Sometimes a story bubbles to the surface that lays bare the utterly corrupted nature of Western political elites, only to be as rapidly as possible “disappeared” by the mainstream media (MSM). Just before the 2020 US elections there was the Hunter Biden Laptop story that threatened a wide range of such elites as well as endangering the Biden election, and was therefore made to disappear in a haze of “unverified” and “Russian dirty tricks” MSM hand-waving and the media cancelling of the New York Post. Two years later, with a Republican house majority about to investigate Hunter Biden, the MSM are being forced to accept the veracity of the laptop and the damning information that it contains. We can expect much word manipulation and reframing attempts to play down the importance of its contents; which point to Ukraine as just another fraud and money-laundering opportunity for the politicians, state operatives and their private sector sponsors.
The details coming out of the collapse of FTX, with the massive flows of money not only to the Democratic Party but also many Republican politicians, the complete lack of regulatory oversight and financial controls within the company, and the “pally” nature of the relationship between Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and many senior politicians and regulators scream “establishment money laundering machine”. All facilitated by the US Supreme Court decisions that equated political donations to free speech. SBH also spent liberally on the halo creating public relations processes, making him appear to be an ethical genius investor with great appeal to the liberals, the woke, and the entrepreneurial-foundation-complex; learning from the likes of Bill Gates. The seeming lack of interest in the arrest and jailing of SBF also point to him having strong establishment connections and/or embarrassing information. I would most certainly not be surprised if SBF “suicided” himself in the next weeks and months.
From the 1970s onwards, we have witnessed the utter decay of Western economic elites into rentier extractivism, facilitated by their bought and paid for courtiers in the political and state bureaucratic realm. When one understands this, the twenty years and US$2 trillion spent on the occupation of Afghanistan, which ended in abject failure when viewed from a traditional geopolitical lens, start to make sense. Hardly any of the money went to help the Afghani people, rather it went into the pockets of corrupt officials and military contractors; and that’s not even mentioning the huge growth of drug profits that occurred under the occupation. The Afghanistan operation served as a huge money transfer operation from the US people, in the form of the state, to economic elites and their courtiers. Within the military, it also served to support the upward career trajectory of so many chicken hawk political careerists – many of whom retired into positions on the boards of directors of those military contractors.
The US funded right-wing coup in Ukraine in 2014 provided numerous opportunities for the extractive elites. Firstly, the whole nation could be “Haitinized” into a vast low wage sweatshop and the richly fertile lands and raw materials looted. Secondly, vast sums could be spent “Westernizing” the Ukrainian military and its state institutions, providing rivers of financial gravy for Western contractors, state functionaries and NGOs. Then in addition, there was the blindingly obvious straight-forward bribery, as with Hunter Biden’s “job” with a Ukrainian natural gas exploration company. The final cherry on the top of the cake was that Ukraine could be used to destabilize Russia and hopefully return it to the Western dominance and extraction that seemed to be so achievable in the 1990s. The most dangerous thing to the Western establishment would be a thorough Russian victory in Ukraine and the unearthing of the massive graft operations practised there. Without Afghanistan and now Ukraine, the establishment would also be lacking a large-scale scheme for the ongoing looting of the US Treasury.
The utter degradation of the Western, and especially US, elites into rentiership and the strip mining of their own state and society means that the Western nations are unable to compete with the rising powers effectively – as this would require a significant reduction in those elites wealth and ongoing rentier/extractive incomes. Instead, we see these elites pontificate about a “reshoring” that will not happen to any meaningful degree (as it would crush Western corporate profit margins and strengthen the power of labour at home) while attempting to throw sand in the wheels of the development of nations such as China, Russia and Iran through sanctions, extra-territorial technology transfer bans and support for internal oppositions. As they cannot make their own nations stronger, they must make the others weaker. In the case of Europe, such actions have backfired and threaten to push its industries into a long-term catastrophic decline. In this case, the US seems to be attempting to strip mine its’ European “allies” of their industrial strength.
In the next decade to come we will see more of the same as the elites of China, Russia and Iran work generally toward furthering their nation’s national interests, rather than their own at the expense of the nation. Short of a revolution in the West, the European dominance of the past few hundred years will see its Sun set in a surprisingly short amount of time.
If I were SBF I would be very worried. FTX was an utter scam from start to finish. The crew running it were all obvious morons and that will be their excuse. 'We were all wrapped up in this thing and it got out of hand!' Maybe they'll do some time. But someone has to pay and that's SBF. The real manipulators of FTX can't afford SBF spilling the beans - or even testifying as he'll be exposed for the utter moronic fake he is - so that can't happen. Best he Epsteins himself so all those untidy questions don't get asked. The MSM has already laid the groundwork for his epitaph.
great overview roger.. thank you..