On February 13, the US Senate passed a bill including $95.3 billion in taxpayer handouts the Ukrainian, Israeli, and Taiwanese regimes.
Inter-, intra-, and bi-partisan wrangling in the Senate, House, and Biden administration will likely change the exact size and composition of those handouts right up to the moment of final passage and presidential signature, but let’s accept that $95.3 billion as a starting point for how it’s going to get marketed to you and how much it’s going to lighten your wallet.
The answer to the latter question is: About $287 per American. Keep that in mind, because we’ll be coming back to it.
The marketing points will include items like “only 1.5% of what the federal government spent last year!” and “only 11.6% of last year’s US military spending!”
And, of course, the old perennial: “We’re not just giving them the money — they have to spend it in the US, creating jobs by buying weapons and ammunition from American military contractors! It’s like we’re giving it to ourselves!”
No, it’s not like we’re giving it to ourselves — it’s like politicians are giving it to politically connected corporations, minus an “administrative” rake-off for the various involved regimes, at our expense.
What could you do with $287 — or, if your family is average size (3.13 persons), what could you do with about $900?
Unfortunately, however, it’s difficult for a weak people — people who are frightened of their own shadows and deeply afraid of losing their dole — to overthrow a big and powerful government that has made them that way.
For all of our lives, it has been the aim of most Americans to make the federal government stronger, especially with respect to the warfare state. The principal justification for an ever more powerful government is that it keeps the American people safe from the likes of terrorists, drug dealers, communists, illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and Muslims. Moreover, it is argued, a powerful military-intelligence establishment enables the U.S. government to violently police the world and thereby earn respect and credibility from foreign regimes.
What hardly anyone notices about this big-government shibboleth is the price that is paid for it: a weak nation.
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For example, no one can deny that the American people, despite living under the most powerful government in history, are among the most frightened people in the world. This phenomenon was perfectly manifested after the 9/11 attacks, when most Americans eagerly and willingly traded away their freedom for the aura of “security.” Examples include the support for the USA Patriot Act, the TSA takeover of airports, the unconstitutional invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture center at Guantanamo Bay, the power to torture and assassinate American citizens, and the illegal telecom surveillance scheme.
Westerners who don’t appreciate the extreme dysfunctionality of western civilization are like someone in an abusive marriage who hasn’t yet recognized that there’s a problem, or someone who had a violent and chaotic childhood who still thinks their home life was basically normal.
All of us understand that there are problems with our society, and most of us understand that a lot of of those problems are severe. But few westerners really get just how bad it is. How pervasively diseased it is.
In reality, we are living in a profoundly sick dystopia that is built on a foundation of human corpses and fueled by an endless river of human blood. Our news media are propaganda services, our entertainment is brainwashing, and our mainstream culture is social engineering, all built to keep us turning the gears of a vast globe-dominating empire.
There’s a widespread assumption throughout the western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists. In fact western civilization is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.
Western minds don’t like to be told this, because it goes against everything they’ve been trained to believe about their nation, their society, and their world. Obviously we are much freer here than those poor saps to the east; here in the west we are free to choose between 197 flavors of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies. We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labor at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing. We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.
The latest PR claim is that abysmal customer service will all be fixed by AI-based chatbots and digital assistants. Based on my experience, I beg to differ: the chatbots simply add another layer of incompetence and complexity to the wretched, time-wasting, frustrating mess.
All the work that once was performed by agencies and companies has been offloaded onto the customer. This is called shadow work: work we perform that isn’t paid or even counted as “work,” though it eats up our time and energy, leaving us less leisure and more frayed.
One wonders what we’re paying for via taxes, products and services, when we end up having to do so much of the work ourselves for nothing.
Let’s look at a day-to-day reality that is so ubiquitous it doesn’t attract the attention it deserves:
Digital services–the foundation of the digital economy–are dumpster fires we’re supposed to put out ourselves. The services are broken, dysfunctional rubbish, and yet somehow the agencies or corporations that are responsible for the endless dumpster fires of their digital interfaces have shifted the burdens of this incompetence onto the consumer / customer, who is supposed to put the fire out ourselves and make do with the smoldering sludge at the bottom of the dumpster.
Digital services are everything relating to customer service or customer portals / interfaces. The latest PR claim is that abysmal customer service will all be fixed by AI-based chatbots and digital assistants. Based on my experience, I beg to differ: the chatbots simply add another layer of incompetence and complexity to the wretched, time-wasting, frustrating mess.
All the work that once was performed by agencies and companies has been offloaded onto the customer. This is called shadow work: work we perform that isn’t paid or even counted as “work,” though it eats up our time and energy, leaving us less leisure and more frayed.
The ever heavier burdens of shadow work are a major reason modern life is increasingly stressful and harried: what was once done for customers as part of the service being paid for is now the customer’s responsibility.
I just spent–or shall we be honest and say “I wasted”– significant time navigating AI chatbots and a smartphone app which is touted as an AI assistant. The corporate entity is Xfinity (previously Comcast), one of the nation’s cartel of Internet-telecom providers.
The internet-service AI chatbot is SMS-based, and it works by offering the consumer-customer a limited menu of options, often only two but occasionally up to four. If your issue isn’t covered by the options, then you must begin a wild-goose chase in which you select whatever option you hope might be a way station to resolving the actual issue.
As for the iPhone app, it certainly excels at looking useful, and in pitching an endless scroll of upselling, but in actually identifying the problem and resolving it, the app was a complete failure, misleading, inaccurate and frustratingly limited–in a word, dumb, the opposite of useful and intelligent.
The situation is I’m responsible for a rarely used Internet-Wi-Fi “gateway,” what we used to call a modem and router, that’s 2,500 miles from my home. So all management of the account and hardware/software must be done remotely. Theoretically, AI-enhanced apps are tailor-made for remote management and trouble-shooting.
The gateway wasn’t working, and the source of the problem required an actual human technician to visit the site, for the problem could have been a cut cable, a loose connection, the modem, or any number of other causes. The technician arrives, our friend meets them, and the tech installs a new gateway: problem solved, Wi-Fi works great.
Until the next day, when the Wi-Fi stops working. Turning to the AI app, I test the system, and the app reports that everything is working perfectly: the network connection and the Wi-Fi to our friend’s phone and laptop are all strong. Only the Wi-Fi doesn’t work, and power-cycling the gateway and restarting Wi-Fi on the phone and laptop accomplishes nothing.
The chatbot generates a series of “verification codes” which don’t restore Wi-Fi, they only direct our friend to download the corporate app, which after she does so, fixes nothing and offers nothing.
After wasting a frustratingly large amount of time fiddling with the app on my end, I give up and ask to get a callback from the chatbot. A polite rep (based in the Philippines) calls me back, and after hearing my description of the issue, he reports that he sees the source of the problem right away: an update to the gateway’s software did not load properly, and so no amount of restarting would get it to work properly.
One would think the AI app’s troubleshooting script would include a check on whether the gateway’s software was actually functioning or not, but you would be wrong. The app said everything was nominal even when it didn’t work.
While he re-installed the software, I chatted with the rep about his working from home–a real boon as it eliminated his commute and enabled him to help with the family’s infant. He said we’d have to restart the gateway and then it should work. For good measure, I changed the Wi-Fi access password, and to my great relief, our friend once again had Wi-Fi.
Let’s consider the productivity gains / losses resulting from the chatbot and phone app’s troubleshooting and menu of fixes. The AI-enthused analysts only consider the corporate side’s measures of productivity: did more profitable work get done by employees and capital / computers, etc.?
Fear (and worry) is the coin of the realm in every national security state. The more people are afraid, the more they will look to the national-security establishment to keep them safe. That ensures the continued existence of the national-security establishment as well as ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess.
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, who recently retired as director of the National Security Agency, is worried. He’s worried about terrorism, drug cartels, Russia, China, hackers, spies, and other scary things. His many worries are detailed in an op-ed he has in the Washington Post today entitled, “What Worries Me Most After Five Years as Leader of the NSA.”
Surprisingly, for some unknown reason, Nakasone expressed no worry whatsoever about the “invasion” of illegal immigrants on our southern border. Wouldn’t you think that a career military man and the head of the NSA would be worried about an ongoing “invasion” of our nation? Sounds like a grave case of military malpractice to me.
Nakasone’s role as a military general helps to remind us of the gigantic military-intelligence establishment that controls our country. It’s easy to view the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA as three separate and distinct entities. In actuality, they are three parts of an overall entity known as the national-security establishment. It is one gigantic military-intelligence entity that is simply divided into three parts — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Longtime readers of my work know that I have long recommended a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Glennon’s thesis, to which I subscribe, is an ominous one: The national-security establishment — not the president, Congress, or Supreme Court — runs the federal government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs.
The federal government was not always a national-security state. For more than 150 years, Americans lived under a type of governmental structure known as a limited-government republic.
The difference between a limited-government republic and a national-security state is day and night. The powers of a limited-government republic are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and are also restricted by the Bill of Rights. The powers of a national-security state are omnipotent and unrestricted by anything, including the powers of torture, assassination, and indefinite detention, not to mention coups, invasions, occupations, and wars of aggression.
Fear (and worry) is the coin of the realm in every national security state. The more people are afraid, the more they will look to the national-security establishment to keep them safe. That ensures the continued existence of the national-security establishment as well as ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess.
“Editor’s Note: We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms.”
International Man: Western countries are leading the charge in restructuring their economies around the issue of climate change. They’re committed to a comprehensive agenda to “decarbonize” their economies by 2050.
What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey: To sum it up in one word, it’s insane. In two words, it’s criminally insane.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the overwhelmingly major fuel source was wood. After that, we went to coal, which was a big improvement in density of energy and economics. Then, we went to oil, another huge improvement in energy density and economics.
These things happened not because of any government mandates but simply because they made both economic and technological sense. If the market had been left alone, the world would undoubtedly be running on nuclear. Nuclear is unquestionably the safest, cheapest, and cleanest type of mass power generation. This isn’t the time to go into the numerous reasons that’s true. But if nuclear had been left unregulated, we’d already be using small, self-contained, fifth-generation thorium reactors, generating power almost too cheap to meter. The world would already be running on truly clean green electricity.
Instead, time, capital, and brainpower have been massively diverted to so-called “ecological” power sources—mainly wind and solar—strictly for ideological reasons. The powers that be want to transition the whole world to phony green energy, like it or not.
I’m all for green energy in principle. There’s no question that solar and wind are worthwhile and effective for select applications—generally small, isolated, special locations where conventional fuel is inconvenient or too costly. The efficiency of solar has been tremendously improved over the last few decades, as has wind efficiency. But neither make any sense for mass base-load power in industrial economies.
With further technological advances, they may become more economic someday. Perhaps people will eventually put large collectors in high Earth orbit and microwave the power down to the surface. There are all kinds of sci-fi possibilities. But right now, “green” is just a nice word for “stupid,” “ideological,” or “government-sponsored.”
Doing things the green way takes power away from the markets, which is where people vote with their dollars. It instead places power in the hands of ideologues and bureaucrats.
In brief, wind and solar are being promoted at the very time, nuclear and fossil fuels are being damned. It’s the opposite of what should be happening and a very bad trend from every point of view.
Put me down as liking the birds and the bunnies as much as anyone else, but I’m anti-green. Anyway, ecofreaks don’t really care about the birds and the bunnies so much. That’s just a veneer. They actually just hate people and really want them to disappear. At a minimum, they want to control them. And the great global warming/anti-fossil-fuel hysteria is a great way to do it.
What we do get for the overall well-over-a-trillion in yearly military spending is…a hollowed-out military that doesn’t even have enough ammunition to defend the United States!
So both the Bell-Textron with the 360 Invictus and Sikorsky with its Raider X were funded and developed these past five years with more than two billion dollars and…suddenly…the Pentagon said, “never mind.”
(This article first appeared as an exclusive update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.)
Why does the US military budget keep skyrocketing? The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2024 passed in December came in at a whopping $841.1 billion, and that’s just part of the total amount that will be spent on military-related issues this year. Just this weekend, for example, the Senate cleared the way for a nearly $100 billion in additional spending to boost the military capabilities of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan!
What do we get for all that spending? A military that can do whatever it takes to defend the United States? A military whose mere formidable existence acts as a deterrent to any would-be invaders of our geographically unique country surrounded by a massive moat? We shouldn’t be naive!
What we do get for the overall well-over-a-trillion in yearly military spending is…a hollowed-out military that doesn’t even have enough ammunition to defend the United States!
We get a military that is so unattractive to young people that they have had to make radical reforms in desperate attempt to recover from the recruiting death-spiral – including, in the US Navy at least, abandoning the requirement to have any educational credential at all, including a high school diploma or GED. Prospective US Navy personnel need only score 50 or above out of 99 on the notoriously rudimentary ASVAB test (that means with a score of 50% – which in the real world is a failing grade – you’re in!).
But surely for all those billions we are getting weapons that are absolutely crushing it on the battlefield? Not exactly. As we have seen for two years on the Ukraine battlefield of the US proxy war against Russia, each new “wonder weapon” sent by the Pentagon – starting with Javelins and continuing through HIMARS, Bradley fighting vehicles, M1A1 Abrams tanks, and even the new Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (which are so new the Pentagon itself doesn’t yet have them in its arsenal) – is quickly defeated by Russian counter-measures.
Even the rabidly pro-war and anti-Russia Washington Post – the Pravda of our regime – is admitting that Ukraine is headed for defeat. The Pentagon – and NATO – has sent all they had into Ukraine to fight Russia and still it is losing.
How could it be that we spend orders of magnitude more on the military than a country like Russia and still are being bettered on the battlefield? It is not that our servicemembers are sub-par or that the US is incapable of technical and industrial innovation.
The problem is very different. It has to do with a deeply broken system that serves not US security, but special interests.
MCViewPoint 
