The remarkable thing about the Stratfor Wikileaks flap is what it says about America 2001-2011. A hyper-militarized society conditioned to fear the outside world, prostrate itself before ‘the warfighter’ and venerate the clandestine inevitably would create a Stratfor-like entity.
This is exactly why places like The Atlantic get it precisely wrong. Here, the The Atlantic smugly assures us, the -in-the-know-Atlantic-reader, that George Friedman and others (some of whom the Stiftung knows) built a fairly significant cash flow from nothing based purely on ‘marketing.’
Something more than ‘marketing’ is revealed by Stratfor’s significant cash flow. (Friedman after all makes more money than Newsweek/TheDailyBeast. We’d be interested in seeing The Atlantic’s numbers). Corporate intelligence subscription newsletters have catered to Wall Street and executives for decades. Still, Friedman’s achievement building a business from nothing to today’s enterprise is a fact.
How did it start?