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osean-kitty · 1 year
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IT FINALLY HAPPENED
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PLAYING WAR THUNDER IS NOW A VIABLE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY
Update: post is fake, playing War Thunder doesn't make you a national security risk.
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The disclosure of highly classified material already represents Washington’s worst national security breach in many years, including details about Ukraine’s lack of ammunition, US intelligence collection methods used against Russia, and embarrassing evidence pointing to US spying on close allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel. Analysts suggest the damage to the US could still get much worse.
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That’s a good investment.
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The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things
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There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.
That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.
These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.
Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."
Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."
(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice
So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.
Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.
In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.
The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.
A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.
This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.
If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.
What's not to like?
Here's what.
The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.
That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.
These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.
For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.
But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.
Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.
Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.
The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.
This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.
This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.
For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.
Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.
But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.
That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.
Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.
For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.
These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.
It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.
For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.
Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.
This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:
https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#
Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.
The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.
Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.
Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.
Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.
The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?
2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.
That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.
The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.
Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.
The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.
The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.
Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").
All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.
Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.
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Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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riflebrass · 7 months
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workersolidarity · 8 months
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Kit Klarenberg reporting on a new far-reaching investigation on the CIA's twisted MK Ultra program and its experiments on people of color in the United States.
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Answers and accountability is something we'll never get under the Capitalist system, because the Capitalist Class cannot allow any precedent set that allows for holding members of the Capitalist Class accountable for any kind of actions they take, regardless of the harm caused. And in this case, an unprecedented amount of harm was done to Left movements within the communities of people of color in the US as the CIA attempted to use mind control methods to suppress communities of color from organizing radical political organizations.
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How sick do you have to be to use political prisoners to experiment with mind control methods? Our Wall Street sponsored Government has NO ethical or moral boundaries they aren't willing to violate to retain their power and control.
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Our Capitalist Elites biggest fear is organized resistance to Capitalist control and Revolutionary Socialist movements. By labeling followers of anti-Capitalist organizations and ideologies as mentally ill, our government used this as a Medical excuse to experiment on, harm and suppress Anti-Capitalist groups and communities of color, ravaging those movements and their ability to affect policy as they had begun to do in the 1960's.
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"The darkness of MKULTRA lingers still, calling for urgent answers and transparency. America’s Black community deserves nothing less than the full extent of these operations exposed; culprits held accountable, and rightful compensation for survivors. As the shadows of the past stretch into the present, the demand for truth rings louder than ever, and justice becomes an undeniable imperative."
Couldn't have said it better myself. Major thanks to Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton for publishing this incredibly dark report, and Truthout and MPN for reporting on it.
You can read the more in-depth Truthout article Here
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alwaysbewoke · 11 days
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whumpetywhump · 6 months
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Whumptober Day 14 - Water Inhalation
Kei X Yaku: Abunai Aibou - Ep. 4
King Of Pigs - Ep. 12
National Security (2012)
Oasis - Ep. 3
Tale Of The Nine-Tailed 1938 - Ep. 3
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wartakes · 6 months
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Clear and Present Danger 2: Mr. Musk's Wild Ride
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In this essay, we find that when it comes to U.S. National Security and asking the question of what the greatest threats to it are, the answer is the one comes up when asking most questions about problems when you're on the Left: "it's the Capitalism, dummy."
If you’re on the Left, you probably don’t need to be told that capitalism is the greatest threat to our collective survival and freedom. Even if the world isn’t going to “end” in the doomer sense of things, if immensely rich and powerful capitalists are allowed to continue acting with impunity to amass further wealth and power at the expense of all else (including our lives), the future we can “look forward” to is a truly grim and dystopian one, in which the planet and its climate have been significantly altered, countless people are dead as a result, and those who aren’t have their neck trapped under the metaphorical (or literal, in many cases) boot of authoritarianism.
That being said, that long-term threat is not the only thing we have to worry about. Aside from the long term threat posed by capitalists to the world and its people if they continue to get their way unimpeded, we’re now seeing more pressing and immediate threats to the lives and security of many around the globe from their actions more. I’m not just talking about exploitation through trade and industry or the more traditional ways in which capitalists threaten lives and livelihoods around the globe, but through the direct involvement of prominent capitalists into the business of war and statecraft in a way that hasn’t been seen before.
Even if I was not as far left as I am now, as a national security professional I would be hard pressed to look at billionaire capitalists like Elon Musk (who will be something of the main character for most of this essay), examine his involvement in US. national security, look at his actions to date, and not feel at least uncomfortable if not extremely concerned or even threatened. When I look at Elon Musk wearing my leftist cap, I see a threat to the world coming from a dipshit, self-absorbed, fascist megalomaniacal capitalist; when I look at Elon Musk while wearing my NatSec cap, I see a clear and present danger not only to the national security of the United States, but to the security of states and peoples across the world. In my world – the world of security or defense or war or whatever you want to call it – under the right circumstances, capitalists of an ilk like Elon Musk could make decisions and take actions that could kill and maim large swathes of people and devastate communities and lives.
Regardless of whether or not you call yourself a “leftist” and (if you are, in fact, a leftist) regardless of how you may feel about certain states and governments and the wars they are or may end up fighting, you should be worried about hyper-wealthy, hyper-ideological capitalists with questionable politics and ideology and allegiances getting close to the levers of military power in any substantial form. In the remainder of this essay, I intend to lay out why that’s the case.
Elon Musk The Strange Case of the World War III That Wasn't
Elon Musk has been having a bit of a time lately and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying it immensely and hoping it only gets worse for him.
Even when his bare minimum veneer of respectability began to scratch off years ago – even as his ideas became more and more dumb and outlandish and his opinions more and more questionable, he seemed shielded from any substantive negative consequences. He was surrounded by what I’ve heard referred to as “the Elon Musk reality distortion field.” It didn’t matter what he did; the money and adoration seemed to keep flowing from all corners with no end in sight, and he could convince anyone and everyone that he was a genius that could do no wrong.
That state of affairs now seems to be very gradually, tentatively, changing. Finally.
It seemed like it started going downhill the moment Elon Musk bought Twitter – something he was essentially forced to do legally after probably embarking upon it as a bit. As he’s proceeded to run Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) into the ground while almost certainly mainlining ket and God knows what else, he only seems to have become more unhinged. Every action he takes seems to be based around appealing to the absolute worst kind of people from the darkest corners of Twitter: extreme libertarian venture capitalists, slimy right-wing grifters, foreign dictators and aspiring dictators, and out and proud fascists and anti-Semites.
It now appears that Musk’s desperate attempts to get the cross section of 8chan membership that actually pays for a Blue Check to like him may actually, potentially, have some real life consequences for him. And it all started several weeks ago, revolving around a snippet from the billionaire’s forthcoming biography revolving around the ongoing war against Ukraine by Russia.
In addition to aid of various types being provided by the United States and its allies and partners, Musk had been providing Ukraine with access to Starlink – the space-based internet service provided by SpaceX, which is perhaps his only company he’s currently involved in that is actually successful. Musk’s provision of Starlink to Ukraine (which began days after the war started in February of 2022) was not without controversy, with Musk essentially threatening to cut it off at one point due to lack of payment before later relenting (a deal was eventually struck for funding through DoD). But that turned out to only be the tip of the Ukraine Starlink iceberg.
In the segment quoted from Musk’s biography, Ukraine had been purportedly planning a sneak attack on the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet at its home base in Sevastopol in Crimea (which had been annexed illegally by Russia from Ukraine back in 2014). This attack was to make use of seagoing drones, the control of which at a distance would be enabled by Starlink. These small, hard to spot, remotely operated vessels would get the drop on the Russian warships – with Russian vessels already having been damaged by Ukrainian maritime drones on several occasions. A cunning plan.
There was only one problem: Starlink wouldn’t actually allow that to happen.
Initially, Musk’s Biographer – Walter Isaacson – asserted in the Washington Post (which was then later quoted by CNN) that Musk had Starlink “turned off” for the Ukrainians on purpose as the attack was undertaken, making their subs lose connection offshore of Crimea and be rendered useless. Since the initial bombshell, there’s been a series of denials, excuses, and ass-coverings from both sides of the story that has only muddled it further. Musk asserts that Starlink was never activated over Crimea to begin with and he had simply denied an emergency request from the Ukrainian government to extend Ukraine’s Starlink coverage. Issacson then walked back his claims in line with Musk’s, instead saying the Ukrainians only thought that Starlink was enabled out to Ukraine and then asked for it to enable their attack after finding out it wasn’t – only then to be denied by Musk. Most of the mainstream media coverage has since been edited to reflect Issacson’s claims (while still making reference to the original assertions in some cases), but I feel like things have only been made more confusing and contradictory than clear.
Regardless of which side of the story on the Ukraine Starlink debacle that you believe, there’s one aspect that is present in both the original and walked-back versions of the tale: Musk specifically denied Ukraine the ability to use Starlink in their planned surprise attack because he feared that the attack would be the equivalent of “Pearl Harbor”, potentially leading to World War III (with SpaceX being partially responsible, in his eyes). Musk was so concerned about this potential World War III sparking attack, that he not only made calls to the Ukrainians and to US. President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, he also apparently was in contact with the Russian government – something that I’m sure had a great many Western intelligence agencies pricking up their ears when they found out.
The fear of Russia’s war against Ukraine sparking World War III is reflective of Musk’s adherence to his own form of “longtermism” – an ideology common among hyper-rich (and hyper-weird) capitalists of his type that centers on ensuring the long term survival and happiness of the human race (at least, its long term survival in a way its adherents find acceptable). Such a worldview no doubt dovetails well with Musk’s own personal “only I can fix it” Messiah complex. At any rate, his fears of the Ukrainian “Pearl Harbor” attack causing a major war between the United States and Russia turned out to be (surprise surprise) complete and utter bullshit after Ukraine launched a different kind of surprise attack on Sevastopol, making use of British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles that all but destroyed both a Russian Navy landing ship as well as a Kilo-class diesel attack submarine (one capable of firing Kalibr cruise missiles back at Ukraine, no less). As you’re guessing by now, since no nukes have popped off since that attack, no World War III broke out as a result of that attack.
Since we haven’t all died in an Oppenheimer style nuclear firestorm (yet), and even as the story about the denial of Starlink coverage has been walked back, Musk has now faced increasing criticism and scrutiny from not just from online commentators, but from the US. government itself. The Chair of the US. Senate Armed Services Committee – Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island – announced not long after the Ukraine Starlink bombshell dropped that his committee would be “aggressively probing” Musk’s and SpaceX’s “outsized role” when it comes to providing space services to the US. government and warning that no “private citizen, can have the last word when it comes to US. national security.” I mostly agree with Senator Reed here (though my reasons for thinking the same thing as him would only partially overlap with his reasons and I think we’d both be worlds apart in what we ultimately want and how far we’d be willing to go for it, but that’s neither here nor there and I can get into that more later).
Will this Senate probe go anywhere and lead to any meaningful consequences for Musk? Has his reality bending force field finally weakened enough to the point he may actually have to experience the “finding out” end of “fucking around?” I’m still somewhat skeptical but I’m not prepared to say “no” because stranger things have happened and we’ve already been seeing a wave of “finding out” lately. It’s not implausible Musk may finally face some real consequences of some kind for something he’s done, even if those consequences aren’t as harsh as any of us would like and aren’t for EVERYTHING he’s done as opposed to only some things that make the state feel uneasy. All I know is no matter how it turns out, it’ll be funny to watch – kind of like with Trump’s numerous indictments and trials.
Likewise, regardless of what happens with Elon Musk in this specific case, the right questions are not being asked about the potential threats that individuals with outsized power and influence – coupled with questionable political viewpoints – could have not just on US. national security but on international relations and international security as a whole. When those questions are examined in greater depth and breadth, the threats both at home and abroad become far more stark.
The Real Threat From Within
It is commonly said by various foreign policy officials and talking heads that the world is entering or risks entering a new Cold War, centered on the United States and China. I would argue we’re entering less of a Cold War in the sense of how the last one went, and more of a new era of multi-polar great power competition that is more similar to the decades prior to World War I (I’ll leave it to you whether that makes you feel better or worse about our current situation). No matter how you look at it, we’re entering a period of far more tense relations and mutual suspicion among great powers and their respective bloc, with coinciding arms races and military buildups.
Be it a Cold War or Edwardian Era-style competition, these periods always come with worries not only of the threat of foreign adversaries, but also of “threats from within”; individuals and entities with loyalties to foreign states and groups that seek to deliberately undermine and weaken the country that they’re living in to the advantage of that country’s adversary or adversaries. Such fears are almost always both overblown, but also usually tinged with some form of racism or other prejudice in search of a convenient scapegoat – be it the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair in pre-World War I France, the internment of Japanese Americans after the Attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, or the recent dramatic spike in hate-crimes in the United States against Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent. As tensions with China rise, the old and ugly question of “dual loyalties” is raised from xenophobic right-wingers, essentially suggesting that not only any American of Chinese descent but any American who is not sufficiently white and European enough in their lineage has an unspoken loyalty to the country of their ancestors over any to the United States.
Obviously, anyone who actually has more than two lonely brain cells knows that the idea of dual loyalties is patently bullshit. Albert Dreyfus turned out to be falsely accused of spying for Germany, only being exonerated and reinstated in the French Army after years of protests on his behalf; the Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps in the American Southwest were just normal people, who were deprived of their property and livelihoods baselessly despite the fact their family members were also fighting and dying on the front lines in Europe, then going without so much as an apology from the US. government for years. Yes, an AAPI American could turn out to be a spy or a saboteur acting on behalf of a foreign government, but literally anyone could could turn out to be a spy or saboteur or insider threat; ethnic, racial, or religious background could have next to nothing to do with it. After all, the recent perpetrator of one of the largest US. intelligence leaks in modern history wasn’t Chinese or Russian or Iranian or Korean, but was in fact a 21-year old white dipshit Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard of Portuguese descent.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “KD why are you going on about this in an essay that’s supposed to be about billionaires and capitalists and Elon Musk?” Well, part of if is just that it pisses me off in general and I wanted a chance to rant about it and this was as good an opportunity as any. However, I do have a point I’m trying to make here that brings us back to the main theme of this essay: there is a threat from within, and its capitalists like Elon Musk. The real “threat from within” isn’t based on race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin, but is instead based around money, self-importance, narcissism, and the bizarre and harmful ideas that come from being online far too much and not having anyone around you ever tell you “no” or that you’re wrong. The whole Ukraine Starlink debacle is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the threat that Elon Musk-style capitalists could pose to US. national security – and however you feel about it, to your own security depending on where you live. Capitalists like Elon Musk not only are more likely to have the intent to embark upon the kinds of actions (and more) that those going on about racist “dual loyalties” assert, but they’re increasingly in a far better position to be able to act on that intent in a major way and cause serious harm. In my business, intent plus capability to act on it equals threat; you do the math.
For the longest time, weird billionaire capitalists like Elon Musk were confined to their more traditional domains of tech, finance, business, and so on. Their involvement in international affairs was mainly through a lens of investment, trade, and – of course – economic exploitation, but less through one of war and security (although Musk has dipped his toe in before). But over the years, Elon Musk and those of his ilk have increasingly latched on to the national security apparatus in the United States.
When it comes to the Defense Industrial Base – or DIB (this is what people in my profession call the “Military Industrial Complex” in polite company), its still mostly dominated by the kinds of companies you’d expect: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman – you know, all the superstars of companies that love selling weapons to some of the worst people you know (with the US. government’s blessing). Aside from building weapons and munitions, these companies often also provide direct services to the US. government through contractors. Search for job listings in the Washington DC. area and you’re sure to find a whole host of various shades of “intelligence analyst” positions for one of these companies working in support of some part of the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community.
While capitalists like Musk have not come anywhere near to shaking the hold the legacy defense companies have on the industry, they’ve managed to weasel their way in through various cracks and make themselves indispensable in unique ways. Musk’s SpaceX is the prime example of this, as if the United States wants to conduct a National Security Space Launch to put a sensitive military payload into orbit, its only two options are either SpaceX, or the United Launch Alliance – a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing (the US. is set to expand from two to three from 2025). While SpaceX itself may be the most normal and successful of Musk’s companies (it actually turned a profit this year, compared to say, Tesla), his influence and personality are still very much felt and subject to its whims – with SpaceX’s employees previously deriding their own boss as a “distraction” from their work.
It’s through SpaceX’s activities that we see capitalists like Musk don’t even have to take over the DIB to harm national and international security. Musk and those of his ilk only need to get enough responsibility and power in the right areas to have outsize impacts if they decide to go rogue. Ukraine was just a preview of what could happen on a larger scale. The United States military and other armed forces around the world have become increasingly dependent upon Musk as space has continue to grow in importance as a domain of warfare. In the case of Ukraine, Musk was quoted as saying “how am I in this war?” in addition to his concerns about a potential World War III, when it came to one Ukrainian attack on a Russian naval base; what about in other scenarios directly involving the United States? Musk has stated that he thinks Taiwan is “an integral part of China”; if the United States gets involved in a war with China to prevent it seizing Taiwan, would he then see fit to shut off all support to the US. military to prevent a nuclear war (admittedly, much more of a possibility here than in the Ukraine case, though not guaranteed to happen)?
In a more low stakes case than war with China, Musk has already put his relationships with various authoritarian and right-wing populist leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on display for all to see, with questions have been asked by the US. government about investment from Saudi royals in Musk’s Twitter. If the United States went to war against a regional authoritarian power that Musk was financially dependent on or felt common ideological cause with, would he cut off support then because he disagreed with the US. attacking one of his fellow travelers and/or business partners? Musk’s actions on Ukraine opens up not simply a can of worms, but an CostCo sized value barrel of them.
Aside from potentially being able to take direct action in the form of denying services and capabilities to the military, Musk and those like him pose risks simply in having access to sensitive information – getting back to our espionage and “threat within” discussion earlier. As the head of a company with substantial DoD contracts, Musk holds a security clearance – one that has come under scrutiny twice now due to his drug use, but at time of writing he still has (full disclosure: I don’t think drug use in and of itself should deny you a clearance, but if we’re going to have all these rules about security clearances it’d be nice if they applied to all of us and not just all of us who aren’t a billionaire or the former President or someone else who’s “important”). I’m much more worried about an ideologically motivated billionaire capitalist with questionable loyalties and politics leaking large amounts of sensitive information, than I am some nobody. We’ve already seen how much classified material Trump was literally keeping in his shitter; what’s to say Musk and others like him wouldn’t do the same if they felt it in keeping with their worldview (especially if they also feel they have that aura of invincibility from their “reality distortion field” around them)?
I’ve mainly been using Elon Musk as my hobby horse throughout this essay because he’s the one that everyone is most likely to know about; but he’s far from the only one. Even if the big, traditional defense giants will continue to dominate the DIB, other Musk types are worming their way in and carving out fiefdoms that they could potentially do damage through. Another prominent example of this is Palmer Luckey (name alert). Prior to trying to break into the NatSec game, Luckey was best known for having founded Oculus VR and having designed the Oculus Rift, which he later sold to Facebook (now Meta) and became a key component of the Metaverse (which of course, as we all know – especially if you listen to Trashfuture – has been immensely successful and has moved everything we do into a virtual world with no legs).
Having moved on from Oculus, Luckey has now started and runs a startup/venture capitalist minded defense company known as “Anduril” that specializes in all the various flavors of the moment. Primarily, Anduril’s focus has been on autonomous systems (i.e., drones) of various kinds – as well as the means to counter them, but since its founding in 2017 its broadened its reach into areas such as solid-motor rockets (such as those used in hypersonic missiles), and command and control systems. As Anduril expands it operations and acquires other companies to facilitate these expansions, Luckey has made no secret of his goal of breaking into the top tier of defense companies, giving the giants mentioned earlier in this essay a real run for their money.
All of this hullabaloo about Anduril would be much of a muchness if Luckey wasn’t also a strident libertarian who donated to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign (Anduril later worked with the Trump administration on technology for its infamous “border wall”), who is also connected to infamous right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel (an early investor in Anduril). Luckey may very well be the ‘quiet’ Elon Musk that you don’t know about unless you’re a tech or NatSec person; the kind that only gets traction in Defense and tech trade publications and doesn’t end up as much in the mainstream news in comparison to Musk, but may very well just be just as ideological as Musk (if not more) and potentially just as dangerous under the right circumstances.
Potentially, Luckey and Anduril could be even more dangerous depending on how deep Anduril gets its tendrils into the DoD and in what ways). As mentioned before, Anduril is working on command and control (C2) systems for the DoD. Much like logistics is the lifeblood of any military, C2 is also extremely important. It doesn’t matter what fancy weapons you have or even what fancy intelligence collection methods you have (be it satellites, drones, or humans), but if you can’t information and intelligence back to the decision makers and then relay it to the units in the field, all the big guns and fancy drones you have are useless. If a company or companies like Anduril led by highly political leaders like Luckey in a highly polarized political environment like we have today become crucial to how the DoD plans to fight a war, you find yourself in another Elon Musk style situation where Palmer Luckey or someone like him could simply decide to shut off support to DoD if they do something he doesn’t like – or just being able to leak classified information should he choose to.
Before we move on, let me make something clear: I’m not saying the current situation with the big defense contractors dominating the DIB is good by any means. I don’t think private enterprise has any real role in national defense and if it were up to me all of those companies would be nationalized and replaced with Soviet-style design bureaus or something else entirely. What I’m talking about here, is the devil you know versus the devil you don’t. In terms of changing the world, until we can just nationalize the defense giants away or make them irrelevant in issues of national security, I’d prefer it be them doing what they’re doing than an Elon Musk or a Palmer Luckey doing it. For all of the faults of the big defense companies, they’re less likely to do something as crazy as Musk or someone like him is going to do. They’re going to be less personality driven and far more pragmatic in a way that is more manageable and also more predictable. While these companies may facilitate some awful shit, I feel like it pales in comparison to what Musk or those like him could wreak if they’ve given a bigger slice of the pie and more involvement in our national security. Musk has already proven he’s willing to torch large amounts of his wealth in the drug-fueled pursuit of his ideological and philosophical visions; don’t underestimate the capacity of him and people like him to fuck things up for everyone even more than they’re already doing.
The “Why You Should Care” Section (Yet Again)
I can understand why a number of leftists may read everything up until now (if they even still are reading) and at best wonder “why should I care”, or at worst thing “let them fight, this is good actually.” I can understand that impulse to a point – while I still disagree with it, but let me assure you and plead with you that you don’t actually want this state of affairs to continue and if its taken to its logical conclusion you’ll be sorry.
Billionaire capitalists like Elon Musk are already dangerous under “normal” conditions when they aren’t involved with waging war and they’re “only” dealing with electric vehicles that catch fire easily and run over people, space rockets that explode, bad transportation solutions, and etc. If you don’t think they could cause even more harm if they get involved in national security – both at home and abroad – you’re deluding yourself.
For someone who is stridently anti-war and fears for the state of the world, I can imagine there may even be some kind of an appeal to the idea of Elon Musk intervening in a war between the United States and some other power to stop it escalating to a nuclear exchange. But you have to understand, the interference of people like Musk in national security will never EVER be for the same reasons as you’d like, not even one bit; and the reasons he’s doing it will ultimately always contribute towards something making your life even more miserable. It’s either going to be done out of an interest to protect investments and markets, or out of an ideological or philosophical drive to protect their own twisted long-term worldview that still involves people like you and me being at best massively marginalized or at worst liquidated – or both!
The above all assumes if people like Musk makes more attempts like was done with Starlink in Ukraine on a larger scale in a more extensive conflict that it even accomplishes what was intended and doesn’t somehow backfire in a horrific way. Remember you’re dealing with cretinous man children who are often high out of their mind on ket or benzos or whatever, trying to post through their latest crisis, all while casually breaking laws left and right. You’ve seen the effects of Musk’s ownership of Twitter on the world at large; do you really think people like him getting more involved in matters of war is in any way good or helpful? That it wouldn’t potentially just make things even worse for everyone involved?
Admittedly, I may be making up someone to get mad at here (trying to anticipate “an anti-imperialist defense of Elon Musk” essay by some loser later on down the line). The real people I’m getting steamed at those who have promoted a Silicon Valley style “startup culture” mindset when its come to defense, hoping to invigorate a stagnant and stifled DIB leftover from the post Cold War era and the War on Terror and revitalize it for the new and multiplying security challenges the United States and the world now faces. Well, again, be careful what you wish for, I suppose.
I feel like many of those who had previously supported a startup/Silicon Valley style “disruption” of defense – in particular, those who don’t share Musk and Luckey’s ideological leanings – may now be starting to tentatively realize what many of us further on the Left have known for a while: billionaire capitalists are not a solution, they’re a threat. And they’re not just to our national security, but to all of the well being of everyone, everywhere. That second part of that point may still be a bit too much for some of these folks to swallow, but getting them to understand that first point about billionaires being a national security threat is a point that could serve as a useful wedge issue that has the added virtue of being true. If we can get security minded liberals or even so-called centrists to understand the security threats posed by this generation of extremely online right-wing minded billionaires we’ve been cursed with, maybe from there we can get them to see all the other problems they (and the system they’re a part of) can cause. More people need to understand that’s no room for ultra rich fascist-friendly freaks like Elon Musk in national security, and whatever perceived benefits they’ve deluded themselves into thinking those types bring to the table is heavily outweighed by the risks not only to US. national security but to international security and the lives and livelihoods of people across the world.
For too long, too many convinced themselves that the “disruptive” and “innovate” styles of start up entrepreneurs and tech bros would be a shot in the arm to a defense establishment trying desperately to retool itself for large scale conflict after twenty years of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency with mixed to failed results. Now, they’re seeing what those of us on the Left have seen for ages: a threat – and a threat they’ve let into their home. While I wish they’d come to this realization sooner, it’s not too late to do something about it. Ultimately, the role of capital needs to be removed our defense and security entirely, but I’ll certainly take getting dangerous dipshits like Elon Musk out of it for a start before we move onto the more traditional ones.
On that note, I just looked at my word count for this one and went “holy shit” and have decided this is as good a place as any to wrap up (I could have gone on longer just about the more “traditional” capitalists in Defense, especially given news that Wall Street Executives are going to be doing a war game with Members of Congress – an announcement that made my eyes roll back up in my head), but I think I’m saving those rounds for another engagement. Until next time, stay safe out there, and peace.
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nodynasty4us · 5 months
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From the October 12, 2023 opinion piece:
Trump is the loudest but hardly the only Republican willing to sabotage the U.S. national security architecture. Other GOP presidential contenders have expressed an equally strident desire. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to “use executive authority to shut down the deep state.” His plans included firing 75 percent of the federal workforce and dismantling the FBI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission....
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Imagine, for example, what a second Trump term would actually look like. If he only appoints toadies to cabinet-level positions, there would be no adults in the room. His planned jihad against the permanent bureaucracy would trigger an exodus of the best, most independent diplomats, general officers and intelligence analysts. The ability of Trump’s weakened administrative state to accurately assess or respond to any national security threat would be suspect at best and incompetent at worst. The likelihood of a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, undeterred Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, or open war in the Pacific Rim would rise exponentially. The U.S. military would be too busy bombing Mexico or governing U.S. cities to respond. As chaotic as Trump’s first term was, his second term could set the world on fire.
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Honestly, I won't be surprised that despite all this Fuckery from Russia yet again trying desperately to ruin shit and cause more disorder. Is that you'll still have idiots and tankies fools either on this hellsite or other parts of social media in general that are still willing to make excuses for Russia bullshit and continue to kiss Putin ass for some brain-dead unknown reasons. Or those other morons who still think Trump shitting on NATO allies and encouraging Russia to have its way with the rest of Europe is still "No BiG DeAl. "
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Each time an objectionable act becomes racialized, such as how “crime” is coded as Black and “terrorism” as Muslim after 9/11, the problem is not that every individual from the minority group is innocent but that the collective is regarded as uniquely guilty, and anyone who shares the identity is implicated by association. The ethnicization of espionage in the US as a distinctly Chinese threat is rooted in centuries-old Orientalism and reinforces racial stereotypes. The rhetoric is weaponized to expand state power and advance special interests. The illusion of protection by discriminatory means obscures fundamental questions about our relationships with technology and the state, as well as how to navigate between our intimate and communal selves. In a world of privatized commons and militarized borders, who sees or cannot be seen? For whose benefit, and to what end?
[...]
TikTok is not a product of communism but of surveillance capitalism. As China moves from the margins to the center of global capitalism, the panic over Chinese espionage is inseparable from the apprehension about the West in decline. History repeats itself as Florida and several other states pass or propose legislation restricting Chinese citizens from purchasing property, citing security concerns. Similar excuses were used for the “alien land laws” in the early 1900s that barred Chinese and Japanese immigrants from land ownership. The spying allegations against TikTok and other Chinese products are often hypothetical: It’s not so much about what the companies have done or even what they can do; China is used as a foil to project American fears and desires. After all, the US military and intelligence agencies are pioneers in surveillance technology and foreign interference. As it was in the aftermath of 9/11, a perceived threat is used to justify massive expansions of executive power, which also include the ability to monitor and manipulate, both at home and abroad. The Senate bill to ban TikTok has been aptly called a “Patriot Act for the internet.”
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saywhat-politics · 10 months
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“There's no allegation that there was harm done to the national security,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers are finding novel ways to defend Donald Trump after he became the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.
Trump is accused of violating a section of the Espionage Act, making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice after he refused to hand over classified information pertaining to America’s national secrets. According to the explosive indictment, Trump hoarded boxes of classified documents in a bathroom at his ritzy Florida estate and showed some of them off to guests.
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Tim Campbell
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
February 29, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
MAR 1, 2024
Today’s story is that in the negotiations to fund the government and pass the national supplemental security bill, MAGA Republicans appear to be losing ground. Biden appears to be trying to weaken them further by making it clear it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are preventing new, strict border security legislation.
The first of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 will expire tomorrow. Fiscal year 2024 began on October 1, 2023, and Congress agreed to a topline budget, but it has been unable to fund the necessary appropriations because MAGA Republicans have insisted on having their extreme demands met in those measures. In this struggle, former president Trump has urged his loyalists not to give way, telling them in September 2023: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” 
But a poll from last September showed that 75% of Americans oppose using brinksmanship over a government shutdown to bargain for partisan gain. 
After kicking the can down the road by passing three previous continuing resolutions, House Republicans a week ago expected a shutdown. But today they backed off. The House passed a short-term continuing resolution that pushes back the dates on which the two continuing resolutions expire, from March 1 and March 8 to March 8 and March 22. The vote was 320 to 99 in the House, with 113 Republicans joining 207 Democrats to pass the measure. Ninety-seven Republicans opposed the bill, as did two Democrats who were protesting the lack of aid to Ukraine. 
Tonight, the Senate approved the continuing resolution by a vote of 77 to 13. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it tomorrow. “What we have done today has overcome the opposition of the MAGA hard right and gives us a formula for completing the appropriations process in a way that does not shut the government down and capitulate to extremists,” Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said.
Trump opposes helping Ukraine in its fight to resist Russia’s invasion, and under his orders, MAGA Republicans have also stalled the national security supplemental bill, which contains Ukrainian aid, as well as aid to Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The measure passed the Senate on February 13 by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29, and is expected to pass the House if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) takes it up, but so far, he has refused.
Today, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told reporters that “several” House Republicans are willing to sign a discharge petition to force Speaker Johnson to bring a national security supplemental measure to the floor for a vote. A simple majority can force a vote on a bill through a discharge petition, but such a measure is rare because it undermines the House speaker. With Johnson refusing to take up the Senate measure, Fitzpatrick and his colleague Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) have prepared their own pared-down aid measure. Fitzpatrick told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday that “[w]e are trying to add an additional pressure point on something that has to happen.” 
Speakers from the parliaments of 23 nations wrote to Johnson yesterday and urged him to take up the Senate measure, saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has “challenged the entire democratic world, jeopardizing the security in the whole European and Euro-Atlantic area,” and that “the world is rapidly moving towards the destruction of the sustainable world order.”  
On Tuesday, Johnson met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate majority leader Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to discuss the importance of funding the government and passing the national security supplemental bill. There, he was the odd man out as the other five pressed upon him how crucial funding for Ukraine is for U.S. national security.
Yesterday, Johnson told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that the leaders told him he was “on an island by myself, and it was me versus everyone else in the room.” He went on: “What the liberal media doesn’t understand, Sean, is that if you’re here in Washington and you’re described as a leader that’s on an island by themselves, it probably means you’re standing with the American people.” 
But an AP-NORC poll released today shows that it is not Johnson but the others at that meeting who are standing with the American people: 74% of Americans, including 62% of Republicans, support U.S. aid to Ukraine’s military. 
The struggle between Biden and Trump for control over U.S. politics played out starkly today as both were in Texas to talk about immigration. Both say the influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States needs to be better managed. But Trump blames Biden for what he compares to a war in which an “invasion” of criminal “fighting-age men” are pouring over the border. (NBC News noted that “there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States” and that, in fact, their review of crime data ”shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.”)
Trump promises he would solve immigration issues instantly with executive orders, although his orders during his term faced legal challenges.  
In contrast to Trump’s promise to dictate a solution, Biden emphasized that the government should work for the people. In Texas, he noted that the federal government has rushed emergency personnel and funds to the state to combat the deadly wildfires there that have burned more than a million acres, and he urged Congress to pass a law to address border issues, as he has asked it to since he took office. 
Such a measure is popular, and earlier this month, Trump undermined a bill that was tilted so far to the right that it drew the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the U.S. Border Patrol union. Senators from both parties had spent four months hammering the bill out at the insistence of House Republicans, who then killed it when Trump, apparently hoping to keep the issue open for his campaign, told them to. 
Today, Biden urged Congress to pass the $20.2 billion bipartisan border bill that would, he said, give border patrol officers the resources they need: 1,500 more border agents, 100 cutting-edge machines to detect and stop illegal fentanyl, 100 additional immigration judges to deal with the backlog of cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, more immigrant visas, and emergency authority for the president to shut the border when it becomes overwhelmed. 
Biden spoke directly to Trump: “Instead of playing politics with the issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I'll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together…. Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don't we just get together and get it done. Let’s remember who the heck we work for. We work for the American people, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We work for the American people.”
Trump may not share that perspective. Last night, Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins of the New York Times reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in Hungary, will visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week as Trump scrambles to find the more than half a billion dollars he needs to pay the fines and penalties courts have ordered. “We cannot interfere in other countries’ elections,” Orbán said last week, “but we would very much like to see President Donald Trump return to the White House.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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rockyp77mk3 · 9 days
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