During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow); and, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.
Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclearly checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclearly checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).
President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion. That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
Let’s be honest about what is really going on in Ukraine. The United States is providing most of the funding, most of the equipment, most of the ammunition, most of the high level intelligence and much of the training. That makes the United States a direct participant in the conflict. Yes, many other NATO countries are also contributing in various ways, and that makes them direct participants as well. But the mainstream media here in the western world continues to insist that this is Ukraine’s war and that we are just helping them out. Without a doubt, Ukraine has lost an enormous number of soldiers over the course of 2022, but at this point the Ukrainians are really a junior partner in the war. If the U.S. and NATO had not intervened on an epic scale, the war would already be over and Russia would have won. Unfortunately, now that we are so deeply invested in the conflict there is no easy way out, and that has very serious implications for all of us.
So much of the death and destruction that we have already witnessed could have been avoided so easily, and we should be constantly pushing our politicians to find a peaceful way out of this mess before nuclear weapons are used. Back in 2020, I published a book in which I specifically warned that war with Russia would be coming, and a lot of people thought that I was nuts to say such a thing. But sure enough we now have a war with Russia.
And the Russians are very clear about who they are really fighting. Earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov boldly declared that the U.S. and NATO are “directly participating” in the conflict in Ukraine…
“You shouldn’t say that the US and NATO aren’t taking part in this war, you are directly participating in it,” Lavrov said in a video call with reporters. “And not just by providing weapons but also by training personnel. You are training their military on your territory, on the territories of Britain, Germany, Italy, and other countries.”
I wish that this wasn’t true.
Sadly, in this particular case Lavrov is quite correct.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but Ukrainian soldiers are being flown into the United States all the time. The following comes from a BBC article about one location in Kansas where Ukrainian officers have been receiving “strategic training”…
Senior-level Ukrainian officers have been studying in the US state of Kansas, thousands of miles from Russia’s invasion and the battlefields of Donbas.
Outside the Fort Leavenworth army base, wheat fields are starting to turn. Wide, open prairie land, with softly rolling hills, stretches for miles, and the sky is huge.
This quintessentially Kansas landscape has become the backdrop for generations of international soldiers, who head to the US base to receive strategic training.
Of course Ukrainians are also being trained in the UK and in other NATO countries as well.
Unless we actually want to be considered direct participants in the war, we should not be doing this.
All of us should also be deeply alarmed by how much money we are giving to Ukraine.
According to the Kiel Institute, as of October 3rd the U.S. had already given 54.43 billion dollars worth of military and non-military aid to the Ukrainians…
Eventually I tracked down a database operated by the Kiel Institute, a German think tank. They have been tracking total military and non-military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict. Their numbers include all aid from Jan. 24, 2022 to Oct. 3, 2022 (the data is scheduled for an update on Dec. 6).
According to Kiel, the U.S. has transferred military and non-military aid worth $54.43 billion to the government of Ukraine. The database Kiel has maintained is by far the most granular and detailed accounting of what the U.S. government has provided to Ukraine, including descriptions of the individual batches of military equipment. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.
Needless to say, more aid has been authorized for the Ukrainians since October 3rd.
So the grand total is even higher now.
At this point we have actually spent far, far more money on the war than the Ukrainians have.
The Ukraine military is now outfitted with cutting edge equipment and ammunition, but all of that money is being spent in other ways as well.
Vast hordes of international mercenaries have been hired to fight, and your tax dollars are paying for them.
You see, the truth is that the Ukrainian army that existed at the beginning of the war has mostly been destroyed. To replace them, Ukraine conscripted a whole bunch of new soldiers, and they also hired large numbers of mercenaries from other nations in Europe.
Yes, there are some western Europeans and Americans among the mercenaries, but the vast majority of them appear to be from the poorer countries of eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t seem to care that these poor mercenaries are being fed into an endless meatgrinder that is unlike anything that we have seen since the worst days of World War I…
As Russia moved fresh formations to the area in recent weeks, including reinforcements previously in the Kherson region, the fighting in the Bakhmut sector has descended into trench warfare reminiscent of the first world war.
Over the weekend, images emerged of Ukrainian soldiers in flooded, muddy trenches and battlefields dotted with the stumps of trees cut down by withering artillery barrages.
For a moment, I would like for you to consider what it is like to be a soldier on the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
Imagine standing in a muddy trench that is filled up with water up to your waist. Your teeth are chattering like crazy because of the bitter cold, but you don’t dare crawl out of the trench because you are likely to be killed. Your socks are soaked, your underwear is soaked and everything else you are wearing is soaked. Both sides are endlessly shelling one another, and so it is almost impossible for you to sleep. There are dead bodies all around you for as far as the eye can see, and you just hope that you will be able to make it through another day somehow.
At military hospitals all across eastern Ukraine, there is an endless parade of the dead and the wounded. The following comes from the New York Times…
For almost an hour, the stream of Ukrainian casualties in the eastern city of Bakhmut seemed unending: Ambulances, an armored personnel carrier and private vehicles all screamed to a halt, one after another, and disgorged the wounded in front of the city’s only military hospital.
A soldier propped up by his comrades, his face a mass of mangled flesh, walked in the main gate. The dark green stretcher that awaited him was one of several still covered in blood.
Sadly, there is no end to the war in sight.
In fact, both sides just continue to escalate matters. The Ukrainians are now regularly shelling targets inside Russian territory, and the Russians are now systematically going after power and water systems all over Ukraine.
This is going to be an extremely bitter winter for both the Ukrainians and the Russians.
And as this war intensifies, there is a growing risk that someone could eventually use weapons of mass destruction.
The purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, we have gone so far in the opposite direction from the ideals of a good government that it’s hard to see how this trainwreck can be redeemed.
According to the San Francisco Police Department’s draft policy, “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.”
Yet as investigative journalist Sam Biddle points out, this is “what nearly every security agency says when it asks the public to trust it with an alarming new power: We’ll only use it in emergencies—but we get to decide what’s an emergency.”
A last-minute amendment to the SFPD policy limits the decision-making authority for deploying robots as a deadly force option to high-ranking officers, and only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means.
In other words, police now have the power to kill with immunity using remote-controlled robots.
It’s only a matter of time before these killer robots intended for use as a last resort become as common as SWAT teams.
Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s military surplus recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment, weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.
Given the widespread use of these SWAT teams and the eagerness with which police agencies have embraced them, it’s likely those raids number upwards of 120,000 by now.
A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.
These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.
Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of nonviolent criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.
If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, by which police justify the acquisition of sophisticated military equipment and weapons and then rationalize their frequent use.
Mind you, SWAT teams originated as specialized units that were supposed to be dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations (that language is almost identical to the language being used to rationalize adding armed robots to local police agencies). They were never meant to be used for routine police work such as serving a warrant.
As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers.
How long before these armed, militarized robots, authorized to use lethal force against American citizens, become as commonplace as SWAT teams and just as deadly?
Likewise, how long before mistakes are made, technology gets hacked or goes haywire, robots are deployed based on false or erroneous information, and innocent individuals get killed in the line of fire?
And who will shoulder the blame and the liability for rogue killer robots? Given the government’s track record when it comes to sidestepping accountability for official misconduct through the use of qualified immunity, it’s completely feasible that they’d get a free pass here, too.
We’re gaining ground fast on the kind of autonomous, robotic assassins that Terminator envisioned would be deployed by 2029.
If these killer robots follow the same trajectory as militarized weapons, which, having been deployed to local police agencies as part of the Pentagon’s 1033 recycling program, are turning America into a battlefield, it’s just a matter of time before they become the first line of defense in interactions between police and members of the public.
As Sam Biddle writes for The Intercept, “As with any high-tech toy, the temptation to use advanced technology may surpass whatever institutional guardrails the police have in place.”
There are thousands of police robots across the country, and those numbers are growing exponentially. It won’t take much in the way of weaponry and programming to convert these robots to killer robots, and it’s coming.
The first time police used a robot as a lethal weapon was in 2016, when it was deployed with an explosive device to kill a sniper who had shot and killed five police officers.
This scenario has been repeatedly trotted out by police forces eager to add killer robots to their arsenal of deadly weapons. Yet as Paul Scharre, author of Army Of None: Autonomous Weapons And The Future Of War, recognizes, presenting a scenario in which the only two options are to use a robot for deadly force or put law enforcement officers at risk sets up a false choice that rules out any consideration of non-lethal options.
“Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics of … police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech, as happened frequently during the George Floyd protests.”
This gradual dismantling of cultural, legal and political resistance to what was once considered unthinkable is what Liz O’Sullivan, a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, refers to as “a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization.”
It’s the boiling frog analogy all over again, and yet there’s more at play than just militarization or suppressing dissent.
There’s a philosophical underpinning to this debate over killer robots that we can’t afford to overlook, and that is the government’s expansion of its power to kill the citizenry.
Although the government was established to protect the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the American people, the Deep State has been working hard to strip us of any claims to life and liberty, while trying to persuade us that happiness can be found in vapid pursuits, entertainment spectacles and political circuses.
Having claimed the power to kill through the use of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later, SWAT team raids, no-knock raids, capital punishment, targeted drone attacks, grisly secret experiments on prisoners and unsuspecting communities, weapons of mass destruction, endless wars, etc., the government has come to view “we the people” as collateral damage in its pursuit of absolute power.
“The Ukrainians are in bad shape… It won’t be long before the Ukrainians run out of food. It won’t be long before they freeze… They have done all that we can reasonably expect them to do. It’s time to negotiate…. before the offensive begins, because once it begins, there will be no further discussion between Moscow and Kiev until it is over to the satisfaction of the Russians.”Colonel Douglas MacGregor, “War in Ukraine; Quiet Before the Storm”, 15 minute-mark
“Strictly speaking, we haven’t started anything yet.” Russian President Vladimir Putin
The relentless attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, fuel-storage units, railway hubs, and Command-and-Control centers mark the beginning of a second and more lethal phase of the war. The increased tempo of the high-precision, long-range missile attacks suggests that Moscow is laying the groundwork for a major winter offensive that will be launched as soon as Russia’s 300,000 reservists join their formations in east Ukraine. Kiev’s refusal to negotiate a settlement that addresses Russia’s core security concerns, has left Russian president Vladimir Putin with no other option but to defeat Ukrainian forces on the battlefield and impose a settlement through force-of-arms.The impending winter offensive is designed to deliver the knock-out punch Russia needs to achieve its strategic objectives and bring the war to swift end. This is from Reuters:
Russian missile strikes have crippled almost half of Ukraine’s energy system, the government said on Friday, and authorities in the capital Kyiv warned that the city could face a “complete shutdown” of the power grid as winter sets in.
With temperatures falling and Kyiv seeing its first snow, officials were working to restore power nationwide after some of the heaviest bombardment of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in nine months of war.
The United Nations says Ukraine’s electricity and water shortages threaten a humanitarian disaster this winter.
“Unfortunately Russia continues to carry out missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure. Almost half of our energy system is disabled,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said….
Until recently, Russia had avoided targets that would dramatically impact civilian activities, but now military leaders have returned to a more conventional approach. Presently, the military is destroying whatever facilities, transformers, storage units, substations, rail yards and energy depots that allow Ukraine to continue to wage war. Clearly –as the bigger and more powerful state — it was always within Russia’s ability to take a sledgehammer to Ukraine and break it into a million pieces, but Putin chose to hold back hoping that Kiev would come to its senses and see the hopelessness of its cause. And –despite the deluge of western propaganda to the contrary– the outcome of this war has never been in doubt. Russia is going to impose a settlement on Kiev and that settlement will require the government to cut all ties with NATO and to sign a treaty declaring its neutrality into perpetuity. Russia is not going to allow a hostile military alliance to place its missile sites and combat troops on its western flank. That won’t happen.
Unfortunately, Russia’s military operation is going to greatly increase the suffering of the Ukrainian people who find themselves locked in a cage-match between the Washington and Moscow. This is from the World Socialist Web Site:
Poverty in Ukraine has increased more than tenfold since the outbreak of the US/NATO-Russia war, according to the latest data from the World Bank (WB). Officially, 25 percent of the country’s population is now poor, up from supposedly just 2 percent before February 2022… With officials predicting that the poverty rate could rise to as much as 60 percent or more next year, levels of deprivation are emerging in Ukraine that have not been witnessed on the European continent since the end of World War II.
Unemployment is now running at 35 percent, and salaries have fallen by as much as 50 percent over the spring and summer for some categories of workers. … according to the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine’s public debt has now soared to 85 percent of GDP…. A recently released joint study by the World Health Organization and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health found that 22 percent of people in Ukraine cannot access essential medicines. For the country’s 6.9 million internally displaced, that number rises to 33 percent.
…The medications that are hardest to get—those that treat blood pressure, heart problems and pain, as well as sedatives and antibiotics—reveal a population struggling to cope with decades of poverty-induced ill health and the physical and psychological trauma of war.
While US and NATO officials are able to dispatch massive amounts of firepower to Ukraine’s front lines within a matter of weeks, the delivery of life-saving humanitarian goods is seemingly an impossible logistical challenge.” (“Poverty skyrockets in Ukraine”, World Socialist Web Site)
Washington’s proxy-war on Moscow has inflicted incalculable suffering on the people of Ukraine who now face plunging temperatures, dwindling food supplies, a crashing economy and a growing shortage of essential medications. And despite the chest-thumping bravado over the recapturing of Kherson, the Ukrainian people will now be forced to flee their battered homeland by the millions seeking refuge in Europe which has already slipped into a post-industrial slump brought on by Uncle Sam’s reckless provocations. How many of these working-class Ukrainians would have preferred that their leaders reach an accommodation with Putin (regarding his legitimate security concerns) rather than engaging the Russian army in a pointless war which has cost them their homes, their jobs, their cities, and (for many) their lives? And do the people outside the country who claim to “Stand With Ukraine” realize that they are actually supporting the impoverishment and immiseration of millions of civilians that are caught in a geopolitical crossfire between Washington and Russia? Anyone who genuinely cares about Ukraine should support Ukrainian neutrality and an end to NATO expansion. That is the only way this war is going to end. Russian security will be achieved by-way of a treaty or an iron-fist. The choice is Ukraine’s. This is from an article titled ‘Russia Is Right: The U.S. Is Waging a Proxy War in Ukraine‘:
“The war in Ukraine isn’t just a conflict between Moscow and Kyiv, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently declared. It is a “proxy war” in which the world’s most powerful military alliance … is using Ukraine as a battering ram against the Russian state … Lavrov is … not wrong. Russia is the target of one of the most ruthlessly effectively proxy wars in modern history.”
The US foreign policy establishment does not care about Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. The country is merely a launching pad for Washington’s war on Russia. That is why the CIA toppled the democratically-elected government in Kiev in 2014 and that is why the CIA armed and trained Ukrainian paramilitaries to fight the Russian military in 2015 (7 years before the invasion!) Here’s some background from a 2015 article at Yahoo News:
“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials….
“The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”
…the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion.
…“We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. …representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.
If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official…
There it is in black and white. The plan to use Ukraine as a staging-ground for conducting a proxy-war on Russia preceded the invasion by at least 7 years. The Obama administration and their neocon allies set a trap for Russia in order to drag them into an Afghanistan-like quagmire that would deplete their resources and kill as many Russian servicemen as possible. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently admitted, the US wants to “weaken” Russia so it is unable to project power beyond its borders. Washington seeks unhindered access to Central Asia so it can encircle China with military bases and nuclear missiles. The US intends to control China’s growth while dominating the world’s most populous and prosperous region of the next century, Asia. But first, Washington must crush Russia, collapse its economy, isolate it from the global community, demonize it in its media, and topple its leaders. Ukraine is seen as the first phase in a much broader strategy aimed at regime change (in Moscow) followed by the forced fragmentation of the Russian state. The ultimate objective is the preservation of Washington’s preeminent role in the global order.
Putin’s winter offensive threatens to derail Washington’s plan to drag the conflict out for as long as possible. In the weeks and months ahead, Russia is going to intensify its assault on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Most of the country will be plunged into darkness, fuel supplies will dry up, food and water will become scarcer, communications will be cut off, and all rail-traffic will cease. Millions of civilians will flee to Europe while the entire country slowly grinds to a standstill. At the same time that Russian battalions overtake cities and towns east of the Dnieper, the Russian army will block vital supply-lines from Poland cutting off the flow of lethal weaponry and combat troops headed to the front. This, in turn, will lead to widespread capitulation among Ukrainian fighting units operating in the field which will force Zelensky to the negotiating table. Eventually, Russia will prevail and its legitimate security demands will be met. Here’s how Colonel Douglas MacGregor summed it up in a recent interview:
“What’s coming in the future is a very massive offensive... the kind of offensive that I and many other military analysts expected at the beginning; Very decisive operations, multiple operational axes designed to effectively annihilate the enemy on the ground. And that’s what’s coming now, that’s what lies in the future.” (Colonel Douglas MacGregor, “War in Ukraine; Quiet Before the Storm”, you tube)
When the ground freezes, Russia’s offensive will begin.
The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.
As we discussed previously, AP’s anonymously sourced report which said “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people” went viral because of the massive implications of direct hot warfare erupting between Russia and the NATO alliance. AP subsequently retracted its story as the mainstream political/media class came to accept that it was in fact a Ukrainian missile that had struck Poland.
AP’s firing of reporter James LaPorta looks at this time to be the end point of any accountability for the circulation of this extremely dangerous falsehood. AP spokesperson Lauren Easton says no disciplinary action will be taken against the editors who waved the bogus story through, and to this day the public has been kept in the dark about the identity of the US official who fed such extremely egregious misinformation/disinformation to the public through the mainstream press.
Important that AP accounts for publishing the false claim that Russia fired missiles into Poland. But the much more important task is finding out why an anonymous senior US intelligence official fed AP that false claim. https://t.co/6YmAn0VDap
It is utterly inexcusable for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of a government official who fed them such a profoundly significant falsehood. This didn’t just affect AP staff, it affected the whole world; we deserve to know what happened and who was responsible, and AP has no business obstructing that knowledge from us.
LaPorta’s firing looks like this is yet another instance where the least powerful person involved in a debacle is being made to take the fall for it. A powerful intelligence official will suffer no consequences for feeding false information to the press — thereby ensuring that it will happen again — and no disciplinary action will be taken against LaPorta’s superiors, despite the absolute buffoonery that subsequent reporting has revealed on their part.
Internal AP communications viewed by The Post show some confusion and misunderstanding during the preparations of the erroneous report.
LaPorta shared the U.S. official’s tip in an electronic message around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. An editor immediately asked if AP should issue an alert on his tip, “or would we need confirmation from another source and/or Poland?”
After further discussion, a second editor said she “would vote” for publishing an alert, adding, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.”
“I can’t imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this.”
Can you imagine not being able to imagine a US intelligence official being wrong? This would be an unacceptable position for any educated adult to hold, much less a journalist, still less an editor, and still less an editor of one of the most influential news agencies on earth.
These are the people who publish the news reports we read to find out what’s happening in the world. This is the baby-brained level of thinking these people are serving the public interest with.
Antiwar commentator Daniel Larison writes the following of the AP editor’s shocking quote:
Skepticism about official claims should always be the watchword for journalists and analysts. These are claims that need more scrutiny than usual rather than less. If you can’t imagine that an intelligence official could get something important wrong, whether by accident or on purpose, you are taking far too many things for granted that need to be questioned and checked out first.
Intelligence officials of many governments feed information to journalists and have done so practically ever since there was a popular press to feed information to, and that information certainly should not be trusted just because an official source hands it over. It is also always possible for intelligence officials to just get things wrong, whether it is because they are relying on faulty information or because they were too hasty in reaching conclusions about what they think they know.
Whether the AP’s source was feeding them a line or was simply mistaken, a claim as provocative and serious as this one should have been checked out much more thoroughly before it got anywhere near publication. The AP report in this case seems to have been a combination of a story that was “too good to check” and a culture of deference to official sources in which the editors didn’t feel compelled to make the effort to check.
"If you can’t imagine that an intelligence official could get something important wrong, whether by accident or on purpose, you are taking far too many things for granted that need to be questioned and checked out first." https://t.co/u6VWdxsOG3https://t.co/4D7S9PisM3
Indeed, the only reason the press receive such explicit protections in the US Constitution is because they are supposed to hold the powerful to account. If the editors of a wildly influential news agency will just unquestioningly parrot whatever they are fed by government officials while simultaneously protecting those officials with anonymity, they are not holding the powerful to account, and are in fact not meaningfully different from state propagandists.
They are state propagandists. Which is probably why they are sipping lattes in the AP newsroom while Julian Assange languishes in prison.
As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observed, this is far from the first time AP has given the cover of anonymity to US government officials circulating bogus claims of potentially dangerous consequence, like the time it reported an official’s evidence-free assertion which later proved false that Iran had carried out an attack on four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, or the time it let another one anonymously claim that “Iran may try to take advantage of America’s troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Irresponsible journalism from the AP, but this strikes me as quite damning and suggests it's more than just one reporter that's the problem. After all, this isn't even close to the first time the AP has published a false, war-baiting claim by a anon official. pic.twitter.com/id4bWr4zdz
Powerful government official who fed AP a false story: Zero accountability
AP editor who asked if a report should immediately be published upon receipt of the story: Zero accountability
Second AP editor who says she can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong: Zero accountability
Journalist who wrote the story: Singular accountability
In a sane society, power and responsibility would go hand in hand. A disaster would be blamed on the most powerful people involved in its occurrence. In our society it’s generally the exact opposite, with the rank-and-file taking all of the responsibility and none of the power.
Our rulers lie to us, propagandize us, endanger us, impoverish us, destroy journalism, start wars, kill our biosphere and make our world dark and confusing, and they suffer no consequences for it. We cannot allow them to continue holding all of the power and none of the responsibility. This is backwards and must end.
The Ukrainian government mysteriously disappeared online records of its fundraising arrangement with the FTX crypto scam just days before the scandal erupted. The initiative claims to have raised $60 million for Ukraine, but where did the money go?
The demise of FTX, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume in 2022, and the second-largest by holdings, has sent a wave of chaos through global financial markets.
As the turbulence grows, the government of Ukraine is conducting an ongoing cleanup and whitewashing operation to rid any and all references to a high-level cryptocurrency fundraising arrangement it struck with FTX from the web. Eerily, it seems to have commenced just days before the scandal erupted.
Online records unearthed by The Grayzone claim tens of millions were raised by FTX for the Ukrainian government, and put to a variety of belligerent uses. But with the company now exposed as a Potemkin village lacking underlying assets, and major question marks hanging over whether its operations were from day one fraudulent top to bottom, where does that leave the supposedly successful donation scheme? Were those sums truly raised, and if so, to what purposes were they actually put?
FTX’s destruction resulted from a mass sell-off of the company’s native bitcoin token, FTT, by the rival exchange, Binance. Its value plummeted, prompting a three-day “run” on billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, which in turn created – or exposed – a “liquidity crisis” within FTX, as it did not have the available assets required to redeem client withdrawals. FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11th.
FTX founder and top Democrat Party donor Sam Bankman-Fried now faces criminal investigations in the Bahamas, where the exchange was headquartered, and calls for official investigations into the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry are reverberating across the globe.
The sudden death of FTX has been compared to the 2008 disintegration of Lehman Brothers that precipitated the financial crisis.
Massive customer holdings have apparently gone missing thanks to a secret “back door” in the FTX bookkeeping system that allowed Bankman-Fried to make changes to the company’s financial records without any accountability. This connivance may have been used to hide at least $10 billion in client funds Bankman-Fried transferred from exchange to another company he founded, digital asset trader Alameda Research.
While mainstream media pores over the details of Bankman-Fried’s gargantuan crypto scam, not one single major outlet has investigated or even acknowledged FTX’s relationship with the government of Ukraine.
Were client holdings unaccountably and illegally funneled into the West’s proxy war? Or did the supposed aid FTX sent to Kiev find its way into the hands of Ukrainian scammers, corrupt warlords and illicit actors?
The corporate media’s failure to explore these questions appears all the more perverse given Bankman-Fried’s flamboyant promotion of his intimate financial relationship with the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
FTX pledges to “turn bitcoin into bullets, bandages and other war materiel” for Ukraine
The partnership between FTX and the Ukrainian government was first publicized on March 14th when the leading cryptocurrency website CoinDesk announced Kiev had launched a dedicated webpage for cryptocurrency donations dubbed Aid for Ukraine.
Under its auspices, FTX pledged to “convert crypto contributions to Ukraine’s war effort into fiat for deposit” at the National Bank of Kiev, allowing the embattled government to “turn bitcoin into bullets, bandages and other war materiel.” CoinDesk stated the initiative “deepens an unprecedented tie-up between public and private sector forces in crypto.”
Oleksandr Bornyakov, an official at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, hinted to CoinDesk about an “upcoming NFT collection” auction to “give the next boost to the crypto fundraising process.”
(Bornyakov’s Ministry of Digital Transformation played a key role in the successful, Zelensky-led campaign to cancel The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate’s appearance at Web Summit, a major international gathering of the tech industry in Lisbon, Portugal).
In a press release accompanying the announcement of the FTX partnership with Ukraine, Bankman-Fried explained that, “at the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could.” He promised that the arrangement provided “the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most.”
Kiev disappears Aid for Ukraine site days before FTX scandal goes public
The Aid for Ukraine webpage has now been deleted, but can still be accessed via the Internet Archive. Until very recently, it encouraged visitors to “help Ukraine with crypto” and pleaded, “don’t leave us alone with the enemy.”
The site featured promotional quotes from an assortment of Ukrainian government officials and bitcoin bros – among them, FTX’s founder.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, thanked “the crypto community” for funding the purchase of helmets, bulletproof vests, and night vision devices. For his part, Bankman-Fried declared himself “incredibly excited and humbled” to “support crypto donations to Ukraine.”
The last available Internet Archive capture of Aid for Ukraine” took place on the afternoon of October 26th. Throughout the webpage’s existence, the Internet Archive captured multiple snapshots of it weekly. This clearly indicates the page was purged by Kiev in late October, several days before the FTX crisis initially broke out.
Once it was deleted, the Ukrainian government created a standalone websiteon November 1st to promote the endeavor. The page was identical, and quotes from Bankman-Fried, and references to FTX’s involvement and its logo, remained in place until the morning of November 15th.
Was the original webpage’s dumping and erasure, and the shift to a totally new interface, at that time merely a spooky coincidence, or were the Ukrainians warned of what was coming? What did Kiev know, and when did it know it?
Bankman-Fried channeled millions to Biden through “stealth” PAC
Though FTX has been accused of serving as a money laundering vehicle for the US Democratic Party, concrete evidence supporting this claim has yet to materialize. But given Bankman-Fried’s background as one of the most prolific donors to the Democrats, and the role he played as a nexus between party power-brokers and the cryptocurrency sphere, the allegations are understandable.
Bankman-Fried is the son of Stanford law professor Barbara Friedman, founder of a shadowy Super PAC called Mind the Gap which quietly channeled millions to Democratic party candidates, primarily from nameless Silicon Valley investors.
The organization has no website or social media footprint, and its founders do not advertise their involvement publicly. Chosen through complex data analysis, beneficiaries of the Super PAC often have no idea themselves who or what has donated to their campaigns.
“The raison d’être is stealth,” an individual “with ties to the organization” told Vox back in 2020.
Bankman-Fried establishment of FTX in April 2019 – the same month Joe Biden announced his 2020 Presidential run – has added to the intrigue surrounding the scandal. Once vast sums started flowing into and through the FTX exchange, its founder channeled profits into Biden’s campaign coffers. Oddly, Bankman-Fried had no prior history of political giving.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Bankman-Fried gifted over $5 million to Biden and groups supporting him. This reportedly helped fuel a potentially decisive “nine-figure, eleventh-hour blitz of TV advertising” targeting swing states, and made the crypto bro the second-largest donor to the president, right behind Michael Bloomberg.
Bankman-Fried claimed this wellspring of generosity was “motivated less by specific issues than by the Biden team’s ‘generic stability and decision-making process.’” Such an apparent lack of enthusiasm for the President stands at odds with the staggering sums he has pumped into Democratic party coffers ever since.
In 2022 alone, Bankman-Fried lavished almost $40 million on Democratic candidates, campaigns, and PACs. The giving spree made him the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes, behind liberal venture capitalist George Soros.
More recently, Bankman-Fried pledged to donate a staggering $1 billion between this year and 2024 to ensure a Democratic victory in the next presidential vote. On October 14th, however, he completely backtracked, branding the investment a “dumb” move. Something scandalous was brewing behind the scenes.
One week later, the Texas State Securities Board announced it was investigating FTX on suspicion of selling unregistered securities. The development went largely unnoticed by the media. To the extent it generated any interest at all, it was framed as just one of several examples of financial authorities scrutinizing crypto players.
What happened to the $60 million raised by Aid for Ukraine?
If FTX was indeed laundering funds for the proxy war in Ukraine, the slightest indication that regulators were investigating its operations would have triggered alarm bells throughout Washington – and by extension, Kiev. This may be why the Ukrainian government switched the Aid for Ukraine webpage with a dedicated website, and scrubbed the original entirely from the internet just days after the announcement.
Also curious are the Internet Archive captures of the Aid for Ukraine website that show records of funds purportedly flowing to Kiev via Bitcoin had not been updated since July. At the time, the webpage reported that over $60 million had been raised by the “community.” This figure is reflected on the updated standalone Aid for Ukraine fundraising site.
A breakdown of spending on the new Aid for Ukraine website states Kiev had spent a total of $54,573,622 in cryptocurrency donations by July 7th on a wide variety of equipment, vehicles, drones, “lethal equipment” and other resources. One of the biggest single expenditures was $5,250,519 on a “worldwide anti-war media campaign,” the details of which would only “be published after our victory” due to “security reasons.”
Ukrainian government officials and private sector actors involved in the operation of Aid for Ukraine have scoffed at suggestions of impropriety regarding its use, but have only raised further questions with their denials.
Oleksandr Bornyakov of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation declared that Aid for Ukraine simply used FTX to “convert donations into fiat in March.” The CEO of Everstake, the “validator” company that in theory guaranteed crypto funds donated via Aid for Ukraine reached Kiev’s Ministry of Defense, also thanked “every crypto holder for donating…in those early day [sic], when every cent and every minute was crucial.”
Taken in tandem, these comments suggest Aid for Ukraine was set up purely to receive donations in the initial stages of the war, and the $60 million figure represents sums received and converted in the weeks immediately following the launch of the initiative. This interpretation is reinforced by an Everstake staffer’s presentation at a cryptocurrency conference at Web Summit on November 1st, on the subject of “raising [over] $60m in crypto for Ukraine.”
Our Segment Lead @jane_everstake is getting ready to speak at a #FILLisbon panel about @_AidForUkraine and raising >$60m in crypto for Ukraine. The panel kicks off in just 15 min, at 11.30 Lisbon time. Don’t miss it if you’re there! pic.twitter.com/wTnC9Qfqvx
But an Internet Archive capture of Aid for Ukraine on April 1st adds to the confusion, showing that two-and-a-half-weeks after the initiative launched, the webpage was updated to claim “over $70 million” had been raised from crypto donors. This was revised down to “over $60 million” five days later.
More strangely, Aid for Ukraine records show that from the time of the initiative’s launch to April 14th, a total of $45,103,538 was spent. This means just $9,470,084 was spent between April 14 and July 7th, a period in which the war developed into a “bloody war of attrition” according to The Guardian.
This leaves a gap of at least $5.5 million in the money Aid for Ukraine claimed to have raised in its initial weeks, and the funds it says it distributed in Ukraine.
The disparity was confirmed in a tweet by the official Aid for Ukraine Twitter account, posted on the evening of November 15th, which stated that “out of $60 million received, $54 million have already been spent on Ukraine’s humanitarian and military needs.”
7/11 Here is a tweet from Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine @abornyakov refuting those rumors:https://t.co/vUsGNkkjh5
This implies that no further funds of any size were received after early April, and the total has remained static ever since, despite the resource being open for donations. Which would be highly unusual.
The government of Ukraine, FTX, and Everstake all now have serious questions to answer. Namely, why the funds purportedly raised appear to have decreased in a span of a few days, why no donations have been received since then on the Aid for Ukraine webpage or its new website, how much has been donated since the alleged initial influx, and where did the rest of the money go?
Ukraine: a black hole for Western aid
Stories of potential financial impropriety by Ukrainian officials and the country’s military are invariably ignored or outright buried by the Western media. An August exposé by the Kyiv Independent documented wide-ranging abuses by the leadership of a wing of the International Legion, including sexual harassment, looting, threatening soldiers at gunpoint and sending them unprepared on reckless missions. Though the Kyiv Independent often influences Western media’s coverage of the Ukraine conflict, this story was completely ignored in mainstream quarters.
That same month, CBS broadcast an investigative feature revealing that only 30 percent of Western arm shipments to Ukraine ever reach the frontline. Due to intense backlash from the Pentagon and other powerful sources, CBS temporarily pulled its own documentary and an accompanying promotional trailer and article from the web. The feature has since been “updated” to claim that “the situation has significantly improved” since filming, and “a much larger quantity now gets where it’s supposed to go.”
When it comes to Ukraine, Democrats at the highest levels are also immensely skilled at burying embarrassing stories. In December 2015, Joe Biden coerced Kiev’s then-leader Petro Poroshenko into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin as a condition for the US underwriting a $1 billion IMF loan to Ukraine.
“I’m going to be leaving here in six hours. If [Shokin] is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden threatened.
With Shokin’s firing, the experienced lawyer’s ongoing probe into the energy giant Burisma ended as well. Which meant that Burisma’s most famous board member, Hunter Biden, the son of then-US Vice President’s son, eluded official scrutiny.
Now, a politically connected crypto-billionaire who used a secret financial “back door” to fleece customers of ungodly sums of money has become the latest character in the saga of shady US aid to Ukraine. And though the collapse of his FTX firm is front page news, mainstream outlets are studiously avoiding the Ukraine angle.
So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
Many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.
The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying hundreds of journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook’s values are based on the American tradition of free expression. Yet, censorship on social media has gone mainstream as part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality.
In an official Facebook video, a Meta employee identified as “Aaron” states that he’s the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook,” deciding “what is acceptable and what is not.” These gatekeepers effectively dictate what the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see when they’re scrolling their feeds.
“It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day.
“Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.”
But according to Macleod’s MintPress investigation, many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and DOD, to the extent that, he says, “some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.”
‘Aaron is CIA’
Facebook employee Aaron, featured in their marketing video, formerly worked for the CIA, up until July 2019, though this isn’t disclosed by Facebook. According to Macleod:
“In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA.
“For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, ‘wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,’ especially on ‘the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,’ his LinkedIn profile reads.
“None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.”
Meta is teeming with ex-government agents
Berman is not the only ex-CIA agent working at Facebook — far from it. So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
Deborah Berman, a trust and safety project manager for Meta, was an intelligence analyst at the CIA for 10 years.
Bryan Weisbard, now a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta, worked as a CIA intelligence officer from 2006 to 2010 before becoming a diplomat.
While at the CIA, his job involved leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns.”
Cameron Harris, a trust and safety project manager at Meta, was a CIA analyst until 2019.
Former members of other government agencies are also common at Meta. Macleod revealed:
Emily Vacher, who Facebook/Meta recruited to be a director of trust and safety, worked at the FBI from 2001 to 2011, becoming a supervisory special agent.
Mike Bradow, employed as a misinformation policy manager at Meta since 2020, worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2010 to 2020.
“USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua,” Macleod noted.
Neil Potts, Facebook’s vice president of trust and safety, is a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Sherif Kamal, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a program manager at the Pentagon until 2020.
Joey Chan, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a commanding officer for the U.S. Army until 2021, where he oversaw more than 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.
Ex-intelligence officers in control of what you see
Meta is appearing increasingly like another branch of government put in place to mold the views of society, as with a workforce composed of ex-intelligence agents, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remain impartial.
Macleod wrote:
“Hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power.
“Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.
“Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, ‘woke’ organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial.
“It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of ‘black sites’ where prisoners are repeatedly tortured.
“Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.”
CIA history of control and corruption
For instance, U.S. intelligence agencies kept watch on Ukrainian nationalist organizations as a source of counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Declassified CIA documents show close ties between U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.
After WWII, Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most radical section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in 1929 and had the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure, independent Ukraine, and other Ukrainian Nazi leaders fled to Europe, and the CIA helped protect them.
The CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets.
While the Nuremberg trials brought justice to the leaders of fascist Germany, “the Ukrainian Nazis were spared the same fate, and some were even granted indulgences by the CIA.”
According to the film “Ukraine on Fire,” “By 1951, the Agency [CIA] excused the illegal activities of OUN’s security branch in the name of Cold War necessity.”
In another disturbing example, one of the first scientists assigned to Fort Detrick’s secret biological warfare laboratory during WWII was bioweapons expert Frank Olson. In 1953, Olson died after plummeting to the ground from a high-rise hotel room window in Manhattan.
Days earlier, he had been secretly drugged by the CIA, which claimed Olson’s death was a suicide. Decades later, however, it was revealed that Olson didn’t jump from the window — he was deliberately murdered after the CIA became concerned that he might reveal disturbing top-secret operations.
This includes the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra project, which engaged in mind control experiments, human torture and other medical studies, including how much LSD it would take to “shatter the mind and blast away consciousness.”
Bernstein described full-time CIA agents who worked as journalists and more than 400 U.S. journalists who secretly carried out assignments for the CIA over a 25-year period.
The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news. Activist Post added:
“Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s … dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete.
“Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird.”
As further noted by Monthly Review, the situation has only gotten worse, as evidenced by the steady stream of ex-CIA agents now heading up policy and content moderation at Facebook. “The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media,” the news outlet noted, adding:
“Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world.
“Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.”
Social media infiltrated by government agencies
To be clear, it’s not only Facebook that’s relying on former CIA agents to decide what you can see. Other social media giants are similarly affected, employing individuals from a multitude of government agencies.
“In previous investigations,” Macleod wrote, “this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council.”
However, he says, “the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.”
What does this mean for the information you see on a daily basis, assuming you’re one of the billions who take a peek or two at Facebook during the day? Macleod explained:
“The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.
“In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.
“The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s.
“And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.”
It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective.
I used to be disgusted, now I’m disabused: beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as serious analysis, these are the core dynamics I see:
1. Imperial corruption of democracy and open markets. I described this in Regardless of Who’s Elected, Imperial Corruption Rules the Nation: the dynamic adaptive churn of unfettered representative democracy and open markets are anathema to insiders, vested interests and elites, each of which has gained asymmetric power by subverting democracy and markets to serve their private interests rather than the public interest / common good–phrases that are meaningless to insiders, vested interests and elites except as simulacra used for PR.
2. The Deep State, the unelected and unaccountable Administrative State. I’ve been discussing the Deep State before it entered common use–for example:
The Administrative State has existed in some form in every nation-state / empire, but the U.S. Deep State only gained its vast global powers in World War II and the Cold War, where the lesson learned was the public may choose unwisely (for example, choosing appeasement over preparation) and so the really important decisions needed to preserve the nation cannot be left to parochial politicos in elected office–those decisions must be in the hands of those who know what has to be done.
Democracy is the rubber stamp for doing what’s necessary. Beyond that, it’s a potentially fatal hindrance. That’s the mindset of the Deep State, and if you and I were in upper-echelon positions in the Administrative State, we’d agree with this mindset when things get serious.
This mindset is a self-reinforcing group-think feedback loop: those who believe the public should set policy are weeded out, either by self-selection or via being sent to bureaucratic Siberia.
We’re protecting you. That’s all you need to know.
This opens the door to functionaries who came to do good but stayed to do well, i.e. those with the right credentials and connections to enter the Power Circle to “serve the public” but soon become insiders maximizing their own private gains. That’s the problem with the Administrative State: it’s ultimately unaccountable, not just to the public or elected officials but to itself.
3. Vested interests block adaptions that threaten their share of the spoils. Any advance that increases efficiency and productivity and furthers the public good is squelched, suppressed or co-opted by vested interests who rightly fear their share of the spoils might be diminished by advances that obsolete their particular cartel, monopoly or other embedded skim, scam, fraud, embezzlement or simply unproductive dead weight.
The status quo is thus locked into a death spiral as gatekeepers, insiders, vested interests and sold to the highest bidder politicos will protect vested interests even as the engines flood and the ship begins its long descent into the void.
How do otherwise smart people become so blind to what’s going on? They believe the status quo is so wealthy, so powerful, so clever, etc., that it will overcome any obstacles or crises because it’s always done so in the past, and so it is permanent, immutable, forever, and our supping at the trough of free money couldn’t possibly weaken such an enduring Leviathan.
This is the fatal fantasy of every empire. We’re too successful to fail and collapse. But oddly enough, faith in the permanence of success leads to the very collapse that’s deemed “impossible.”
4. Concentrations of wealth, power, capital and production fatally distort the economy and the social order. When “competition” has been reduced to two telecoms, two healthcare insurers, two pork processors, etc., the system has been stripped of adaptability and resilience.
When 10,000 small farmers each have 100 chickens, the stock of 1 million chickens is spread over a wide geography and entrepreneurial network of suppliers, wholesalers, etc. Bird flu may spread widely but it’s far more difficult to wipe out 10,000 small farms’ poultry compared to the ease of bird flu spreading in one giant factory that concentrates 1 million chickens in one facility. Supply chains stripped of network resilience are equally fragile and prone to disruption and collapse.
Concentrating any form of capital, production and power renders the system vulnerable to collapse due to the inherent weaknesses generated by replacing complex networks with vertical-integration under the control of a few cartels, monopolies, autocrats, gatekeepers or regulators–the latter two being easily influenced by political pressure and/or private gain.
It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective. Everything is forever until systemic weaknesses reveal themselves, typically at the most inopportune junctures.
After the Crash 