Category Archives: List of People to Watch

Fifteen More People to Watch in 9/11/2011-9/11/2021

Posted on December 8, 2010 | 9 comments

A few months ago I wrote a blog post largely about people to watch in the period following the end of the first  post 9-11 decade. I recommend you check the post out again.

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/the-last-year-of-the-9-11-decade-has-begun/

This is the second in a  series of posts  about the people who will play an important role in the second  post 9/11 decade. In that post I mentioned some people who had almost made the first list. There were quite a few and some made this list while others did not and now I am adding some  people to this list that are virtually unknowable from an American point of view as well as a few other names of also-rans. The sketches are longer in this post than the shortest sketches in the other as well. Partly because some people are less known and once having described them a bit it did not seem right to shorten everyone more famous on the list.  Those who almost made this list include two invisible people whose names do not appear here and whose offices are more important than their persons for our immediate purposes. The most watchable in my view is the President of the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. This body produces high quality works for China and others in Chinese from foreign languages, textbooks and educational materials in perhaps twenty-three languages for the Chinese and quality translation into English and other major languages of important Chinese works. In my opinion it is the most important media outlet of any kind which is almost never mentioned in the Western media.  While he is not the President perhaps current presidential information could be had from Professor Wang Tongfu, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.  The next invisible person is the senior official in charge of diversion and concealment in the design of nuclear and military facilities in Iran.

In terms of true also-rans this time I had fewer although I still hope to get to the ones from the first list eventually: They were Drew Brees, Michael Phelps, Helio Castroneves, Ken Feinberg, Helene Baroness Heyman, Bob Gates, Cyril I  Кирилл, Патриарх Московский и всея Руси, Sir Donald Tsang and Marco Rubio.

In that first of these related posts I used the theme of Gearing up for the future of America as a context for coming to know some prominent human beings playing a role on the world stage .  I identified  a group of people as very important Dramatis Personae:

President Barack  Hussein Obama , Josef Ratzinger, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth, HRH Charles Prince of Wales, David Cameron, Sarah Palin, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Glen Beck,  Hillary Clinton, President Nicolas Sarkozy, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Carl Svanberg, UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon, Hu Jin Tao, Timothy Geithner, Al Franken, Barney Frank, Vladimir Putin,  Bobby Jindal, Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton and Osama Bin Laden .

This time I want to post fifteen more people to watch. They may not be the last batch before the September 11, 2011 decennial memorial.

1.Barons Rothschild: This one is sort of cheating. There is a Baron Rothschild in the British Aristocracy which is fully functional  and existent and Jacob Baron Rothschild must be given top billing. There is a separate Austrian Baron Rothschild but the disestablishment in Austria must be factored in for things to be well understood there. There is a network of French Barons Rothschild supporters and a quite serious and prominent man of influence styled Simon Baron Rothschild who lives in New York. I am one person who believes we must aim for a larger and greater Israel and that there must be a Hebrew royalist portion of the new order. There are others who agree with me. In such an event an Israeli Baron Rothschild must be part of these visions of the future. The Rothschilds themselves have never endorsed this plan (nor, as far as I know, decried it). 

2. Britney Spears:  Ms. Spears is a dancer, singer , brand manager, sometimes a songwriter, a mother and an ex-wife. She is also a sort of political voice for the idea of a sexually explicit class or group of performers who are serious about not being antisocial. Avoiding uncontrolled  drug abuse, staying with relatives, seeking to maintain discipline and other values have long been evident despite her many troubles. She is a person who could play a role in the emergence of a formal courtesan culture in the West even if she herself did not become one. I doubt that she would consider herself an intellectual revolutionary but she has played a role with social significance. 

3. Carl A. Brasseaux  Louisiana has been thrust into the public eye around the world again by the BP Oil Spill. One of the important cultures in the area is the Louisiana Acadian or Cajun people who are also part of a larger and more diverse Acadian ethnicity. There has never been a cessation of Acadian action on the world stage. Carl A Brasseaux is the preeminent Acadian historian of my lifetime and of recent centuries certainly. I have great respect for him and we have met and spoken about history. I have read much but not all his work much of which is listed in part below (these are authored works mostly, but he has extensive co-authored and edited works as well). This does not mean he endorses this blog. I have only a Master’s degree and have never published a book of history, so I fall far short of his standards in many ways. He on the other hand is a Brasseaux which is a middle chiefly clan, he is not from Bayou Lafourche or Vermilion Parish and has no close relatives who are recent members of La Maison de Le Roi. He is therefore cut off from most of the insights that inform me in these decayed times. There are five other historians who I rely on as much or more than he in technical terms for my model of recent centuries for our tribe, But none of them do what he does. As with the Queen’s Apology the effort made in this blog is unthinkable without Brasseaux although perhaps like the Queen  of the United Kingdom he might not be able to endorse or verify its statements. Books he has written and edited include: The Founding of the New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana 1765-1803, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People 1803- 1877, Selected Bibliography of Scholarly Literature on Colonial Louisiana and New France,  The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792-1809, Scattered to the Wind: Dispersal and Wandering of the Acadians, 1755-1809 and Narrative Paintings: The Collection of Maurice Dedieu/Peintures Narratives.

4. Philip Lord Norton Baron of Louth. A created Peer and a prominent Conservative he is the author of many books including the British Polity and others that deal with issues of Parliament, governance and civil society. He is a professor at Hull University and leads a Parliamentary academic internship program as well as being active in varied fora in Europe and the Commonwealth. He is a truly prolific author and is supposed to write a great deal on the trains he rides frequently. He really is committed to his own connection to civilization as are so many on this list.  He is the blogger on Lords of the Blog with whom I became most involved in dialog and later followed to the newer The Norton View. I am back to commenting  on the Norton View though not on the LOTB as I type this and perhaps comment often and but less in-depth.
 
 
5. Carlos Slim Helu: Carlos Slim Helú is well known as the Telmex Billionaire but is a complex man descended from a prominent Lebanese- Mexican family who actually led the Lebanese movement for full acceptance as part of Mexican society. He  studied Civil Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (known by its Spanish acronym UNAM) School of Engineering and taught Algebra and Linear Programming while studying for his degree, meaning that he was both a student and professor.  He had a very long career building the Grupo Carso before  the 1980s when he became  a noted businessman in the industrial, real estate and commercial ventures for which some business press knows him.  In 1990, the group acquired Telmex in partnership with SBC and France Telecom, and began a new era of entrepreneurial development in a globally strategic sector. Over the course of 16 years, Telmex has developed a world-class technological platform that has optimized its processes and strengthened the corporate culture. Over the period of time in the early eighties when Mexico was in a terrible crisis he acquired a vast and diverse fortune in that country which is still undervalued today.  In the  early nineties he acquired Telmex and is still a major shareholder and its symbol around the world. Over the 90s and ’00s Telmex has invested the equivalent of US$27.692 billion in Mexico’s telecommunications and combined with operations in Latin America, more than US$30 billion. He is a major player in many aspects of development in the region. His values and ideas are both promising and threatening and both supportive of  and undermining to the complex of US  and Iberian American forces for good and ill which shape so much of the region. The worst mistake would be not to pay attention to him. He should be watched and evaluated as a cultural force.

6. Charles Bolden:  The first man of visible African Negro ancestry to lead NASA at the very top-level he is  a resident of Houston Texas most of the time and has been and remains an astronaut and Marine. Bolden was born Aug. 19, 1946 and is a native of  Columbia, S.C. He graduated from C. A. Johnson High School in 1964 the year I was born and received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. There he earned his B.S. in electrical science in 1968 and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. After completing flight training in 1970, he became a naval aviator. Bolden flew more than 100 combat missions in the Vietnam War  and was stationed in Namphong, Thailand, from 1972-1973.  Remaining in the Marine Corps after the war Bolden also earned a master of science degree in systems management from the University of Southern California in 1977. Following graduation from that degree he completed Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Md. in 1979. He was an active and successful test pilot until his selection as an astronaut candidate in 1980.  He held many important positions in NASA and the astronaut corps although he did leave before returning and becoming Administrator .He had left on returning from his last space shuttle flight in 1994, returning  to active duty as  the Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. Should social and constitutional change occur in the United States and should he be alive at the time, he is destined to play an important role in the integration of African-Americans and their heritage into a more rank based society. 

7. Taylor Swift:  Prolific young songwriter and very successful performer Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Not being a Southerner  she nonetheless listened to and developed a love for country music, especially some classic female artists and their work. Performing  from her preteen years around her hometown, at festivals, fairs and sang at karaoke contests. She got a guitar and started writing songs at the age of 12, and this was the same time she got her first guitar.  At this writing she remains devoted to the family that helped her become the youngest songwriter signed to a publishing deal with Sony/ATV.  She was one of the artists who helped launch a new and upcoming record label Big Machine Records. Debut album Taylor Swift came out at No. 3, but helped by My Space and the new media it had risen greatly  instead of receding  39 weeks later and was on  the top of the charts having sold over 2.5 million copies, earning the young star a Platinum album. Her career is not slowing and I think she will play an important role in defining sexuality and  young womanhood in our coming decade. She is also very tall and that will cause her to look at different situations and concerns affecting life in the public eye and our evolving culture.  

8.Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands: Queen Beatrix succeeded her mother as Queen of the Netherlands in 1980. From that date, Her Majesty formed part of the government. The Netherlands remains a very influential country and she remains a powerful influence in the community of royals in Europe especially. The Queen was married to Prince Claus. They had three sons: Prince Willem-Alexander, Prince Friso and Prince Constantijn. The eldest, Prince Willem-Alexander – the Prince of Orange – will succeed her.

9. Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson:  Billing himself in almost all public venues as plain Richard Branson because of his ties in business to the American and French republics and his life’s history as the heir to the casual revolution around the world in the sixties he has been and continues to be a dynamic cultural force. The Green Fund and Virgin Galactic may not come to a hill of beans in the big picture. Like some other things on this post credit is given for effort. I even see Branson a bit more subdued and diminished in hope recently but he is still brash and energetic seeking a way forward in space and ecology.  He was born in 1950 and educated at Stowe School. He created  Student magazine there .In the early 1970s he created  Virgin first as a mail order record retailer, and then with record shops starting with one  in Oxford Street, London and a recording studio in Oxfordshire. Before 1980 came around Virgin Music one of the top six record companies in the world. He leads two hundred companies and has a considerable amount of vision. While he has other vulnerabilities his biggest is death. It is not clear how much influence his work will have if he dies anything other than a very old man. 

10. Kate Middleton,  Catherine Princess of Wales, Princess William of Wales, Princess Catherine: Her name title and form of address are likely to change a great deal over the next decade or so and not just when she gets married. She embodies a commitment by the British royal family to the British people. She is smart and pretty and discreet as it is possible to be (which I admit is almost not at all in her situation). She is devoted to her man. She dresses modestly enough to be respectable and revealingly enough to let the world see that her Prince has a woman who can do the very important wifely job of turning him on sexually. She is sweet and quiet in presentation and yet you can imagine a Knight who loved life wanting to seduce her in the days when this might have gotten his head rotting on a stake. She covers the bases and may turn out to be far more than that once her role is second nature. certainly a young woman of vast potential.    

11. Prince Luís of Orléans-Braganza (born Luís Gastão Maria José Pio Miguel Gabriel Rafael Gonzaga de Orléans e Bragança e Wittelsbach on 6 June 1938) He has been styled as Prince and as His Imperial and Royal Highness throughout his life. This family has taken an activist view to the royalist cause and this claimant more than most. In Brazil he is widely recognized as one of the two claimants to the Brazilian throne and head of the Vassouras branch of the Brazilian Imperial House. He is the  great-grandson of Emperor D. Pedro II .  Prince Luís is a member of the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property a conservative Catholic organization which compared to my politics has been known as less favourable to enhancing Christian development of Aboriginal American and African-American cultural groups and for seeking to stop land reform. However, while I do not claim to influence him or his many groups I can honestly say that he has channels which have kept an open line to voices for diversity, neo-manorialism, American Guildism, Maritainist Royalist culture and other parts of the royalist movements in the hemisphere which are more liberal than perhaps his own positions. There has been little (if any) evidence of hidebound rigidity and he and his family work at the royalist cause hard and over time.

12. Ms. Gail J. McGovern is the Red Cross’s seventh president and chief executive since 2002, and she has more or less balanced the budget in a battered organization. The Red Cross tumbled with a $200 million deficit, and with penalties and  fines related to its blood collection and distribution business it had other crises leading to low morale amid widespread staff cuts at the Washington headquarters.  She left a position as a professor at Harvard Business School to lead this mess. She has stayed out of the spotlight except when doing expert and relevant things in dignified fora or running the large charity with a grand tradition. Gail J. Mc Govern,  is a woman who like Sarah Palin seems to be really doing something to integrate the traditions of the distaff side with the values and leadership of a new feminist society. Unlike Palin she does not have to give her opinions on this subject or any other very often. McGovern was a senior executive at AT&T and Fidelity Investments.

13. Me I have worked in a number of public endeavors more or less continuously since I was four years old. However, I now feel that even if I die tomorrow my own mostly frustrated efforts will produce a few tangible and discernible ripples in the future which an astute person could discover and find significant. Of course because this is my blog I had a much  easier time making the blog list than anyone else. 

14. His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar since June 26, 1995. He continues the Al-Thani dynasty that began nearly two centuries ago. Sheikh Hamad began serving as Minister of Defense when he was acclaimed Crown Prince in 1977.   His extensive preparation for Kingship accelerated in the 1980’s when  he led the Supreme Planning Council, and even more since 1992,  when Sheik Hamad began selecting Qatar’s cabinet and became  responsible for administering the country’s day-to-day affairs. He has also led the development of Qatar’s oil and natural gas resources. His country will spend this second post 9-11 decade preparing for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Political, social, security and technological challenges will make it easier for the country to progress in many ways and to hold the attention of both the world as a whole and of its Persian Gulf and Arab neighbors everywhere.  

 

 15. Prince William of Wales:   Prince William has a  university degree, he did not graduate from Oxbridge, he has been to amusement parks and has held charity rock  concerts, he knows how to behave in Church, he resents being left out of combat. He knows  the maw of celebrity culture devouring his family as a personal memory.  He will be formidable. Prince William is not Prince of Wales at this posting — his father still holds that distinction. He is a Prince of the Blood as Francophone people see things and a Prince is a Prince certainly.  The story is not yet finished in all respects –although he would always be Sir William Knight of the Garter and is  also an offficer with a commissioned rank before the family name of Wales, he is not Prince ”of anything”. He is rather William of Wales who happens to be Prince William. His dad can be styled Prince Charles of Wales but is able to move all the parts around to connect with the others in his identity and his son cannot. Thus in terms of snobbery (as I sit here in my running shorts watching tv alone I still dare to lecture as the superior snob to most) William is an odd creature.  He is fully royal — a Prince of the Blood in the House of Windsor is well up near the top of that club which though vastly much less than one mil of all people is bigger than most people think. He is without reference to royal claims a member of the chivalry being a Knight of the Garter. Without needing to consider his royal or chivalrous claims he is a member of the gentry (in the sense which does not exclude higher ranks) or is a social gentleman as a holder of an officer’s commission. However, because he is not yet Prince “of” anything and does not seem to hold any titles  from the aristocratic ranks such as Baron, Viscount, Marquess, Earl or Duke he is barely an aristocrat. Someone like me who has nothing much to lose in this big bad world can say he is royal, chivalrous and genteel in rank but not Aristocratic or Noble in the exclusive sense.  His father was Prince of Wales and such a royal title is also aristocratic because of the “of-ness” but did not need such a title to be an aristocrat as he was (and is also still) Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay which are plumb aristocratic titles of the best type.  I do not own Burke’s Peerage and I may be missing a title but I think not. Perhaps his grandmother will give him a noble title as a wedding present.

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The Last Year of the 9-11 Decade Has Begun

Posted on September 15, 2010 | 10 comments

This is the first installment of list of People to Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade.  I want to say that in general I do not greatly edit a post and leave it in its original place in the blog. However, this was a jumping off point for a very ambitious project and so it has fallen into a different category of post. The latter parts of the series were first posted much later and had very minor revsions as I am typing this updated introduction in January of 2011. This post has already had some minor edits before tonight and will likely have quite a few more after this. So if you have read this since it was first posted on September 11, 2010. The historian in me is of two minds about this. First, like any historian I revise my writing and there are article versions that precede book versions of histories. However, this is not in any meaningful sense a history whereas by editing this post I am making it less usable and manageable as a typical historical source. I hope you read it anyway and find it useful in mapping out the projections you produce for the future.  The imperfectly kept rule will be that in the biographical sketches under each name the information in the original post will be in ordinary type while later text additions will be in this italic typeface. 

After the initial trauma of the 9-11 experience had grown a bit less raw it became rather a commonplace to assert that America had been forever changed on that day. I became rather a refrain to discuss how life and our history would be marked by that day which split the era into before 9-11 and after 9-11.  Even as I type this American populist conservative  commentator and television host Glen Beck has some sort of 9-12  movement which emphasizes this shift.  The truth is always hard to exactly determine and difficult for people to agree upon entirely. Nonetheless, it is true that we did experience an event of enormous cultural and historical significance on the eleventh day of September 11, 2001.

What will the long-term outcomes likely be?  I am not going to devote most of this post or of my time in these days to really trying to predict a very specific vision of the future.  In this blog I have advocated a certain set of future courses of action and states of being for the United States of America and the world.  However, advocacy and prediction are quite different things. There is little that involves detachment in the former and little that involves committed passion in the latter.

I am entirely engaged in the work of being myself and attempting to live up to my own responsibilities most of the time. That is similar to the lives of most people most of the time. Our responsibilities, aptitudes and abilities vary but  a very large number of us could describe our lives in those terms. What happens to be true is that the world does not wait for us to have our own lives in perfect order before it confronts us with challenges. America and much of its legacy in the world faces such a challenge just now.   

There is no simple solution to all of the problems that we have to solve. But it will simply do little good to pretend that we do not have serious challenges that we must meet.  It helps to know what principles govern human behavior at the individual, family, community , national and global levels. But knowing all the basic principles that will shape the decisions we make and others make will not be enough.  We will need to know many things including players who will be making the decisions and  the reasons that are likely to appeal to them as they make those decisions.  I have left out several people for reasons too complex to summarize here but want to mention some of them by way of showing how incomplete the list is:

Larry Summers, Meg Whitman, Philip Lord Norton, King Juan Carlos, Felipe Calderon, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Mary Landrieu, Nancy Pelosi, Taylor Swift, Michael Phelps, Drew Brees, Colin Powell , Henry Louis Gates, Arnold Schwartznegger, Nick Clegg, James Carville, Anderson Cooper, Billy Nunguesser  and even me…   

Gearing up for the future of America these are in no particular order a group of people to whom more may be added later:

Dramatis Personae:

1.President Barack  Hussein Obama This President of the United States of America  will continue  to set the tone for much of the American future and its policies for the foreseeable future. We face the future as best we can in a world where the election of Barack Obama has already shown us as profoundly weak in the eyes of so much of the world. Barack Hussein Obama it is to be noted is the descendant of an American mother and has married and had children with an American wife. The mother was white, the wife is black. Obama’s father was an African student and he also had an Indonesian stepfather. In a scoiety where forty-one percent of children are currently born out of wedlock, Schwarzenegger has been Governor of California, Jindal  is currently Governor of Louisiana, Granholme was Governor of Michigan until two weeks ago and tens of millions live here without documents Obama has a strong basic appeal to our society which is committed to its own utter destruction at this time.

2. Josef Ratzinger, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI The second consecutive Patriarch of Rome, Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff and Successor to the Throne of St. Peter who has  not been an Italian and that (without saying the Italians are not agreat people and without saying that Bishops ought mostly to come from their own lands or related lands) is a good thing. It would probably be good if about half of all Popes were Italian  over time but I would not want to see dozens of Popes in a row who were not Italian so everyone must do the best they can. He is a German who fought in the regular nonpolitical  part of the German forces doing his duty in World War II and is a very accomplished scholar. However, the service to any state headed by Adolf Hitler and his lunatics is a blemish on the Papacy. But the Papacy has had many blemishes — nonetheless I do not lay all the blame on him personally but I do hold it against him.   He remembers the insanity of Nazi political religion and although his experience was more ambiguous than he admits he will work to see that the liturgy and practice of the Church draws forth a milieu such as produced Mozart, the Bach family and the Gothic Cathedrals. If he could say anything kind and honest to the Jews in the way of professional advice and have it received he would advise them to invest in their worship and liturgy to reach and surpass the heights of the Temple’s musical past.  

3. Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth She has managed to become the Head of State for sixteen countries as they left the Empire as well as head of the Commonwealth. The Crown is more independent of the UK government than it has been in centuries and this gives her bargaining power in that government she would not have otherwise.  Queen Elizabeth of Scotland and of England Second of the Name’s traditional  Christmas Speech this year was perhaps as good as any if not the best she has ever given. She seems to be growing both deeper and more spiritual and nuanced. There is no doubt in my mind that she will continue to be a factor in the world for at least as long as she reigns.

4. HRH Charles Prince of Wales is the Prince of WAles with the most formal education in history. He will not be a pet or showdog for anyone. Much of what he does is decent, admirable and very fine. He deals with issues others fail to see as vital. He can nonetheless be very dangerous to US interests. On the other hand he may help resist greater mutual dangers. As is often found in Kings (which he is not yet) the best and worst of his complex heritage are present together in him.  One of his many new initiatives is accounting for sustainability which is I think in part a response to the BP disaster. I think he is also very involved in the marriage of his son Prince William and trying to make a better and more secure future for both British royalty and the British people.

5. David Cameron A careful and clever young Prime Minister who will not overreach any time soon. He wants to build a Cameronism for the Conservatives  and see them rule the UK but he is in no hurry. Nobody knows what he may be capable of or what his limits are — not even David Cameron.  David Cameron has now formed a coallition government with the Liberal Democrats. He and Nick Clegg have done a very good job of organizing the debate and the reform of parliament in a way which can possibly lay a foundation for a political future that reverses many of the seemingly intractable roots sent into the political ground by the Labour Party in its thirteen years or so in power. He is still feeling his way in these years of Lib-Con coallition and is likely to emerge from the process stronger than ever. With a wife and young children he is clearly a symbol of what long-term political potential could look like.

6. Sarah Palin This former and resigned Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential Candidate has made an impact on American politics and raised cultural hopes which are not easy to quantify. She is not perfect but is a powerful living symbol of deep hopes of many people. Sarah Palin has recently had a television reality show called Sarah Palin’s Alaska in which she promotes her state and makes up in some way for walking out of the Governor’s Office. She also has come out with her second book after  the memoir Going Rogue. This second book is America by Heart and has been very successful.  She continues to develop ties with the Tea Party and other aspects of the US electorate and political milieu. 

7. George H. W. Bush This former US President is getting old enough that he may not be with us for long into the coming decade (or he may live well past this final year of the first decade, through the coming decade and into following one) but regardless his influence on the CIA, his heritage in establishing a unique American family expressed of Presidents, Governors and rooted in his father’s senatorial career makes him unique. His work with  Bill Clinton in the field of disaster relief will make the world and the nature aware of his work well into the Obama regime. He is also taking a measurable role as patriarch (in a limited American sense) of the Bush clan. He is mentioned in his son’s new memoir and has appeared on television discussing his exceptional sons, wife, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He seems to be applying his formidable intellect to the fact that there are systemic problems in the USA which may demand remedies he would not have hoped to see employed during most of his life. 

8. George W. Bush This former President of the United State will continue to have influence both in the Bush family network and in the business community. In time his political legacy will be seen by the  GOP as having been elected twice with significant coattails.  If he lives a long time he will have more of a politico-social life than most imagine now before he leaves the stage. However, he will not be the individual super-producer of work that Jimmy Carter has been. Sincw the first part of this entry was posted this former President Bush has come out with his memoirs Decision Points which has sold very successfully. Dana Perino his former Whte House press secretary has used her television news job to defend his record in subtle by continuous ways. His daughter Barbara Bush has been working on establishing a very successful health and medical charity which givers her occasion to discuss his good deed in AIDS outreach in Africa. His reputation has been rebuilt considerably since he left office amid clouds of critical animosity. 

9. Glen Beck One to watch! It is too early to say what this Mormon populist conservative tv host, commenter and  organizer will really do over the long-term. Beck continues to play a fairly serious game. He is a man of patience and significant internal resources on whom a great deal of the jury of history is not only out but in some cases has not yet even been convened.

10. Hillary Clinton This Secretary of State and former First Lady is a big question mark. She will respond effectively to opportunity. That does not mean the liberal feminist has no ideals but her style is opportunistic. She will do a lot if there are big opportunities in her path and she will do very little (for one of her stature) if there are not good opportunities. Hillary Clinton has begun to pay the full and significant price of being Obama’s secretary of State. On the other hand, she works with her husband and her Senate ties in New York and with leaders around the world. She works and stays with the game and sometimes fails her way to success. She is becoming more impressive and indispensable in American political terms even as she becomes more flawed and marked by faults of various kinds. 

11. President Nicolas Sarkozy has already sought to strengthen ties with the United States, has entertained the Pope, has married a supermodel the whole world has seen nude and is worth seeing nude, has deported Gypsies and taken action against Moslem corruption of French culture. There is something of La Royaume de La Belle France about him. He needs to hunt and got to Church once in a while in very expensive clothes (seriously)  In doing all these other things so far he has avoided brutality, great scandal and the greater than necessary abuse of human rights. He  will chafe against the European bit distance himsel from the UK when he can in conscience and is the first real chance that French royalist gradualists have had for a negotiation towards their better goals. Sarkozy is farther from being able to adress his principal goals than most world leaders and he is a cautious man as regards policy. Sarkozy has not been able to bridge both the Obama gap and the language gap and forge more ties with the United Statres of America. It seems to be a case where events are pushing him into the European mainstream so far.

 12. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu ( בִּנְיָמִין “בִּיבִּי” נְתַנְיָהוּ ), also Binyamin Netanyahu) was born on October 21, 1949 and  is the ninth and current Prime Minister of Israel  and importantly Netanyahu is the first and only Israeli prime minister born in Israel after the establishment of the State of Israel. He achieved this distinction with his earlier Prime Ministry but it is still his distinction currently. With strong social and educational ties to America he holds varied roles in the small and complex country at the unique crossroads of the old world simultaneoulsy serving as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a member of the Knesset, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel. He will surely struggle in the current environment  but if the right changes occur he will lead Israel and the region in capitalizing on this set of changes.  Netanyahu must currently deal with an American regime which is completely antithetical to  a peaceful and secure Israel and where he also lacks a wide variety of good options.  However, as I type this Hezbolla ministers have resigned in Lebanon and there are forces struggling to assert a new order in the Middle East.

13. Bill Gates, William Henry “Bill” Gates III was  born October 28, 1955 and is a great creator and leader who is now largely redefining philanthropy.  He is best known for being long time chairman of  Microsoft, the uniquley important software company he founded in a powerful partnership with Paul Allen. He and his wife Melinda are partners in love and parenthood but their partnership has also been very significant for  the world as they steer and an enormous empire of giving and activism. They are financialy able to do this as Bill Gates  is  ranked among the  richest people in the world  and was ranked as the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he fell to third. During his career at Microsoft, Gates Gates built the giant into an essential part of computing around the world as both CEO and  later chief software archirect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. Perhaps he may be drawn back into the corporate leadership he knows well and into new forms of social leadership. In the meanwhile he is likely to have a profound impact on America and the world as they find their way forward with Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, their cooperation with Warren Buffet and other challenges that come along.  Bill Gates is becoming that kind of litmus test of America’s potential to adapt and survive. He has social moementum which could be harnessed for the good of society by skillfull social change  in America but has long struggled under great suspicions. America does not believe it has to choose between people like Billl Gates and more evil leaders. America believes it does not need leaders. 

14. Steve Jobs will use the Gates retirement to pull ahead. However at the personal level he is a darker figure than he was as a youth. Even as a youth he was no saint. But he is brilliant and a vital national asset like Gate in that way. Apple, the Next flop,  Pixar and more Apple. He is a compelling genius in technology and industry who chose the pirates flag as the icon for Mac development and who instead of a big charity has a liver transplant where someone had to die for him to live. He has ads for Apple that mostly attack PCs and Microsoft’s Windows. He is easily compared to Gates and has always been loved by the cool kids in American society as it is. Steve Jobs cannot be dismissed as someone to watch.  In the layering of this post it happened in 2011 but before Sept. 11 that Jobs took a leave of absnce from Apple indefinitely for health reasons.  

15. Carl Svanberg This Swede Chairman of BP and other corporations is one to watch. Low profile and clever he is not the man to forget.   Svanberg did graduate work  and earned a Master’s degree  in Applied Physics  after a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Scandinavian institutions of quality and honorary doctorates from other institutions.  Svanberg remains a major player in high tech industry in the Norse Lands remaining a well invested director on the board of telecom firm Ericcson where he served as CEO  from April 8 to December 31 of 2009. He is also on the board of several other companies and maintains some of the agressiveness of the ice hockey player he once was. He rubbed several people in Louisiana the wrong way during the BP crisis. 

16. UN Secretary  General Ban Ki-moon,   반기문 (潘基文) This cool professional can think more clearly about the Middle East but his bones and instincts know less than any previous Secretary General. On the other hand this man from East Asia is bringing to 37 years of relevant  service both in Government and on the global stage and having served in Korea as  Director-General of American Affairs he is trying to educate the West about the Far East in his quiet way — Good luck with that!  On 1 January 2007, Ban Ki-moon of the Republic of Korea became the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations .  He was as well as being Director-General of American Affairs, his country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In that Korean ministry he had held  responsibility for a variety of portfolios, including Foreign Policy Adviser to the President, Chief National Security Adviser to the President and Deputy Minister for Policy Planning . As a diplomat he has lived in New Delhi, Washington D.C. and Vienna as well visiting many other places. He is married to his high school sweetheart and they have two children and is believed to be trilingual – French being the third language. He was educated in Korea and a t Harvard in the USA. 

17. Hu JinTao  胡锦涛 is The Premiere in the People’s Republic of China will continue to try to develop the Presidency and Premiere powersharing and to increase the importance of the Congress of People’s deputies if he can. He will try to restore full regularity to the Chinese governments by incorporating Imperial and Confucian elements. He will  reform the Party and execute those who commit crimes which bring the party into ill regard. Minority and foreign relations will be a continuous challenge and he will foster the development of Chinese urban consumer life to make China less dependent on Exports.

18. Timothy Geithner One to watch! He is an opportunist with ideals and may do much or little depending on where money moves relative to him.

19. Al Franken A man to watch. He is clever, rooted, articulate and conscientious. He is also a bitter angry and reckless man. Which guy will show up for the next eleven years? Franken is a comedian who won a bitterly contested recount in his Senatorial election when elected with President Barack Hussein Obama. He has authored books of rather nasty tempered political humor. He is not so far either a substantial statesman nor a total joke in the US Senate.  

20. Barney Frank Money, New England and Homosexuality will increasingly become a portfolio of political expertise and experience for this man. He will grow in stature on these things and lose relevance on others as often happens to older politicians in legislatures. However, he could seize on on some successful other cause and make himself known in other circles. 

21. Vladimir Putin ,Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin  Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин,  will remain Putin while he remains alive. He has many hopes he still cannot really do anything to achieve but he keeps chipping away  at the obstacles. He likes healing and building better but could become a figure of destruction fomenting hate — it just depends on too many factors to sort out here.

22. Bobby Jindal has earned some credibility with Louisiana in the BP crisis but not enough to waste. Look to see him as the Indian-American, Louisiana and Oxford alumni Jindal unless a big chance at being a national Republican Icon is very clear and near.  Bobby Jindal has just come out with a book titled Leadership in Crisis which is part political memoir  and part summary of the BP crisis and part autobiography. I have also met with him briefly since I first published this blog post and we discussed some issues relating to the spill. This was in a public venue in Abbeville’s A.A. Comeaux Recreation Center after a speech and did not get into his secretary’s permanent log. But I thought it was a useful exchange.

23. Bill Richardson will do a variety of things in New Mexico, America and the world. But if constitutional change comes to the USA then expect him to rise to new prominence as a major framer and negotiator for the constitutional rights and role of Aboriginal Americans and their Nations. 

24. Bill Clinton will become a very prominent broker if constitutional change comes and his health holds out. Otherwise expect him to continue to fade away more and more with occasional flashes of influence. Bill Clinton is busy lately. He participated in the 2010 elections which were one of the biggest defeats in the history of the Congressional Democrats. He has worked for Haiti but has seen lots of mediocre and poor results. However, like his wife he is always growing in experience and sophisitication.

25. Osama Bin Laden will become more of an icon as the Obama presidency progresses if his health holds out. His second act will get under way.  Is he a living legend or a dead one? That basic query is the question many can’t help asking and if he is alive what  is he really doing. He may well be behind the rebuilding of his movements in the Arabian Peninsula and Afghanistan.  He is a powerful symbol of what it means to be committed to a cause over a life time. 

What does it mean to pick on a few players in the world and recognize their importance to our future? It does not mean that they are the only participants in the future of our world who will matter.

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Posted in 9-11 attacks, Bobby Jindal, BP Chairman Svanberg, Christianity, France, Geopolitics, Gulf of Mexico, List of People to Watch, Louisiana, Peace Plan in Israel, Roman Catholicism, United States of America, Western civilization, White House

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