Who Picks the Toppings
Who Picks the Toppings
Served up courtesy of bankers, politicians, and the U.S. intelligence community
Last month, Mark Bailey (one ongoing participant in the experiments of Diaphora Co.) launched The Free Mind Gazette. In his most recent release, Bailey touched briefly on cancel culture—a subject I explored in my last dispatch—and speculated about the roots of this modern social phenomenon:
Our control regime has arranged our legal and economic systems in such a way as to shield powerful bad actors from accountability. And most of our informal accountability structures have disappeared as society has become more diverse and we’ve become more atomized. Many sense that the absence of these structures is problematic. I suspect that this sense motivates cancel culture, which attempts to reintroduce personal accountability into society in a variety of misguided and harmful ways.
The premises seem self-evident to me: obviously the legal system protects the rich and powerful, and the economy of the United States has been wholly designed to favor them. Of course our “dictatorship of capital” would keep bad actors unaccountable, since it seems to exist (maybe first and foremost) for the sake of ratifying economic policies that enrich the wealthy and defend the values of their portfolios, whether or not that comes at the expense of the masses.
Policies of the United States federal government offer no shortage of examples to support this perspective, but if you’re looking for one, I suggest its response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to Jeff Stein’s coverage, in addition to provisions in the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act for direct stimulus payments, unemployment benefits, and payroll protection loans, “The $2 trillion coronavirus relief package […] included more than $500 billion in tax cuts, including a payroll tax holiday for employers and tax incentives for employers who keep workers on the payroll.” As Amanda Holpuch adds, “Nearly 82% of the benefits from the tax law change [included in the act] will go to people making $1m or more annually in 2020, according to an analysis by the joint committee on taxation (JCT). Overall, 95% of individuals who benefit from the change make $200,000 or more.”
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine those responsible for this act operated with some degree of self-interest. In fact, that seems to have been the suspicion of Senator Whitehouse (D-RI), who wrote in April 2020 to the Vice President, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget to “assess whether any individuals within the Administration who stand to gain from these provisions were involved in their development”—though my own suspicions extend to how much senators like himself (who voted for the legislation) also stood to gain from them.
Regardless of how far all that spurs your own suspicions, I hope you can see why I find it supports the perspective I mentioned above: specifically, that legislators and other officials in the Americans’ capitalist republic govern the public sphere for the benefit of private interests. In the example of the CARES Act, a full quarter of the relief funds came in the form of tax benefits for the ~5.7% of U.S. households with an income of more than $200,000/yr: that, in turn, becomes a pillar of what Carol Roth called “the ‘Great Consolidation’—the acceleration of a historic wealth transfer and power concentration out of the hands of the middle class and into those with political power and connections.”
Certainly those who started such a process—especially those with political power, like American legislators—would know how to benefit from it. But saying so only addresses one of the premises that I called “self-evident” above: that is to say, the example of the CARES Act only illustrates how the U.S. economic system (and the financial policies it in part comprises) operates to serve “the dictatorship of capital” in extracting wealth from the masses and with it enriching the privileged.
But that only shields the powerful from accountability insofar as it equips them even more optimally. For an example of how American judicial institutions certainly deal out more lenient punishment to the wealthy and well-connected, look no further than Hunter Biden—son of a sitting U.S. President charged with a felony and facing a team of prosecutors including one whose former business partner (among other connections to the Biden family) donated $100,000 to a trust benefitting the children of the defendant’s late brother, as Heather Hunter reports.
Reasons to think Hunter Biden has received unfair treatment go beyond the circumstantial. As Farnoush Amiri writes, “congressional testimony from two IRS agents who worked on the federal investigation into the younger Biden’s taxes and foreign business dealings […] detailed what they called a pattern of ‘slow-walking investigative steps’ and delaying enforcement actions months before elections.”
As it stands, Hunter Biden’s attorneys have “reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would probably keep him out of jail.” Unsurprisingly, Miranda Devine reports, “67 percent of voters say it’s likely the first son got a sweetheart plea deal because of who he is.”
I haven’t discovered yet if Hunter Biden’s confessed tax crimes concern any concealed income or assets related to any matters subject to the ongoing investigation of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. Still, that investigation seems significant: “Between February 2014 and August 2019,” writes Chris Sheridan, “the committee found 93 wires ‘totaling $2,461,962.60 to and from businesses and associates linked to the Biden family and a China-based investment fund controlled by the Bank of China.’”
Two-and-a-half million dollars in wire transfers over five years, starting while and continuing after Joe Biden served as Vice President.
But we’ll have to wait for further developments on that. For now, all I’m trying to convey is that the legal consequences that Hunter Biden looks likely to face (assuming a judge approves the plea deal to which his prosecutors have already agreed) go to evidence that the American legal system protects the wealthy and powerful from accountability, regardless of how well it treats those of other classes.
I think I’m stating the obvious. Still, I know that there’s a segment of the American population among whom prevails a stubborn naivety, or a vulnerability to an idealistic sense of their own national exceptionalism. For them, I feel the need to make the case. They seem not to have encountered the findings of researchers and academics demonstrating that an American citizen’s personal wealth reliably predicts how closely public policy aligns to their preferences: for, as Gilens and Page write in their “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” (2014), “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence” (emphasis mine).
These professors of public policy at UCLA and of decision-making at Northwestern University make it painstakingly clear that the wealthy and powerful aren’t just favored in the U.S.’s criminal proceedings or its tax regimes, but that their interests override the polled opinions of the majority:
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Many might assume the results of this 2014 paper stemmed from the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which upended campaign finance law by prohibiting the federal government from restricting how much private interests and advocacy groups may spend on political communications. But, as Brendan James elaborates, the outsized influence of wealthy elites and business interests has been growing at a subliminal scale for decades: “As the data stretching back to the 1980s suggests, this has been a long term trend, and is therefore harder for most people to perceive, let alone reverse.“
If you need more evidence of how the interests of the wealthy determine political outcomes, just ask one of the folks at BlackRock. As Serge Varlay seems all-too-eager to tell someone (at ~0:30), “It’s not who the president is. It’s who controls the wallet of the president […] The hedge funds, BlackRock, the banks. These guys run the world. Campaign financing, yup, you can buy your candidates. Obviously we’ve got the system in place” (emphasis mine).
Varlay goes on to estimate the market value of a U.S. senator. If his quote is accurate, and if the findings of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee represent a Chinese investment fund purchasing political influence over American federal policy, then it looks like foreign buyers pay a premium.
Maybe, in the domain of foreign policy, what Bailey calls “the control regime” has been less able to coordinate the political and economic systems for its own members’ gain. Or, maybe foreign investors just face a more crowded field. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, speaking at the United Nations, testifies (at ~11:21) to the homegrown business interests directing the U.S.’s proxy war in Ukraine while standing to benefit from the same:
The winners are people like Sec. of State Tony Blinken, who spent his time between the Obama and Biden Administrations launching a consulting firm called WestExec Advisors, which secured lucrative governments contracts for intelligence firms and the arms industry. Blinken's former partners at WestExec include Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psalki, and almost a dozen current and former members of Biden's national security team. Def. Secretary Lloyd Austin, for his part, is a former and possibly future board member of Raytheon and an ex-partner of Pine Island Capital Investment which collaborates with WestExec, and which Blinken himself has advised. Meanwhile the current U.S. Ambassador to this body, the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is listed as a senior council at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a self-described “commercial diplomacy firm” that also finesses government contracts for the intelligence and arms sectors [...] founded by Madeleine Albright, infamously known for her comments that the deaths by sanctions of half a million Iraqi children were worth it.
In other words, those responsible (at various times) for the Biden Administration’s foreign diplomacy, multiple intelligence services, White House communications, and overseeing the military are all business partners—or consult one another’s private firms—working in the intelligence and arms industries.
(I wonder if any of them have ever addressed the potential conflicts of interest. Or even if the thought has ever crossed their minds.)
All that puts another spin, I think, on the perspective of Vivek Ramaswamy (quoted in my last dispatch), who sees the popularity in the financial sector of ESG scores and diversity, equity, and inclusion practices as the industry’s preferred substitute for a leftist political discourse emphasizing wealth redistribution in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
While the financial incentives of high ESG scores may account for corporate efforts toward a kind of profit-driven social engineering—as circumstances imply they do (in concert with the need to renew or establish new intellectual properties and the prospect of cultivating demographics into audiences) for the editorially imposed diversity the became the impetus for Comicsgate—it’s important to remember that the same incentives don’t operate on the state apparatuses that enrich and protect the powerful.
For that reason, however, it’s all the more curious to observe that, since Citizens United v. FEC, the Democratic Party has performed the same substitution of what Ramaswamy called “the new woke Left” to replace one which champions the interests of the working class.
Of course, one shouldn’t need any more evidence that the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. As Senator Schumer (D-NY) said in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” But on the specific circumstances of the Party’s turn toward identity politics, the esteemed Norman Finkelstein offers a persuasive analysis.
Speaking to Aaron Maté (also of The Grayzone), Finkelstein says frankly at ~6:14 of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, “It became very clear that, in the moment of truth […] that identity politics was being instrumentalized—weaponized—in order to stop the Bernie campaign.” At ~15:25, he elaborates further: “Identity politics emerged as a political force just at the moment where a radical socialist worker's movement aimed at the redistribution of wealth and the radical transformation of our society became a real possibility, and it had to be stopped.”
In Finkelstein’s analysis, the necessity of stopping a radical movement for wealth redistribution distinguishes identity politics from its historical predecessor, political correctness. In a different interview, he describes this distinction (at ~36:09) to Keaton Weiss and Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence, with the latter (at ~38:08) interjecting a detail notable for our purposes here:
FINKELSTEIN: “So how does it differ from the current situation? [...] Because the Democratic Party has absorbed the wokeness, promotes it, and there's real institutional power behind it [...] And, if you're old enough to remember, political correctness was basically a fad on college campuses. It was marginal, it was easy to mock and also to exploit […] But now, very significant institutions, first of all politically the Democratic Party has adopted it, in the media, The New York Times, MSNBC, most of the media, not all, obviously, not Fox News, but a large part of the media have become woke—”
DOBULAR: “Also the biggest financial firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, they're pushing these ESG scores—”
FINKELSTEIN: “Yeah, so, now there's real institutional power and weight behind the phenomenon, and that's what's changed a lot, because they're bringing to bear real institutional weight to impose this view of the world.”
Of course, following the implication of the aforementioned 2014 research of Gilens and Page, it’s hardly surprising that the Democratic Party and establishment news outlets would coordinate against a popular labor movement that might threaten the dictatorship of capital. Still, it remains striking that Finkelstein observes in those institutions the same motives that Ramaswamy identifies behind ESG finance.
Whatever progressive agenda these social engineers may promote in the media, it seems clear that the interests of both the political and economic elite lie not in diversity, equity, nor inclusion, but instead in suppressing and marginalizing a zeitgeist focused on empowering the working class.
Now, with that same phenomenon at play in both business and political domains, I have to ask: have any other economic or state institutions either implied or explicitly demonstrated a similar preference?
Wouldn’t you know it: yes, they have—specifically, the U.S. intelligence community.
In February 2020, The Washington Post reported that “U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Of course, with such notoriously false past disclosures—asserting that news of compromising material on Hunter Biden’s laptop amounted to “Russian disinformation” seems most notable here; however, former CIA Director John Brennan supplying (as Aaron Maté reports) “suggestive but ultimately false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials” about the 2016 election deserves mention too, now that Brennan has joined the same WestExec Advisors that Max Blumenthal exposes above—one ought to err on the side of caution, rather than take spies at their word.
Operating under a similar protocol at the time of the Post’s report, Jefferson Morley proposed a different motive for the intelligence community’s briefing with Sanders:
What’s driving the U.S. intelligence community intervention in presidential politics is not just fear of Trump, but fear of losing control of the presidency. From 1947 to 2017, the CIA and other secret agencies sometimes clashed with presidents, especially Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Carter. But since the end of the Cold War, under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, the secret agencies had no such problem.
Under Trump, the intelligence community has seen a vast loss of influence. Trump is contemptuous of the CIA’s daily briefing. As demonstrated by his pressure campaign on Ukraine, his foreign policies are mostly transactional. Trump is not guided by the policy process or even any consistent doctrine, other than advancing his political and business interests. He’s not someone who is interested in doing business with the intelligence community.
The intelligence community fears the rise of Sanders for a different reason. The socialist senator rejects the national security ideology that guided the intelligence community in the Cold War and the war on terror. Sanders’ position is increasingly attractive, especially to young voters, and thus increasingly threatening to the former spy chiefs who yearn for a return to the pre-Trump status quo. A Sanders presidency, like a second term for Trump, would thwart that dream. Sanders is not interested in national security business as usual either.
In other words, Morley argues that the threat which anything resembling a radical labor movement would pose to the project of American imperialism (and the billions it yields for the defense industry) provides a compelling motive for the U.S. intelligence community to suppress that “increasingly attractive” political platform.
Surely it’s only a remarkable coincidence that they linked such a platform to a foreign rival now engaged in a proxy war with the same U.S. vassal for which military support constituted enough of a priority to have been the context for Trump’s first impeachment, and for which BlackRock has this year launched a development fund that the company will manage to rebuild the country after the war. But, I digress.
Returning to the quote from Mark Bailey at the start of this dispatch, it seems not only that “our [American] control regime has arranged our legal and economic systems in such a way as to shield powerful bad actors from accountability” nor just that the same hegemonic orthodoxy fills their pockets too, but that, in the final analysis, it views the interests of the American working class as antithetical to its own.
Maybe that, in fact, gives us the appropriate framework in which to answer the rhetorical question with which I closed my last dispatch, wondering what interest the military-industrial complex has in the phenomenon of cancel culture, and therefore in the larger context of contemporary identity politics.
But regardless of its potential interests there, and of my own speculations about its motives, the mechanics of the political and economic system within which it operates—one which the research of Gilens and Page demonstrates as de facto depriving the majority of their right to legislative representation—must contribute to the deteriorating social conditions one observes in the United States today.
Thus, to me Bailey’s explanation for cancel culture seems likely. With so little recourse to the insult of the American system’s obvious injustices, and with political movements to improve the working class’s economic condition sabotaged by business and state, of course the masses would lash out.
