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The Wars Come Home | naked capitalism

   November 25, 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wars Come Home | naked capitalism


I always appreciated techno-feudal lord Peter Thiel’s obsession with the blood of the young being used in pursuit of eternal life for himself. It seems a perfectly upfront metaphor for our late-stage capitalism in which the pursuit of profit drains the life of an ever increasing number.

Thiel’s lust for the fountain of youthful blood came to mind recently when reading about Sequoia Capital’s return to Israel.

Sequoia is one of the largest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and it invested early in the likes of Apple, Google, and Oracle. It also sprang the “PayPal Mafia” to prominence, a group that includes Thiel and President-elect Donald Trump’s current sidekick and world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Unsurprisingly, as a citadel of capitalism built on eugenics, bombs, and hatred of the working class, Silicon Valley is now among the upcoming Trump Administration’s biggest backers and helps push for the US’ ongoing involvement in the Gaza genocide.

Sequoia left Israel in 2016 because, according to partner Shaun Maguire, Israeli founders looked to sell early in the hundreds of millions of dollars range while the VC firm prefers to invest in companies that could be worth $50 billion or more.

So why is Sequoia back? Maguire says that “The founders here today are among the most ambitious in the world, and we believe that the country will produce companies large enough to suit the fund.” Oct. 7 and the ensuing genocide play a large role in that calculation.

Sequoia’s dozens of investments are centered around defense tech and cybersecurity and are oftentimes headed by veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces Unit 8200, the central collection unit of the intelligence corps, and the Israel Air Force’s Shaldag Unit, which specializes in clandestine operations and military intelligence.

Israeli tech is of course being used and tested in the genocide:

That doesn’t trouble the likes of Maguire at Sequoia. In his telling he’s a profile in courage for his support of Israel that is under attack from all sides, including the Biden administration. By making such comments he’s presumably implying that the jump on the right of the following graph should go much higher:

He expects Trump to accomplish that. It’s not just Sequoia. Others like Greylock, another Silicon Valley behemoth, and New York City-based Lux Capital, which specializes in “deep” tech startups, are getting in on more action in Israel. Here’s the co-founder of Lux with more details that Friedrich Flick could be proud of:

Lux claims to “champion companies that work at the intersection of the new and the not-yet-imagined, looking decades into the future to create a world most of us can barely imagine.”

That’s one way of putting it.

Maybe it’s not a bad bet on these Companies helping bring that world into being are doing quite well. Israeli defense tech firm Elbit Systems, for example, has a record order backlog worth $22 billion at the moment.

American big tech has long supported the Israeli apartheid regime where its products can be tested, and they continue to do so despite the genocide being perpetrated.

Sequoia, Lux, and the others, are of course betting that these technologies developed in Israel can be brought to scale around the world.

Is it just the tech being exported? While Israel is effectively a colonial laboratory for tech of surveillance, control, and extermination, what does that portend for its benefactor, the US — more specifically our ruling class’ inclinations?

An interesting — if terrifying— thought:

Hopefully not. Nuclear war would, after all, harm the plutocrats as well. Even if they have their bunker, with new Russian missiles they wouldn’t have time to get there. Even if they did, what about their staff? Possibly in preparation for the most likely state to go nuclear: Israel.

Perhaps it is not for nuclear war but for a further radicalization of our government and forms of capital extraction that will require more surveillance, control, and violence.

What could that look like? The Israelization of America is one possibility. There is, after all, clear ideological overlap between the ruling classes of both countries.

Silicon Valley tech billionaires dream of a world where democracy is stamped out. According to Netanyahu, the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism. The future would appear to be here.

Authoritarian Capitalism in Israel

It’s important to note how racial and religious apartheid in Israel has always been inextricably intertwined with — if not driven by — by economic factors.

Before Israel even came into existence, Zionists embarked on a campaign to convince the government in London that a Jewish homeland would be in service to British capital whether in Africa, industrial agriculture in Iraq, or that European Jewish labor could claim Palestine for European empire.

During WWII as the US tried to figure out how it could dominate the world without the cost or bad optics of colonial occupation, Zionism ironically offered an answer. As professor of history at Penn State University Laura Robson writes in her 2023 book “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work”:

Zionism’s vision of remaking geopolitical territory and claiming land for empire through racially conscious settlement practices and intensive industrial development represented a central model for this American-led vision of population engineering.

From its very beginning, Israel was about turning a profit for global capital — even if that meant turning on Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

In the battle for Latrun during the 1948 war, the Israel Defense Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ military training, dooming many of them to instant death.

…The national solution to mass displacement, it was transpiring, could be every bit as inhumane as the imperial one, at least for those who could not contribute as workers.

During the June 1967 war,which resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip Israel’s defense minister Moshe Dayan summarized the economic incentives of occupation:

“…a supplementary market for Israeli goods and services on the one hand, and a source of factors of production, especially unskilled labor, for the Israeli economy on the other.”

Prior to Oct. 7, 2023 there were more than 200,000 Palestinian laborers, including those without permits, who work inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. According to Dr. Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset from the Hadash Party, which supports Jewish-Arab cooperation and workers’ rights, the Gaza genocide is a product of late-stage capitalism:

Here, it is a class issue. It is between the oppressed and the oppressor, between the exploiter and the exploited…National hostility serves the economic and political interests of the ruling classes because that way they can divert the rage, the frustration, the alienation from a class-based one to a national-based one…

In order to justify the crimes that an occupier does, occupiers always, eventually, deteriorate into crimes because, eventually, occupation leads to resistance. In order to refrain from seeing yourself or recognizing yourself as a monster, you have to justify the crimes that you do. You do that by demonizing the occupied. It’s the same everywhere. It’s not something that was born under the Israeli occupation. The slave orders in the United States of America did so. The Germans did so, too, with the Jews. The Apartheid regime in South Africa did that with the non-whites, especially with the blacks; of course, there was a hierarchy of different so-called races. It is the same here, a language of occupation.

There are other economic factors to consider, of course. Israel tests out surveillance, population control, and military technology on the captive population and is reportedly using artificial intelligence to aid its genocide.

There’s also the issue of natural resources:

And there’s the Gaza 2035 vision, which is part of the wider US-backed India-Middle East-EU Economic Corridor:

What of the Palestinians in Gaza 2035?

…throughout the three ‘phases’ explained in the document, it becomes clear that the Palestinians permitted to live among the ruins of their homeland would provide cheap labour in this new ‘regional trade and energy hub’ intended for Israeli business interests.

Displacing a population and destroying their existing social, architectural and economic fabric under the guise of modernisation harks back to colonial ideas about certain races and societies being apparently unfit or incapable of extracting the maximum profit from land – an argument favoured by nineteenth-century colonisers from South Africa to North America. Three hundred years of this thinking has landed us in our grotesquely unequal present, yet former colonial powers in Europe and settler colonies like the US continue to finance the militarisation of Israel.

We can turn to President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior foreign policy adviser and property dealer, Jared Kushner, for a glimpse into the real estate potential of such a plan.

“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” Kushner said. “And I’m looking at the situation and I’m thinking: what would I do if I was there?”

For Kushner, the solution is simple: “I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

And that’s probably a good point to segue to the US.

American Parallels

There’s been a lot of analysis about what Trump’s Israel-first cabinet picks mean for Israel, Iran, and the Middle East at large. Less so of what that means for the US.

To be clear, the following is not an argument that Trump represents a unique threat. If anything, his warranted quest for revenge against certain neocon factions and Blob outfits could produce net positives. On the other hand, he is the product of our plutocrat-controlled capitalist system just as Biden, Trump I, and Obama before him. And so short of overhauling the system, the question becomes how will it make use of the Trump administration at this time?

Let’s remember that it was mere months ago that Silicon Valley was largely aligned with the Biden Administration. How quickly things can change.

Tech, finance, government, and Israel are set to be aligned again under Trump, as they are with most every administration. Maybe one difference between Biden and Trump is that we switch out the extreme identity politics for the more old-fashioned religious fanatics:

Together they’re all marching in lockstep with Israel:

Maguire, the above-mentioned partner at Sequoia is an example. He used to be a Democrat. Now he’s ready to go to the mattresses for Trump. And should a Democrat prevail in 2028, he’ll likely be on that team too.

With both parties openly corrupt, it’s always easy to be where action is as it’s only a question of how much. And they’re certainly hoping for action with Trump.

Dovi Frances, an Israeli-American founding partner of the Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Group 11, is a major Trump backer. He’s also being tapped to set up an AI National Directorate in Israel under Netanyahu. An AI directorate already exists in the Israeli Innovation Authority, but the new program is intended to coordinate all the government’s AI activities and might have some big-name backers despite is stated mission being so mundane. From Globes:

Senior figures who are familiar with the plan that has been presented by Frances to Netanyahu say that the two men are expecting the involvement of several senior personalities in the international business community to help realize the plan. Some of these personalities are close to President Donald Trump including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal with Musk, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever who after leaving the ChatGPT developer has founded SST, a new AI company that will be based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.

Of course, the Americans aren’t the only ones taking a keen interest in Israeli AI — at least according to Frances. Here he is writing in The Jerusalem Post about all the opportunities the Trump Administration could usher in:

Gulf investors have quietly begun to join Israeli-related tech companies’ cap tables, injecting capital into Israeli firms, often without public announcement. These activities—both sales and investments—highlight the growing economic ties between Israel and the Gulf and the immense interest from both sides in fostering deeper technological collaboration.

Under the Trump administration, with the expansion of agreements to include Saudi Arabia, Israeli AI companies could serve as platforms for entire industries in the Gulf, including education, banking, healthcare, and cybersecurity.

…The political instability in the Middle East, the AI revolution, and the US political landscape are not isolated from each other—they are intertwined.

Two months ago, I met with Donald Trump in Washington, DC, where we discussed the AI revolution and how his administration, if re-elected, could help Israel maintain its technological superiority in the region. We agreed that once he won the election, we would revisit the topic in a future meeting.

And so we will.

And so the rest of us are faced with the next level of fusion between tech, finance and government — an agreement to protect profit and tech superiority and one written in the blood of genocide.

Whether or not the Gulf states are on board (hard to believe they’d rely on Israel/US for such tech considering how it has been weaponized recently, but what do I know?), Israeli tech is still an export industry. And what’s the motto? “Move fast and break things.”

More of the Same in the US?

The reasons behind the synergy between Tel Aviv, Washington, and Silicon Valley isn’t hard to see.  The surveillance and population tech used in Israel is going to be welcomed home with open arms as described by Tech Policy Press:

 Big Tech firms and venture capitalists are well positioned to exploit the techno-nationalist mood. During the campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped shape the President-elect’s tech policy agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, campaign allies said the new administration will discard Biden’s AI guardrails and go full steam ahead on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity. To meet the vast energy demands of data centers, Trump has called for a boom in fossil fuel production.

Swell. What could that look like in practice? It ranges from the extreme (the government watchdog Public Citizen came out with a report on Friday warning about the Pentagon developing AI weapons that can “deploy lethal force autonomously—without a human authorizing the specific use of force in a specific context”) to the more mundane (especially with Lina Khan and company no longer pushing back):

Maybe nowhere is Silicon Valley’s opportunity bigger than with Trump’s plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

The US has long used the border area as a testing ground for surveillance technology, and that looks set to increase dramatically as the Trump-aligned and spook-led dark money and charity organizations sounding the loudest alarms about the border are also set to be the biggest winners financially.

These include companies like  PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA and Texas DPS, among other agencies.

The Trump administration’s heavy focus on deporting illegal immigrants reminds me of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the middle class.” Built on half truths, it maintained that taking on transnational threats was going to help rebuild American industry and provide good-paying jobs. It ended with few of the jobs and desperate attempts by the administration to tout the production of weapons being used to kill thousands in the Middle East and Ukraine.

If you don’t correctly identify the true threat to the American working class, the solutions aren’t going to work. And that threat is that the American ruling class does not view the rest of the population as fellow citizens, nor fellow human beings. They are vessels to be used for profit extraction — or according to Thiel, potentially blood extraction depending on its purity.

Just to name a few recent examples, we only have to look at Obama’s foreclosure jamboree while banks were rescued, the opioids mass murder, ongoing rises in deaths of despair, ever-increasing homelessness and more draconian efforts to punish the unhoused, mass imprisonment as the result of viewing crime as a problem of too many criminals rather than too few well-paying jobs, the entire US healthcare system, and an ongoing pandemic that harms working class Americans most.

Will Trump take on the forces causing this carnage or will he blame illegal immigrants and provide more of an “innovative” testing ground for Israeli-style surveillance and detention tech on immigrants?

My bet would be on the latter. For comparison we can look to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who rode to power two years ago based in part on strong opposition to illegal immigration and asylum and despite howls of fascism. Meloni quickly backed down on her deportations pledge and ended up increasing the supply of cheap foreign labor at the request of Italian capital. She’s made a big show of it all, however, and now has a nearly $1 billion detention facility in Albania sitting empty after courts blocked the plan.

As Yves pointed out recently, the easiest way to deal with illegal immigration is to make it difficult for these migrants to get paid work.

But that doesn’t seem to be the point, which is instead to find a scapegoat for all the problems plaguing working class Americans — ones driven by rapacious capital. After all, the exploitation of immigrants and resulting wage pressure is the result of government and capital conspiring to make sure it is available. It is the result of the US destroying immigrants’ home countries with coups, sanctions, and other means. And how about the NGOs flying them in. Let’s not forget that Biden presided over plenty of deportations and kept working on the border wall.

On genocide in Gaza, economic issues at home, and immigration theater the two political parties are in tacit agreement. Maybe we have more of this to look forward to, though:

Will they do this with keffiyehs now that orange man bad is back?

The Ruling Class Not as Dumb as They Seem

Let’s briefly examine the other major bloodbath fueled by Washington these days. In the case of the war in Ukraine, the West is unprepared, unwilling, and impotent to affect change on the battlefield, yet the “support” continues to flow to Kiev and escalation continues. There are many potential explanations.

  • Mentally impaired — potentially by repeated Covid infection — and really believe that Russia is going to collapse any day now?
  • Are they simply trying to get past the Inauguration Day finish line before allowing Ukraine to collapse and then blame Trump?
  • Flailing about as it’s curtains for the New American Century only a quarter of the way in?
  • Or maybe our plutocrats and their political representatives are not as dumb as they seem.

Maybe they know that there are “no more easy wars left to fight,” and are resigned to turning inwards and doubling down on profit extraction in territory they do control.

In Europe, at least, the endless gaslighting over the Russia threat certainly serves a purpose. Look at what it’s helped accomplish:

  • Political, economic, and security subservience to the US.
  • More power to the Queen Ursula-led European Commission, which enacts Washington will.
  • Enrichment of multinational fossil fuel and weapons companies at the expense of Europeans who are seeing their standard of living fall as a result.
  • An erosion of freedoms.

In the US, the relentless Trump fear campaign alongside the denigration of Trump supporters largely divides the loudest among us into two camps: those who believe he’s the reincarnation of Hitler and those who think he’s the savior.

Meanwhile the majority just want their economic concerns addressed, and all signs point to them being disappointed. The mainstream media and political figures have an interest in looking for monsters like Russia and Hitler under all the wrong beds. We’re not looking at their benefactors, the real enemy who is the same as it always was: bi-partisan economic warfare waged by the richest.

The US might lose every military confrontation, but that’s a war it still knows how to fight and win.

And while there’s clearly a lot of infighting going on among the US ruling elite these days, there’s at least one unifying force that helps them hold hands and sing “Kumbayah”:

“Unleashing” Silicon Valley in a quest for more productivity and profit will also no doubt sooth many wounds.

Going back to Haz Al-Din’s thought in the tweet above that we are being prepared for much wider devastation, which is unsurprising.

Capitalism and neoliberalism means a disaffected population as every last drop is squeezed from Peter Thiel’s blood providers. ​​Inequality is everywhere a growth industry and with it the fear that if wealth is controlled by a minority but political power is controlled by the majority, well, then it won’t be minority-controlled wealth for long.

And so along with financing directed toward programs  to maximize profit we get the same towards systems of control, which can help maximize that profit and deal with any pestering side effects like a restless population.

Perhaps this go-round “America First” means that as a result of being frustrated abroad, the ruling class will turn inwards with Israel as the model (which also serves as a global reminder to weaker nations looking to rid themselves of Western extractive capital).

What to do? We can return to Dr. Ofer Cassif for one potential solution. He’s talking about Israel (where I’m not sure it still applies since the country is so far gone military defeat might be the only option), but the underlying message could still be useful elsewhere:

The exploited Israelis, especially the proletarians, will not see their own employers as their exploiters and class enemies but as the Palestinians. Who benefits from that? Who’s going to benefit from that? The exploiters. So, ending the occupation, besides being an end in itself because it involves direct oppression and exploitation, will also reduce, using the language of Lenin, the hostility between the peoples. In that sense, it will not only give us a better future to live as good neighbors but will also allow us to make it easier for us to divert our rage against our so-called domestic exploiters.

Is it May Day, 2028 yet?

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