Elon Musk calls for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to be shut down
American billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has called for the US-funded radio stations Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to be shut down. Source: Musk on X (Twitter) Yes, shut them down.
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Are not lot of people clued in to what RFX & VoA are really about nowadays? Because if so, maybe they really have become inefficient propaganda outlets. They could be spending it on new and better propaganda.
I get the impression that the neocon faction is getting purged after having bet everything on Ukraine. The question is what the new faction that's taking power plans to do geopolitically, and we'll have to wait a bit before that becomes clear. I imagine new propaganda outlets will be spun up to support whatever the new narrative is.
Great perspective. It makes the most sense. The faction that said "we will administer the ship of state for all of us" has been shown to have failed and a new faction is not only purging the old faction but is also purging the structures and systems they put in place. Essentially, the new faction of technologists is blowing through the old faction's sunk cost fallacies and emotional attachments, creating the space (vacuum) for new systems to emerge.
And it's clear what the new systems are going to be: artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, autonomous weapons platforms, domestic brownshirts, pre-crime, lebensraum, reindustrialization, and domestic acceleration of precarity.
We can only hope that it doesn't include nukes. But I have a bad feeling I will see one used against humans before I die.
To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we're seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America's "New Money" Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon's take on the Republican "shift" of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.
Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the "Old Money" ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they're also the new overwhelming power in America's elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump's admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the "Old Money."
Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about "New Money" losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the "Old Money" elite nobility, they're deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the "Old Money" elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter's connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.
If this is the case, then we're looking at people who are actually bent on dominating the financial sector, which really behooves us to engage in analysis.
I, for one, don't believe there exists an abstraction higher than the financial industry. I don't think there's something above it that you can make it subservient to. I think that if they want to dominate the financial industry, it means replacing it. And through the lens of the technologist, replacing it means automating it. That means combining capitalist surveillance and computation to automate the deployment of capital, and that means fundamentally reorganizing society into a centrally planned one, albeit centrally planned using computers and AI for the maximization of financial ROI. I think this has been the trend for 25 years now, so I imagine there are very powerful people who believe this enough to try to make it happen.
That would take a good number of years to pull off, and the process would shed a LOT of bankers. It would create entirely new government departments. And it would likely bring about a lot of the things that QAnon people have been afraid of: more digital transactions and far less cash than today, national ID cards with transponders, open use of centralized national biometrics everywhere for everything - essentially the cyberpunk dystopia.
That direction is pretty frightening honestly.
There's definitely an internal contradiction within America's elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America's upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.
The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as "New Money." The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of "persecution" these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.
To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further "technologification" of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.
I think there's a very interesting contradiction here in that the technology oligarchs don't have money. They have securities. They sell some of those securities for money, they receive interest on those securities sometimes, but most of the time they borrow against those securities.
That means that the entire basis for their wealth is in the hands of the financial sector. And this presents a stacked problem for them. First, it means the financial sector has power over them by determining their stock price as well as setting the terms on liquidation and lending. But the second problem is that it's not cash, and therefore the tech oligarchs can't eliminate the financial sector entirely because it will tank or eliminate the value of their securities, which is where most of their wealth is. So they have likely been hard at work for a decade or more trying to figure out how to unseat the financial sector without destroying their own wealth.
Likely it will require use of the government to do it. The first signal they were doing that was 2008 when Facebook became an official channel for presidential campaigns. The fusing of the state and the technology companies accelerated after that. It's likely that this sort of thing was deemed orthogonal to the financial sector. Orthogonal but similar, in that the financial sector was thoroughly fused with the state, exemplified by the Dulles Brothers.
That fusion, though, likely created the path for technology to begin the process of subsuming finance without finance realizing it. And Trump, despite being aligned with finance, appears to be the vehicle for the catalytic changes to make this happen.
I'll go even further and say that Europe represents the financial sector's roots and the Trumpian stance of dominating Europe is a reification of the movement of technology dominating finance domestically.
Very interesting. This could be far more disruptive than I even imagined.
If this is the path we're on, the very obvious linchpin here will be mass produced autonomous weapons platforms or novel (likely energy) weapons (or both) that represent new lethal capabilities and capacities that will take decades for the working class to be able to organize against.
That's my read on the whole thing as well.
I’d be “impressed” if they managed to pull off reindustrialization, given the strength of the finance industry and of neoliberal ideology.
It's not about whether they will pull it off right now, it's about trying to understand what the hell is going on in the minds of the dominant faction. I think reindustrialization is one of their strategic objectives.
reindustrialization
All i can say is, good luck with that. They're gonna have a real tough time pulling that one off when at the same time you have
domestic acceleration of precarity
happening.
Reindustrialization takes rebuilding the human capital base, it takes investing into education, infrastructure, healthcare, housing...none of which are getting any better, in fact they're only getting worse.
There is a fundamental contradiction here between the idea of bringing back industry while at the same time not wanting to do absolutely anything about the social and material conditions or the hyper-financialization of nearly every aspect of the economy that led to industry going away.
And the obsession of their base with ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration is only going to exacerbate the problem even further, as i think even Musk and the other oligarchs recognize who have spoken out against the MAGA base's opposition to things like the H1B visa. They've built up this dumb anti-immigrant narrative and now they themselves have become trapped by it.
I think reindustrialization should be seen the same way Halliburton did Iraq reconstruction. It's just a vehicle for funnelling public funds into the hands of the oligarchs.
Reindustrialization takes rebuilding the human capital base, it takes investing into education, infrastructure, healthcare, housing…none of which are getting any better, in fact they’re only getting worse.
That's not the style of investing Trump is probably thinking about. He's all business so it will be business investments in terms of subsidies, tax incentives and government contracts.
"Human capital" == "handouts" in Trumpland.
I think Trump is similar to other austerity conservative economists hence the cutting of the "fat" : Radio Free Something, VOA, USAID etc etc (even military spending). The idea is to cut a lot of services which will reduce government spending, then juice the industrialists with tax breaks and subsidies. The supposed resulting growth will then help pay the debt off.
Rich people pay for their own stuff. They don't use government education and healthcare. And they don't consume VOA. Hence someone like Trump can basically ditch it easily when looking to cut costs. Even if he was told it's for propaganda, he wouldn't give a fuck about cutting it. It's not important to him. Same with President Musk.
Yes to all of that. I think that is exactly what they plan, and that is exactly why reindustrialization won't happen. You can't reindustrialize with a pauperized, indebted, poorly educated population, particularly not while you also enact racist policies that cause reverse brain drain and shortages of skilled labor. The only question i have is whether they are really so dumb that they believe giving tax breaks to oligarchs and applying some tariffs is sufficient to bring industry back, or if the whole thing was conceived from the start as just another cynical scam.
I think you'll find that industrialization happened under exactly the conditions of a pauperized indebted, poorly educated population suffering under racist policies.
Part of the challenge of reindustrialization is that the working class in America has gotten used to being part of the professional managerial class, has gotten used to things like OSHA, safety, comfort, etc. For 3 generations, at least, the cultural zeitgeist has denigrated laborious work.
What they're doing looks like an attempt to solve this. Assuming they can even create industrial jobs:
Under these conditions, the vast majority of men are going to accept dangerous jobs in infrastructure and industry with moderate pay.
A smaller minority of people are going to be organizing resistance and revolution, just like they did during the industrial revolution, but that's why Thiel is talking about using AI to make sure people are on their best behavior. If you can tightly surveil the workplace and the social behavior of your workers, you don't get much labor organizing, and therefore you tank revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Then the only thing you have to worry about is the lumen, and you solve that with a militarized police force, concentration camps, and the industrialized prison system.
I am not saying this is going to work, I just think it's important to do the thinking work to understand what these people are thinking and how their actions fit a systematized world view. We need to do this to understand the risks and to guide our actions and further analysis.
Ultimately, I think the USA has everything it needs to be second place in the industrialization game - except a market for its goods. By the time the USA industrializes enough to export more, Europe will likely be dependent enough on Russia and China that they will not align with the US economically. The only leverage the USA has on them right now is fossil fuels, which honestly might be enough to keep them as a market, but we'll see.
Without a capitve market, the USA will struggle to export, even if it does industrialize without a fatal debt spiral. The only other solution I can see is to isolate the entire Western Hemisphere including Canada, Mexico, and the entirety of South America and then them into their market. But they're so poor after centuries of oppression it would require some very creative financialization schemes.
I think that's a wildly optimistic take on the likelihood of all of what you described to succeed. I just don't think this strategy is as well thought out and rational as you assume it is, and it will probably run into serious problems as soon as the first contradictions (of which this strategy is chock-full) make themselves visible. But i guess we'll see.
P.S. I also don't think that you can conclude that just because something worked in the 19th century that it will also work today. Industry has changed a lot since then and has different requirements in terms of the kinds of skills needed. Which is why i think it is accurate to say that pauperized labor can't drive reindustrialization because it will suffer from very low productivity and thus low international competitiveness. Unless the US stops both imports and exports and becomes totally inward focused, this strategy won't work.
I think that’s a wildly optimistic take
Imperialists are nothing if not optimistic. They fundamentally believe that they will win and that they will win because their ideas are supreme.
I just don’t think this strategy is as well thought out and rational as you assume it is
I don't know that it's well thought out. I think you and I have to think it out, because we don't have the same priors they do. But I think they are intuitively navigating their ideology. They don't need to fully understand everything they're doing for it to be ideologically congruent. For example, I imagine they said "We need to build more shit here in America!", they were then confronted with business leaders saying they can't find people willing to do factory work, so the next thing they ask themselves is "How do we get more people to do factory work?". They try a few things like propaganda and pay incentives and it doesn't work. So the next thing they ask themselves is "Why don't people want to work?" And that's when the flood gates open: "Liberal arts education. Soft men. They think the work is beneath them because poor brown people do it." etc, etc. So they do this "brainstorm" and then for each thing they go, "OK, how do we counter this?"
Is that "well thought out"? I mean, it's at least basic managerial behavior that we know happens in corporate, and that's where these people all come from, so I just imagine they did the ritual and came up with a task list. And now they're executing it.
it will probably run into serious problems as soon as the first contradictions
That happens all the time in corporate. They never see it coming, but it happens every single time they do something like this. Those serious problems are not interpreted as contradictions, because that would require the possibility of self-awareness and humility. So instead what happens is each contradiction is seen as a moral failing of the people tasked with executing. So the bosses just double down on it with righteous fury, threatening to punish anyone who doesn't make it happen. This gets them in a cycle of getting rid of honest people and hiring yes-sycophants . This cycle continues for as long as the boss can stay in power. The longer the cycle continues, the deeper the chain of sycophants gets. First it's just the direct reports to the boss who get hired, fail, admit defeat, and are then replaced. Eventually they find someone who can survive the game, and they survive the game by replicating the boss's behavior, meaning they cycle through people, rather publicly and brutally, until their direct reports are all sycophants all playing the same game.
I also don’t think that you can conclude that just because something worked in the 19th century that it will also work today.
That's totally fair. I think that the bosses of America, however, only know how to look back to "what used to work" and don't really have a culture of doing new things while under stress. So most of the ruling class is going to look back to the industrial revolution and attempt to replicate any conditions they think existed as a form of magical thinking.
it will suffer from very low productivity and thus low international competitiveness
I don't think it's physically possible for the USA to become internationally competitive at all. I don't think any strategy will work, I don't think any means will bring about the conditions of competitiveness. The USA is too far behind. They squandered every opportunity to learn from Japanese industrial success, choosing instead to punish Japan instead of importing their ideas and spreading them. That was 50 years ago. Now, not only has China adopted best practices, they've got multiple generations of management thinkers and practitioners using a dialectical approach to production, they've got the edge on research, they've got the edge on population, they've got the edge on infrastructure, they've got the edge on international cooperation, they've got the edge on waste management, they've got the edge on power production, they've got the edge on central planning, they've got the edge on currency stability, they've got the edge on productive labor force....
I do not think there is ANY path to international competitiveness for the USA. They will be forced into junior partner status. I doubt the USA could maintain even a number 2 status for very long. The BRI is creating the conditions for a massive transformation that can only be solved by the USA bombing everything, which means that they won't be investing in competition, and since the USA can't bomb China because their bombs rely on Chinese parts, the USA will fall further and further behind China and anyone else that avoids America's hellfire.
In essence, the USA is cooked, but the leaders don't know this. And that's sort of the lens I am using to interpret the actions of American leadership right now. What would a bunch of corporate zombies do if they fundamentally believed the USA was the best and will always be the best despite the evidence before them? What would the combination of that level of fanatical optimism and liberal brain-rot result in and how is it resulting in the behavior we're currently seeing?
I think that's a quite astute analysis. Thank you for elaborating.
The only question i have is whether they are really so dumb that they believe giving tax breaks to oligarchs and applying some tariffs is sufficient to bring industry back
Investment goes where money is so it has some attraction. Probably industry will come back but to a limited degree because the supply chains have not been built AND you have to train workers up. These typically take years to establish especially for stuff like cars and chips.
In the meantime the pain of inflation is going to bite even harder for regular people.
This is probably the only opportunity for regular Americans to organise and get those jobs/wages and make sure to rip off some capitalists who are high on Trump juice. The domestic market is protected by tariffs. Get the bag. Take as much share of profits from the capitalists as possible. Get the employee healthcare and max it out etc.
When those industries go belly up in a few years, those opportunities will be gone.
Complete the pivot to Asia and war in the South China sea
That is a possibility, but retrenchment is another possible outcome.
Honestly I'm super doomer on this. From my perspective, everyone in the US government wants a war with China, they just disagree with how to do it
The debacle in Ukraine might give them pause. The window when US had any serious military advantage over China has already closed, and China will only continue to pull ahead going forward. On top of that, it's been exposed that the US military industry is not able to produce weapons to keep up with Russia, let alone China. And of course, a lot of the existing stockpiles were sent to Ukraine. It's quite likely that the war in Ukraine may have prevented a war with China because Biden admin overcommitted to it.
I hope you're right
me too :)
You mean like Twitter?