When and How Billionaires Break Bad and Government Agencies Get Compromised
When and How Billionaires Break Bad and Government Agencies Get Compromised
Just how many Steve Wynns are there? How many Michael Sussmans? How many Jeffrey Epsteins?
The forced registration of billionaire Steve Wynn by the US Justice Department and superseding indictment of billionaire Tom Barrack raises a lot of interesting questions but the most intriguing of which is this: what happens when billionaires and their servants become enemies of the state in which they live?
Wynn is Chisraeli — unlike his fellow Macao casino magnate Adelson Wynn didn’t have the good timing to die — and his forced FARA registration is the end of alliance. Barrack is UAE and Saudi and Sussman, working as he did for Paul Singer and Israeli intelligence is now on trial.
What does this mean long term though? Seems like they’re paying for a parking ticket in a zone they didn’t know they illegally parked in. What’s the end goal here?
Clean ups are always messy operations and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a cover up — or a warning shot. I’ve come to take it seriously. These operations are the opening bid in a conversation between the Deep State and deep capital. The state cannot tolerate rivals to its own power and so, in much the same way as ProPublica publishing the leaked taxed records was to encourage the billionaire class to be more patriotic, so too is the prosecution of the septuagenarian or octogenarian class is a way of getting them to be a bit more charitable on their way out of life. Uncle Sam wants to be added to the will ahead of the failsons.
It is all but a prelude for what comes next.
In retrospect that the clean up started with the most literally mobbed up parts of the economy — casinos (Wynn) and real estate (Barrack) — ought not to have been surprising. Nor is it odd that Wynn, 80, and Barrack, 75, would come in for destruction by the septuagenarians who run our government. There’s no crime like geezer on geezer crime and the through lines to our own tech billionaire class is clear. Steve Wynn, whose mob ties go way back, was the first investor in Bobby Kotick’s Activision, which, I predict, is not going to get sold to Microsoft, after all. Stay tuned.
What is surprising is that the PayPal mafia (Musk, Thiel, Sacks) is clearly next in the dock. I had mistakenly thought that the PayPal Mafia was smart enough to understand the opportunities that Biden presented. But I neglected the degree to which they too are heavily compromised by foreign powers and dependent on low interest rates. Whoopsy. I guess I overestimated their intelligence.
One of the reasons some of us who were deep state adjacent or Deep State Inc. backed Donald Trump is that we believed his presidency would reveal both the criminal and hostile intelligence agencies undergirding the world order. Everybody would be revealed. It would be a kind of rapture if not a reckoning heralding reform. Sometimes the best way to destroy one’s enemies is to make them think they’ve won.
Trump’s election would be so cataclysmic, so cathartic, so crazy, so “out there, man” that it would present a genuine opportunity for reform of many of the sclerotic institutions that had struggled to adapt to the digital age. It would be the final death blow to the false meritocracy that was really ruled by China and/or by a faux elite like the Kushners, who stole their way into Harvard and into New York real estate.
I looked forward to Trump’s victory. I assumed, wrongly, of course, that I, a nerd, would be seated at the right hand of the Trump. Every government requires brains, after all. And for a time, my patron did actually sit right next to Trump. But ultimately what happened were backroom deals that preserved power, rather than upend it. Facebook wouldn’t be reformed but deformed by cutting deals. Jared wanted in on the tech elite. He wanted to be one of them. Ironically by cutting such a deal Facebook would ultimately slit its own throat. Happily. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here’s how I thought about it at the time.
The optimistic view: Ours is a gerontocracy preparing the way for a technocracy. America becomes China by transitioning away from Soviet-style collapse. We maintain our technological edge because we ultimately would have no choice. The prices of things wouldn’t necessarily increase — only to have a reorienting our society away from consumer Internet and financialization to what we might call national champion economics. Slowly, but surely, we would give up our freedoms to a technocracy.
The pessimistic view: the run of a mob for its own interests by the compromised enemy of the state billionaires. America becomes Russia and the wholesale looting of our resources would begin in interest. We wouldn’t really realize it because we would have cheap energy prices. We’d be happy and fat and middle class. Slowly, but surely, we would give up our freedoms to a despot.
You must choose your enemy well for ultimately you become him. Do you want America to look more like China or more like Russia? I thought, ultimately, that this is the implicit question between the two political parties. Which vision of America you fear tells me a lot more about you than it does the underlying reality of the situation. Great powers ultimately always converge anyhow.
What can I say? I believe many political choices are really Hobson’s choices. That is, they aren’t really choices at all. One person’s “nudge” is another’s shove. Is it any wonder then that Samantha Power, head of USAID (not at all a front for CIA!) is married to Cass Sunstein, whose book, Nudge is inherently anti-democratic?
As I once put it, 2016 was a mob war and I picked the winning side. I make no apologies for that. But there are no permanent victories or permanent defeats so long as there is life.
For me this was a probabilistic bet. I once told Peter Thiel that the strength of companies like SpaceX (a privatized NASA) or Uber (privatized transportation) or Palantir (a privatized CIA) suggested a weak state but that I doubted that that would last for long. Those companies would either be destroyed or requisitioned.
That so many American companies have volunteered or been voluntold to help in Ukraine suggests something quite interesting. The national champions are back, baby.
The sharing economy was marketed as a form of liberation but what if it, in fact, was a form of easing the pain of boomer gouging. Young people couldn’t afford buying houses because their lives had been upended by one boomer scheme after another — Savings and Loan Crisis, tech bubble 1.0, Iraq War, 2008 housing crisis (really China bailed out the boomers), Covid, and now the pending recession.
Because we like to pretend we have two political parties, the Clintons will also come into focus. It is they who initially gave us the birth certificate sideshow, which was Israeli and Netanyahu intelligence looking into the fake origins of Obama. I should know. I was a part of it. The thinking was that given how much Obama had crafted his fake life story, he could always be blackmailed with revealing the truth about it. Say what you will about Joe Biden but there’s something touching about how Netanyahu knew that the only way he could get at Uncle Joe was through his surviving children—Hunter and Ashley.
Let me tell you something you probably know by now but can’t say for reasons of propriety. You don’t want them to do onto you as was once done onto me.
Just as the Wynn probe and Barrack probe were about Chisrael and KSA/UAE, the Sussman trial is about the ways in which the Israelis influenced our FBI. We have pro-Israel billionaire Paul Singer paying for Fusion GPS dossier, which, in turn, was handed to the very compromised John McCain, whose McCain Institute was funded by… Paul Singer.
You know, the same Paul Singer who owns Paul Ryan, Elise Stefanik — he’s her largest donor!, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, former House intelligence chair Devin Nunes and soon to be former Senate intelligence chairman Richard Burr.
As the Strum and Drang around January 6 committee hearings unfolds recall, too, that only Elise stands to gain from the public airing of dirty laundry. Could it be Pegasus — that Israeli hacking tool — strategically releasing the audio of the conversations?
Returning for a moment to the Fusion GPS dossier, remember the dossier was then taken to the Clinton campaign and ultimately to Israeli intel laundry factory BuzzFeed, where Ben Smith (of the very pro-Israel New York Sun) published it to undermine the Trump presidency. (Full disclosure: I am suing BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and my case looks likely to make it to the Supreme Court.) BuzzFeed, you’ll remember, was backed by none other than Andreessen Horowitz, whose own ties to Chisrael deserves a careful airing soon.
The purpose of the dossier was never to be true but to remind Donald Trump of what could come out about him— if he stepped out of line. It wasn’t about Trump’s ties to Muh Russia but to Israel and its attendant ties to organized crime that kept him nervous.
Trump chaffed under the arrangement, of course, and his fighting with Netanyahu after both men are out of power gives you a sense that things are getting a lot more interesting. Stripped of office and of pretense and perhaps soon of their liberty, they can be what they never were in power — honest. Neither Israel nor America is a country for selfish old men and some magnanimity goes along way. Trump dutifully complied by giving the Federalist Society everything it wanted. That the Federalist Society was backed by Barre Seid and Peter Thiel shouldn’t surprise us. Who (and what) is Leonard Leo, really? Enemies of the state indeed, but which state?
Let’s not forget that mob boss Sheldon Adelson wanted Epstein’s prosecutor (and Harvard law alum and Alan Dershowitz student) Alex Acosta to be the head of the Department of Justice.
Of course the FBI today portrays itself as the victim of Sussman but the FBI has long ago been penetrated. That’s what the investigations into Matt Gaetz and Ross-Lehtinen, both of whom have family intelligence ties, were really about.
Fixing that is long overdue. Let’s hope Durham can get it done.
Until then, a few questions that the press ought to be asking:
Why is it that nobody is mentioning how the Clinton campaign’s attorneys took over a GOP opposition research being run by a contractor for Vladimir Putin’s money launderers, Prezevon?
Who approached who to continue Fusion GPS’s work? Was it Paul Singer or the Clinton campaign?
Sussman’s legal team says Fusion was retained to provide protection from Trump’s famous “litigiousness.” Why did Singer — whose net worth dwarfs Trumps and who has armies of lawyers on retainer — hire them, though? Was it for that same “legal advice support”?
Given that Paul Singer is both a major funder of Fusion GPS and of Elise Stefanik — number 3 in House GOP leadership — will she step down from leadership?
Or are we to have a redux of 2015 when patriotic Americans stopped Compromised Kevin from ascending to the speakership — only to have Paul Ryan, another beneficiary of Paul Singer, rise?
And what does it mean that the New York Times consistently and routinely seems to be compromised? Was it always thus?
Good piece, the detail on the phone recordings - McCarthy, Graham etc is an important one not explored enough.