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I at all times appreciated techno-feudal lord Peter Thiel’s obsession with the blood of the younger being utilized in pursuit of everlasting life for himself. It appears a superbly upfront metaphor for our late-stage capitalism by which the pursuit of revenue drains the lifetime of an ever growing quantity.
Thiel’s lust for the fountain of youthful blood got here to thoughts just lately when studying about Sequoia Capital’s return to Israel.
Sequoia is likely one of the largest enterprise capital corporations in Silicon Valley and it invested early within the likes of Apple, Google, and Oracle. It additionally sprang the “PayPal Mafia” to prominence, a bunch that features Thiel and President-elect Donald Trump’s present sidekick and world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Unsurprisingly, as a citadel of capitalism constructed on eugenics, bombs, and hatred of the working class, Silicon Valley is now among the many upcoming Trump Administration’s greatest backers and helps push for the US’ ongoing involvement within the Gaza genocide.
Sequoia left Israel in 2016 as a result of, in response to associate Shaun Maguire, Israeli founders appeared to promote early within the a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} vary whereas the VC agency prefers to put money into corporations that could possibly be value $50 billion or extra.
So why is Sequoia again? Maguire says that “The founders right here right this moment are among the many most bold on the earth, and we imagine that the nation will produce corporations giant sufficient to go well with the fund.” Oct. 7 and the following genocide play a big function in that calculation.
Sequoia’s dozens of investments are centered round protection tech and cybersecurity and are oftentimes headed by veterans of the Israeli Protection Forces Unit 8200, the central assortment unit of the intelligence corps, and the Israel Air Pressure’s Shaldag Unit, which makes a speciality of clandestine operations and navy intelligence.
Israeli tech is in fact getting used and examined within the genocide:
WATCH: Israel is utilizing facial recognition expertise to arrange the way it conducts mass arrests and forcible displacement in Gaza. Some Palestinians say the expertise can be getting used to hold out subject executions. pic.twitter.com/HDeQgElJez
— Mondoweiss (@Mondoweiss) November 19, 2024
That doesn’t bother the likes of Maguire at Sequoia. In his telling he’s a profile in braveness for his assist of Israel that’s beneath assault from all sides, together with the Biden administration. By making such feedback he’s presumably implying that the soar on the fitting of the next graph ought to go a lot greater:
He expects Trump to perform that. It’s not simply Sequoia. Others like Greylock, one other Silicon Valley behemoth, and New York Metropolis-based Lux Capital, which makes a speciality of “deep” tech startups, are getting in on extra motion in Israel. Right here’s the co-founder of Lux with extra particulars that Friedrich Flick could possibly be pleased with:
Simply on with @cnbc @MorganLBrennan + @jonfortt-American 🇺🇸 protection tech, Palantir, Anduril, Israel, US-The need of scientific + tech superiority-Lux’s $1B funding in laborious power-Lux’s funding of soppy energy……with our launch of Lux Labs pic.twitter.com/NlLihvKi7X
— Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh) October 28, 2024
Lux claims to “champion corporations that work on the intersection of the brand new and the not-yet-imagined, trying a long time into the longer term to create a world most of us can barely think about.”
That’s a method of placing it.
Possibly it’s not a foul wager on these Corporations serving to deliver that world into being are doing fairly nicely. Israeli protection tech agency Elbit Methods, for instance, has a file order backlog value $22 billion in the mean time.
American massive tech has lengthy supported the Israeli apartheid regime the place its merchandise will be examined, and so they proceed to take action regardless of the genocide being perpetrated.
Sequoia, Lux, and the others, are in fact betting that these applied sciences developed in Israel will be delivered to scale world wide.
Is it simply the tech being exported? Whereas Israel is successfully a colonial laboratory for tech of surveillance, management, and extermination, what does that portend for its benefactor, the US — extra particularly our ruling class’ inclinations?
An attention-grabbing — if terrifying— thought:
Gaza already ready the world for nuclear struggle.
To expertise dying, destruction and struggling past the size of any significant subjective comprehension.
Now nobody can declare the worth of human life. There’s now no going again.
Might God have mercy on us all. pic.twitter.com/HSdX40N0BR
— Haz Al-Din 🇷🇺 (@InfraHaz) November 19, 2024
Hopefully not. Nuclear struggle would, in spite of everything, hurt the plutocrats as nicely. Even when they’ve their bunker, with new Russian missiles they wouldn’t have time to get there. Even when they did, what about their employees? Presumably in preparation for the most certainly state to go nuclear: Israel.
Maybe it isn’t for nuclear struggle however for an extra radicalization of our authorities and types of capital extraction that may require extra surveillance, management, and violence.
What might that seem like? The Israelization of America is one risk. There’s, in spite of everything, clear ideological overlap between the ruling lessons of each international locations.
Silicon Valley tech billionaires dream of a world the place democracy is stamped out. Based on Netanyahu, the longer term belongs to authoritarian capitalism. The long run would look like right here.
Authoritarian Capitalism in Israel
It’s necessary to notice how racial and spiritual apartheid in Israel has at all times been inextricably intertwined with — if not pushed by — by financial components.
Earlier than Israel even got here into existence, Zionists launched into a marketing campaign to persuade the federal government in London {that a} Jewish homeland can be in service to British capital whether or not in Africa, industrial agriculture in Iraq, or that European Jewish labor might declare Palestine for European empire.
Throughout WWII because the US tried to determine the way it might dominate the world with out the fee or dangerous optics of colonial occupation, Zionism mockingly supplied a solution. As professor of historical past at Penn State College Laura Robson writes in her 2023 guide “Human Capital: A Historical past of Placing Refugees to Work”:
Zionism’s imaginative and prescient of remaking geopolitical territory and claiming land for empire by means of racially acutely aware settlement practices and intensive industrial improvement represented a central mannequin for this American-led imaginative and prescient of inhabitants engineering.
From its very starting, Israel was about turning a revenue for international capital — even when that meant turning on Jewish survivors of Nazi focus camps.
Within the battle for Latrun throughout the 1948 struggle, the Israel Protection Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ navy coaching, dooming a lot of them to instantaneous dying.
…The nationwide answer to mass displacement, it was transpiring, could possibly be each bit as inhumane because the imperial one, at the very least for individuals who couldn’t contribute as staff.
Throughout the June 1967 struggle,which resulted within the occupation of the West Financial institution and Gaza Strip Israel’s protection minister Moshe Dayan summarized the financial incentives of occupation:
“…a supplementary marketplace for Israeli items and providers on the one hand, and a supply of things of manufacturing, particularly unskilled labor, for the Israeli financial system on the opposite.”
Previous to Oct. 7, 2023 there have been greater than 200,000 Palestinian laborers, together with these with out permits, who work inside Israel and the occupied West Financial institution. Based on Dr. Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset from the Hadash Occasion, which helps Jewish-Arab cooperation and staff’ rights, the Gaza genocide is a product of late-stage capitalism:
Right here, it’s a class problem. It’s between the oppressed and the oppressor, between the exploiter and the exploited…Nationwide hostility serves the financial and political pursuits of the ruling lessons as a result of that approach they’ll divert the fashion, the frustration, the alienation from a class-based one to a national-based one…
In an effort to justify the crimes that an occupier does, occupiers at all times, finally, deteriorate into crimes as a result of, finally, occupation results in resistance. In an effort to chorus from seeing your self or recognizing your self as a monster, you need to justify the crimes that you just do. You try this by demonizing the occupied. It’s the identical in every single place. It’s not one thing that was born beneath the Israeli occupation. The slave orders in america of America did so. The Germans did so, too, with the Jews. The Apartheid regime in South Africa did that with the non-whites, particularly with the blacks; in fact, there was a hierarchy of various so-called races. It’s the identical right here, a language of occupation.
There are different financial components to think about, in fact. Israel exams out surveillance, inhabitants management, and navy expertise on the captive inhabitants and is reportedly utilizing synthetic intelligence to help its genocide.
There’s additionally the difficulty of pure assets:
Israel offers exploration licenses for pure gasoline in places which might be thought of to be inside Palestine’s maritime boundary in preparation for ‘occupying’ these areas
Considerations raised over potential violation of worldwide legislation and humanitarian penalties… pic.twitter.com/lAhQKoiPCZ
— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) February 15, 2024
And there’s the Gaza 2035 imaginative and prescient, which is a part of the broader US-backed India-Center East-EU Financial Hall:
What of the Palestinians in Gaza 2035?
…all through the three ‘phases’ defined within the doc, it turns into clear that the Palestinians permitted to dwell among the many ruins of their homeland would offer low cost labour on this new ‘regional commerce and power hub’ supposed for Israeli enterprise pursuits.
Displacing a inhabitants and destroying their current social, architectural and financial cloth beneath the guise of modernisation harks again to colonial concepts about sure races and societies being apparently unfit or incapable of extracting the utmost revenue from land – an argument favoured by nineteenth-century colonisers from South Africa to North America. 300 years of this pondering has landed us in our grotesquely unequal current, but former colonial powers in Europe and settler colonies just like the US proceed to finance the militarisation of Israel.
We are able to flip to President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior international coverage adviser and property vendor, Jared Kushner, for a glimpse into the actual property potential of such a plan.
“I’m sitting in Miami Seashore proper now,” Kushner stated. “And I’m trying on the state of affairs and I’m pondering: what would I do if I used to be there?”
For Kushner, the answer is easy: “I might do my greatest to maneuver the individuals out after which clear it up.”
And that’s most likely an excellent level to segue to the US.
American Parallels
There’s been numerous evaluation about what Trump’s Israel-first cupboard picks imply for Israel, Iran, and the Center East at giant. Much less so of what meaning for the US.
To be clear, the next just isn’t an argument that Trump represents a singular risk. If something, his warranted quest for revenge in opposition to sure neocon factions and Blob outfits might produce internet positives. Alternatively, he’s the product of our plutocrat-controlled capitalist system simply as Biden, Trump I, and Obama earlier than him. And so in need of overhauling the system, the query turns into how will it make use of the Trump administration right now?
Let’s do not forget that it was mere months in the past that Silicon Valley was largely aligned with the Biden Administration. How rapidly issues can change.
Tech, finance, authorities, and Israel are set to be aligned once more beneath Trump, as they’re with most each administration. Possibly one distinction between Biden and Trump is that we swap out the intense id politics for the extra old style non secular fanatics:
And, certain sufficient, Hegseth has 2 Crusader tattoos: a Jerusalem Cross, the image of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem on his chest, & “Deus Vult” the Crusaders’ theological cri de coeur (“God wills it”) on his bicep.
“Deus Vult” means God mandated Crusaders’ violence. 13/ pic.twitter.com/kAGwqjToyE
— Matthew D. Taylor (@TaylorMatthewD) November 13, 2024
Collectively they’re all marching in lockstep with Israel:
JUST IN 🚨
Trump’s incoming Nationwide Safety Adviser, Waltz: “Come January, count on a powerful response for each the ICC and the UN.” https://t.co/jRVlXzBsez pic.twitter.com/iFauLKUceh
— Open Supply Intel (@Osint613) November 21, 2024
Maguire, the above-mentioned associate at Sequoia is an instance. He was a Democrat. Now he’s able to go to the mattresses for Trump. And will a Democrat prevail in 2028, he’ll probably be on that crew too.
With each events brazenly corrupt, it’s at all times straightforward to be the place motion is because it’s solely a query of how a lot. They usually’re definitely hoping for motion with Trump.
Dovi Frances, an Israeli-American founding associate of the Los Angeles-based enterprise capital agency Group 11, is a significant Trump backer. He’s additionally being tapped to arrange an AI Nationwide Directorate in Israel beneath Netanyahu. An AI directorate already exists within the Israeli Innovation Authority, however the brand new program is meant to coordinate all the federal government’s AI actions and may need some big-name backers regardless of is said mission being so mundane. From Globes:
Senior figures who’re accustomed to the plan that has been offered by Frances to Netanyahu say that the 2 males expect the involvement of a number of senior personalities within the worldwide enterprise group to assist understand the plan. A few of these personalities are near President Donald Trump together with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who based PayPal with Musk, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever who after leaving the ChatGPT developer has based SST, a brand new AI firm that shall be based mostly in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.
In fact, the Individuals aren’t the one ones taking a eager curiosity in Israeli AI — at the very least in response to Frances. Right here he’s writing in The Jerusalem Put up about all of the alternatives the Trump Administration might usher in:
Gulf traders have quietly begun to hitch Israeli-related tech corporations’ cap tables, injecting capital into Israeli corporations, usually with out public announcement. These actions—each gross sales and investments—spotlight the rising financial ties between Israel and the Gulf and the immense curiosity from either side in fostering deeper technological collaboration.
Underneath the Trump administration, with the growth of agreements to incorporate Saudi Arabia, Israeli AI corporations might function platforms for whole industries within the Gulf, together with training, banking, healthcare, and cybersecurity.
…The political instability within the Center East, the AI revolution, and the US political panorama will not be remoted from one another—they’re intertwined.
Two months in the past, I met with Donald Trump in Washington, DC, the place we mentioned the AI revolution and the way his administration, if re-elected, might assist Israel keep its technological superiority within the area. We agreed that when he received the election, we might revisit the subject in a future assembly.
And so we’ll.
And so the remainder of us are confronted with the subsequent degree of fusion between tech, finance and authorities — an settlement to guard revenue and tech superiority and one written within the blood of genocide.
Whether or not or not the Gulf states are on board (laborious to imagine they’d depend on Israel/US for such tech contemplating the way it has been weaponized just lately, however what do I do know?), Israeli tech remains to be an export business. And what’s the motto? “Transfer quick and break issues.”
Extra of the Identical within the US?
The explanations behind the synergy between Tel Aviv, Washington, and Silicon Valley isn’t laborious to see. The surveillance and inhabitants tech utilized in Israel goes to be welcomed dwelling with open arms as described by Tech Coverage Press:
Large Tech corporations and enterprise capitalists are nicely positioned to use the techno-nationalist temper. Throughout the marketing campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped form the President-elect’s tech coverage agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, marketing campaign allies stated the brand new administration will discard Biden’s AI guardrails and go full steam forward on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity. To satisfy the huge power calls for of information facilities, Trump has referred to as for a increase in fossil gasoline manufacturing.
Swell. What might that seem like in apply? It ranges from the intense (the federal government watchdog Public Citizen got here out with a report on Friday warning in regards to the Pentagon growing AI weapons that may “deploy deadly drive autonomously—and not using a human authorizing the particular use of drive in a particular context”) to the extra mundane (particularly with Lina Khan and firm not pushing again):
New office dystopia simply dropped.
AI monitoring software program now flags you when you kind slower than coworkers, take >30sec breaks, or checks notes have a constant Mon-Thu however barely completely different Friday.
Bonus: It’s gathering your workflow knowledge to assist automate your job away. pic.twitter.com/Nkq0AkS7sp
— Deedy (@deedydas) November 23, 2024
Possibly nowhere is Silicon Valley’s alternative greater than with Trump’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of unlawful immigrants.
The US has lengthy used the border space as a testing floor for surveillance expertise, and that appears set to extend dramatically because the Trump-aligned and spook-led darkish cash and charity organizations sounding the loudest alarms in regards to the border are additionally set to be the most important winners financially.
These embrace corporations like PenLink, Ltd., a tech agency that sells surveillance instruments to legislation enforcement, together with software program that may monitor cell telephones and not using a warrant. The tech has been bought by ICE, the DEA and Texas DPS, amongst different businesses.
The Trump administration’s heavy deal with deporting unlawful immigrants jogs my memory of the Biden administration’s “international coverage for the center class.” Constructed on half truths, it maintained that taking over transnational threats was going to assist rebuild American business and supply good-paying jobs. It ended with few of the roles and determined makes an attempt by the administration to tout the manufacturing of weapons getting used to kill 1000’s within the Center East and Ukraine.
If you happen to don’t accurately determine the true risk to the American working class, the options aren’t going to work. And that risk is that the American ruling class doesn’t view the remainder of the inhabitants as fellow residents, nor fellow human beings. They’re vessels for use for revenue extraction — or in response to Thiel, doubtlessly blood extraction relying on its purity.
Simply to call a number of latest examples, we solely have to have a look at Obama’s foreclosures jamboree whereas banks have been rescued, the opioids mass homicide, ongoing rises in deaths of despair, ever-increasing homelessness and extra draconian efforts to punish the unhoused, mass imprisonment as the results of viewing crime as an issue of too many criminals fairly than too few well-paying jobs, all the US healthcare system, and an ongoing pandemic that harms working class Individuals most.
Will Trump tackle the forces inflicting this carnage or will he blame unlawful immigrants and supply extra of an “progressive” testing floor for Israeli-style surveillance and detention tech on immigrants?
My wager can be on the latter. For comparability we are able to look to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who rode to energy two years in the past based mostly partially on sturdy opposition to unlawful immigration and asylum and regardless of howls of fascism. Meloni rapidly backed down on her deportations pledge and ended up growing the availability of low cost international labor on the request of Italian capital. She’s made a giant present of all of it, nevertheless, and now has a virtually $1 billion detention facility in Albania sitting empty after courts blocked the plan.
As Yves identified just lately, the best option to take care of unlawful immigration is to make it tough for these migrants to receives a commission work.
However that doesn’t appear to be the purpose, which is as an alternative to discover a scapegoat for all the issues plaguing working class Individuals — ones pushed by rapacious capital. In any case, the exploitation of immigrants and ensuing wage strain is the results of authorities and capital conspiring to ensure it’s out there. It’s the results of the US destroying immigrants’ dwelling international locations with coups, sanctions, and different means. And the way in regards to the NGOs flying them in. Let’s not neglect that Biden presided over loads of deportations and saved engaged on the border wall.
On genocide in Gaza, financial points at dwelling, and immigration theater the 2 political events are in tacit settlement. Possibly we’ve got extra of this to stay up for, although:
Will they do that with keffiyehs now that orange man dangerous is again?
The Ruling Class Not as Dumb as They Appear
Let’s briefly study the opposite main massacre fueled by Washington as of late. Within the case of the struggle in Ukraine, the West is unprepared, unwilling, and impotent to have an effect on change on the battlefield, but the “assist” continues to stream to Kiev and escalation continues. There are various potential explanations.
Mentally impaired — doubtlessly by repeated Covid an infection — and actually imagine that Russia goes to break down any day now?
Are they merely attempting to get previous the Inauguration Day end line earlier than permitting Ukraine to break down after which blame Trump?
Flailing about because it’s curtains for the New American Century solely 1 / 4 of the way in which in?
Or possibly our plutocrats and their political representatives will not be as dumb as they appear.
Possibly they know that there are “no less difficult wars left to struggle,” and are resigned to turning inwards and doubling down on revenue extraction in territory they do management.
In Europe, at the very least, the limitless gaslighting over the Russia risk definitely serves a goal. Take a look at what it’s helped accomplish:
Political, financial, and safety subservience to the US.
Extra energy to the Queen Ursula-led European Fee, which enacts Washington will.
Enrichment of multinational fossil gasoline and weapons corporations on the expense of Europeans who’re seeing their way of life fall because of this.
An erosion of freedoms.
Within the US, the relentless Trump concern marketing campaign alongside the denigration of Trump supporters largely divides the loudest amongst us into two camps: those that imagine he’s the reincarnation of Hitler and those that suppose he’s the savior.
In the meantime the bulk simply need their financial considerations addressed, and all indicators level to them being disillusioned. The mainstream media and political figures have an curiosity in on the lookout for monsters like Russia and Hitler beneath all of the fallacious beds. We’re not taking a look at their benefactors, the actual enemy who is similar because it at all times was: bi-partisan financial warfare waged by the richest.
The US may lose each navy confrontation, however that’s a struggle it nonetheless is aware of how you can struggle and win.
And whereas there’s clearly numerous infighting happening among the many US ruling elite as of late, there’s at the very least one unifying drive that helps them maintain palms and sing “Kumbayah”:
US assist for the Israeli genocide grows out of home pressures and imperial logics. However we must always not underestimate the significance of this international coverage as a venue for elite reconciliation, after eight years of unusually intense inter-elite battle. https://t.co/74jI9E9TPh
— Tim Barker (@_TimBarker) November 18, 2024
“Unleashing” Silicon Valley in a quest for extra productiveness and revenue will even little doubt sooth many wounds.
Going again to Haz Al-Din’s thought within the tweet above that we’re being ready for a lot wider devastation, which is unsurprising.
Capitalism and neoliberalism means a disaffected inhabitants as each final drop is squeezed from Peter Thiel’s blood suppliers. Inequality is in every single place a progress business and with it the concern that if wealth is managed by a minority however political energy is managed by the bulk, nicely, then it received’t be minority-controlled wealth for lengthy.
And so together with financing directed towards packages to maximise revenue we get the identical in the direction of methods of management, which will help maximize that revenue and take care of any pestering unintended effects like a stressed inhabitants.
Maybe this go-round “America First” implies that because of being pissed off overseas, the ruling class will flip inwards with Israel because the mannequin (which additionally serves as a world reminder to weaker nations trying to rid themselves of Western extractive capital).
What to do? We are able to return to Dr. Ofer Cassif for one potential answer. He’s speaking about Israel (the place I’m undecided it nonetheless applies because the nation is thus far gone navy defeat could be the one choice), however the underlying message might nonetheless be helpful elsewhere:
The exploited Israelis, particularly the proletarians, is not going to see their very own employers as their exploiters and sophistication enemies however because the Palestinians. Who advantages from that? Who’s going to profit from that? The exploiters. So, ending the occupation, in addition to being an finish in itself as a result of it includes direct oppression and exploitation, will even cut back, utilizing the language of Lenin, the hostility between the peoples. In that sense, it is not going to solely give us a greater future to dwell pretty much as good neighbors however will even enable us to make it simpler for us to divert our rage in opposition to our so-called home exploiters.
Is it Might Day, 2028 but?
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