Duboka Država(e)

Indeed, Smith’s single most famous idea – that of ‘the invisible hand’ as a metaphor for uncoordinated market allocation – was invoked in precisely the context of his blistering attack on the merchant elites. It is certainly true that Smith was skeptical of politicians’ attempts to interfere with, or bypass, basic market processes, in the vain hope of trying to do a better job of allocating resources than was achievable through allowing the market to do its work. But in the passage of The Wealth of Nations where he invoked the idea of the invisible hand, the immediate context was not simply that of state intervention in general, but of state intervention undertaken at the behest of merchant elites who were furthering their own interests at the expense of the public.

It is an irony of history that Smith’s most famous idea is now usually invoked as a defence of unregulated markets in the face of state interference, so as to protect the interests of private capitalists. For this is roughly the opposite of Smith’s original intention, which was to advocate for restrictions on what groups of merchants could do. When he argued that markets worked remarkably efficiently – because, although each individual ‘intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’ – this was an appeal to free individuals from the constraints imposed upon them by the monopolies that the merchants had established, and were using state power to uphold. The invisible hand was originally invoked not to draw attention to the problem of state intervention, but of state capture.

Smith was, however, deeply pessimistic about the stranglehold that the merchants had managed to exert over European politics, and despaired of it ever being loosened. Accordingly, he labelled his preferred alternative – of liberal markets generating wealth to be passed on to all members of society – a ‘Utopia’ that would never come to pass. History has to some extent proved him wrong on this score: we now live in an era of comparative market freedom. But nobody should deny that merchant conspiracy, and the marriage of the state to what we now call corporate power, remain defining features of our present-day political and economic reality.

Mike Lofgren, a former Congressional staffer for the Republicans, in his book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, describes the Deep State as a shadow government whose "governing philosophy profoundly influences foreign and national security policy and such domestic matters as spending priorities, trade, book coverinvestment, income inequality, privatization of government services, media presentation of news..."

This has resulted in the paradox of impoverished public services and infrastructure at the same time as billions are spent on foreign wars and mass surveillance.



The existence of the Deep State means that whether the Democrats or the Republicans win elections in the US, economic and security policies do not change much. The real differences are in the arena of "cultural and identity issues". Even presidents have limited power with respect to "very big issues of international finance and national security". Instead they become the front persons for the Deep State. For example, Lofgren says that when Clinton was at the end of his term as president he "signed a bill which took the wraps off derivatives trading. He claimed later that somehow his hand was forced and that it was going to be written anyway and all that; I don't think so. He ended up being paid over $100 million afterwards, mainly by corporate sponsors, to give speeches."

The Deep State, according to Lofgren, consists of "a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections."

Peter Dale Scott, in his book The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy, describes the Deep State as decision-making and enforcement, particularly with respect to US foreign affairs, that takes place both inside and outside of government and the law. Scott, like Lofgren, claims the Deep State includes agencies set up by the government such as the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and the NSA (National Security Agency) and powerful banks and law firms, sometimes referred to as Wall Street. To this mix, Scott adds the transnational oil corporations.

The collaboration between Treasury officials, CIA, and Wall Street bankers and oil executives is facilitated by the revolving door.

Scott shows that Wall Street played a crucial role in the formation of the CIA in 1947 and aided the large oil companies to maintain their cartels in opposition to government in the 1950s. Allen Dulles, a Republican lawyer at Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, was appointed to plan and structure the new agency and he formed an advisory group of six men including five investment bankers and lawyers from Wall Street. Dulles later became CIA director.

Kevin Taft, in his book Oil’s Deep State, claims the Deep State in Canada is dominated by the oil industry. He says the Deep State is a "a public-private hybrid that operates outside public view" as a result of "several key democratic institutions" being "captured and held by the same private interest". As a result the Deep State consists of business owners and executives (in Canada's case from the oil industry), together with allied politicians and bureaucrats.

The oil industry acted in response to Canada's efforts to reduce global warming in the 1980s and 1990s;

The Harper Conservatives became clients of the oil industry, withdrawing from the Kyoto accord and silencing federal scientists. The federal Liberals and Alberta NDP committed to expanding pipelines and oil sands production. The National Energy Board was tarred by conflicts of interest and the Alberta Energy Regulator was chaired by a former oil executive, while millions of oil dollars flowed to universities. Enough public institutions were captured by the oil industry that a state within a state was created: a deep state.

Jason Royce Lindsey, in his book The Concealment of the State, differentiates between a deep state and a shallow state. Traditionally matters of defense and security have been kept secret but "we now see a shift of even mundane policy decisions to less visible agencies in the Deep State. Examples include budget recommendations, environmental regulations, consumer and workplace safety, scientific investment, transportation planning, and educational policies." Privatisation of public services has further removed public services from the democratic arena.

By bifurcating politics into a deep and shallow state, contemporary states hide their ability to act, but at a cost. Political actors in the shallow state are left to visibly debate policies, which, from the outset, have been closely circumscribed by the actions of the deep state. This shift of responsibility allows politicians in the shallow state to pursue votes with popular, or populist, policies that ignore increasingly hard economic and ecological constraints. To some extent, politicians must engage with their constituents (and with each other) in this circumscribed, populist arena because so many issues of substance have been removed from their sphere of influence.

The shallow state focuses on issues of "national identity, cultural controversy, consumer frustrations, and symbolic acts of solidarity with constituents". The Deep State has taken over decisions about taxation and government spending, with austerity no longer up for public debate. The private interests dominating the Deep State ensured that during the Global Financial Crisis, many nations directed government aid to large financial institutions rather than to public welfare.

Lindsey says that national governments like the US's concede power to transnational corporations, even though it undermines national sovereignty, in order to remain economically competitive and therefore have power and influence in the international sphere.

After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American “jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s assistance.

The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

Google–one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world–is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.


Chief amongst these is the trust and safety department, whose staff, in the words of then Google trust and safety vice president Kristie Canegallo, “[d]ecide what content is allowed on our platform”–in other words, setting the rules of the internet, determining what billions see and what they do not see. Before Google, Canegallo had been President Obama’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Implementation and is currently Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 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.

Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.

Perhaps the most worrying NATO alumnus, from a public perspective, is new Feature Policy Manager Greg Andersen. According to his own LinkedIn profile, until 2019, Andersen worked on “psychological operations” for NATO. This fact, according to MintPress contributor Lowkey, was removed after his tweet raising concerns about the relationship between big tech and the national security state went viral. Lowkey wrote:

Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.

That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.

This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.

The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.

However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh’s jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.

Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.

Social media giant Twitter raised many eyebrows recently when it announced that it had partnered with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in its fight against disinformation and fake news. ASPI, Twitter revealed in a blog post, had helped identify thousands of accounts that “amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives” around China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. These accounts have now been permanently deleted.


This is of concern because the ultra-hawkish Australian think tank is actually the source for many of the most incendiary claims about China and its foreign policy, and, as Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told MintPress, has been a driving force in the ramping up of tensions between China and the West, something he explored in his 2016 documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Pilger stated that,

War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
   
2. Who makes the profits
   
3. Who pays the bills?
   
4. How to smash this racket!
   
5. To hell with war!
   

 
It contains this summary:
 
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

History is Marching is a feature length documentary analysing the rise in tensions between major powers across the globe over the course of 2018.

An Atlantic Tide is a short documentary looking at the continued disintegration of the transatlantic alliance through the first half of 2019. We will be following this up with a more detailed article on our Patreon. The video builds on the discussion contained in our first film, History is Marching

Everything Under Heaven is a short documentary looking at the continued proliferation of antagonisms between global powers, the threat of global - even nuclear - war, and the crisis of imperialist capitalism. Building upon the analysis put forward in our 2018 documentary, History is Marching, and our 2019 short film, An Atlantic Tide, it covers the US-China trade war, the "phase one" US-China deal, Hong Kong, the politicisation of the coronavirus, conflicts between the EU imperialist bloc and the US, Brexit, the resurgence of a Turkish colonialism, the US dollar and oil, and the US' push toward drastic escalation in the Middle-East.

.Decay: on fascism and breakdown is a feature length Marxist documentary looking at 20th Century fascism, early English settler colonialism in the Americas and the prospects of a contemporary neofascism. The film focuses on the political economy of these forms, drawing on Rajani Palme Dutt's view that fascism represented an organisation of capitalist decay, to illustrate the various different laws of motion which condition the development of reactionary political movements.

In this episode of our series looking at technology and late postmodernity, Further Studies in a Dying Culture, we look at the concept of "digital feudalism" and the internet of things. This episode is the first of a number of planned pieces looking at the so-called "fourth industrial revolution" for this series

In this video, we look at the material roots of the war in Ukraine in imperialist competition, the political and economic character of the Russian Federation, the rise of fascist forces in Ukraine, the continued escalation of the global capitalist crisis, and the potential for war to spiral into global conflagration.

 My interest in water began in Victorville, but it showed me a side of California that I had never realized existed.


People focus on Hollywood or Silicon Valley as the state’s most powerful industries. And indeed, they are powerful. But as I discovered, the true power brokers here are the farmers: They own the water. They own the land. And nothing happens in California without those two things — not even Silicon Valley or Hollywood can change that.
 
This small group of wealthy families run California like their own banana republic. They buy politicians, own towns, import migrant labor, pollute with impunity, and bend everything and everyone to their will. The story of California power is straight out of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The only difference is that it’s not fiction and it’s not ancient history. It’s happening today. Right now.

 
Last week, filmmaker Rowan Wernham and I launched a Kickstarter for Pistachio Wars, a documentary about the stealth privatization of California’s water — and the small group of billionaires who are driving it.


It focuses on a Beverly Hills billionaire power couple: Stewart and Lynda Resnick. They’re farmers — the biggest and most powerful in California. They’re also water barons. They control more water than the entire population of Los Angeles uses in one year — that’s 4 million people.
 
The doc tells a wild story. And it stands, in a very unexpected way, at the intersection of all sorts of ugly forces that are hitting us at the same time: oligarchy, global warming, environmental destruction, useless consumerism and marketing, the failure of liberal philanthropy, and America’s destructive neoconservative foreign policy. It seems like a lot of disparate issues to tie into a documentary about some pistachio farmers, but they all do come together in Pistachio Wars.

The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom won’t last forever. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. Nothing will stop the houses. The Wheat King begets the Cattle King, and the Cattle King begets the Cotton King, and the Cotton King begets the Nut King and Pomegranate Queen. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. The fog is our history.

 A reporter unearths the true history of the internet: it was built by the government to spy on citizens, at home and abroad. In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine traces the history of the internet back to its beginnings as a Vietnam-era tool for spying on guerrilla fighters and antiwar protesters–a military computer networking project that ultimately envisioned the creation of a global system of surveillance and prediction. Levine shows how the same military objectives that drove the development of early internet technology are still at the heart of Silicon Valley today. Spies, counterinsurgency campaigns, hippie entrepreneurs, privacy apps funded by the CIA. From the 1960s to the 2010s — this revelatory and sweeping story will make you reconsider what you know about the most powerful, ubiquitous tool ever created.

"Yasha Levine's bold and sweeping history of the Internet-from its shadowy inception as a military contrivance for counterinsurgency and domestic surveillance, to its current incarnation as a commercialized tool for everyday communication that turns everyone's life into an open book-tells a gripping story of our algorithmic way of life in the making. Defying common Internet tropes that present a battle between valiant and independent rebels versus omnipresent state and corporate powers, no one comes out of this book looking clean. Whatever your thoughts about our digitized world, this book will challenge them." —Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor of History, Sociology and Media Studies at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center
 
"Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley is an important and not well known history of computers and the internet. In our tech driven culture, history is ignored, yet it is only by knowing the history of technologies can we hope to create a much needed politics of technology. Without history, it is impossible to adequately understand any given technology's impact on society...If we want a democratic future, and those controlling and implementing the technology show little democratic inclinations, we need to develop a politics of technology. Levine's history of Surveillance Valley provides an essential first step." —Joe Costello, Author of Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy

In today’s backlash over Silicon Valley’s contracts with American military and intelligence agencies, people are focused on Facebook, Google and Amazon — while Pierre Omidyar’s eBay has been entirely ignored. But Omidyar has been at the forefront of building out Silicon Valley’s global private-public surveillance apparatus.
 
For the past decade Omidyar has quietly worked to expand eBay’s privatized surveillance-state model beyond online sales and into elections, media, transportation, education, finance, as well as government administration. His vehicle for that: the Omidyar Group, an investment vehicle that bankrolls hundreds of startups, business and non-profits around the world.”
 
By the mid-2000s, when Google was still a small company and Facebook barely existed, eBay had built this global private division into a behemoth: 2,000 employees and more than a thousand private investigators, who worked closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operated — including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Russia, Czech Republic and Poland. EBay was proud of its close relationship with law enforcement, touting efforts to arrest 1,000 people a year and boasting that it had handed over user data to the NSA and FBI without requiring subpoenas or court orders.”

Omidyar’s support for the same neocon guru who oversaw the publication of an article branding NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor” should place the ebay founder’s acquisition of the Snowden files in a disturbing light. By establishing The Intercept and recruiting the journalists who possessed Snowden’s leaks, the billionaire effectively privatized the files. Not only did this delay their release, it denied the public access to the information in order to supply his stable of hired reporters with exclusive scoops that continue to appear years after they were leaked. To this day, only a minuscule percentage of the Snowden files have been made public and, for whatever reason, none of those that have been released relate to ebay or its assorted business interests.

What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
 
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

The book is a definitive overview of the financial markets and their economic and political role.

"The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself. It may be helpful to look at these developments -- which include Bitcoin and blockchain -- in the light of 19th-century mechanization. Although the new tide of automation recruits technologies that have become available only in the 21st century, it is no less dependent on the living work of human and more-then-human beings. Nor is it any less prone to exhaust or "max out" that work, wreaking ecological destruction and necessitating the organization of new frontiers of extraction. The new mechanization is also entwined with some of the same fantasies and rituals that have animated industrial capitalism since its beginnings.
 
Download the paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333319658_Blockchain_Machines_Earth_Beings_and_the_Labour_of_Trust

The infrastructure and architecture of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is designed by the ruling class; in conjunction with transnational corporations, global finance capital and global institutions. The human population is controlled "via digital identity systems tied to cashless benefit payments within the context of a militarized 5G, IoT (Internet of Things), and AR (Augmented Reality) environment. The billionaire class has built and is rapidly putting the finishing touches on infrastructure to run human capital social impact markets that will securitize the lives of most people as data streams.

 
Today, prosecution rates for white collar crime are the lowest they’ve ever been and trending downwards. Theft itself becomes a conversation, rather than just a crime, when a wealthy person does it. When one capitalist robs another, my experience is that they tend to discuss among themselves how to restore the thief to good standing without destroying anyone’s life, livelihood, or privacy. There are of course exceptions. Bernie Madoff and his $50 billion investment Ponzi scheme springs to mind. But Madoff’s position was dependent on resources and connections that turned out to be fictional. He had no realistic means to ever repay the investors he scammed (or even to return their initial investment), and so he went to prison. But for those that genuinely are well connected and do have the means to repay the people they rip off, the wealthy already have the restorative justice prison abolitionists fight for. 


Petty theft, on the other hand, is prosecuted mercilessly. I find this especially strange given how much more of a problem fraud is than theft. The FBI estimates that burglary and petty theft cost Americans about $3.4 billion in property losses. White collar crime costs between $426 billion and $1.7 trillion annually. This kleptocratic culture isn’t harmless. Enron was a natural gas company whose entire business was propped up by fraud. When they were no longer able to continue to hide the extent of their debt, they both crashed that industry and spurred massive reforms in accounting practices and fraud controls. Perhaps those reforms worked, but I doubt fraud has dropped at the rate fraud prosecution has. 
 
One white-collar criminal who comes to mind—I personally had some contact with him—was in a niche industry. He was a deal broker for commodities, and his customers would only deal with him. 10 million dollars is a lot of money, but in relation to his commission, it was not that much. His placement in the industry, his relationship to labor, was what made him wealthy, not merely the dollar amount of his salary and his assets. He himself didn’t work to produce a product, or really provide a service. He maintained a set of relationships with business owners (who also didn’t make anything with their own hands—they had employees for that) and acted as a gatekeeper of information about who needed what. Within the very specific parameters of his work, he was trusted. Of course his embezzlement wasn’t brought to the police. Focusing on the numbers rather than seeing their movement as descriptive of something, as pointing towards his relationships, is the same kind of mistake a dog makes when you point at the moon and he sniffs your finger.

One of the most important intermediaries between the Hungarian government and German corporations is a man named Klaus Mangold, a former top manager at Daimler AG, who is often referred to in German press simply as Mr. Russia (Direkt36 wrote about him earlier several times). According to a former diplomat of the Orbán government, Mangold was already active under the Socialist MSZP governments as a “man beyond party lines”. “Mangold has always represented German big capital in Hungary and in Russia. He is primarily in the service of German industry,” former ambassador Sándor Peisch said about the lobbyist.

A Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) story published last year described him as a person who “understands the Russians.” According to FAZ, he met Vladimir Putin in 1993 during a visit to St. Petersberg as CEO of Quelle. The two have been in touch ever since.
 
“I have good relations with important Russian governmental institutions,” Mangold told the newspaper.
 
According to FAZ, he also regularly invites the political and economic elite to a 700-acre property in Schwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg. He avoids publicity but is proud of his relations. As he told FAZ, “my relations are my know-how.” He added, “This is the basis of my businesses.”

During the 50’s and 60’s they invested in the political career of a young representative from a suburb of the BASF town of Ludwigshafen, his name: Helmut Kohl.
 
From 1957 to 1967 the young Helmut Kohl was a paid lobbyist of the “Verband Chemischer Industrie,” the central lobby organization of the German pharmaceutical and chemical cartel. Thus, the German chemical and pharmaceutical industry advanced one of its own as a political representative, leaving the German people with only the choice of final approval.
 
The result is well known: Helmut Kohl was chancellor of Germany for 16 years and the German pharmaceutical and chemical industry became the world’s leading exporter of chemical products, with subsidiaries in over 150 countries, more than IG Farben ever had. Several billion people will now die prematurely, if the pharmaceutical industry gets its way. Germany is the only country in the entire world in which a former paid lobbyist for the chemical and pharmaceutical cartel was head of the government. To sum up, the support of German politics for the global expansion plans of the German pharmaceutical and chemical companies has a 100-year-old tradition.

First published in 2010 and containing copies of previously unpublished historical documents sourced from international archives, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’” proves that the key architects of the European Union were recruited from among the same technocrats who had previously designed the plans for a post-WWII Europe under the control of the Nazis. By revealing how the undemocratic nature of the European Union bears a notable resemblance to the intended post-war plans of the Nazis for a “total European economic area,” the shocking information contained in this book essentially marks the beginning of the end for the so-called “EU Project.” As such, mindful that the Europe of today is now teetering on the brink of economic collapse, the authors conclude by showing how the building of a new Europe – designed for the people and by the people – could lead to a world of health, peace and social justice becoming a reality.

In Braudel's view, the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition, as it is usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.^[13]

What is surveillance capitalism? In her influential 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff defines it as the claiming of “human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data”; by way of machine learning algorithms, this “behavioral surplus,” or “data exhaust,” is then converted into “prediction products,” which are traded on the “behavioral futures markets.” Phrased differently, our behavioral data are used to train predictive models that can guess things about us, which can then be monetized in many different forms, from steering our clicks or purchases to selling our data and predictions to others. The better and more plentiful the data, the better the downstream machine learning predictions, and the larger the profits. In her book, Zuboff aptly describes how Google’s monetized surveillance tactics have matured into a profit structure amenable to tech and tech-adjacent companies more generally. The list has grown to include Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Snapchat, Netflix, Spotify, LinkedIn, IBM, Palantir, Verizon, rideshare companies, automotive companies, e-commerce sites, health companies, dating apps, porn sites, banks, insurance companies, and consultancy firms. The scale of these companies’ investments in machine learning research is remarkably difficult to comprehend, as evidenced by the many research labs that power surveillance capitalism: Google Brain, DeepMind, Facebook AI Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Watson, Uber AI Labs, Walmart Labs, and Salesforce Research to name a few. And yet, the scale of data collection in our daily lives is even more difficult to comprehend.
 
Who, precisely, are our surveillance capitalists? My guess is that when the history books are written, the remembered faces of surveillance capitalism will be the oligarchs of Silicon Valley—the same faces who occupy so much of our attention today. But obscured behind them will be the massive systemic complicity and banal personal motives that have fueled it all. For each Sergey Brin and Larry Page, there are a thousand Google employees who had each accumulated a net worth of $5 million or more within a few years after Google’s IPO. For each Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, there are countless engineers, data scientists, machine learning researchers, product managers, IT specialists, operations researchers, advertising executives, corporate lawyers, in-house economists, UX designers, tech consultants, and university professors with surveillance capitalism research appointments who profit off of surveillance capitalism’s monetization of us all. Some turn a blind eye to their own complicity. Others hide behind their inconsistent utilitarianism (it was Facebook’s News Feed creator Andrew Bosworth, after all, who said, “We connect more people…. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools…. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”). Some pay lip service to the ills of technocratic capitalism. Others legitimize and rationalize corporate transgressions through big tech AI ethics groups. The common denominator is that they all cash their paychecks. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair told us. 
 
The decision by Microsoft employees to protest $8 million in ICE contracts is commendable. So, too, is Google employees’ successful campaign against the company’s $10 billion contract with the Pentagon to provide AI services. These successful demonstrations reveal the collective power held by these many thousands in their capacity to say “no.” And thus, along with our tech gospels Sergey and Mark and Jeff and Bill, they, too, are responsible for what they have not taken an emphatic enough stand against: the extractive mining of our bodies; the exploitation of laborers who power content moderation, product shipments,and data labeling; the unprecedented embargoing of wealth among the technocratic elite; the co-optation of university engineering schools into recruitment centers; the monetary AI arms race that is erasing academic research in favor of big tech AI labs; the conversion of the internet into one large A/B test; the dark design patterns that force us to opt in to data collection; the euphemistic reduction of people to “users” who are addicted to the dopamine hits of likes and shares; the pollution of local elections such as those in California and my home city of Seattle with floods of tech money; the intimate relationship between surveillance capitalism and the carceral state; the proliferation of NDAs with non-disparagement clauses to silence those who sour.These unspoken thousands, too, are our surveillance capitalists, and these, too, are their wrongs. 

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money

 From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has always been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Perhaps the most crucial link is Mike Griffin, who, at the time, was the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm that seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that will work with the CIA and other security services, equipping them with cutting edge technology. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond series – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech.Griffin was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002, where they attempted to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles to start Musk’s business. Musk felt that he could substantially undercut opponents by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. The attempt failed, but the trip cemented a lasting partnership between the pair, with Griffin going to war for Musk, consistently backing him as a potential “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. Three years later, Griffin would become head of NASA and later would hold a senior post at the Department of Defense.

While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket before. As National Geographic put it, SpaceX, “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll. The company was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services. Thus, from its earliest days, SpaceX was nurtured by government agencies that saw the company as a potentially important source of technology.

Therefore, while the 50-year-old businessman presents himself as a maverick science genius – an act that has garnered him legions of fans around the world – a closer inspection of his career shows he earned his fortune in a much more orthodox manner. First by being born rich, then by striking it big as a dot-com billionaire, and finally, like so many others, by feeding from the enormous government trough.

Perhaps more seriously though, SpaceX’s close proximity to both the military and the national security state marks it out as a key cog in the machine of U.S. empire, allowing Washington to spy, bomb or coup whoever it wants.
 
It is for this reason that so much of the hysteria, both positive and negative, over Musk’s ongoing purchase of Twitter is misplaced. Elon Musk is neither going to save nor destroy Twitter because he is not a crusading rebel challenging the establishment: he is an integral part of it.