trump’s support for the mergers; David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison and client of Cardinale’s who owns the behemoth that the mergers created; and Shari Redstone, who sold Paramount to Ellison’s Skydance after October 7, 2023 so she could serve the Zionist cause.
The point of these mergers is monopolization, or the cornering of a large part of a particular market by a single owner. This is particularly the case with the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, which at $111 billion is likely the largest in media history. The merger creates a Leviathan on several different playing fields: the largest theatrical distributor in the country; the owner of media powerhouses in their own right like CBS, CNN, and HBO; and the captor of intellectual property like the D.C. Comics, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Top Gun, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek franchises. Intellectual property, as Cardinale has repeatedly said, is the key to this merger, because it will potentially allow Paramount Skydance to use AI to make sequel after sequel to these franchises at ever-lower price points. The human cost of this approach is stark: in the words of one Hollywood veteran, “[they] are pillaging this… thing… [Their] top five executives are going to make a billion dollars in compensation with the sale, and they’re going to cut at least six thousand jobs. And that’s just getting started.” Also stark is the cost to Americans, who, judging by the history of monopolization, will have access to fewer entertainment and news sources, with the ones remaining now pushing a relentlessly oligarchic and Zionist social-political line. Unsurprisingly, the Ellisons’ Paramount network is already mobilizing to cast recent anti-Zionist populist politics in New York as “anti-semitic”, a framing which makes sense considering the Ellisons are the largest single private donor to the IDF.
But Zionist interests are not the only ones being serviced with deals like these. Cardinale’s role in the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal, a deal which was widely considered overleveraged, was to secure investments from “Israel’s” ally, the United Arab Emirates. In fact, the UAE was a familiar player already in both Cardinale’s business and in the United States: Cardinale had already worked with the UAE on the aborted deal for The Telegraph, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, a prominent Jewish Zionist with deep ties to Zionist financial networks including Jeffrey Epstein’s, had just approved the UAE to invest $1.4 trillion in America’s economy. The United Arab Emirates remains, to most Americans, a misunderstood country: under Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his extended family, it currently functions less as a nation and more as an economic construct. It is “home” to 11 million people, 10 million of whom are foreign workers. It invests in oil and energy extraction inside its territory, which traps impoverished workers in low-wage, dangerous jobs. It also invests in agricultural and mineral predations around MENA, depriving nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan of arable land and mineral wealth. Thanks to Cardinale and Lutnick, the UAE is now investing in America: in AI infrastructure, parking meters in Chicago, a smelting factory in Oklahoma, the NBA, and Paramount Skydance. This investment sounds, on its face, more constructive than the UAE’s extractions or predations abroad, but the line between all three of these concepts is blurrier than it might appear. The key example to this effect is data centers.
There is nothing that makes Americans feel more disempowered in 2026 than data centers. Data centers house computer servers, storage systems, and networking equipment for the exchanging, processing, and storing of information, and are vital for powering the internet and AI–but at the expense of colonizing land and energy from surrounding communities across the nation. According to NBC, protestors “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March” of 2026. The UAE is one of the biggest investors in these data centers: the Abu Dhabi-based company MGX and the Dubai-based investor Hussain Sajwani, businesses with close ties to the government, have been the major players in this effort. In the name of “investing,” in other words, the UAE is extracting Americans’ space and electricity to serve its own predatory bottom line. And yet Americans’ concerns about this expansion have been largely ignored by the Trump White House. This is largely thanks to David Sacks: the Jewish Zionist who, along with Larry Ellison, serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
A hint of where investment like this by the UAE might eventually lead in America comes from two other nations where the UAE’s investment has been facilitated by Jewish Zionists in the Trump White House: Azerbaijan and Armenia. Beginning in 2023, the UAE invested $3.2 billion in Azerbaijan. Much of this investment has centered around “sustainable energy solutions and investment opportunities,” especially “solar power plants, wind farms, and solar farms.” An instructive case study of the “radical transformation” these investments give rise to is new “smart villages” in Azerbaijan “ostensibly intended to boost the rural economy through high-speed Internet access, green technology, and the digitization of many aspects of life.” In reality, experts say these amenities are a cover for surveillance communities where citizens’ every movement is monitored, with the most obvious examples being the “smart cities” of Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE.
This erosion of the daily and communal life of citizens via foreign investment, the very definition of a play against sovereignty, is also occurring in Armenia, thanks to an investment project in both Azerbaijan and Armenia, which runs under the heading of a “cessation of hostilities” signed between both countries in 2025. The main mover behind this treaty was Steve Witkoff, the Jewish Zionist real estate investor appointed by Trump to be special envoy to a number of what are generically called “conflict zones.” Playing a secondary role in the deal was Jared Kushner, also a real estate developer and President Trump’s son-in-law. Witkoff and Kushner were operating from a familiar playbook. They have lately been hopscotching MENA “conflict zones” using American and Israeli forces and finance, as well as a roster of Jewish and Israeli connections to underwrite similar developments, sometimes by commerce and sometimes by force.
In Lebanon, Witkoff has spent his time loosely negotiating a settlement to “Israel’s” invasion of the country’s southern region—a “negotiation” which has allowed “Israel” to spend most days since March using its incursions into Southern Lebanon to settle Israelis across the area. This process also extends to Syria, where, last month, “dozens of Israeli occupiers from the so-called ‘Bashan Pioneers’ movement entered the Syrian village of Hader, where they climbed onto a building and waved Israeli flags in the presence of Israeli forces.” And it extends more implacably to Gaza. There, Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu, who have known each other since the 1990s, have used Trump’s newly established “Board of Peace” and the IOF to clear Gaza of Hamas with the aim of constructing a “smart city” modeled on Singapore. This transformation of Gaza is a longtime dream of politicians across the Israeli spectrum. It will function to turn an area of small businesspeople, farmers, and entrepreneurs into a destination for the super-rich, “Gaza on the Riviera,” with Palestinians reduced to low-level workers servicing them.
The desired outcome for these Middle East maneuvers by the political operatives who are underwriting them is the creation of “Greater Israel”. This is, famously, an iteration of the “Jewish state” which not only includes Palestine but stretches past the Jordan River to include substantial portions of Lebanon and Syria and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The comfortable fiction under which this radical agenda has been presented to the public for the past half-dozen years is the “Abraham Accords”: normalization agreements between “Israel” and several Arab states brokered by Jared Kushner in 2020 with the aim of expanding Israeli investment across the region. In Trump’s second term, the “Abraham Accords” have explicitly become a model for the entirety of the Middle East. Posters have gone up in Tel Aviv, with Trump, the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and a collection of other states posing together, heralding a new era of commerce and peace. In reality, most of this investment amounts to what it amounts to in Azerbaijan and Armenia: a relentless leveling of sovereignty in favor of corporations linked to “Israel” and Zionist oligarchs, a kind of “Greater Israel” in everything but name. Meanwhile, the locus of resistance to this commercial expansion, Iran, has been subject to a war of attrition waged by the United States, “Israel”, and the UAE: a war prodded into motion by Benjamin Netanyahu.
The most recent example of what “Abraham Accords”-style development looks like—and who benefits from it, and who loses—is in Kazakhstan. Last September, two months before becoming the first post-Soviet Central Asian nation to formally join the “Abraham Accords”, Kazakhstan signed over substantial deposits of tungsten, “a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods,” to a US company with links to companies run by Donald Trump’s and Howard Lutnick’s sons. The ensuing deals benefited not just the Trumps and the Lutnicks but also Howard Lutnick’s old finance firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, an institution at the center of Jewish Zionist power in New York. The entity these deals did not benefit was the Kazakh economy, since American companies “control 70% of a joint venture and sales of the metal,” whereas the Kazakh stake is 30 percent. Notwithstanding the fact that Lutnick is considered a “respectable” Wall Street player, the distance between a deal like this and something more akin to a scam executed by con artists is not necessarily so far as it might seem.
And this reality of commerce as an eraser of particularity and community and citizenship and prosperity for the benefit of oligarchs and “Israel” has now gone truly global with its infiltration into Latin America via the “Isaac Accords”. The “Isaac Accords”, an explicit imitation of Kushner’s “Abraham Accords”, are funded by a handful of Jewish Zionist billionaires via the offices of Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, and Shimon Axel Wahnish, an Argentinian Jewish Zionist who now serves as Milei’s Ambassador to “Israel”. Specifically, Milei has established a foundation, the American Friends of the “Isaac Accords”, which aims to provide Latin American countries “Israeli expertise in water technology, agriculture, cyber defense, [financial technology], healthcare, and energy,” while also “aim[ing] to encourage partner countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize [Iran’s proxies] Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.”
The Foundation’s reach is wide. It “will initially focus its efforts on three Latin American countries: Uruguay, Panama and Costa Rica” and “ultimately aims to expand its mission to Brazil, Colombia, Chile and potentially El Salvador by 2026.” But recent actions suggest a wider play. In Honduras, President Trump, helped by his longtime consigliere Roger Stone, effectively helped swing a recent election toward a pro-“public-private partnership” candidate and away from the moderate Leftist then occupying Honduras’s presidency. In the process, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Trump and Stone ensured the preservation of
Próspera, a semiautonomous city on the Honduran island of Roatán…backed by…Trump-aligned tech moguls such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; corporations there pay incredibly low taxes to Honduras. It was built in a “special economic zone,” a rapidly multiplying form of territory with its own business-friendly laws, like looser environmental regulations and labor standards.
Prospera, like the new Gaza, is eerily dystopian when it comes to its government. According to The New York Times, it was founded in the late 2010s by a Delaware-based company that raised $120 million from players like Thiel and Sam Altman to fund it. “Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city” where “security is provided by a private firm of armed guards” and “an arbitration center staffed by three retired Arizona judges handles dispute resolution.” The Times noted that this framework is similar to the “Build – Operate – Transfer (BOT) framework” developed by associates of Jared Kushner for the “raze-and-rebuild” of Gaza, and the newspaper’s observation understates the case. As I reported in more detail last year, [the Gaza] framework will be invested in by unnamed countries which will become “equity shareholders with a 50-year lease,” with “the sovereignty for the residents” only “be[ing] addressed…after the 50-year lease arrangement is complete.” In lieu of self-government by residents, government will be “subcontracted to the selected investors and/or their representatives.” Under this model, “civil administrators” will be “brought into Gaza” to set up a bureaucracy based on “‘private provision of public services’” while creating “the ‘rule of law.’” Additionally, “a revitalized education system will be instituted based on a reformed UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabian curriculum…staffed by international educators based on the Singapore IB model.” Also, “the introduction of an urban environment with an above ground rail system and 100 percent solar power throughout the strip.” And “a three-sector Gaza economy (tourism, agriculture and high tech)…will be implemented to address alternative pathways for the development of this sovereign non-militarized green economy…” This model doesn’t call for much in the way of citizens, who are not mentioned in the proposal layout, nor does it call for anything in the way of free market entrepreneurship. But it calls for a great deal of government-backed investment.
But whereas the people of Gaza have little choice but to acquiesce to the Build-Operate-Transfer framework that creates a “special economic zone,” Hondurans had used their electoral process to push back against Prospera—and it was this electoral process that Trump and Stone worked so assiduously to circumvent. Now, not coincidentally, with its new “pro-development” president, Honduras is now not only preserving and expanding Prospera but also queuing for inclusion in the kind of technological investment from “Israel” whose apex is the “Isaac Accords”. Inclusion in these Accords may also eventually be the trajectory for Venezuela and Cuba, the two Left-wing sovereigntist outliers in the region, thanks to an actual and a threatened intervention in those countries’ governments by the Trump White House.
Again, the footprints of the usual Zionist suspects run across these Honduran, Venezuelan, and Cuban plays. Peter Thiel’s Palantir has deep contacts in “Israel”. Marc Andreesen is a Zionist and the business partner of the Jewish Zionist Ben Horowitz and serves alongside David Sacks and Larry Ellison on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The Venezuela play was run by Stephen Miller, President Trump’s chief domestic advisor and a Jewish Zionist, as well as Marco Rubio, President Trump’s Secretary of State, who owes much of his past political support to Jewish Zionist financiers. Paul Singer, the Jewish Zionist hedge fund operator who was one of Rubio’s major political funders and also sold AC Milan to Gerry Cardinale, has interests in Venezuela, which he secured via the Trump White House’s recent intervention there. The result of these operators’ plays in Latin America is much the same as Kushner’s and Witkoff’s plays in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Palestine, and Lebanon: to erode traditional economies and communities and “expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.”
The emerging capital of the western hemispheric end of this new empire of financial elites is its own “special economic zone,” but without the paperwork: Miami, Florida, the American city which has long functioned as the “gateway” to Latin America. Called by Jewish Zionists their “New Jerusalem” and open in its ambitions to displace New York as America’s hub of financial capital, Miami is now home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of billionaires and one of its largest concentrations of Jewish Zionists. These new arrivals, mostly transplants of the last few years, are increasingly displacing Miami’s middle and working-class population, so that the city is actually losing residents even as its economy is nominally booming. Jewish Zionists like Stephen Ross have invested massively in the real estate of Miami and surrounding areas; Zionist-connected companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir have opened outposts there; and the UAE and Saudi Arabia have become major presences there. This, again, is a special economic zone in all but name. Its leaders’ mantra (“We keep taxes low, we keep people safe, and we lean into innovation,” becoming “the capital of capital”) means in practice that captured politicians allow billionaires and foreign interests to sponsor corporate and real estate development against the wishes and interests of the actual citizenry.
Upper-tier white-collar workers, many of them Zionists, have also brought their wealth to the area. Gerry Cardinale’s family lives in Palm Beach, and Roger Stone, a longtime resident of South Florida, is a regular presence in Miami and Palm Beach. Jared Kushner has a home in Miami, and Marco Rubio grew up there. Tony Doukopil, the evening anchor of CBS, now owned by the Ellisons via Paramount Skydance, is a Jewish convert and a Zionist whose second broadcast was an emotional paean to Miami, his hometown. And David Sacks has openly predicted Miami will achieve its goal of “dethroning” New York as the center of American capital. In sum, Miami and its environs are becoming a clearinghouse for an international Zionist financial elite. These are people whose only demonstrated loyalties are to finance and “Israel”. To benefit themselves and “Israel”, they are engaged in a raze-and-rebuild project extending across the Middle East and portions of Latin America, even as it is turbocharged inside America via data centers and massive commercial buyouts of entertainment media.
More frighteningly, this project is going on largely under the radar of reportage. Snippets of what’s happening surface casually in op-eds about the Honduras or Lebanon plays or the Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. merger in The New York Times; or in tempered coverage of Jared Kushner’s plans for Gaza in a center-Left paper like The Guardian; or in a dutiful report on American discontent with data centers in The Wall Street Journal. But no major media outlet connects the dots to reveal the larger play in the works. The clearest articulation, however mediated this articulation might be, comes through fiction like David Hare’s.
One likely reason for this silence is that, as I reported in my most recent analysis for Al Mayadeen English, these publications have deep connections to financial networks with interests in the UAE and “Israel”. Another likely reason for this silence is that many of the owners or editors of these publications are Jewish, and they hold the understandable concern that exposing a play run by extremist Jewish supremacists will rebound on Jews who in no way support these extremist supremacists’ actions. But the price of these owners’ concern is silence about arguably the world’s main threat to global peace and national sovereignty. The answer to the question of whether the rest of us succeed in breaking this silence and identifying the threat in such a way that we break through the media sound barrier comes with high stakes. It will go some way toward determining whether we live in Cardinale’s projected future, a world where nations’ trajectories are determined by public-private partnerships and quick drop-ins by oligarchs to whatever leader is in power—or in a world where citizens determine the course of their nations through collective action, which is to say through popular politics.
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