davel

Bullets:

• The war in Ukraine consumes vast quantities of arms and ammunition, supplied almost entirely by the US and the EU.
• Battlefield demands in Ukraine far outstrip the combined production of the entire Western bloc.
• Arsenals across the EU are empty, and the United States is far more reluctant today to supply the Ukraine war effort.
• But Europe faces severe problems in their efforts to rearm, and to make good their public support and promises to Ukraine.
• Despite having a far smaller economy than either the US or the EU, Russia easily produces more ammunition and war materiel than the NATO countries, combined.
• Meanwhile, Russia's close ally China has the world's most productive industrial sector, and monopolies on the supply chains necessary to build armaments.
• Last year, China cut off exports of antimony, a critical component of explosives, and antimony prices have more than quadrupled in less than a year.

Full text of the paywalled article, without the markup or the dozens of links, because I don’t have the patience to recreate them.

From the BBC’s “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backing’ in warm No 10 welcome” today:

Sir Keir Starmer has told Volodymyr Zelensky he has "full backing across the United Kingdom" as the two met in Downing Street.

The Ukrainian president told the prime minister he was happy his country had “such friends” after arriving in the UK in the wake of a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump that descended into a row between the two leaders…

I read that headline as “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backrub,’” which might have been more accurate. The Zelensky World Tour for the last week now includes punking the White House, lecturing America for its insufficient billions, getting yelled at for having “no cards” by a furious Donald Trump (who took offense “on Putin’s behalf,” not the taxpayer’s, according to the New York Times), then instantly backtracking on X and opening the door to a NATO-less solution. Afterward, he fled across the pond to England, where he offered to resign in exchange for NATO admission before dismounting into the arms of Starmer, who eased urgency toward a settlement by pledging to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it may take.”

Zelensky’s transformation from affable populist to Anne Applebaum’s idea of a sex symbol was off-putting even before he started appearing before swooning legislators around the world wearing his trademark wan face and “I Saved The World From Putin and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” costume. We just spent three years turning a fixable local issue into a test case for a new ethos of imperial intransigence, one that apparently requires constant weeding of unbelievers and full control of media to preserve “democracy.” Zelensky may not have started as a hawk for this global Misinformation is Murder movement, but once he realized selling the idea was a requirement for NATO’s billions, he threw himself into the role with gusto. Now, he’s refusing to give up the part.

Many readers were offended last week by my irreligious attitude toward Ukraine’s president. Those of us who won’t salute this NATO-crafted character actor are apparently “careening into full-on MAGA paranoia,” no better than “comrades” and “fellow travelers” in Vladimir Putin’s figurative if not literal employ. The former comedian is now reprising Ben Kingsley’s Marvel role as the Mandarin, playing tough-guy mascot for transnational bureaucrats whose idea of a good joke is getting Americans to pay to correct their own wrong opinions. Maybe he’s doing what he has to do for his country, but seriously, fuck him. And fuck Starmer, for that matter.

If you’re not offended by the whole affair, you should be. Recapping:

Placed in an impossible situation when Russian forces massed on his border in early 2022, Zelensky at first pursued a strategy of speaking his mind. He criticized Americans for withdrawing diplomats from Kyiv pre-invasion, saying, “We do not have a Titanic situation here.” American officials complained he was “poking us in the eye” with comments that were “mind-boggling,” adding they were “puzzling” over his apparent optimism about a deal with Russia. They preferred he take a different approach, one in line with a new American idea about “information warfare” that didn’t permit local politicians to act like they had a say in how America chose to conduct wars on their territories.

Before Russia invaded, American officials announced in a series of high-profile features in the New York Times that it planned to “beat the master at his own game” by using the press to engage in “information warfare,” claiming it was difficult to go “toe-to-toe with an autocratic state” if the U.S. couldn’t also flood the media zone with untrammeled propaganda. The first target of “information warfare” was said to be Putin. By releasing intelligence in papers like the Times, we were told, he might be stunned by our level of insight into his operations and “reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.” Pre-invasion, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine even told us the new strategy was working, that “Putin has already blinked” and was now “looking for a way out.”

Tanks rolled anyway three weeks later, after which we were told there was a new target of “information warfare”: ordinary people, including Ukrainians and the foreign populations supporting them. Our leading media outlets now filled with heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance, including the eerily Bastogne-like “Go fuck yourself” tale of Snake Island Ukrainians choosing death over surrender to a Russian warship, or portraits of the mysterious “Ghost of Kyiv,” a MiG-29 fighter pilot who “dominates the skies” with his supersonic “brass balls.” The story was repeated over channels like MSNBC even after it came out that the key images had been stitched together from old Twitter posts and a flight simulator program:

[Video insert]

The Times in pointing out that these stories proved mythical noted they “do not compare to the falsehoods being spread by Russia,” and that it was “important” to “keep morale high among the fighters and marshal global support for their cause.” A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Peter Singer, said, “If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose.” He added that in the social media age, audiences are targets and participants, so sharing such images “makes them combatants of a sort as well.”

We were no longer just readers about the conflict in Ukraine, but a type of soldier in battle. By swallowing tales like the “Ghost of Kyiv,” we were “doing our part,” to put it in Starship Troopers terms. But how to square this with the movement against “misinformation”? First, the Times quoted one “Twitter user” saying, “‘Why can’t we just let people believe some things?’” Then it quoted Twitter, which said such videos didn’t violate its terms of service. Finally, Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos declared, “I think this demonstrates the limits of ‘fact-checking’ in a fast-moving battle with real lives at stake.”

Things got weirder when the excuses for leaving mythical stories untouched coincided with Europe’s decision to ban RT and Sputnik continent-wide for the crime of “disinformation and information manipulation.” Microsoft, in announcing its adherence to Europe’s decision, echoed other American firms in pledging to stop “state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” bent on “undermining truth.” Most Americans seemed to agree with this decision. Even some once-liberal friends of mine explained in the New Republic that losing RT was no big loss, both because RT was “ridiculous” and because it gave the likes of Tucker Carlson “Russian talking points.”

It wasn’t until a year later that we found out that these events coincided with a broad-scale program in which the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, sent lists of accounts it wished to ban to the FBI, which in turn sent those requests to American platforms. We thought it was a scoop when a letter from the FBI’s San Francisco office to Twitter asking to remove Canadian journalist Aaron Maté along with hundreds of other accounts was found in the Twitter Files.

That was just one item on a giant conveyor belt of SBU requests to Twitter, Instagram, and other outlets. The House Weaponization of Government Committee later found the SBU induced the FBI to pass on requests to remove 15,865 posts across 5,165 Facebook accounts, and even requested (by mistake, possibly) the removal of the official Russian language Instagram account of the US State Department, @USAPoRusski. When colleague Lee Fang managed to contact Ilya Vitiuk, head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity service, and asked how he differentiated “Russian disinformation” from legitimate content, Vitiuk explained, “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’”

From SBU to FBI to STFU: Left, SBU requests to Meta sent via FBI. Right, an SBU-to-FBI-to-Twitter request, from Twitter Files

In April 2023 word broke that an Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira was arrested after leaking intelligence documents. These showed internal U.S. assessments calling Ukraine a “catastrophic situation” that was “grinding toward a stalemate” and a “protracted war beyond 2023.” This came out just after Anthony Blinken said Ukraine’s position was “stronger than ever,” Joe Biden said Putin would “never” win, and General Ben Hodges said Ukraine would be liberated by August.

Having established the U.S. may conduct “information warfare” even against its own people, it now arrested Teixeira for interrupting official messaging with truth, and media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post helped authorities catch their own source. Not only did media not report negative news about Ukraine, it helped authorities arrest those who possessed such information.

David Sanger, the Times reporter who helped write the piece introducing “information warfare,” now wrote an article explaining that the “freshness” of the Pentagon Leaker docs made them different from those of Ed Snowden or the Wikileaks cables. It also became common to dismiss any defense of Teixeira or communication of the information he leaked as right-wing propaganda.

Not long after we saw American media shrug off the death in Ukrainian custody of writer and YouTuber Gonzalo Lira. While he was in jail, The Independent set the tone, suggesting the United States should not ask the recipient of billions its aid to free one of its citizens: “An American ‘Putin propagandist’ was jailed in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk want him freed.” The Daily Beast did better: “How a Sleazy American Dating Coach Became a Pro-Putin Shill in Ukraine.” When Lira died, the headlines featured lines like “Kremlin Shill Died in Ukraine” and “Pro-Putin Expat Dies in Ukrainian Jail.” Ukraine meanwhile banned the World Socialist Web Site and jailed local writer Bogdan Syrotiuk, a cause that didn’t animate the American left much, perhaps because it lacked a Trump angle.

If you’re keeping score, the Ukraine war established American officials could plant deceptions in media as part of “information warfare”; Pro-Ukraine deceptions would be tolerated to maintain “morale”; Russian media was blocked officially in Europe and quasi-officially here; individual posts of Americans were routinely removed or deamplified, sometimes at the behest of Ukraine; and leaks of true information running counter to our own state media narratives would be harshly punished. We banned foreign state media, and essentially mandated fealty to our version at home.

Less formal campaigns denounced anyone who advocated a “diplomatic solution” as a spewer of Russian talking points, on par with the Russian diplomats who were now described as “disinformation warriors.” It did not take much digging to figure out that many Ukrainian news operations denouncing figures like John Mearsheimer or Robert F. Kennedy were funded by the American State Department. The U.S.-Ukraine Foundation that ran a piece saying Kennedy furthered “Russian talking points” had a DOS award, and others with detailed schematics of Ukraine’s informational enemies were done up spiffily by USAID contractors. One is a perfect metaphor for what this war turned into: a way for European contractors to get paid by Americans to correct Americans.

On September 20, 2017, a company called Peregrine Technical Solutions, LLC which specializes in “customized cyber offense and defense,” was awarded $101,917 by the U.S. State Department. The funds were for a transaction described as “ACS CALL CENTER SERVICES — MONTERREY, MEXICO.”

The sub-awards for Peregrine (a company “associated” with other names like Goldbelt and CP Marine) included a $2.43 million outlay for a British firm called “Zinc Network.” That contract featured a similar start date of September 27, 2018, and ran through 2023. Like Peregrine, Zinc is linked to at least three names, including Breakthrough Media and Camden Creative. The description of its award from Peregrine says it aimed to “mitigate the effects of Russian disinformation and engage online audiences primarily in the east of Ukraine by amplifying trusted local voices” to “present a positive, democratic version of a unified Ukraine.”

Following just this one group of contractors reveals the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “social media influence” all over the world. In Ukraine, much of the money went to European middlemen who created dummy Internet personalities to sell the war. They put this in writing! Zinc was obligated $1.23 million from the State Department’s Office of Acquisition Management for two contracts, each of which would “identify, train, and engage 25 to 40 social media influencers” who’d “produce and publish their own social media content in line with U.S. Foreign policy objectives.”

Your tax dollars, turned into dummy social media accounts

When I called Peregrine, they were shocked to hear a request for a public relations office. The London-based Zinc office seemed similarly unprepared for public inquiry. It’s too bad, because it would be good to know why an American contractor like Peregrine at the outset of a Ukrainian social media campaign needed to hire a call center associated with a U.S. embassy in Mexico. From Zinc, it would be nice to know identities of its social media influencers (did they “engage” Americans?). Also, what did it do for its $500,000 USAID “Pro-Vaccination Campaign” in Georgia, or its $911,613 State Department award for “social media management services for Hindi/Urdu”? What does an “information integrity” services contract entail?

I generally have sympathy for people like Zelensky. The former Soviet Union is a place where success is mostly reserved for men of violence, and anyone outside that club who manages to rise usually needs a big bag of other extraordinary qualities. But this politician allowed his persona to become just another legend “in line with U.S. foreign policy objectives,” forgetting that voters decide what those objectives are, not contractors who don’t answer the phone, or Keir Starmer, or Jens Stoltenberg, or any of a hundred other officials who think they know what wars we must support. I’m tired of being lied to about why this mess can’t get fixed and just want to move on. Is there really anyone left who doesn’t feel the same way?

These are the same European and American liberals who not only couldn't bring themselves to express an ounce of solidarity with defenceless Palestinians as America's colony state went on an 18 month genocidal slaughter spree but who, in many cases, enthusiastically armed and funded this slaughter spree.

But now, in headline after headline, statement after statement, these fucking liberals, who’ve displayed biblical levels of satanic death-eating depravity, who said the square route of fuck all about the gravest act that a state can ever inflict on a people, they’re desperate for us to feel sorry for a rich man sitting in the White House because Trump said some hurty words?

FUCK OFF.

And let me tell you what you won’t hear from the media obsessing and whining over bullied little Zelensky. You won’t hear that at almost the exact moment Zelensky was walking out of the White House the Trump administration signed off on an emergency package of ‘military aid’ for Israel.

$3.01 billion in arms & equipment. On top of the $7 something billion from a few weeks ago. More than $10 billion in a few weeks.

They’ll say nothing about this. Nothing about this at all. Because they are murderous, racist, irredeemable scum who apply a selective morality to advance political and geopolitical agendas.

They’ll condemn Trump when he doesn’t play along with their imperial games but lose their tongues and their keyboards when he does.

Trump is an obscene and hideous character, but I blame liberals for all of it. All of it. Everything that’s happening.

This meme went over like a lead balloon at the other instance 🤷

• Optics Valley Suspended Monorail
• Wuhan Metro

Links up Musk’s DOGE malarkey with Curtis Yarvin’s playbook.

Because of Trump’s funding freeze, the extent of that shadow media structure has newly come to light. According to Reporters Without Borders, USAID is the “the primary donor” for the nine out of 10 Ukrainian media outlets that rely on foreign funding. The head of one such outlet, Detector Media, told the Washington Post that “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign money are “dependent on American assistance.”

The Post headlined its story “Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze.” According to the Post’s editorial standards, a foreign media outlet can presumably remain “independent” even while funded by the most powerful state in the world. To shore up its narrative, the Post argued that these US-funded outlets have “produced work often critical of their governments,” including the US client in Kyiv. Yet these same outlets have often promoted the US government’s agenda in Ukraine at the country’s expense.

One illustrative case came in March 2020, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky took a major step towards implementing the Minsk accords, the February 2015 pact that sought to end Ukraine’s post-2014 civil war. In a landmark move, Zelensky agreed to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics – a major step towards Minsk’s implementation.

In a statement at the time, dozens of Ukrainian NGOs, political figures, and media outlets denounced Zelensky’s decision on the grounds that it would recognize the breakaway republics as equal partners, and play into the Russian narrative that Ukraine was facing an as an “internal conflict,” rather than “armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski, the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.

US-funded opponents of diplomacy are not just targeted at Ukrainian audiences. As journalist Lee Fang reports, USAID “has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are agents of the Kremlin.”

US media outlets often interview these same groups and present them as independent voices without acknowledging their US state funding. To show how pervasive this is, even the stalwart progressive news show Democracy Now!, which has long challenged government propaganda, has been susceptible. Last month, DN! interviewed Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who argued against diplomacy with Russia and advocated the “Reagan principle” of “peace through strength.” DN! failed to inform its audience that Matviichuk’s group, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, is funded by USAID, and that she is also on the Steering Committee of the “World Movement for Democracy,” a project of the National Endowment for Democracy. Reagan, whose administration founded the NED to advance the foreign policy objectives that DN! was founded to expose, would have approved.

Investigating the structural/legal peculiarities of political parties in US.

A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability” – if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem. One solution regularly proposed is that the left needs to break with the Democrats and build a third party. Rather than continuing to run candidates on the Democratic ballot line, the left should create its own party; such a party could endorse only candidates fully vetted by and accountable to the party membership, and could discipline candidates–even revoke their party membership–if they moved right in office.

This is an appealing idea. Unfortunately, here in the United States, creating a formal political party which exerts this kind of control over candidates is illegal.

Some people on the left wing of DSA argue that we need to form our own party so we can avoid candidate accountability issues like the ones they perceive in our relationship with AOC. But, as I have shown, this is exactly wrong: DSA can address candidate accountability issues only to the extent that it is not a formal political party. A formal political party would have no way of unendorsing someone like AOC.

This isn’t true in most countries. In the UK, for example, the national elected leadership of the Labour Party is perfectly capable of forbidding an individual from running for office as a Labour candidate; that’s what they did to Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party didn’t have to go to Corbyn’s district and door-knock, or drop a million-dollar independent expenditure on him, to knock him off the Labour line; they simply voted him off, as they had a perfect right to do. In most countries the idea that the elected leadership of a party can decide who runs on that party’s line seems quite natural–what else could it mean to have a political party?

But in the US, parties just aren’t allowed to do that—not the Democratic Party and not the Socialism Party. The Democratic Party can’t stop AOC (or Joe Lieberman, or Kyrsten Sinema, or Ilhan Omar) from running as a Democrat.

The question of why the US regulates political party selection of candidates down to the last detail would take us beyond the scope of this essay. Briefly, though, state regulation of parties is best seen as a reformist compromise ameliorating the anti-democratic effects of the two-party duopoly. In most countries, parties can choose candidates in any way they see fit, including in ways that exclude ordinary voters from having a voice. But the potentially undemocratic effects of these selection processes are mitigated by the fact that voters who don’t like the outcomes can split and form another party. In the US, our law on political parties reflects a judgment that voters can’t (as a practical matter) form a separate (viable) party, and so as a consolation prize we have the legal right to influence the candidate selection processes of the parties we’re stuck with.

In DSA and on the US left more broadly, when we argue about whether to use the Democratic Party ballot line or create our own ballot line so we can have a disciplined party, the debate is often over whether our own ballot line is a necessary condition for party discipline and coherence ("can we build a caucus of elected socialists if they're elected on the Democratic line, or do we need our own line?") That's the wrong question. The right question is whether our own ballot line is even compatible with discipline and coherence ("can we maintain electoral unity when our decision-making process on who to back electorally is taken out of our hands, broken up across hundreds of districts and opened to anyone who wants to participate?") and the answer is, obviously, no we can't.

This is a double-edged sword for the left. On the one hand, we can't build our own ballot-line party that enforces candidate discipline through collective decisions. But on the other hand, neither can "the" Democratic Party. "The" Democratic Party is legally bound to let us run on "their" ballot line in "their" internal (primary) elections. If they weren't – if the laws were different – then we'd find it both necessary and also possible to form a ballot-line third party. As things stand, it is not necessary and also not possible.

None of this is to say that we can stop worrying about candidate accountability and party discipline. The absence of real, disciplined political parties is a colossal problem in US politics; not only does it confront the socialist left with the constant threat of political co-optation, but the very same issue makes it enormously difficult for even moderate Democrats to enact their political agenda. One need think only of the fate of Biden’s very progressive domestic agenda in 2021-22 at the hands of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The lack of a framework for meaningfully accountable electoral representation in the US is a huge barrier to enacting not only radical but even moderate reforms.

But the left is deluded if it believes that forming a new ballot-line political party will help overcome this barrier. Realistic efforts to address the problem of party accountability and discipline must begin from the observation that these characteristics, which are intrinsic features of formal political parties in most democracies, are incompatible with formal political partyhood in the US.

A lot of people view this rise of fascism as a some as a sort of fundamental opposition or reaction to the liberal or neoliberal order under which we're living. You know, it's like do you want fascist Trump or neoliberal Kamala? That sort of thinking […] seems to me to be both individualizing—like making fascism into something fascist ideologues do rather than like a constellation of features which make up a fascist society—but also kind of undermines the various continuities between neoliberal societies (and liberal ones) and fascist ones. And it's in this context that Clara Mattei offers a really important intervention which clarifies these important continuities.

Specifically, Mattei highlights how austerity as a form of authoritarian state practice functions to rebalance the capital relation in favour of capital, and in doing so paves the way to Fascism in the early 20th century.

The book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

Calls are growing for President Biden to posthumously exonerate Ethel Rosenberg following newly publicized documents proving that the FBI knew of her innocence long before she was prosecuted by the federal government more than 60 years ago. Rosenberg and her husband Julius were charged with sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union and executed on June 19, 1953. A federal pardon or exoneration would be “the right thing to do,” says Massachusetts Congressmember Jim McGovern, who is part of an effort led by the Rosenbergs’ son Robert Meeropol “to get history right.” Ethel Rosenberg “was framed,” says Meeropol. “She was not a spy.”

In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous now, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.

My comment from a related post: The United States launched a wave of airstrikes against ISIS in Syria

The US is trying to degrade the chaos monkey of its own device, now that it has wrought the desired power vacuum?