From the article below, I come away with the thought that the big construction and railroad consulting companies of the world must be lapping at the Saudi feet for a piece of the pie the Saudis are holding out enticingly to the dhimmi world. The powers-that-be in the money-hungry business conglomerates of the West and their lobbyists in Saudi Arabia must be getting ready to sell even their mothers to the Saudis for the big bucks contracts for the Saudis' favorite hobby of constantly modernizing the outward look of their hellhole while the koranic innards remain as evil, dirty, warlike, backward and vomit-inducing as ever.
From TheEconomist:
Despite their immense wealth, the Saudis are not happy.
Money can buy many things: luxury, influence, security—and even time. How frustrating, then, to be vastly rich but never quite to get what you want. Such is the dilemma faced by the world’s richest family, the Al Sauds of Saudi Arabia.
Their kingdom has sold the rest of the world around $1 trillion-worth of oil in the past three years alone, accumulating a hoard of sovereign assets nearly as big as its GDP of $745 billion. Immense new investments in infrastructure, industry, health care and education are spreading that wealth by the shovelful. A new underground-railway system for the capital, Riyadh, is to be dug, not one line at a time but all at once, with six full lines due to open by 2018. And this is just one rail project among many. The kingdom is to spend around $30 billion on mass transit for the cities of Jeddah and Mecca, as well as $12 billion on a high-speed link running 450km (280 miles) from Mecca to Medina, in addition to billions more on a national freight network.
Yet rather than the ebullience you might expect, the mood among Saudi Arabia’s 30m residents (a third of whom are foreign workers and their dependants) is one of nagging unease. Even as shiny new buildings, universities, “financial centres” and entire cities sprout, the machinery of government has remained as creakily top-down and tangled in red tape as ever. And even as Saudis grow ever more sophisticated and worldly—about 160,000 of them are studying abroad on government scholarships, and those left behind are among the world’s heaviest internet addicts—social, political and religious strictures remain stifling.
“The government keeps people quiet with money, and in the rare cases where that doesn’t work, with threats,” says a diplomat in Riyadh. “But this is not a happy place.” For one thing, ordinary Saudis have no say in where the money is spent. All too often what they see, following the much-trumpeted princely opening of each new project, is vast empty buildings and unused facilities. What they hear is tales of which privileged courtier or business mogul has pocketed how much...........
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