World War Grift – Blake Lovewell

“Everywhere is war” – Bob Marley

War is a bad thing. Most people will agree. Often a war is perpetrated for an ostensibly good cause. It is seen as an unfortunate side effect that regular people are killed, maimed, scarred and diminished – whilst the ‘baddies’ somehow remain at large. Well then, if war is bad, and often ineffective, why does it continue? In this article we will delve into the private corporations who insidiously overlap with their governmental and media counterparts to promote, fund and facilitate endless conflicts. We will also assess the case for acts of war and explore the theory that war is often perpetrated for financial profit rather than any moral cause.

Feel free to listen to a discussion about this article here, starting at 7:25 :

Cui Bono?

‘Cui Bono’ is a fancy Latin phrase, that you might hear from Sherlock Holmes during an investigation. It means ‘Who Benefits?’. It is often used in political discourse as a knife to cut through the tangled webs of intrigue and speculation around events and get to the heart of the matter. Here we are discussing a global business, arms manufacturing and sales. It is a worldwide industry and has myriad influences. When it is presented in sound-bites by the corporate-owned media, we are seeing a glimpse, only a small portion of the picture. It is usually degisned to make the reader or viewer think a certain thing – as we will discuss later. Yet when we take a wide-lens view the picture becomes cloudy with many different angles. We ask cui bono? – who benefits from violent conflict, in particular those hot conflicts of today: Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia/Yemen and so on?

It is an easy implication to lay at the door of the arms industry. More violence is more profit. Even mere instability in a country can lead to a ramping up of arms purchases by the military of a state. The massive price tags for weapons, the long lead-time of research and development coupled with the bottomless pockets of government budgets make for a fertile landscape for exploitation. It is not only the private military corporations who benefit, but the politicians and nation states too. The politicians get huge kickbacks from lobbyists, too much money to maintain that moral compass they may have once had. They also have a useful ‘casus belli’ – a ‘case for war’ which is a sure fire vote winner. Remember that Margaret Thatcher was set to lose her seat as leader of the UK until a miraculous military victory over Argentina in 1982 galvanised massive public support and a massive electoral victory. War for votes is nothing new. Yet these days, selling war is an uphill battle. I believe, perhaps naively, that most people don’t like suffering and violence. The Anglophonic destruction of Iraq through two wars ended up an unpopular decision, similarly the US’ failed conquest in Viet Nam is viewed regretfully in hindsight. So we are left pondering, why must suffering the curse of armed warfare continue?

Before we delve too deep into the long grass, let us set our sights on our targets. We know the names of countries, sometimes politicians, but who are the arms dealers, the manufacturers of death who lurk in the shadows and create shiny new weapons of mass destruction?

“They call it warfare, but your wars aren’t fair
If they were there’d be suicide bombers in Arms Fairs
On a scam for the funds, they will mangle your son
If you try to speak out, they will stamp on your tongue
To your land they will come ’till you stand up as one” – Lowkey

Lockheed Martin

Clocking in at $66bn in sales per year, Lockheed Martin is the biggest arms manufacturing corporation in the world. It started out as a fraternal airplane company 100 years ago, yet after the great depression it shifted to US military production in the 1930’s. It quickly became the US’ number one aircraft manufacturer. When it became insolvent in 1971 it was bailed out to the tune of billions of taxpayer funds. Shortly therafter it emerged that Lockheed  had been guilty of massive bribery of officials for military contracts. A practice that continues to this day.

Lockheed Martin continues to have an active presence in Israel: “Lockheed Martin is proud of the significant role it has fulfilled in the security of the State of Israel.” Where they not only supply weapons and machinery, but also fund university programmes demonstrating the well rounded integration of arms manufacturing with civil society of a nation state. Similarly n the UK Lockheed Martin have funded a £50million programme at Northumbria University for space technology including weapons and surveillance technology. You too can go to the school of Lockheed Martin and take part in a global empire of war!

Lockheed Martin are currently facing a court case from Yemeni families who were bombed during a wedding ceremony. Such a bombing is a war crime, it is actually illegal to bomb civilians, and the victims’ families are trying to hold arms manufacturers to account for their part. Yet as the lawyer said in a statement: “I think most judges are going to be very afraid of issuing decisions that would somehow step into the dynamics of the … weapons supply relationships between the U.S., Saudi Arabia and UAE.”

Raytheon – (Now known as RTX)

Raytheon, or RTX to its friends, clocks in at $67billion of arms sales per year, just short of Lockheed Martin. Another 100 year old company, Ratheon was borne of innocuous beginnings manufacturing refrigeration tubes. Following the aforementioned trajectory, they were weaponsied in 1930s USA where they manufactured magnets for radar equipment and military fuses. This research also lead to the invention of the microwave oven in 1945. By 1948 they had full military credo as they invented the first missile guidance system which took down its first plane in 1950.

One big claim to fame was the widespread use of the Raytheon Patriot Missile System in the 1991 war on Iraq. The system was so successful (or destructive depending on your perspective) that it garnered new contracts from many nation states around the world. In 2016 Poland signed a $5.6billion contract for the Patriot system.  It is prevalent in the Middle East, being used by Saudi and UAE attacks on Yemen. It is also favoured by the military of Israel. It was used in 2014 in Israeli occupied Golan Heights to shoot down a Syrian air force jet. The Syrian jet was en route to attack Islamic State forces in the country.

Remains of Raytheon missiles have been found throughout Yemen after attacks on civilian areas. A Scottish investigation found that Scottish made technology was present in the aftermath of many bombings in Yemen – bombings which killed over 200 and injured up to 1000 civilians and children. They decry the fact that Raytheon benefit from £200,000 a year grants from the Scottish government who is not a belligerent in the conflict.

As a side note, the inhumane campaign in Yemen from 2014-2023 was often referred to by media outlets as  a ‘Saudi-led coalition’ as they relentlessly attacked Yemen. However, Saudi foreign secretary at the time Adel al-Jubeir, said:

“We have British officials and American officials and officials from other countries in our command and control centre. They know what the target list is and they have a sense of what it is that we are doing and what we are not doing,”.

Thus I conclude that the present, 2024, US-UK fronted campaign against the Yemeni people, is merely a continuation of a decade-long campaign of war-crimes by the Anglophonic war industry.

Boeing

Boeing, to the layman, is an unassuming global aircraft manufacturer. They enable millions of travellers to get around the world, and if you’ve flown abroad before, it’s likely you were on a Boeing plane at some point. However, they come in as the third largest manufacturer with over $60billion in arms sales per year.

They came from a small sea-plane business in 1920s USA and, wait for it: became military contractors in World War 2 providing both planes and helicopters to the US military. Interesting there that we see the top 3 arms manufacturers in the world are all American companies that were high-tech and became absorbed into the US military apparatus in the period of war between 1930-45. Little wonder that Eisenhower in 1961 called out the ‘military-industrial complex: “[the] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience”

Today Boeing have their sideline in passenger aircraft. Their main hustle is military, encompassing mainly aeronautical equipment such as jets, helicopters, missile and bombs.  In fact many investors see jumbo military contracts as the only way out of the financial difficulty for Boeing. They recently landed multi-billion dollar contracts from Poland for Apache helicopters, Canada for Maritime war-planes and Germany for Chinook military transport helicopters. They also do a roaring trade with Israel, some highlights include $1billion for in-air refuelling planes and $735 million for GPS guided bomb technology.  Just to re-iterate the unhealthy revolving door of military industry, Israel’s former Air Force leader recently became the president of Boeing’s Israeli office.

It is worth noting too that there is often very little separating these mega-sized war corporations. Although they compete to bid for contracts from national militaries, they also work together to build warships, planes, jets, missiles, bombs and munitions. Boeing for example, contributes to the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air-superiority stealth fighter and the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. The illusion of competition belies the monolithic nature of the military industrial complex.

BAE Systems

 “First in my scope is BAE systems
Specialize in killing people from a distance
Power is a drug and they feed the addiction
Immediate deletion of people’s existence
Who says what is and what isn’t legitimate resistance
To push these buttons you don’t need a brave heart
State of the art darts leave more than your face scarred” – Lowkey

BAE Systems is the first non-USA based military company in the top 10 arms manufacturers. It is based in the UK, which isn’t too different from the US in foreign policy terms. I would even say they are the same face of the same coin where the US goes, the UK follows. Yet BAE systems was formed in part out of a response to the agglomeration of military industry in the USA. BAE formed in 1999 as a merger of Marconi, a naval arm of General Electric and British Aerospace. In the process they hovered up plenty of subsidiary corporations to become one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, with a total of $28billion of sales per year.

BAE Systems produce aircraft, boats, satellite technology as well as missiles, armoured vehicles, submarines and rifles. They work at all levels of military equipment. This too means they are deeply embedded in controversy too. BAE were found guilty of issuing millions of dollars in bribes to push through the UK’s biggest ever arms deal. With the help of Margaret Thatcher in 1985, British Aerospace signed a $43billion deal with Saudi Arabia, which was later found to have been influenced by bribery and BAE were forced to pay huge fines. BAE Typhoon jets were sold to Indonesia despite the threat they would be used against East Timorese minorities in 1993. This was approved by John Major, ironically, having blocked the sale of the same aircraft to Iraq in 1989 for fear of them being used on Kurdish minorities. Buried in the article we too find that despite the threat to international law: “The deal will help to safeguard jobs at BAe plants in Lancashire and on Humberside” – an insidious argument that we will turn to shortly.

Perhaps the largest ongoing controversy for BAE pertains to these massive contracts with Gulf states. BAE Systems have sold hundreds of tonnes of high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman; gulf states who have in turn committed atrocious acts of war on the Yemeni population. By 2019, over 100,000 Yemeni civilians had died in a decade of conflict with a high number of them being civilians. A huge outcry from human rights organisations put a 1 year pause on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia from the UK. However, the UK still sold £2.6billion pounds of BAE equipment, under Liam Fox, to Saudi Arabia, negotiated during the embargo. The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) put the total sales from BAE Systems to Saudi Arabia alone, at £22billion plus from 2015-19.

Lastly on BAE Systems, in 2013 they appointed Roger Carr as Director. He seemed to be innocuous enough, just another money man who is able to manage a sprawling conglomerate. Yet in 2015 he was also appointed to the board of the BBC. I looked at a series of news articles from the BBC from his 4 year tenure and found none to be critical of BAE, despite many newsworthy events. We only saw puff pieces coming out from the BBC about fresh new military technology boosting Britain’s industry.

 I allege here that having Roger Carr as boss of BAE Systems whilst sitting on the board of the BBC which decides editorial policy is a conflict of interest. It benefitted BAE systems massively to have a large measure of control over the UK’s state broadcaster – and illustrates the more than close relationship between military corporations and corporate media. In this structure, the corporate media is unable to interrogate the military industrial complex, and we now see regularly that it is little more than their mouthpiece calling for more war, more arms and not to look at the dealers.

So we have the profit motive understood. Massive corporations seek profit, military contracts offer a huge boost which benefits staff and shareholders. BAE Systems is a FTSE 100 company so it’s likely invested in unwittingly by millions of unknowing shareholders via their pension fund. Yet we have also outlined how each company has been implicated in both nefarious political dealings, such as bribery, as well as overt war crimes. Each time the media censors the story and the state taciltly allows the practices to continue. Recently the UK government backed off its initial denial and accepted evidence that BAE systems cluster bombs were used in Yemen, a flagrant breach of international law. Yet they continue to do business as usual. How can this happen?

Well I argue that there is a complex synthesis of propaganda from nation states, propaganda from military corporations as well as an unhealthy dose of obfuscation. This mixture of astroturfing opinion and covering-up facts allows for a world where such war crimes are profitable and proumulgated.

The Jobs

“There’s a war going on for your mind

Those who seek to occupy it will stop at nothing

The battlefield is everywhere

There is no sanctuary, there are no civilians

You have two choices: surrender or enlist” – Flobots

Politicians love jobs. When there aren’t enough jobs they look bad, when they ‘deliver’ jobs – when employers arrive in their region – they support it. Simple electoral mathematics is one strong motivator for politicians to allow an arms manufacturer to set up shop in their region. As well as, of course, the handsome kick-backs or outright bribes.

But this card is also played by the arms industry. Whenever a new factory of death is built there are fawning headlines: “Lockheed Martin’s Greenville Site to Add More Than 300 New Jobs by End of 2022”. These insidious war-mongers need a lot of reputation washing to get the blood off their hands but they lay it on thick: “With approximately 700 jobs currently at the site and hundreds more to come, Lockheed Martin remains embedded in the local community, as it has been for more than 37 years.”. When those jobs are manufacturing F-16 jets, which will be sold at outrageously high markup to foreign dictators, usually to bomb and terrorise innocent civilians, we are left pondering, are those jobs worth it?

Further to this point,  the ‘jobs’ argument is used in a generic sense by politicians. I recently caught a clip of Jens Stoltenberg – the boss of NATO – in yet another propaganda exercise to puff up the, out of hand, Ukraine war spending. He claimed that yet another package of billions for weaponry was a good economic decision:

“Most of this money is spent in the United States. We buy US weapons to support Ukraine, This secures jobs in America and makes us all safer”

He doesn’t say how many jobs, he obviates the fact that most of the money will be hovered up by a small number of billionaires, and ends with the laughable phrase, ‘makes us all safer’. Well it is not clear to me how more weaponry and continued war, increases anyone’s safety, in the US, Ukraine, or beyond. The fact that billions of dollars are swilling around in such a manner is terrifying.

I will give Ron Paul the floor for a moment as he eloquently takes down the American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken’s recent opining on the subject.

“Last month Secretary of State Antony Blinken inadvertently revealed what exactly all the spending for war is about when he stated that as much as 90 percent of the aid for Ukraine is actually spent in the United States. The money is used “to the benefit of American business, local communities, and strengthening the US defense industrial base,” he said in an interview. In other words, the money “for Ukraine” is actually a massive welfare program for well-connected military contractors back home.

                As we begin the year 2024, we need to home in on the real threat to the United States. It is not Russia or China or Iran. The true threat is closer to home: it is a corrupt system that bleeds the country dry to fight imaginary enemies while enriching the military-industrial complex.”

Ukraine

Ukraine has been such a boon for the arms industry that it warrants its own investigation. I will give a cursory look, but await an in-depth exposé of the sheer quantity of arms hustling that was allowed to occur in modern Ukraine.

[Since publishing this article I found a video made by UKR Leaks. It is a Ukranian investigative journalist outlet, focussing on military malfeasance in Ukraine. Their video details how weapons are funnelled from Ukraine, via the military, to the Middle East. They document plenty of evidence of Western weapons moving out of Ukraine, as well as documentary evidence. This sort of journalism is rare and highly illuminating. Do watch the video here: https://rumble.com/v4bpbpz-unsaint-javelins.-a-documentary-by-ukr-leaks.html]

Recent statistics show that between 2019-2022 the USA sent over $22billion in ‘military aid’ (weapons, training and money for weaponry). They then earmarked a further $67.1 billion further in free weaponry and money for weapons. Doing a deal, with full knowledge that 90% of that money would boomerang into military-industrial magnates pockets. The UK in the same period had sent over £5 billion in specifically military supplies to Ukraine. Many other Western nations have done similar.

Despite the conflict beginning in 2014 with the Euromaidan coup and the CIA backed ousting of Ukranian President Yanukovich, many Western eyes were averted. That was until Russia was provoked into defending ethnically Russian areas of Eastern Ukraine, which had been being bombed by Kiev for 8 years. Suddenly the Western media – one arm of the military industrial complex – kicked-in and we were presented with daily barrages of one-sided propaganda. This quickly astorturfed the population into ‘Slava Ukraini’ – half understood jingoism. Ukraine flags were thrown up on British council buildings and nursery school windows for the plight of the innocent Ukrainians. ‘They need armaments’ was the rallying cry, and a battalion of armchair generals started fervently searching online about what tanks the Ukranian junta were demanding. All of it to face off against the simultaneously strong man and perilously frail Vladimir Putin. If we Westerners don’t commit untold billions to the frontlines of the NATO empire, the big bad Soviets, sorry Russians will come and get you! To quote Craig Murray: “This is the classic operation of the military industrial complex, which does not just need an enemy, it needs a massive, terrifying, ultra-powerful enemy. Or why would you and I keep feeding the military industrial complex huge sums of money?”

4 years later and the campaign has all but fizzled out. I saw a tattered ukranian flag soldiering on in an English village recently, reminding me of the plight of the Ukranian state. It has lost almost half of its population to emigration, it’s wealth is depleted, its industry is failing and a once shining nation state is now a hollowed out zombie. Somehow the US appointed dictator, Zelensky, is clinging onto his job. I posit that this is because he is good at one thing, funnelling money through Ukraine as a laundering exercise for the Western military-industrial complex. He is able to demand this many billions from the USA, to visit Davos and make further demands of the World Economic Forum, as their favourite plaything. He may receive plaudits from the writers of the anti-human warmongers’ agenda there, but at home he will go down in history as a rank criminal. Yet despite the military failure of NATO and Ukraine – Russia has all but secured East Ukraine and hungrily eyes further gains – the period of war has been a massive success for military contractors. Therefore I argue that the war in Ukraine was less about sovereignty, as it was presented in the corporate-media, but more about profit and laundering on an industrial scale for military companies.

Suspicions are also mounting that vast quantities of armaments destined for Ukraine have been diverted, sold-on and channelled to the black market. We have already seen the spectre of corruption being raised, even by the supplicant Ukrainian military leadership. They recently issued a statement about $40 million in military aid being missing.

We may be seeing the dam breaking on Ukrainian weapon laundering this year. Just today, the US Department of Defense released a report evaluating the end-use of military aid to Ukraine. It found that 59% of military equipment given by the USA in 2023 is ‘delinquent’. That means it is fully off the US radar, missing in action. 59% of the $1.6billion of equipment is $1billion. A billion dollars of brand new attack drones, bombs, anti-tank missiles and night vision equipment is missing from the US’ oversight. This comes after 2022’s delinquency rate of 82% – the US knows it’s throwing billions of dollars of deadly weapons into a black hole. Weapons do not disappear, they head underground, onto the black market and find their way into the hands of rebels, militias and new enemies. One could even suggest that, given the US and CIA’s record of running weapons to gangs and rebels for regime change, that this is a deliberate policy by the USA to funnel weapons off the database for their own shady ends.

 I believe that these revelations are the tip of the iceberg and it would take extensive investigation to uncover what has happened with the remaining $100 billion, at least, of ‘military aid’.  

Conclusion

“Peace, love and understanding tell me
Is there no place for anything else?
They say we must fight
To keep our freedom
But Lord, knows there’s got to be
A better way” – Edwin Starr

I believe that most modern wars are fought for private profit. There is an argument that the two Iraq wars were for the oil industry, that Afghanistan is for the opium trade, yet I point the finger at the trillion dollar arms industry. More often than not we will find a profiteer at the heart of a conflict, who benefits financially from violent conflict. They may use an obsequent media to propagandise. They will pit one side against another, dehumanise the enemy, allow the murder, torture and harm of war to occur. Meanwhile to the other side they will demand high prices for dubious arms all in the moral, humanitarian cause. Arms manufacturers will tell you they help communities, whilst elsewhere demolish them. They will say they are fighting for the environment and promoting diversity. Yet I quote the research of AOAV (Action On Armed Violence):

“The irony is hard to miss: just as these manufacturers claim their employment practices are inclusive and non-discriminatory, so too are their weapons, too frequently used in attacks which fail to abide by International Humanitarian Law’s principle of distinction, prohibiting indiscriminate attacks that fail to distinguish between military and civilian targets. Over the past decade (2013-2022), 63% (12,001) of explosive attacks from manufactured explosive weapons recorded by AOAV were reported in populated areas – areas where 92% (111,788) of casualties from manufactured explosive weapons were civilians, including at least 11,651 children and 5,982 women.”

Despite campaigns like theirs, despite pacifists like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK enjoying large support amidst disenchantment with endless foreign wars, it seems as if the warmongers are winning. From AOAV research, deaths from explosive weapons are up 122% for the year 2023. 90% of those casualties were in civilian areas.

As for viable actions we can take against the military-industrial complex there are a few. Firstly, I follow the maxim given to us by Julian Assange:

“If wars can be started by lies, then Peace can be started by truth”.

Thereby, if we can promulgate veracious information, if we can research and find good resources and support independent media we will empower ourselves with the tools to see through the fog of war. We will also be less liable to being manipulated in our ignorance. Much of the information we need is out there, open source – all of the sources for this article are on the open internet, no hacking necessary. However we should also support the courageous whistleblowers who leak and disseminate information that should be in the public domain. Where we allow shadows we allow the evil to perpetuate but where we cast our light we change the equation to good.

I firmly believe that we humans do not innately crave wanton violence and destruction. We innately seek safety and comfort from harm. Therefore it is only by artificial means that wars and violent conflict can be established. If we can harass and diminish those means of promoting violence, we can go some of the way to ceasing much of the conflict in the world today. Then it is time to find a way to arbitrate lasting peace and re-establish justice which, for now, is sorely lacking.

I’ll leave you with the re-assuring words of Boeing UK’s military arm Boeing Defence UK:

“Boeing’s partnership with the UK has helped create a brighter, safer and more sustainable future.”

Sources:

Statisia – Arms Sales for top Ten Largest Companies 2022

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267160/sales-of-the-worlds-largest-arms-producing-and-military-services-companies/

Lockheed 1970s bribery scandal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1977/05/27/lockheed-paid-38-million-in-bribes-abroad/800c355c-ddc2-4145-b430-0ae24afd6648/

Lockheed Martin in Israel

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-il/index.html

Lockheed Martin give £50million to UK university for research

https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/north-east-space-skills-and-technology-centre/

Lockheed Martin court case – after Yemeni Wedding bombing

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/04/12/us-defense-companies-sued-by-yemenis-over-weapons-used-in-civil-war/

Poland signs $5.6billion contract for Patriot missiles

https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Poland_moves_towards_multi-billion-euro_Patriot_missile_deal_999.html

Raytheon missile shoots down Syrian jet in Golan Heights

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4574214,00.html

Scotland funds Raytheon war crimes in Yemen

https://theferret.scot/raytheon-paveway-missiles-war-crimes-yemen/

British and American officials are in Saudi control centre (2016)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/15/british-us-military-in-command-room-saudi-strikes-yemen

Eisenhower: Military Industrial Complex

https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/military-industrial-complex

Boeing: $1billion from Israel for in-air refuelling jets

https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2022/09/01/israel-boeing-prepare-to-sign-927m-deal-for-four-kc-46a-tankers/

Boeing $735 million for precision guided GPS bombs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-18/boeing-accelerates-delivery-of-up-to-1-800-gps-guidance-bomb-kits-to-israel

Boeing works with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman on jets

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boeing-Company

BAE Systems found guilty of millions in bribes to Saudi officials

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/05/bae-saudi-yamamah-deal-background

BAE jets sold to Indonesia (1993)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/british-jets-may-be-used-on-timor-rebels-controversy-surrounds-the-sale-by-bae-of-hawk-military-aircraft-to-indonesia-1490891.html

BAE alleged involvement in war crimes in Yemen

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/11/bae-systems-accused-of-being-party-to-alleged-war-crimes

UK: BAE cluster bombs were illegally used in Yemen

https://caat.org.uk/homepage/stop-arming-saudi-arabia/uk-arms-used-in-the-war-on-yemen/uk-made-cluster-bombs-in-yemen/

NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg selling the proxy war on Fox news:

https://nitter.net/Glenn_Diesen/status/1751873323489800395#m

Ron Paul article taking down Anthony Blinken and military Industrial Complex

https://original.antiwar.com/paul/2024/01/02/in-2024-congress-should-commit-to-cutting-the-war-budget/

USA have spent $22 billion, pledge $67.1 billion in ‘military aid’ to Ukraine

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/congress-approved-113-billion-aid-ukraine-2022

UK has given over £ 5 billion to Ukraine in military spending

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-much-money-has-the-uk-spent-on-weapons-for-ukraine-and-what-is-zelenskyy-asking-for

CIA coup in Ukraine in 2014 called out by Kremlin

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-calls-ukraines-2014-revolution-foreign-sponsored-coup-2023-11-21/

FT: Nobody knows where the arms are going in Ukraine

https://archive.is/qriQ0

Ukraine: $40 billion from military budget is missing

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-corruption-476d673cc64a4b005c7ee8ed5f5d5361?taid=65b6616af47c880001ea9e06

US DoD report on delinquent military aid in Ukraine

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/11/2003374323/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-043-EEMU_REDACTED%20SECURE.PDF

AOAV research on how military corporations spin propaganda

Selling Death: how arms manufacturers put a positive spin on weapons production

AOAV : Deaths from explosive weapons increases 122% in 2023

122% rise in global civilian fatalities from explosive weapons in 2023: a year of harm reviewed

Boeing Defence UK – Sustainable future

https://www.boeing.co.uk/boeing-defence-uk

The State of Cryptocurrency in 2023 – Blake Lovewell

^{December 2023}

Watch here for a conversation on the themes elucidated in the article below:

As we reach the end of 2023 there is brief pause for thought and reflection. In the cryptocurrency sphere there has been tumult, winners, losers and a continued expansion of the full fledged industry. Through crisis and successes we will track the many threads of discourse as well as the key events that occurred. It is important, in our 24 hour news cycle, to be able to take a wider perspective and trace trends to enlighten our perspective for the future.

We would be remiss to begin our summation of 2023 in cryptocurrency without discussing the wider economic context. We witnessed the swingeing return of the controversial ‘i’ word: Inflation. It is something that many will have forgotten about. We have had, until 2020, over a decade of extremely low central bank interest rates. In this environment, economic growth was mainly burned in the central bank furnaces to print money. After the financial crisis of 2008, central banks had been on a money printing spree and by keeping the interest rates low they could offset this printing with the sale of treasuries at low interest rates. There was slow and steady, yet imperceptible, inflation in prices; below the mystical 2% standard promised by central banks. Then, in 2020, most nation states in the world decided to simultaneously enact strict policies of central control. Following the lead of infamous dictatorship China, countries from East to West foamed at the bit to restrict the activity of citizens and businesses. Suddenly small businesses were shuttered and forbidden to open, workers were told to stay home and police drones roamed the streets to monitor the citizenry of the world. This caused a huge economic black hole. There was little to no productivity – only certain large corporations were allowed to trade and remain open, to their own obscene profits. The rest of the global economy was put on an intra-venous drip of easy money. The printing spree turned binge, and the floodgates opened. Through programs such as furlough, the state would support recently imprisoned workers with state money. This government expenditure was funded by an unprecedented purchase of government debt by the central banks, think parents paying off the kids credit cards. For two years there were aggressive restrictions on economic activity and extreme state spending to sustain the economy and prevent total collapse. Now, three years down the line from the instigation of these policies, the chickens came home to roost.

As economies around the world see stagflation, weak growth and economic uncertainty, cryptocurrency as a whole has taken a hit. Its rapacious growth was stemmed in the wake of the collapse of FTX in 2022 and concurrent bank failures in the USA in 2023. This means that easy money has exited the market – the government stipends have dried up and cryptocurrency as one of the beneficiaries of this easy money has taken a hit. The decline, as is a regular trend in cryptocurrency starts at the fringes. Alt-coins, those tiny speculative projects have been hard pressed to find suckers for their schemes. However, even top 10 coins have seen a diminishment. In these hard times people flock to the safest assets, and in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is king. By the end of 2023 it returned to 50% dominance of the crypto market, having dipped to about 40% at its lowest.

Bitcoin as a hedge

Bitcoin is seen by some as a hedge against inflation and meandering central bank policy. If you hold an asset outside of the Dollar, Pound or Yen, you are insulated from the vagaries of their money printing policy. Whilst Bitcoin had fallen by 50% from its peak in 2021, it made up a lot of ground through 2023. It also gained more resilience. The number of new wallets, which correlates to new users continued to steadily increase. The price in dollar terms increased too, ending the year on around $42,000 per Bitcoin. However, if we are true anarchists, we don’t attend to the price of Bitcoin in dirty fiat, which is only worth the paper it’s printed on. We pay more attention to the market fundamentals of Bitcoin, namely hashrate. The global ‘hashrate’ is the sum total of computing power that is grinding away to solve Bitcoin’s equation and mine a block. This is a measure of people’s confidence in Bitcoin moving forward as investing in mining equipment and energy is expensive – almost out of the realm of the average Joe without lots of spare money. Global hashrate is at an all time high at the end of 2023, meaning miners are confident that Bitcoin will hold its value, or even go much higher, furthermore the network is more secure the more people who mine it so it is a good indicator of the increased health of Bitcoin’s network despite a tumultuous year.

I should mention here: ordinals. I mentioned them earlier in March of 2023 in conversation but they have come to greater prominence, booming in the Winter. An ordinal is a piece of information encoded into a Bitcoin transaction. It exploits a part of Bitcoins fundamental code whereby someone can add information in a Bitcoin transaction, perhaps to signify who the Bitcoin was transmitted to, or for what. Yet canny nerds have managed to use this field to fill with jpeg image codes, music file codes and other piles of information. These little units of information are then traded like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and as they are on Bitcoin’s main blockchain they garner a lot of interest.

By misusing this information field someone can transmit a transaction of 0.00000001 BTC, the smallest denomination of Bitcoin, and include 2mb of data which would fill a whole block on Bitcoin’s blockchain. We can think of a block mined on Bitcoin’s blockchain as a bus. Usually they come about every 10 minutes, and carry about 10,000 transactions in their 2mb capacity. Thus if I sent you 1 Bitcoin, it would arrive in about 10 minutes, alongside thousands of other transactions. One ordinal with a picture of a cat, however, can totally fill the bus, so my transaction would be stuck at the bus-stop (known as the memory pool) until the next bus in 20 minutes. You can see how the network effect of ordinals can cause a massive clogging of the network and there is currently a war over their usage.

Some mining pools, groups of miners, are disavowing any block with ordinals, so they can filter out the ‘true’ transactions, in their eyes. The trouble is not all pools agree on a set of rules for ordinals. Some other pools support the purist motion that all transactions are equal and no transactions should be censored; otherwise you become the same middlemen bankers and statists that Bitcoin set out to expunge in the first place. We have yet to see the outcome of this debate, but it is an important issue which could rock the foundations of Bitcoin if it induces a change in the base code which hasn’t been touched by hard-fork in about a decade. It is definitely one to watch moving forward.

The Collapsed FTX and the Trial of SBF

FTX rose to prominence in 2021, hitting a million users. It was a cryptocurrency exchange, allowing users to trade and hold crypto. It also offered its own token, FTT, to use as intermediary when trading. It quickly grew from its shady beginnings to a million users, and sponsoring a sports arena before its collapse in 2022.

The shady beginnings I refer to were the ascendency of a small group of MIT alumni to the top of the USA’s political and economic spheres. Obviously, as with most corruption, there is an unhealthy dose of nepotism. Bankman and Fried, Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents were high up Stanford economists. Though they present themselves as having a back-seat role, SBF’s father did help draft legal documents for the creation of Alameda Research in 2017. But perhaps more pertinent is the connection with MIT. Carole Ellison was part of the polycule that instigated FTX. Her father was Gary Gensler’s boss when he worked at MIT. Gensler segued smoothly from his role as economics professor, where he advocated for Ripple; a burgeoning payments technology which just partnered with Mastercard – into his role as head of the Securities Exchange Commission. Thus we have a tight ring between two of the founders of FTX, the movers and shakers at the top of the USA’s universities and the boss of the SEC – the institution in charge of regulating shady financial instruments. Perhaps, I add with dripping sarcasm, this had something to do with the easy ride FTX had through regulation.

That easy ride was verily lubricated by significant political donations. It is not all out in the open as SBF used plenty of obfuscation in donations. We do though know that at his peak SBF donated over $100million in the US mid-terms from FTX users’ deposits. These donations were linked to Senate leaders such as Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Also infamously he was blown a kiss by Maxine Waters on a visit to the Capitol. To the political establishment’s great chagrin, just months later, FTX would completely collapse. Having funnelled billions of dollars of customer funds into Alameda Research and losing some big gambles, the whole empire became insolvent.

SBF had cannily based his company in the Bahamas, ensuring a nice safe haven for their business activities. Thus after the collapse, SBF was holed up in the Bahamas and it took some machinations to get him back to the USA to face a jury. 2023 would see the fallen SBF attend trial in the USA on charges including fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. He was released to his parents multi-million dollar property on bail; set at $250 million, the largest ever bail bond. Although in July 2023, after being caught witness tampering, he was remanded in prison.

During the trial, which mostly focussed on the illicit credit lines between Alameda Research, the shady trading venture, and FTX, the cryptocurrency empire. SBF would claim ignorance of much of the activities which took place on his watch and in his name. Countless billions of dollars of customers’ money were though accounted for and traced into the black hole, estimates start at the $8 billion mark. Similarly many of the political donations would lead straight into the ether and, usefully for US politicians, fall outside the remit of the trial. In fact the campaign donations violation charge was dropped from the docket at the behest of the Bahamas. They would not extradite SBF on that charge, we presume due to US political pressure.

One aspect of corruption ongoing is the return of customer funds. Autism Capital, a crypto researcher, claims that user funds are being returned at the lower dollar value from 2 years ago whilst FTX’s legal team are able to sell the underlying asset off at 4 times the market value and pocket the difference. He also highlights the deliberately weak coverage of SBF’s campaign funding violation trial – whereby the political dimension of corruption could be revealed.

Addendum: Fortunately I waited until the very last day of the year to finish this article. We are presented with the news today that whilst SBF was found guilty on 7 charges earlier in 2023, that the second trial, for 5 more charges including unlawful campaign contributions, would be dropped. The Department of Justice claim they have already seen much of the evidence and that the case should be dropped in the interest of expediency. We can therefore conclude that the SBF case exemplifies the corruption of the US political class of today. There is an open door between regulators and corrupt actors to ensure that predatory financial corporations are allowed to victimise customers with no oversight or prevention. It also highlights how the politicians themselves are owned by their donors, be they economic such as SBF, or military such as Nikki Hayley being on the board of Boeing, I digress.

Regulation

As aforementioned, the job of regulating crypto in the USA seems to fall unto the SEC. The SEC was created in the shadow of the Wall Street crash. FDR was on a spate of alphabet agency creation; this agency was to protect investors from the exigencies of high-risk financial schemes. However, as with most regulation bodies they become co-opted by the groups whose behaviour they should be curtailing and often become toothless pawns. The case of SBF, Gensler and the SEC demonstrates this – and Gensler’s role is still under some scrutiny. However, there is much political lobbying for cryptocurrency and related industries to fall under the remit of the CFTC: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. They are similarly poised to regulate, in particular, speculative investment devices – such as stock investment. They also are seeking to bring crypto under their wing by expanding their purview. Throughout 2023, the US Senate have held a commission on this expansion of CFTC’s role in regulating cryptocurrency as well as the burgeoning carbon credit markets.

A second and vitally important arena of regulation to mention is ETFs. An ETF, an Exchange-traded Fund is a financial instrument that people can buy or sell in a similar way to a stock or share. Some ETFs are bundles of shares held by a company. ETFs are pertinent here because a number of the biggest investment firms in the world are vying to create a Bitcoin spot ETF. This would be tied to the price of Bitcoin – it would be a bet on if you think the price of Bitcoin would go up or down. An ETF allows people to participate in the hype around Bitcoin without the regulatory jamboree of buying and taking the actual asset into self-custody.

The SEC is currently the institution that regulates ETFs and given the huge upside potential, they are the prime target for lobbying. Blackrock, the biggest asset holder in the world, is in prime position to push out their Bitcoin spot ETF in 2024, which would have a massive price on Bitcoin itself. If the ETF sold too much at a certain price, there would be an incentive to hold Bitcoin’s market value either higher or lower, leading to market manipulation. Therefore if Blackrock, a massive asset holder, can run a worldwide bet on Bitcoin’s price they can effectively manipulate the price. Tie that in with malicious actors in the sphere who have other interests and you can see potential for market rigging on a large scale. As Max Keiser points out, the only solution to the burgeoning ETF market is for deep-pocketed investors to begin picking up vast quantities of underlying Bitcoin itself to ensure the asset remains in public hands. As yet we still await these angel investors appearance.

El Salvador – Bitcoin country

We cannot bring up the arch-maximalist Max Keiser, formerly of RT, without mentioning his side venture, as economic adviser to El Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele. El Salvador has seen something of a tidal shift in the last few years. Nayib Bukele, a mild populist leader, managed to pull back some power from the omnipresent USA in El Salvador. The country had been plagued by gang violence as the hub for the notorious MS-13 gang. Many gang members were forcefully extradited from US prisons into El Salvador, causing a wave of criminality. Bukele came into power, apparently mild-mannered but behaved as a strong-man. Strict regimes of policing were created and he has cut El Salvadorian crime to a huge degree. It has gone from the most dangerous countries in the Americas, with shootings every day, to one of the safest with months with no violent crime at all. His policies have not been without detractors, as humanitarian charities have challenged his imprisonment of so many gang members, but his approval ratings are high.

In parallel with the crime crackdown, Bukele introduced Bitcoin to El Salvador. With Keiser by his side, he went further in adoption of Bitcoin than any State leader has to this point. Not only did he adopt Bitcoin as legal tender / currency, as other states already have, he also invested central bank funds in Bitcoin, making El Salvador itself a big holder of Bitcoin. Furthermore he established a Bitcoin wallet for Salvadoreans and gave every citizen a stipend of about a week’s wages in Bitcoin. Whilst it has only been a qualified success with low usage of the wallet, El Salvador has seen a growth in GDP whilst many South American countries have seen a fall or stagnation. Furthermore El Salvador are on the brink of launching their own volcano powered mining operation and bond scheme to allow foreign investment into the ‘Bitcoin nation’. There is also blooming interest in Arab Gulf states in Bitcoin, with rumours abounding about their possible entrance into the sphere. If a Saudi Arabia or Qatar began moving their central bank funds into Bitcoin, we would see a ‘God Candle’ and it would move the legitimacy of Bitcoin to a much higher level. Whilst this is great cause for optimism for Bitcoin’s price, we must always balance that by saying no official statement has been made formally.

In Other News

The cryptocurrency sphere is huge. It used to fit mainly inside one forum, bitcointalk.org which was the hub for all cryptocurrency for the early years. Nowadays there are hundreds of full-time publications, each churning out high-end analyses of the cryptocurrency market. The cryptocurrency market is rated at a value of over $1trillion. There are thousands of coins, tokens and products constantly innovating, some shorter lived than a damsel-fly. Plus we have the growing acceptance of institutions around the world who flex and adapt to the new landscape and evolve regulation in tandem with innovation. Thus it is an impossible task to give a deep dive on crypto in one article. But I have picked out some more salient trends, ones to watch for the new year – which should give a little gestalt, a sprinkling of pixels from the bigger picture view.

The first is the case of Binance. Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world; it has its own token, BNB, used for billions of dollars of trading each year. They have always skirted the fringe of regulation, locating offices in various Caribbean and Asian islands and hopping jurisdictions regularly. This year, the USA caught up with Binance and launched a class-action lawsuit. Binance had encouraged American users to use proxy servers to access their services and skirt US controls on crypto. This ended up with Binance paying billions to the USA, and their CEO stepping down. This indicates a big win for US regulation as they have poached one of the bigger sharks in the sphere.

Binance falling to the regulators may in the long term spell the end of Binance itself, as they have a lot of shady business going on in the background. As with any crypto exchange there are accusations of market manipulation and the bending of international laws is not always well received. The intense oversight and scrutiny also puts the stopper on many of their activities. One important point for me is the regulation of privacy coins. Privacy coins, like Monero and to a lesser extent Zcash, allow users to interact and transact privately. Even though their blockchain is public, there is no way to decipher who is transacting, how much, and when. This allows for people to evade censorship, and state control. Obviously the success of these technologies is a massive thorn in the side of global power structures who seek to control as much as possible the lives of the people. This is pertinent to the Binance case as Binance has been pressured to drop Zcash and Monero from their exchange by US regulators. It is not the first time that Monero for example has been dropped from exchanges for fear of regulation, but it indicates a step further in the battle of the State vs. Privacy technologies. We note too the US government’s Luddite attempts to make any type of encryption illegal. It is a battle worth watching as these privacy technologies usually keep ahead of government regulation – Monero doesn’t require Binance to function, it is designed to be peer-to-peer and fully decentralised, and continues to grow.

Another one to watch is Tether. Tether is the biggest stablecoin. A stablecoin is a token that is tied to the price of a currency, in this case, the US Dollar. Because 1 USDT (Tether’s token name) is worth 1 US Dollar, people can arbitrage their cryptocurrencies virtually with something that resembles a digital dollar. This is important for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the USA along with all other developed nations, have been working to create a fully digital version of their currencies, this allows for greater control and scrutiny over transactions. You can look into my other articles on CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) for a much deeper dive on this topic. Another aspect of the Tether story though, is that it has to back its digital token with ‘real-world’ assets. The way they choose to do so is by buying US treasuries. These are certificates issued by the USA at a certain interest rate – the state will pay the bearer a fixed interest rate over a fixed time period, for example a 2-year treasury might earn you 2% interest when it matures. The trouble for the US treasury in 2023 is that they have burned up most of their street credibility. Most people don’t believe that the US have the power to ensure the dollar is worth similar or more on a 2, 5 or 10 year period. This is due to 2 things: the first is that in sanctioning Russia, the USA said they would not honour any treasuries held by the Russian state, thereby defaulting on the debt and losing face. Secondly, the Federal Reserve has had trouble throughout 2023 in keeping inflation under control and looks weak. This means that having a buyer like Tether, who must buy treasuries to remain liquid, and back their ever expanding book of assets, is very important. Some commentators think that Tether is one of the few backstops propping up the US treasury market and ensuring the USA doesn’t publically default on its debt.

As we can see, in just a few years Tether have become a linchpin for the US economy and show no signs of slowing. Their biggest competitor, USDC, another stablecoin, lost the faith of the markets as it was tied in with Signature bank, which went down in the flames of the FTX fiasco. Tether is cemented as number 1 for now. But I believe that, similarly to Binance, its days are numbered. They too have a history of negligent behaviours and an opaque operating procedure. They refused to be properly audited for many years and even now, many don’t believe their accounting. They are also tied into multiple complaints of price manipulation with Bitcoin. There is an open case in court declaring that Tether issued USDT and bought up cheap Bitcoin on the news, thereby manipulating the price and garnering huge private profits – this is market rigging.

Furthermore, in November 2023, Tether was caught in the ‘Authorised, not minted’ scandal. Here they ‘authorised’ the creation of $1billion of USDT on Christmas Day, but didn’t mint it directly into tokens and release it to the public. Instead they held it in reserve, but the authorisation itself caused a huge pump in Bitcoin price. Anybody with advance knowledge of the authorisation could stand to make huge profits in another case of market manipulation, and it seems on statistical analysis that certain actors did. Whether this too will be borne out in a court case, we are yet to see but it is indeed shady behaviour from a huge player in the crypto space. A worrying sign no less.

I would go as far as to say that Tether is the test case for future stablecoin technology. Not only does USDT help the US government and operate as a middleman in cryptocurrency trading, but it operates as a functional currency in states where the local currency is untrustworthy. In Lebanon for example, the central bank defaulted on its debts and effectively became bankrupt. The Lebanese Pound became useless as a currency with its value in freefall, so USDT, Tether, became one of the fallback currencies. It’s certainly an interesting time for financial innovation, but I implore people to be wary of technologies presented as ‘the next best thing’ or which seem extremely convenient as they may be masking inhumane profit-seeking motives, as I believe Tether do.

Do look out in the new year for the threads unravelling from some of the small tears in the tapestry I have highlighted here. For those of us who are interested in crypto – these times are enjoyable and worrying in equal measure. As for predictions, we can only go on what we have seen so far, and that is a rollercoaster of ups and downs, a myriad of controversies and always a rogue actor lurking in the shadows. Similarly there are huge causes for cautious optimism, the resilience of the cypherpunk ideology is heartening, so too is the slow pace of institutional progress to deal with the new era of finance in cryptocurrency. It is worth reminding you, lastly, of the old maxims of crypto: ‘Trust no-one, Do Your Own Research’, ‘Hodl – to the moon’ and ‘Not your keys, not your coins’. Perhaps these could be a new year’s resolution if you are still looking for one.

Sources:

BBC, March 202: State will fund 80% of workers wages

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51982005

Coinmarketcap: Bitcoin 2023 statistical summary including market dominance

https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/a-visual-look-back-on-bitcoin-in-2023

Ordinals: An example of a Bitcoin Ordinal: Bitcats Inscription #312037

https://gamma.io/inscription/f68560d5aa1c8022ed2ca50932c83f39ef17a9cca7f00e6a204dd39df220ba2ei0

Bankman, father, drafts legal documents for Alameda

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-14/sam-bankman-fried-s-parents-did-they-enable-ftx-s-rise

Gensler at MIT advocates for Ripple, with Ellison as boss

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roslynlayton/2021/10/29/sec-chair-genslers-war-on-crypto-is-about-his-resume/

Ripple partners with Mastercard to offer blockchain products

https://coinpedia.org/news/ripple-news-xrp-goes-mainstream-mastercard-integration-unveiled/

SBF donates $100 million during US mid-terms

https://nitter.net/CollinRugg/status/1741100200465183034

SBF campaign donation violation charge dropped due to Bahamas

Autism Capital: User funds returned at low rate from FTX case

https://nitter.net/AutismCapital/status/1740924608134693129

Rumours of Qatar’s $500 billion entry into Bitcoin

https://cryptonews.com/news/qatars-sovereign-wealth-fund-dives-into-bitcoin-with-potential-500b-investment-confirmed-news-or-just-rumors.htm

Blake Lovewell: The 7 Pillars of a Global CBDC system

The 7 Pillars of a Global CBDC System

Tether in court over Bitcoin price rigging

https://cointelegraph.com/news/plaintiffs-in-tether-bitcoin-price-manipulation-case-will-not-drop-complaint

Tether: ‘Authorised not minted’ scandal

https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2023/12/tether-ceo-announces-1b-usdt-mint-authorized-not-issued