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Christian Sorensen is a researcher focused on the U.S.-based corporations profiting from war. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Sorensen is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), a group of military and intel veterans who disagree with U.S. foreign policy and know a better world is possible.

The structure’s widespread lies—including but not limited to official government propaganda, industry media operations, and the two in tandem—prevent the U.S. public from understanding the main ways in which the military-industrial complex harms the country, including:

• The over one trillion dollars funneled each year toward militarism and war could instead go toward helping the public. It could be invested in education, infrastructure, healthcare, local food production, affordable housing, international scientific cooperation, debt relief, and other beneficial endeavors.

• The military-industrial complex comes before the wars, not in response to them. Deploying the troops worldwide is the sustenance of the complex. The poor and the working class fight while the ruling class profits.

• The military-industrial complex’s massive espionage apparatus (known widely as the surveillance state) spies on the public.

• The military-industrial complex’s pollution poisons the air, water, and soil.

Despite all, the popular struggle (fighting for labor rights, civil rights, genuine democracy, and an end to war and war profiteering) rises again and again. The body politic—from the advent of socialism, through the turbulent sixties, through Occupy and black life, through COVID-19 and the summer 2020 protests—screams for freedom.

In the United States today, the working class is crushed beneath immense overlapping problems: no universal healthcare; no job security; costly higher education and mammoth student debt; food deserts in cities; pollution in the form of particulates, nuclear waste, industrial runoff and dumping, microplastics, and contaminated soil; unpotable water; a changing climate and massive biodiversity loss; a consumer culture imposed from above; crumbling public infrastructure, including public transit; incessant persecution of Arabs, black people, Asians, and other ethnicities; hundreds of thousands of homeless; millions of children going to bed hungry every night; a paltry social safety net; and the financial industry commodifying human needs, including water, housing, and food.

The tradeoffs are real. A small portion of the money that the U.S. government allocated to the post-9-11 wars could have sent every young person in the U.S. to college.1

And preventing the next pandemic will cost $22.2 billion, scientists say. The Pentagon on average shovels that kind of money toward war corporations in less than three weeks, I calculated based on 2022 budgets and contracting announcements.

As I edited this section on 19 August 2022, the U.S. government issued five $975 million contracts for research into new military aircraft propulsion. What could your town or state do with that kind of money?

The U.S. working class allows the ruling class to make these harmful decisions every single day. The U.S. working class allows the ruling class to keep the country at war.

Genuine “national security” is cooperation for the sake of the natural world, including improvement of the human condition.

One with faith in the system might say that ridding ourselves of fascism requires disassembling the fascist structure legislatively. This would start with revoking its foundational legislation (the 1947 National Security Act and Labor Management Relations Act), all subsequent “national security” legislation, including the aggressive policies passed each year in the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Supreme Court rulings that have given corporations incredible authority to influence policy. Ridding ourselves of fascism legislatively would require the imprisonment and eventual rehabilitation of current and former top war criminals, war profiteers, and their premier congressional and White House abettors. It would require passing a constitutional amendment banning war profiteering and immediately signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It would require the dissolution of numerous intelligence agencies, the outlawing of covert action, and the redirection of the military-industrial complex’s technology and brain power toward care of the natural world, including humanity. Meanwhile, many military bases and vast training ranges would become off-limits to humans, allowing the natural world to rebound. Ridding ourselves of fascism legislatively would require transferring Defense’s budget into other departments, as well as into a fund for the peoples of the world who have been on the receiving end of the wars. Those would be the first legislative steps.

There is one problem: Under U.S. fascism, legislation aids—not hinders—militarism and oppression. What does that mean? That means it is up to local organizing—workers united across racial lines—to take the lead in determining the fate of the species.

The U.S. ruling class will try to continue the business-as-usual approach that has served it so well during wars, proxy and direct, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the regular protests. Additional stressors coming down the pike (e.g., water scarcity, internally displaced persons, crop failure, further collapse of ecosystems, capitalists keeping prices high on necessities) will intensify the rallying hive of local organizing and the fascist state’s brutality.

If the species does not rid itself of the fascist structure, we risk losing everything—art, architecture, and mathematics; literacy (computer, linguistic, scientific); connectivity; and modern medicine—in the very real, overlapping climate crisis and sixth mass extinction.

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Wars Home and Abroad

Tools and procedures refined abroad against the workers of the world, rebels, and armed resistance groups are later used at home. And refinement at home abets use abroad. After NSA, overseas, pioneered the use of technologies to pinpoint a person’s cellphone,  local and state police used such technology daily against the U.S. public.1 As narcotics officers in cities across the United States had long planted evidence on suspects (the Baltimore Police Department reportedly exemplified this behavior), a U.S. military task force in the Middle East added evidence in order to justify deadly airstrikes after the fact.2 As U.S. banks took $12.4 billion from the poor (“overdraft fees”) during just one pandemic year, the International Monetary Fund collected (pdf) billions of dollars from heavily indebted countries (“surcharges”) during the pandemic.

Behavior and tactics travelled back and forth between the “homeland” and overseas warzones, as demonstrated during the summer 2020 protests. In both the “war on terror” overseas and the war against dissent at home, the fascist state created categories (e.g., franchise, affiliate, domestic violent extremist, violent extremist organization) and then stuffed people into these categories. U.S. intelligence and civil affairs personnel used counterinsurgency techniques overseas to quell populations whose countries the U.S. military occupied or bombed. At home, effective counterinsurgency techniques on display during summer 2020 included police joining protests, police taking a knee, and police dancing with protestors. As U.S. special operations forces rode around in nondescript vehicles in Iraq and Libya, snatching people off the street and out of cars,3 so then did federal special operations units ride around U.S. cities in nondescript vehicles and snatch civilians off the street.4

Law enforcement budgets did not go down in the wake of the 2020 protests. There was no “defund.” Budget expert Stephen Semler calculated that the U.S. ended up spending at least $277 billion on policing and prisons in fiscal year 2021. For perspective, that was “about $25 billion higher than China’s entire military budget.” The NYPD budget for 2021 ($6 billion) was larger than the military budget of many European countries. At $2 billion, the LAPD budget for 2021 was comparable to the military budget of dreaded North Korea. The White House’s fiscal 2022 request for federal law enforcement was roughly equal to Russia’s entire military budget.5

And the number of black people killed by U.S. law enforcement each year actually increased in the wake of the 2020 protests.6

“Public trust, as any cop will tell you, is the foundation of public safety. If they’re not trusted, the population doesn’t contribute, doesn’t cooperate,” President Joe Biden affirmed on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, signing an executive order on police reform. By banning chokeholds, establishing a national database for police misconduct, limiting the use of no-knock warrants, and revising use-of-force policies in federal agencies,7 the order polished the image and role of law enforcement in the core capitalist country. It did not touch the fascist nature of the military-industrial complex or address the role that law enforcement plays in U.S. society. The Democratic faction again boosted the structure it serves. (And DHS didn’t even fully comply! While DHS updated its use-of-force policy to align with the executive order, the Government Accountability Office soon determined that DHS was regularly undercounting the times it used force.)

Social Media Exploitation

Corporations specializing in surveillance of publicly available information (“open source intelligence”) proliferated after 9-11, marketing products aggressively to law enforcement as helping to reduce the time it takes to complete an investigation. The products sift through social media, online fora, and public chat platforms. What do you write or like? What photos do you post? Who are your friends and acquaintances? It is all up for grabs. And grab they do. Law enforcement across the country can now search for personal identifiers (known address, name, phone number, email address) when investigating the public. Pricy products display search results clearly, including webs that illustrate the public’s personal and professional networks. Washington does not actively regulate this business sector of war. Capitalist legalese, including nondisclosure agreements and the proprietary nature of corporate products, shields the invasive racket.

Building upon this baseline surveillance, Social Media Exploitation (SOMEX) teams use fake social media accounts to find information and informants. The Chicago Police Department’s SOMEX teams, for example, have investigated the public by using fake social media accounts furnished by the FBI, internal documents and emails indicate. Recall how legalese is one of the main advantages of U.S. fascism. The FBI and the Chicago Police Department have defined social media so broadly (they include dating sites, delivery apps, e-commerce sites, and “any and all online communication sites known and unknown which collect user data”) as to have nearly unlimited digital range. Additionally, the FBI has its own SOMEX team operating within its National Threat Operations Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, focused nationwide.8

Dataminr, a corporation that had received early investment from the CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, reportedly helped law enforcement keep tabs on the 2020 protests. Twitter gave Dataminr access to its full content stream, so Dataminr could scan all public tweets immediately after they were sent. Dataminr personnel sorted, bundled, and briefly described Twitter content, and then forwarded this information to law enforcement via email. Content could include protest locations, allegations of property damage, and understanding or misunderstanding of public grievance. Corporate surveillance of the public was merely newsgathering, not espionage or surveillance, public relations personnel explained. The corporation was just relaying information, keeping people safe via its “information discovery platform.”9 Dataminr employees, speaking with investigative journalist Sam Biddle on condition of anonymity, pointed to a pattern of racial profiling in the corporation’s monitoring of the 2020 protests.

Silicon Valley juggles its role as a key part of the military-industrial complex and its desire, for public relations purposes, to appear as an independent entity. Google made a big deal about no longer helping the U.S. military analyze drone imagery and then continued to work with the military and intelligence on other projects.10 Facebook states that the creation of fake profiles violates company policy, though it has yet to kick off FBI units that use fake profiles to monitor the public. Some Microsoft employees publicly dissented when the corporation got to work on augmented reality headsets for the U.S. Army, though Microsoft was and still is a top military contractor.11 Twitter in 2016 reportedly cut off U.S. federal intelligence agencies and fusion centers from Dataminr’s Twitter-related output, but the corporation continued to provide alerts to the U.S. military.12

Free Speech

Algorithms written by humans do most of the monitoring and censoring on social media. Capitalist media and ideologues (funded by Washington and its allies) position themselves as fact-checking organizations to help tech firms decide what speech is permissible. Some firms also use oversight boards—comprised of academics, activists, and specialists amenable to U.S. foreign policy—to oversee content moderation. Big Tech firms even accept censorship “requests” from the U.S. government, including from FBI, DHS, DOD, and CIA.13

Former intelligence personnel move to Silicon Valley, where they work directly for tech firms on everything from content moderation to “trust and safety” to policy,14 as DHS works with these firms to eliminate what it deems to be “inaccurate information” and “disinformation,” focusing on speech and writing about U.S. wars abroad and civil rights at home.15 In parallel, other portions of the fascist state manipulate social media and spread propaganda, targeting overseas audiences.16

Capitalism is a Right-wing economic system, and tech firms are among the top capitalists. Independent Left media challenge this authority, so they are censored regularly. These media face demonetization, suppression, removal of reportage, or account suspension, often without prior warning. This has happened in recent years to reporting from BreakThrough News, Status Coup, Grayzone, Consortium News, Redacted Tonight, Chris Hedges’ On Contact, MintPress News, the World Socialist Website, journalist Patrick Lawrence, theAnalysis.news, Second Thought, Black Power Media, multiple anarchist accounts, and more. The Right, meanwhile, is organized and funded well across all media—social, radio, and television.

The Democratic faction had pushed to censor speech. After losing the 2016 presidential election, this faction—instead of engaging in an honest internal critique regarding the numerous ways it was demonstrably failing the public—spread claims of Russian “meddling” in the election and fingered Moscow as the one who leaked the sordid emails of a Democratic official, which were published by Wikileaks. Prominent U.S. intelligence officials supported these claims blaming the Russian government but provided no evidence or proof. Tech firms stepped up censorship in the name of targeting the state’s enemies. It is now commonplace for Democratic partisans to portray Left voices, long unwelcomed on U.S. corporate media and/or relegated to broadcasting on foreign media, as foes: “puppets” of foreign governments, Russian “influence operations,” and Chinese “disinformation.” Immense Democratic establishment resources have gone toward stifling and corralling any party member who leans leftward on matters of war and peace.

With the Democratic faction structurally incapable of addressing the many crises facing the U.S. working class, far-Right politicians utilize social media to position themselves as anti-establishment, using “anti-woke” campaigns and populist rhetoric. Many alienated and confused workers are pulled rightward. Charismatic bullies, themselves the product of an ill society, attract big audiences. There certainly are racists among the supporters of a top bully, Donald Trump, though painting all of his voters as mere racists sidelines some of his supporters who are themselves people of color and ignores others who had voted previously for Democratic candidates, including black ones, before casting a vote his way.

The billions of people worldwide who today use large U.S. tech platforms are subject to rules—Terms of Service and “Community Standards”—narrowly defined by capitalist ideology, U.S. government policy, and a Western understanding of history. As life slowly “returned to normal” in North America, 2022, tech firms held onto the authority they had obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 protests, and pursuit of the 6 January 2021 mob.

Do you say “mob”?

Blues

The military-industrial complex is not just a fascist structure. It also contributes to the creation of a population that welcomes fascism.

• In directing over a trillion tax dollars every year—away from programs of social uplift and into programs of militarism and war—the military-industrial complex creates a desperate public, harmed economically by such policies of neglect (in addition to being harmed by living in the core capitalist country wherein every necessity of life, from shelter to water, costs a lot of money).

• In manufacturing public support for nonstop war (the first Cold War, the “war on terror,” and today’s new Cold War), the military-industrial complex damages the public’s mental state. People are led to believe that the humans on the receiving end of the wars are bad and deserving of what they get. The public is unable to recognize friend (a worker of the world) or foe (the fascist structure at home and the humans who ascend to its top).

• The public becomes restive and disgruntled when politicians repeatedly break their promises. U.S. politicians lie the big lie. Broadly, they claim democracy and American exceptionalism while rejecting democracy (anti-democratic behavior includes embracing corporate lobbyists and campaign financing and, crucially, sustaining a profit-over-people economic model wherein executives, not workers, make the decisions) and treating the working class as disposable, replaceable.

What could prevent the Right from capitalizing upon disillusion? An economic system that values the working class, allows democracy in the workplace, and is free from nonstop war. But the U.S. government cannot permit that, as doing so would mean the end of the fascist structure as well as the removal of top officials in government and industry who profit professionally and financially from this structure.

The nationalist combination of big business and government authority prefers the profitable status quo over instability. When it came to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, the military-industrial complex was fairly unified in its preference for a peaceful transfer of presidential authority. All ten living former Secretaries of Defense took to the Washington Post on 3 January 2021 to formally remind the U.S. military establishment that staying out of election disputes is an institutional practice and the best way to ensure continuity of government. The country’s top lawyer, the U.S. Attorney General, deployed federal commandoes to Washington, D.C., to posture against a large-scale foreign attack. Then, when a violent mob, revved up by an unstable outgoing president, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, some top capitalists recommended that Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment,17  which would have allowed Vice President and Cabinet to assume the presidency and get on with the transfer of power.

Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th—an “insurrection,” many media stated—were made out to be a unique threat to democracy. Basic questions were not asked:

• How did the most powerful structures within federal authority view the matter?

• How did the insurrection compare to the U.S. government’s own actions abroad and at home? Low estimates indicate that recent U.S. wars have killed hundreds of thousands of humans and caused millions of people to flee their homes. How many tens of thousands of humans die each year in the U.S. because they lack healthcare? How many die because they lack shelter? How many die from corporate pollution? Why was there forceful, steady outrage at the events of January 6th and not at these federal policies that causes mass death?

• What democracy? The ballot one casts in elections for U.S. Congress and/or President does not rival the influence of massive corporations and the superrich who fund and lobby the two political parties and funnel dark money through nonprofits.

The political analyst Caitlin Johnstone summarized the situation: The U.S. government “is doing literally hundreds of things right now as you read this that are more harmful and concerning than a pretend ‘insurrection’ that never at any time had a higher than zero percent chance of succeeding…”

Swimming in disgust for President Donald Trump’s harmful policies and actions, many people Left of center completely misunderstood that U.S. fascism prefers profitable stability over potential instability (even if the political instability comes from a Right-wing mob, whose precarious economic situation and militant mindset the fascist structure had helped create and boost).

As it does with pandemics and civil rights protests, the military-industrial complex used the January 6th mob attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to expand its power and authorities. The nearsighted aims of the Democratic political faction (leverage the January 6th events to harm the Republican faction politically) overlapped with the aims of the broader fascist structure (crack down further on a restless public) when inflating the mob as a major threat and then picking apart that threat. Many factors (e.g., standardized public education system, state propaganda, partisan bickering, and the conformity inherent to consumer society) had weakened the public’s ability to recognize and resist this reality.

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Counterinsurgency

The former director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center took to the New York Times’ Opinion page to position Donald Trump’s broad base as a domestic insurgency. Leaning heavily on his CIA credentials, Robert Grenier’s plan for counterinsurgency involved tracking and investigating the insurgents. Isolate and “alienate the committed insurgents from the population,” he advised. Regarding insurgency leadership, it “is far too late for appeasement.” Invoking visions of Saddam Hussein’s military defeat and Osama bin Laden’s years in hiding, Grenier affirmed: Trump’s veneer of invincibility “must similarly be crushed.” Grenier recommended convicting Trump in Congress and barring him from holding elective office—a “national security imperative.”

Naturally, Grenier did not mention the capitalists’ war against the working class or how the fascist state had created the conditions wherein people are desperate, open to illusion and delusion, and easily duped by authoritarian billionaires.

U.S. Congress held several narrow public hearings, some broadcast in primetime, investigating the January 6th mob attack and former President Donald Trump’s role as instigator. Led by neoconservative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the hearings positioned law enforcement as the good guys and President Donald Trump as an aberration, instead of the inevitable outcome of a society built upon greed. Pretending the United States is a democracy, Representative Thompson was forceful in his deceit: “January 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.” He cited devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, and a shared journey to build a more perfect union as examples of what “makes America great.” U.S. fascism—the military-industrial complex—was never mentioned in the hearings.

In the wake of the mob attack, authorities took steps to further separate U.S. Congress from the public it pretends to serve. The Capitol Police’s budget increased. (D.C. already contained more law enforcement personnel per capita than any other large U.S. city.) The Metropolitan Police Department’s Joint Operations Command Center, an intelligence unit in D.C., now collects constantly on the public. It ramps up activity (intel gathering, photographing of protestors, coordination with undercover police) when protests are expected and in progress, internal emails indicated. A top military contractor, Microsoft, has sold the broader Metropolitan Police Department a product that uses artificial intelligence—artificial intelligence (AI) involves feeding a computer program enormous amounts of data so the program can look for patterns—to compile data and connect regional and federal law enforcement databases, displaying information in user-friendly format. An intel unit with the Capitol Police now studies the backgrounds of people who are scheduled to meet with lawmakers. The FBI and other government units have doubled down on monitoring social media, allocating millions of dollars to purchase or license surveillance technology from the war industry.

The U.S. government began charging people with seditious conspiracy over their roles in the mob attack. Set forth in 18 U.S. Code Section 2384, seditious conspiracy happens when

“two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof…”

Punishment for seditious conspiracy is a fine and/or up to twenty years behind bars. Charging members of a mob with seditious conspiracy is precedent: The U.S. working class will be similarly charged the next time it rises up to challenge the capitalist ruling class.

U.S. government acquisition, storage, and utilization of biometrics—a person’s measurable features—skyrocketed during the post-9-11 wars, particularly in Afghanistan and the United States. One particular biometric, facial recognition involves scanning a human’s face and comparing that scan to a library of digital images. The Real ID Act of 2005 required U.S. state license photographs to be digital, facilitating data sharing and analysis across government agencies. Biometrics of most U.S. citizens and residents are now in government databases.18

Across the country, law enforcement used biometrics, particularly facial recognition, to find the summer 2020 protesters, even arresting them months after their alleged crime.19

Capitalists apply artificial intelligence to many different priorities, including imprisonment, espionage, and military operations.

Artificial intelligence, biometrics, and other modern tools were used to identify and round up some members of the January 6th mob.20

Weaponized Data

Capitalists are constantly looking for new ways to profit: Health, land, air, space, and now data—information about your life—are excellent ways to make money. The products we interact with every day include audio recorders, automobiles, cameras, laptop computers, household voice command devices, license plate readers, point-of-sale payment tools, payment websites, and smartphone apps. Smartphone apps, for example, can track your physical movement, day-to-day—where you go, what you do, who you visit, what floor you’re on—and your smartphone activity. Cookies, files that websites place on your computer, monitor movement online. Data brokers are corporations that gather information from these sources and publicly available information and then bundle and sell that information.

The U.S. government has not regulated data brokers. It is actually a major customer of these brokers and user of the data they gather. The Fourth Amendment, the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” doesn’t apply because the government isn’t searching the person; it is acquiring data from a third party. Government legal teams further argue—successfully—that citizens and residents do not get privacy, because use of devices, apps, and websites requires consent, typically via Terms of Service or download, to provide data to third parties.

The activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are illustrative. Journalist McKenzie Funk summarized in 2019, “ICE, like other federal agencies, sucks up terabytes of information from hundreds of disparate computer systems, from state and local governments, from private data brokers and from social networks.” The government agency “piggybacks on software and sharing agreements originally meant for criminal and counterterrorism investigators, fusing little bits of stray information together into dossiers.” Corporate America can play a more direct role, like when a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters refined public and commercial data into lists (name, current address, driver’s license information, rap sheet, phone number) for ICE to then use to investigate and pursue humans for deportation.21

In its daily operations, ICE can access datasets containing the detailed personal information of most people living in the United States, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology has concluded.

Government and industry offer assurances. A given person’s identity can be anonymized using an alphanumeric code, they say. But large datasets clearly betray one’s identity, and even small datasets indicate sleep and work locations. Drawing from corporate brokers and federal databases, the fascist state has bountiful information to analyze: car registration and insurance, cell phone movement, date of birth, facial recognition, medical bills, web browsing and social media, taxes filed with a social security number or an individual taxpayer identification number, utility bills, email address, license number and plates, and more.

U.S. government utilization of data brokers continued with respect to the summer 2020 protests and beyond.22

The Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence units regularly search the public’s data.23

Counterterrorism

The fascist state’s domestic counterterrorism strategy (pdf), issued under the Biden administration one year after the summer 2020 protests and five months after the 6 January 2021 Capitol mob, claims to make “no distinction based on political views,” though it notes that potential domestic terrorists might be motivated by anarchist doctrine, anti-capitalism, environmental worry, and concern for animals. Positioning domestic counterterrorism as a matter of confronting “white supremacy” brought on board some from the progressive wing of the Democratic faction, though the state has no incentive to actually combat white supremacy, as white supremacy doesn’t threaten the fascist state. Indeed, as seen in Chapter Five, racism is a core feature of permanent warfare.

As 2022 began, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was forming a new unit focused on domestic terrorism. Making the announcement in front of Congress on 11 January 2022, the assistant attorney general for national security pointed out that the Justice Department’s domestic terrorism caseload had doubled since March 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly before the summer civil rights protests. Though the Department of Justice already had a counterterrorism unit perfectly capable of handling terrorism cases, foreign or domestic, and the U.S. government already operated the most invasive domestic surveillance apparatus in human history, the Democratic faction eagerly supported establishment of this new unit focused on domestic terrorism.

Leaving plenty of room for future prosecution of the Left, the assistant attorney general noted, “We've seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies” (emphasis mine). Jill Sanborn, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, testified to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that the FBI had opened over 800 cases related to the 2020 protests. The biggest threats—climate change, ecocide, nuclear weaponry, the fascist state itself—were never on the agenda.

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling declassified in spring 2023 showed repeated widespread use of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—this section allows the U.S. government to collect and search without a warrant the online communications of innocent U.S. citizens and residents who are in communication with foreigners living outside the United States—to search for information about U.S. persons: those who participated in the summer 2020 protests as well as those who participated in the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol.

Counterterrorism units under a Democratic White House stand ready to pursue Left forces while making bureaucratic moves to tackle some white gunmen or violent Right militia members. Counterterrorism units under a Republican White House will openly pursue the Left, including strong labor movements, socialists, anarchists, civil rights activists, and antifascists of any stripe.

Conclusion

The internet is the species’ first chance to communicate, learn, and exchange ideas rapidly on a global scale. Unrestricted public communication threatens fascism, as it allows a gradual collective understanding of the oppressor’s nature. This is why the nationalist intersection of U.S. government and industry has worked so hard to dominate and monitor the internet, regulate thought, and sow advertisements, lies, and propaganda.

Today, one U.S. political faction is defined by hubris; billionaire donors; full funding of the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies; and organizing against and empty gestures toward the Left. The other political faction is defined by reactionary grievance; billionaire donors; full funding of military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies; and concrete organizing against the Left. Both factions are unresponsive to the public’s needs.

First, they came for the anarchists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an anarchist. Then they came for the communists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the Arabs, but I didn’t speak up because “terrorism!” Then they came for some black activists, but I didn’t speak up because I was taught to fear them. Then they came for the labor unions, but I didn’t speak up because I lived in a “right-to-work” state. Then—wait a second!—the system is fascist!

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Defund

The ruling classes of the United Kingdom and the nascent United States had a serious problem on their hands in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Facing hundreds of diverse protestors uniting against the economic system, the ruling classes came up with a solution: Elevate working-class whites over blacks.

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin explains that when “European indentured servants joined with Blacks to rebel against their lot in the late 1600s, the propertied class decided to ‘free’ them by giving them a special status as ‘whites’ and thus a stake in the system of oppression.” The new social status and material incentives kept these lower classes in line. “Even poor whites had aspirations of doing better, since their social mobility was ensured by the new system. This social mobility, however, was on the backs of the African slaves, who were super-exploited.”

Ervin continues:

“When they sought to organize unions or for higher wages in the North or South, white laborers were slapped down by the rich, who used enslaved Black labor as their primary mode of production. The so-called ‘free’ labor of the white worker did not stand a chance. Although the Capitalists used the system of white skin privilege to great effect to divide the working class, the truth is that the Capitalists only favored white workers to use them against their own interests, not because there was true ‘white’ class unity.”

This implementation of racism prevented the working class from uniting.

In the 1790s, the white population of Charleston, South Carolina, established the first formal police unit. This unit, the Watch and Guard, monitored and controlled slave movement in the majority black city. Policing expanded and evolved during Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era, monitoring and controlling the black population. Though anti-racism struggles altered the layout of U.S. society over time, the role of law enforcement remained the same: In enforcing capitalist law and the inequality inherent to capitalism, law enforcement protects the property of corporations and the wealthy and suppresses popular protests that want to change the economic system.

Law enforcement professionals often display racist behavior. For years, members of law enforcement in Torrance, California, sent one another racist and homophobic text messages and images. Training materials used by the Kentucky State Police featured quotes from Adolf Hitler and Robert E. Lee and advocated for a “ruthless” warrior mindset in policing. The Minneapolis Police Department, former employer of the Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd about two months into the pandemic (25 May 2020), carried out discriminatory, race-based policing. Local and state law enforcement across the country regularly posted violent and racist messages and imagery online.

The summer 2020 civil rights protests didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They rose against the backdrop of dismal living conditions that U.S. fascism creates when funneling tax dollars away from programs of public need (e.g., education, nutrition, housing, infrastructure) and into war, espionage, and policing. Policies that had hit families of color particularly hard included housing demolition, housing privatization, and the subprime mortgage crisis, which wiped out most black wealth.

Defunding the police is about putting resources toward helping the poor and working class (food, shelter, clean water, education, job opportunities) instead of militarized policing. As one protestor put it, defunding the police is about creating “systems that actually protect and serve, not just some but all… Abolish the police in favor of whatever that new service will be, whatever that new service is that resembles justice that the people decide on.” Less money for law enforcement does not correspond to an increase in crime.1

Many viewed the federal government’s response to the 2020 protests as uniquely Trumpian. This was not accurate. The fascist response to the uprising was part of a deep tradition, one which included operating against anarchists, socialists, and communists, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, the Occupy movement, the Ferguson protests, and more. U.S. fascism responds with the same intent no matter who is in the White House. The blowhard in the White House during summer 2020 did, however, make handling the popular uprisings more difficult. A sophisticated Executive would have wielded the state’s tools subtly, with an eye for the long-term.

Media Focus

Activity is criminal in the United States if capitalist politicians make it so via legislation. Capitalist crime (embezzlement, financial fraud, price fixing, price gouging, union busting, wage theft, industrial pollution, war profiteering, commodification of all life) is far bigger than working-class crime (burglary, larceny, robbery, vehicle theft), but the state does not consider much of the former to be criminal or prosecute it as such.

The U.S. government hurts the public in a variety of ways also not considered criminal. For example, it does not assertively regulate big business. It also refuses to implement universal healthcare, leading to tens of thousands of deaths each year.2 Washington’s priority is spending tax dollars on optional wars that kill civilians overseas and the U.S. public. (The wars kill U.S. troops directly. The wars kill U.S. citizens and residents indirectly, as tax dollars that could go toward programs that save lives, such as healthcare, housing, and nutrition, instead go toward war and espionage. The pollution from the military and the war industry kills U.S. citizens and residents, too.) Washington also wages a “war on drugs” that disproportionally polices and imprisons people of color.

Though law enforcement treated the public brutally during the summer 2020 protests,3 corporate media often presented this violence in gentler terms. Euphemisms included aggressive tactics, clashes, forceful arrests, heavy presence, rough treatment, and strong response.

The protests were largely peaceful,4 but looting took place at a relatively small number of locations. As the Hampton Institute pointed out, “You can't commodify every single aspect of living and then not understand looting as a legitimate form of protest. Looting is the ultimate strike against a system that deems mass-produced objects to be far more precious than life itself.”

The Secretary of Defense addressed looting:

“Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here… And for suddenly the biggest problem in the world to be looting is really notable.”

Of course, this was Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking years prior—on Friday, 11 April 2003—about Iraqis looting in Baghdad during the early days of the U.S. military occupation.

“While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime,” Rumsfeld concluded.

Economist Richard Wolff contextualized looting within the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic:

“When you throw 40 million people out of work in nine weeks, you are looting lives. You are depriving people of the most precious things they have: their security, their jobs, their incomes, their mental and physical health, their savings, if they have any.”

Compared to such looting of the U.S. public, “taking a television from a broken window in a storefront is nothing. It’s tiny.”

In the Ranks

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin,” President Harry Truman ordered in July 1948. “This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.”

President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 thereby directed the U.S. military to integrate. The U.S. officer corps took its time implementing this order. Only when the Korean War heated up and the ruling class needed more fighters did U.S. military leadership fully commit to ending segregation.

Racism remained.

Heading into the summer 2020 protests, racism reportedly pervaded the institutions of higher military learning, like the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where future officers study and train.5 Even the nomination process to get into the military academies seemed to favor white applicants over applicants of other ethnic backgrounds.6 The troops were regularly racist toward their peers, polling indicated.7 People of color in the military even turned down assignments due to concerns over racism. The military judicial system was a barrier to fixing this terrible situation.8

On a personal note, some relevant moments I experienced in the military included the time a field-grade military officer told our table during transition assistance class, “As a Christian, I say we kill them all and take the oil,” and the time a military linguist said of the 2008-2009 Israeli massacre of Gaza, “That’s how you do it. No mercy.”

Different genders and skin colors are permitted in the top ranks of the military, intelligence agencies, and the war industry. Representation does not change the structural necessity: nonstop war. (The Pentagon with a black leader still used drones to kill Africans; the CIA with a female director still pursued regime change abroad; and a massive corporation with a female CEO still made record profits in the business of war.) Diverse ideology—i.e. anti-capitalist and/or acknowledging that the business of war must end in order for the species to have a chance at survival—is not permitted in the top ranks.

Nevertheless, leaders of the military-industrial complex did not reflect the country’s racial diversity in 2020.

• The highest officer ranks were mostly white. Of the military’s 42 most senior commanders, the New York Times reported in August 2020, two were black and one—General Paul Nakasone, leading the agency eavesdropping on the world’s electronic communications—was second-generation Japanese American.9

• The war industry’s top executives were mostly white, I determined when studying the leadership of the ten most profitable U.S. war corporations in July 2023.

And 67 of the 72 judges ever appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves federal requests for domestic surveillance warrants, were white.10

Reform (to enhance recruitment)

During summer 2020, U.S. military leadership rewarded people of color who had previously demonstrated adherence to institutional violence. After Lieutenant Madeline Swegle completed her final tactical training flight on 7 July 2020, commander of Naval Air Forces, Vice Admiral DeWolfe “Bullet” Miller, called her “a courageous trailblazer” who “answered the call to defend our nation from the air.” Diversity in naval aviation “makes us a stronger fighting force.” In August 2020, General Charles Brown Jr. became the first black chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. His previous commands had included multiple leadership positions in Central Command, helping to lead the massive air war killing thousands of brown people across the greater Middle East.11 In the same month, JoAnne Bass rose to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, the first ever of Asian-American lineage. Bass had deployed multiple times in support of military operations in southwest Asia, including those harming Iraqis. Chief Master Sergeant Bass and General Brown would be good stewards of military-industrial hostility against China and Russia, the Air Force indicated in standard euphemism.12 The Army closed out the year by putting a black woman in charge of the 7th Mission Support Command in Germany to coordinate U.S. military logistics across dozens of countries, from the Baltic Sea through North Africa.

Military leadership’s priority was implementing bureaucratic reforms abetting recruitment and retention. On Tuesday, 14 July, Secretary Mark Esper, formerly a Raytheon executive, issued new policies against discrimination and bias in the Armed Forces (pdf). Steps included removing photographs from the promotion process, upgrading equal opportunity policy, reviewing hairstyle regulations, and expanding awareness training. “Diversity and inclusivity in the ranks… are fundamental necessities to our readiness and our mission success,” Esper’s memorandum explained.

The Air Force in August mandated that all new gear and weaponry be designed to better fit the body size of most potential U.S. recruits, making aircrew career fields more accessible to people of color and women. Will Roper, in charge of Air Force acquisition at the time, affirmed that this design change was a strategic imperative to improve recruitment during military buildup against China. The head of Air Force Recruiting soon stressed how important diversity was for improved warfighting.13

The highest-ranking Marine officer confirmed in autumn 2020 that diversity in the military’s ranks was about effective military operations.

Moral High Ground

The fascist state must demonize and spread fear about the foreigner—Vietnamese, Nicaraguan, Iraqi, Somali, Russian, whomever—in order to build support for the wars against that foreigner. The U.S. working class cannot rally against or fight a foreigner they understand, empathize with, or love. This building block of permanent warfare is fairly well known.

An underreported aspect of permanent warfare is how the U.S. government has kicked diverse peoples off their land in order to establish military installations. It stole land in Guam, compensating locals a paltry sum or nothing at all. It took the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It stole Vieques, Puerto Rico, turning it into a bombing range, which the locals eventually succeeded in closing, but not before the exploded ordnance had poisoned the soil and water. It teamed up with the Danish government to remove the Inughuit to make way for Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland. And with the U.K. it removed Chagossians from an archipelago in the Indian Ocean in order to set up what is now called Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia.

Today, nothing has changed. For example, the militarization of space, part of the fascist state’s elective Cold War against Beijing and Moscow, has harmed people of color when building up Earth-based infrastructure. City government in cooperation with federal designs used eminent domain to confiscate land in a predominantly black neighborhood of North St. Louis for the construction of a massive new NGA headquarters.14 The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is in charge of mapping the world from space and distributing this information for military and intelligence objectives, including locating and killing people in Africa and Asia. According to the U.S. census, residents of wealthy (mostly white) western St. Louis County typically lived into their mid-80s, while life expectancy in portions of (mostly black) northern St. Louis County was only 60-some years of age.15

Though racism was rife in the U.S. military and foundational to the wars, officials at the top of the fascist structure claimed the moral high ground during the summer 2020 protests. U.S. military leadership—including Secretary Mark Esper (former Raytheon executive) and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy (former Lockheed Martin executive) and four-star officers about to join the war industry in retirement—issued letters, tweets, and video recordings.

Hypocrisy clouded the gestures of the few leaders who might have meant well. On 1 June, the top enlisted leader of the branch of the U.S. military that had been bombing the Middle East for decades, tweeted:

“Who am I? I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. I am George Floyd... I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown, I am Alton Sterling, I am Tamir Rice… Just like most of the Black Airmen and so many others in our ranks ... I am outraged at watching another Black man die on television before our very eyes.”

This Chief Master Sergeant, Kaleth Wright, then expressed his “greatest fear,” that young black airmen might too be shot by police. The white Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General David Goldfein, quickly sent a memo in support of Chief Master Sergeant Wright to Air Force commanders in which he called George Floyd’s death a “national tragedy.” General Goldfein would soon retire and join the massive financial firm Blackstone, which profits from many industries, including war. Known for throwing its weight around in order to defeat democratic initiatives, Blackstone reportedly allocated millions of dollars to help defeat Proposition 10, which would have let California cities enact greater rent control laws—laws that would’ve helped people of color and the working class more broadly.

Retired black generals spoke up in favor of U.S. civil rights, but their career contributions to the killing of black and brown foreigners showed duplicity.16

Militants-turned-profiteers condemned President Donald Trump’s support for violence against the protestors, though each—including former Secretary of Defense retired General James Mattis (on the board of General Dynamics), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs retired Admiral Mike Mullen (on GM, Sprint, and Afiniti boards), former chief of Special Operations Command retired Admiral William McRaven (on the board of ConocoPhillips and later Palantir), former Supreme Allied Commander Europe retired Admiral James Stavridis (Carlyle Group executive), and former Secretary of Homeland Security retired General John Kelly (on the board of the private equity firm DC Capital Partners)—had overseen elective military and intelligence operations against countries filled with black or brown people. Stavridis and Kelly had even run U.S. Southern Command, a primary instrument of U.S. military hegemony in Latin America.

CIA played the role of the benevolent uncle, counseling, concerned. On 2 June 2020, Greg Miller in a Washington Post piece titled “CIA veterans who monitored crackdowns abroad see troubling parallels in Trump’s handling of protests,” led off:

“In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.”

A former CIA analyst in charge of monitoring China: “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.” A former CIA official who had led operations in Asia said of the government violently clearing protestors so President Trump could hold a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, “It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world… Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”

Three days later, in a Washington Post opinion piece titled “89 former defense officials: The military must never be used to violate constitutional rights,” giants of the fascist state condemned President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and rumored plans to use active-duty military against the protestors. The authors included former secretaries of defense, former high-ranking Pentagon civilians and four-star officers, former heads of intelligence agencies, and former top military lawyers. Prominent among them were former Pentagon and CIA chief Leon Panetta, former director of CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, and revolving door virtuosi Michèle Flournoy and Robert Work. Many of the 89 signatories were working in corporations profiting from ongoing war. It was unclear how many held stock in war corporations.

On that same day, hundreds of former government officials, including many top diplomats and military figures, took a stand in the online forum Just Security against the use of active-duty military to quell the protests. These 612 officials cited their pride in the “Strength of America’s Apolitical Military,” omitting the fact that the military was indeed a political instrument used to foil other countries’ self-determination while profiting Corporate America. On Tuesday, 9 June, a group of 38 retired U.S. admirals and generals published a separate open letter via the interventionist nonprofit Human Rights First, stating, “Like the deployment of troops abroad, their deployment at home should only be a last resort.”

Such posturing was part of the larger effort to employ platitude and superficial diversity as a means of steering the fascist ship while isolating the disruptive presence of an uncouth authoritarian in the White House.

Pretending to Care

Big business benefits from selling to law enforcement and from the essential job of law enforcement (protecting corporate property, crushing a restive working class, and enforcing the capitalist status quo). Big business even funds police foundations. Foundations purchase products—weaponry, gear, surveillance equipment—outside of municipal and state oversight and then route these products to law enforcement. This corporate funding of police foundations is in addition to already massive U.S. law enforcement budgets.

Within profitable boundaries (e.g., statements of unity, financial pledges, establishing committees), massive corporations tried to capitalize on the protests. Nike social media altered its Just Do It slogan to say, “For once, don't do it. Don't pretend there's not a problem in America.” YouTube suddenly displayed, “We stand in solidarity against racism and violence.” The CEO of Uber tweeted her corporation’s stance “in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protests against the injustice and racism that have plagued our nation for too long.” Apple pledged $100 million to create a racial equality and justice initiative. The CEO of Walmart pledged $100 million to create a center for racial equity. And on and on.

The adoption of slogans and wording of racial progress in ways that do not threaten capitalist exploitation is called blackwashing. It is about “firms trying to expand their market share through expressions of care and concern,” political science professor Dr. Cedric Johnson explained. Blackwashing distracts from the many ways that big business harms the poor and working class: exploitation of workers (including black workers), union busting, pollution, buying up real estate and then jacking up the price in order to profit from housing, distribution of processed foods causing obesity, lobbying (e.g., to block implementation of universal healthcare), food waste, and the gutting of the social safety net.

Not a single large vocal corporation—from Amazon to Walmart—changed its capitalist business model during or after the protests.

Top war-industry executives played the game quite well. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes: “Although authorities are taking action to ensure justice, the national response and global dialogue related to Mr. [George] Floyd’s death point to a serious issue ― and we must not look away… We have to respond clearly that racism, discrimination and hatred will not be tolerated. We must take this moment to embrace the fundamental values that unite us.” Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden: “I am deeply saddened and concerned about the acts of senseless violence against Black men and women in our society. I know many of you are struggling right now, and I want you to know that on behalf of our company and as an individual, I stand with you. Now is the time for unity.” Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was “shocked and deeply saddened watching the recent events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and unrest across the United States.” She affirmed, “The reaction of anger, shock, and frustration in communities across the nation has created a moment for each of us to assess how we engage, interact, respect and value each other as human beings.”17

L3Harris CEO Bill Brown wrote:

“We stand resolutely against racism in all its forms. We denounce senseless deaths and affirm unequivocally that acts of discrimination, hatred or violence will not be tolerated at L3Harris. We commit to living our values of integrity, excellence and respect. We do what is right. Always.”

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, which was one of the primary institutional holders of war industry stock, wrote:

“The past few weeks have been deeply painful for the black community. I am appalled – as is anyone who cares about diversity, fairness and justice – by the events of the last few weeks involving racial injustice in the U.S.”

None mentioned that technology from the war industry helped monitor the 2020 protests in the U.S. and killed black and brown people overseas.

Journalists as Adversaries

Corporate media function more as stenographers of U.S. authority than as investigative bodies. Commonplace is the practice of writing entire stories based on the assertions of high-level military and/or intelligence officials. Veteran journalist Robert Fisk explained this phenomenon in 2013 from the perspective of an on-the-ground reporter far removed from Washington:

“It’s like Americans are living in this kind of fantasy world that bears no relation to planet Earth where I’m trying to report. This is getting steadily worse, and I think one of the problems is, as I say, this parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power: our ever-growing ability, our wish… to rely on these utterly bankrupt comments from various unnamed anonymous intelligence sources.”

Fisk highlighted this problem by mocking a prominent piece published in one western daily: “U.S. intelligence officials said, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, U.S. officials said, the intelligence officials said…” He concluded, “We might as well name our newspapers ‘Officials Say.’ This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore.” More broadly, large corporate media networks help the fascist state when creating and inflating threats and spreading fear as part of their quest to attract viewers and clicks.

The U.S. government is a threat to the few dogged investigative journalists who remain. The primary inward manifestation of the fascist state (typically referred to as the surveillance state), in which U.S. government agencies utilizing goods and services from the war industry spy electronically on the public, chills the press. Sources are afraid to leak important information or speak up and journalists are afraid to dig. Bye-bye goes the journalism that relies on dissent to expose government deceit and the destructive behavior of big business.

A clear example of fascism harming journalism is the U.S. government’s treatment of Julian Assange, the journalist who established the anti-secrecy publisher WikiLeaks. Wikileaks publishes information, some of which incriminates the U.S. ruling class. The U.S. government uses the Espionage Act of 1917 (originally passed during the First World War to stifle antiwar, working-class organizing) to persecute whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, and courageous journalists, such as Julian Assange. The act does not allow defendants to point out that it is in the public’s interest to learn of the information released. The fact that Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen, and therefore the Espionage Act doesn’t apply to him, is irrelevant to a fascist structure.

CIA spied on Assange (and senior CIA officials reportedly discussed killing him) when he was sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.18 He was later ripped from the embassy and imprisoned in Prison Belmarsh.

Harming Assange sent a message to all journalists: Think twice before engaging in hard-nosed journalism about permanent warfare or publishing candid information about the way U.S. authority functions. After years of persecution, Assange was allowed to return to his home country of Australia in June 2024. The precedents had been set: 1) years of persecution and 2) a requirement that he plead guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose “national defense information.”

Another dogged journalist who reported honestly about the nature of the permanent warfare state, Mumia Abu-Jamal, has spent over four decades behind bars. In prison for allegedly murdering a police officer, Abu-Jamal received what is widely considered an unfair trial—one riddled with prosecutorial misconduct.

Superficial adjustments convince members of the public that the government responds to public need and is capable of reform. A training course on operational security (steps to protect information), mandatory for all military personnel, referred to protesters and journalists as “adversaries.” The Pentagon later changed the language in the mandatory course from “adversaries” to “unauthorized recipients.” Elsewhere, DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis produced intel reports on journalists who were covering the 2020 protests in Portland, Oregon. DHS later replaced the official in charge of the Office. The 45th President of the United States employed four press secretaries whose inconstant, often abrasive, dispositions displeased many in the press pool who were used to polished liberal comportment. The 46th President then employed public relations masters, comfortable with establishment media, who helped pitch and spin all-time record military funding and more war abroad. Neither changing language nor replacing personnel alters the underlying fascist structure.

Monitoring journalists is commonplace.19

Killing journalists is not taboo. The U.S military killed Al Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayoub and cameramen Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and José Couso of Telecinco during the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Independent journalists like Terry Lloyd died in crossfire. A U.S. gunship murdered Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh in Iraq on 12 July 2007, the video of which Wikileaks later released. Journalists who went along with (“embedded with”) the U.S. military were safer.

Law enforcement arrested and attacked journalists during the 2020 protests. In the final two days of May alone, police harassed, attacked, or arrested journalists in over 60 separate incidents, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association. It didn’t matter if journalists identified themselves as press or not. Law enforcement even slashed journalists’ tires in Minneapolis, Minnesota.20

Other notable incidents included police arresting a CNN reporter and crew in Minneapolis and pepper-spraying a reporter from Louisville’s NBC WAVE-3 in the face. Joe Concha of The Hill tallied that in the six days following George Floyd’s murder eight Associated Press journalists were hurt, including those shot by rubber bullets, punched, or knocked to the ground. Law enforcement also practiced catch and release, wherein they rounded up and detained journalists, preventing them from documenting the protests and police brutality, only to release them later, sometimes with their media equipment and sometimes without. Uncompromising antifascist groups covering the protests on the ground, such as ItsGoingDown and CrimeThinc, were kicked off social media.

The following summer, Attorney General Merrick Garland banned federal prosecutors who conduct leak investigations from seizing journalists’ records. Several press freedom groups celebrated this ban, missing the fine print. Garland’s ban gave the fascist structure plenty of leeway. Federal prosecutors could still seize a journalist’s records if the federal government asserted that the reporter had obtained information in an illegal way, if the federal government deemed or suspected a reporter was working for a terrorist organization or a foreign power, if the federal government was investigating the reporter for unrelated activities, or if the situation involved imminent risk. This “ban” was a textbook example of the Democratic faction’s valuable legal sustenance of U.S. fascism.

Outside Enemy

The dumbing down of political discourse is prevalent in fascist societies, from Italy in the 1920s to the United States one hundred years later.21

The dumbing down of political discourse in the U.S. took many forms: massive misinformation regarding the coronavirus and the relative efficacy of various drugs combatting it; unsubstantiated allegations from senior U.S. intelligence officials and the Democratic faction that Moscow had been key to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election; unsubstantiated allegations from the Republican faction that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election; and capitalist media polluting large swaths of the working class with lies regarding the goals and intentions of Left forces, including but not limited to the summer 2020 civil rights protests. Adherents to both capitalist political factions dismissed inconvenient facts as “fake news,” while genuine fake news—the superrich using media to steer the masses away from systemic change—ran wild.

Fascism requires an outside enemy against which to rally the public. In the case of U.S. fascism, the ruling class made the working class ignorant through dismal public education, bread and circus (innutritious food + Hollywood), and media-induced enmity (FoxNews v. CNN). Since World War II, the outside enemy had variously been communists, socialists, Muslims, Arabs, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, and more. People who viewed such groups as enemies did not necessarily know what those groups stood for. Socialism, many in the U.S. believed, was equivalent to totalitarianism or the government providing public services. Anarchism, many in the U.S. believed, was chaos and looting. Cultivated ignorance was fascist success.

As the mass movement for civil rights took off in late spring 2020, officials invoked familiar baddies, which had the effect of demonizing the movement and justifying the ongoing crackdown against black-led protest.

• Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice spoke to CNN: “We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we are all wrestling with that have to be addressed and then we have extremists who have come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they probably also, I would bet based on my experience—I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days—but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. But we can't allow the extremists, the foreign actors, to distract from the real problems we have in this country that are longstanding, centuries-old and need to be addressed responsibly by new leadership.”

• John Cohen, senior DHS official turned ABC News contributor, avowed, “This is yet another indicator that Russia is using the combination of overt propaganda and covertly disseminated disinformation to sow discord across our populace, expand the cracks in our society, and undermine the credibility of the U.S. government.”

• Chair of the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives, Adam Schiff (D-CA), closed out the summer by informing CNN viewers that the “Russians four years ago exploited Black Lives Matter. They set up their own false flags online to try to divide people along racial lines… They are once again doing their best on social media, in their overt media, and other means to grow these divisions again.”

These assertions insulted the intelligence of African Americans and/or downplayed the country’s institutionalized racism.

The bloated system lacked coordinated messaging. A DHS memorandum dated 1 June 2020 framed claims of police brutality as largely “foreign influence activity,” including the work of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media. DHS officials tried to tie antifascists to a foreign power, an internal DHS intel report indicated.22 Designating a U.S. person or group “sponsored by a foreign power” activates substantial legal authorities regarding greater monitoring and detention. The Mayor of Minneapolis (@MayorFrey) tweeted without evidence, “We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.” An internal CBP document invoked the ever-present demon of drug traffickers: “[D]ue to nefarious actors and drug trafficking organizations using these protests as façades, there have been incidents where law enforcement (LE) officials have needed to respond with nonlethal and escalated force…” The CBP document also asked, “What is the level of state-sponsored influence? To what extent are domestic terrorist organizations involved with the protests?” Without evidence, the White House and Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) pointed fingers at a perennial bogeyman, the Venezuelan government.

The first casualty of war is truth, and a nation at war 24/7/365 since World War II had no truth remaining.

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Criminalizing Protest

The Democratic faction offered verbal support to the protestors while stifling the protestors legislatively. Curfews were a favorite tactic at the local level. Novel tactics included the use of “influencers” and social media campaigns. Democratic performances included kneeling while wearing traditional African garb in the Capitol Visitor Center, spinning police brutality as a uniquely Trump phenomenon, and taking photographs with street murals—all while increasing federal law enforcement funding and deflecting attention away from capitalism and the role that law enforcement played in sustaining that economic system.

“Watch them,” the political analyst Caitlin Johnstone advised early on.

“Watch Democrats and their allied media and corporate institutions try to sell the public a bunch of words and a smattering of feeble, impotent legislation to mollify the masses, without ever giving the people the real changes that they actually need… It’s much easier to control a populace with false promises and empty words than with brute force…”

And that’s exactly what happened. A faction within the fascist structure funneled fury into belief in the political establishment.

Law enforcement personnel, meanwhile, were quick to view community organizing, protestors’ defensive precautions, and political speech as threatening, official documents made available in the release known as BlueLeaks revealed. Law enforcement communications (e.g., activity alerts, intel notes, memoranda, situational reports) circulated partisan news accounts and social media that hyped unsubstantiated threats to police and/or completely misrepresented the nature of protest activity. (The documents also tabulated, collated, and disseminated information regarding police officers’ minor injuries, but offered no attempts to do the same regarding the great and widespread harm done to protestors.) This created an environment in which law enforcement believed themselves to be threatened and even under armed attack, justifying even greater warlike mentality and presence.

Civilians in charge of armed bureaucracies stoked fear. In June, Acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan (@CBPMarkMorgan) tweeted a picture of law enforcement personnel inside a federal building in D.C. alongside the caption, “These ‘protests’ have devolved into chaos & acts of domestic terrorism by groups of radicals & agitators. @CBP is answering the call and will work to keep DC safe.” In July, DHS’ Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) shared images via social media of items confiscated from Portland demonstrators: “Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.”23

As the federal government is comprised of bureaucrats and personnel of varying aptitude and intelligence, some who invoke the threat of terrorism are likely genuinely ignorant. The ruling class and political appointees atop these bureaucracies, however, do understand the nature of antifascism. Their invocation of the threat of terrorism is not due to ignorance. It is a tried and true trick: Conflate dissent with terrorism in order to crack down on portions of the working class who are mobilized and advocating for systemic change.

Domestic terrorism is “any act of violence that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources” and that aims to intimidate or coerce the public or a government body, according to DHS.24

The FBI monitors nonviolent anti-pollution protestors as part of tracking of domestic terrorism. Government and industry mobilize law enforcement to repel humans who peacefully protest against fossil fuel infrastructure or try to change the polluting status quo.25

The judicial system even applies “terrorism enhancements” against people protesting polluting projects. A terrorism enhancement greatly increases the possible length of a prison sentence. After protesting peacefully for a number of years, Jessica Reznicek, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, damaged fossil fuel infrastructure in 2016. Judges applied a terrorism enhancement against Reznicek after 84 members of U.S. Congress (having together received a combined $36 million in campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry) wrote to the U.S. Attorney General in 2017 requesting that people who tamper with fossil fuel infrastructure be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.26

The fascist state, we see, defines terrorism in terms favorable to big business and then pursues the terrorists.

From coast to coast, crying wolf (“extremism!”, “terrorism!”) when cracking down on the popular 2020 protests was the norm. A fusion center in the state of Maine monitored citizens and residents going about their daily lives. The commissioner of the Maine Public Safety Department defended this surveillance, asserting that sharing intelligence about “domestic violent extremism” was a crucial part of fusion-center activity.27 An “intelligence bulletin” issued by law enforcement in Pierce County, Washington, and reportedly prepared using information from FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, listed antifascists alongside the likes of white supremacist groups and the so-called Islamic State. (Antifascists had not been linked to a single murder in the U.S.) Similarly, a U.S. military counterterrorism training document conflated socialists and anarchists with neo-Nazis—all lumped in the category of “political terrorists.”

The state’s criminalization of the summer 2020 protests involved handing down lengthy sentences and terrorism charges.28

One masked woman—who neither threatened nor harmed anyone—was seen setting a police vehicle on fire during protests in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But how to find the masked menace? The FBI reviewed helicopter footage from local news, which showed a woman a throwing debris, aflame, through the shattered window of a police cruiser. FBI officials then searched for more video and images of the protests, which had been uploaded to social media, and spotted a tattoo on the woman’s right forearm, a peace sign. In other images, law enforcement found clearer depictions of the woman with the peace-sign tattoo. Her unique t-shirt featured anti-racist messages. The custom shirt, sold by an Etsy store, led to a customer’s five-star review. The customer’s username when entered into a search engine revealed comparable usernames on other online marketplaces and led to a LinkedIn profile. The woman soon arrested was Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal. Her lawyer described the prosecution as “political” after she was charged at the federal level instead of locally. Blumenthal was sentenced to thirty months in prison, two years of probation, and restitution payments of over $96,000. Blumenthal’s experience is a warning to anyone considering violence in the age of ubiquitous cameras and social media.29

Charging protestors with violations of federal law was one of the many tools used to target people who had protested in support of civil rights. After examining the 326 criminal cases that U.S. federal prosecutors filed over alleged conduct related to the protests, 31 May to 25 October 2020, the Movement for Black Lives and Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility determined that the federal government had “spread anti-BLM propaganda and cast protestors as ‘violent radicals’ in order to seize power in local communities and charge protestors with inflated federal indictments that carry significantly harsher penalties than local charges.” Most charges were for non-violent offenses or for property destruction that never threatened a single human. In 92.6% of the cases examined there were equivalent charges at the state level that could have been brought against defendants. And among those 92.6% of cases, 88% of the federal charges carried harsher potential sentences than equivalent state criminal charges. Known data indicated that black people were dramatically overrepresented in the people charged.

Government prosecution of “domestic terrorism” rose dramatically after summer 2020.

Physical Crackdown

Expanded legal authorities formed the foundation of the federal response to the summer 2020 protests. Normally restricted to implementing federal drug law, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was granted authority, which the government assured was temporary, to “conduct covert surveillance,” gather intelligence, intervene in protests, and “enforce any federal crime committed as a result of protests over the death of George Floyd,” a DEA memorandum indicated.30

DHS leadership authorized personnel to gather information about protesters it assessed to be threatening to statues or memorials, whether or not the commemoratives were located on federal property. The Washington Post noted that this was a massive expansion of legal authorities that had been initially legislated in order to protect landmarks from international terrorism. DHS was reportedly not authorized to engage in signals intelligence (the use of war industry technology to snoop on foes’ electronic communications), though it was able to ask other federal units and corporate contractors to do so. In asserting the Executive Branch’s right to deploy federal agents into U.S. cities, the White House press secretary invoked capitalist legal code: “40 U.S. Code 1315 gives DHS the ability to deputize officers in any department or agency, like ICE, Custom and Border Patrol and Secret Service.”

The fascist state’s secret police covered the country. The New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested people for misdemeanors and petty violations at protests, including charges that people were violating city curfew, after which the FBI and plainclothes NYPD intelligence personnel interrogated the arrestees about their political beliefs, particularly their views of antifascism. Aside from beating protestors, NYPD, captured on video, tricked people into entering vehicles that looked like taxis at which point NYPD arrested them for breaking curfew. FBI officials, after determining that a North Carolina resident who had tweeted jokingly to FBI Twitter accounts was just tweeting in solidarity with the protests, inquired if he’d be willing to be an informant.31

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz indicated that NSA was providing “intelligence support,” including communications intercepts. A federal task force, which included DHS Intelligence and Analysis, reportedly intercepted protestors’ phone calls in Portland, Oregon. Regarding a cloning procedure that facilitates interception of cellphone communications, one former intel officer stated, “You’re getting an inside view into your targets, who they are, who they’re talking to—the hierarchy.”

Government snipers were authorized to open fire on the public at George Floyd’s funeral on 9 June 2020, as an FBI surveillance aircraft circled the skies. The FBI assisted Seattle police in clearing out the main protest encampment in the city, according to the Seattle Police Chief. The FBI infiltrated the protest movements in Portland, Oregon, as early as July 2020. The FBI agents, originally deployed under legal authorities to protect federal property, widened the scope of their activities to participate in demonstrations, surreptitiously film demonstrators, and tail vandalism suspects until local police were able to pounce. The FBI also reportedly infiltrated protest movements in Colorado.32

At least sixteen different types of federal tactical teams deployed nationwide in May and June 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office (pp. 53-56). A DHS spokesperson explained that federal use of unmarked vehicles helped the armed authorities avoid “potential attacks by lawless criminals.” Units making arrests included the Border Patrol Tactical Unit and the U.S. Marshals’ Special Operations Group. The Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security made no secret of his desire to take harsh tactics nationwide. “I believe all options continue to be on the table, specifically as we talk about Portland,” acting DHS chief Chad Wolf later confirmed. “All options on the table” is a common refrain within fascist U.S. circles, particularly when bullying noncompliant governments.33

A few National Guard members refused to deploy against the protestors. Other members of the National Guard did deploy but disapproved of how law enforcement treated the protestors. The protestors themselves included some U.S. military veterans. Veteran groups that organized in favor of civil rights included About Face, Common Defense, and Veterans for Peace. A Marine with two Purple Hearts to his name stood outside the Salt Lake City Capitol in the scorching heat, black tape covering his mouth, which read, “I can’t breathe.” In Portland, Oregon, a police officer dressed in camouflage pepper-sprayed a former Army medic in the face. “I instantly knew the cop pepper sprayed me because I was bearing witness… He did not like what I was saying. I have come to accept that. I did not feel rage at him.” The 75-year-old veteran, Mike Hastie, emphasized, “You have to bear witness. If you don’t bear witness, then history repeats itself.” Army veteran Aubrey Rose commented in Colorado Springs, “The way that these police have been behaving—any military service member that would behave like this would be in Leavenworth right now.” Around the country, military spouses joining the protests were dismayed, to say the least, at the level of police violence.

Not all military personnel were so peaceable. Airman Larry Williams Jr., 22, a military policeman stationed in Utah, was charged in August 2020 with destroying government property. Images had circulated of someone wearing a government-issued gas mask setting a Salt Lake City patrol car on fire at a May protest. Federal investigators used these images to identify the lot number written on the gas canister, which they traced back to Williams. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him at his home. In January 2022, Williams, since dismissed from the military, was sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $2,500 in restitution.

Armed bureaucracies excused some state violence as the result of inadequate training. Internal DHS documents indicated that DHS personnel who deployed to Portland lacked proper training regarding how to confront large demonstrations. A report from New York City’s own Department of Investigation concluded that New York police violence during the summer protests was due in part to a lack of “relevant training” in dealing with protesters. After an Army National Guard medical evacuation helicopter flew very low over D.C. protestors, an Army official stated, “There was a very general lack of understanding of how to use—how to employ—helicopters in civil disturbance support operations.”34

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, a revolving-door habitué, acknowledged that he had given the order sending helicopters to the protests. (The Times did not mention that Secretary Ryan McCarthy had come from Lockheed Martin. He later returned to industry, sitting on boards of Tomahawk Robotics, the venture capital firm Scout Ventures, the artificial-intelligence business Striveworks, and CACI.)

Contextualizing the protests within the crisis of capitalism, former Delta Force soldier Stan Goff warned in a 19 July 2020 post on Medium.com:

The “abuse and kidnappings in Portland by federal militarized cops and their hired mercenary thugs ought to be a tripwire… The legal justifications employed by the Trump administration for this fascistic brutality and overreach were co-signed by Democrats, who likely will succeed Trump. Security state Democrats who can barely be differentiated from Bush II neocons… Vichy Democrats. They are coming. We cannot stand down when Trump goes.”

Airborne Reconnaissance

Drones (a.k.a. unmanned aerial vehicles or remotely piloted vehicles) circled the skies above. Developed in wars of aggression during the 1990s (e.g., Palestine, the Balkans), this business sector of war, drones, took off after 9-11. Gorging at the gusher of federal funds, the war industry refined the relevant drone technology, particularly the sensors, payload, and bandwidth, while Offices of General Counsel at CIA and DOD and the White House Office of Legal Counsel arranged the legal opinions and classified directives and memoranda for monitoring and/or killing overseas.

Like most weapons of war, drones were soon deployed at home. DHS first used large drones, an unarmed General Atomics drone, in 2012, flying one over a North Dakota ranch at the request of the Grand Forks special weapons and tactics team, which was dealing with a property dispute. Facing no solid, organized pushback from the working class, the fascist state expanded its domestic use of large drones. Federal use of unarmed General Atomics drones was nationwide by 2020, reportedly flying over major cities from Maryland to California and minor (e.g., Fargo, North Dakota, and Laredo, Texas) that summer. Even the U.S. Marshals Service got in on the summer action, flying unmanned aircraft over such cities as D.C. and Portland, Oregon.

CBP’s drones generally stay within 100 miles of land and sea borders, though 6 U.S. Code § 211 authorizes CBP units “to conduct aviation and maritime operations in support of federal, state, local, tribal, and international law enforcement agencies without any geographic limitation for such operations.” The Department of Defense, meanwhile, has the legal authority to use drones in U.S. airspace for about a dozen types of operations, including counterintelligence.

A string of digits unique to each smartphone is known as an international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI). The war industry sells devices known as IMSI catchers, which scan the airwaves to obtain and analyze signals that lead to an IMSI. A different espionage device, known as a cell-site simulator, pretends to be a cell-phone tower by broadcasting a strong signal, thereby tricking nearby cellphones into connecting to it. Domestic law enforcement positions IMSI catchers and cell-site simulators on stationary objects, land vehicles, and aircraft, gathering information on people not accused or suspect of a crime. Cell-site simulators on the bottom of drones have reportedly been key to the locating and killing of civilians and suspected militants overseas.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in most cases law enforcement needs a search warrant to monitor a suspect’s movement via cellphone information. True to fascist form, the ruling gave law enforcement significant wiggle room. 1) The ruling did not affect other business records, including banking records. As seen in Chapter Two, the fascist state has had no problem defining “business records” so broadly as to include a telecom corporation’s entire database of calls. 2) The ruling allowed law enforcement to cite emergency situations to obtain records without a warrant. These two massive loopholes, business records and emergency situations, let law enforcement continue to monitor the location of mobile devices without a warrant.

The federal government meanwhile gradually expanded and normalized its use of piloted reconnaissance aircraft—planes packed with advanced espionage technology—over U.S. cities. These harmless looking aircraft got extensive worldwide use and upgrades in the war on drugs and the post-9-11 wars and were deployed within the United States against relatively trivial threats. In 2002, the FBI under Director Robert Mueller reportedly requested, and the U.S. military came through with, such reconnaissance aircraft to help search for a sniper who was shooting people in and around the nation’s capital. The New York Times reported, “Lawyers ultimately decided that the military could offer equipment in the manhunt without violating the law.” A Pentagon spokesperson assured, “Every step in this process is taken so that we remain within the limits of all laws including Posse Comitatus,” the act passed in 1878 nominally preventing the federal government from deploying the U.S. military in a domestic law enforcement role. In 2010, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill elaborated upon reports of the federal government using piloted reconnaissance aircraft to locate a man suspected of trying to set off a makeshift explosive device in a car in New York City: Leaning on highly classified programs and post-9-11 legal authorities, the government had utilized cell-site simulators aboard these aircraft.35

Armed bureaucracies soon solidified airborne coverage. In 2015, the Associated Press summarized, “The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country using video and sometimes cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts” for the federal government.

Ten months later, journalists Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife added: FBI and DHS, often using front companies, fly military-intelligence aircraft over U.S. cities, including Oakland, California, and Baltimore, Maryland, citing such pretexts as the need to combat drug trafficking, defeat violent crime, secure borders, and fight terrorism. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so,” affirmed FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, who later left government and ascended to the top of an investment firm. FBI reconnaissance aircraft could be used in conjunction with informants, human snitching on humans. The FBI alone had more than 15,000 informants, and it paid them roughly $42 million per year collectively. While FBI agents need probable cause to try to infiltrate a protest group or the civil rights movement, FBI informants do not.

One type of aircraft flown over U.S. cities during the 2020 protests was the RC-26B. According to members of Congress, it was “the only fixed-winged aircraft to have Title 32 authority to conduct domestic surveillance while maintaining the ability to conduct Title 10 missions abroad.”36

One way to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act is for state governors to invite in another state’s National Guard, which they did when using RC-26 aircraft. For example, West Virginia’s Air National Guard flew RC-26 aircraft over the nation’s capital, and Wisconsin’s Air National Guard flew such aircraft over Minneapolis, Minnesota.37

Some aircraft sent live video to control centers managed by a unit within Customs and Border Protection, the New York Times reported. The footage was then fed into DHS’ Big Pipe computer network, which could be accessed by other federal agencies and local law enforcement for use in future investigations, according to senior officials. (DHS’ own privacy impact assessment indicated that data in Big Pipe could be stored up to five years. Air and Marine Operations was the CBP unit managing control centers receiving video footage from reconnaissance aircraft.)

The U.S. Air Force was quick to say that reconnaissance aircraft (Dornier Do-328 turboprop planes, a kind that had previously operated overseas in support of U.S. special operations forces) circling near Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado, were not snooping on protesters. They were conducting tests, which had been planned months in advance.

A couple months later, the Air Force Inspector General, Lieutenant General Sami Said, determined that the military’s domestic use of RC-26 reconnaissance aircraft during the summer 2020 protests was legal and not aimed at protestors. Over one year later, Said held no one responsible for the U.S. military’s August 2021 drone strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and his children. In retirement, Sami Said was quick to join Raytheon Technologies’ Intelligence & Space business as vice president of global security.

Conclusion

The federal response to the summer 2020 protests was not just the ruling class deploying law enforcement (who are traitors to the working class) to use shocking brutality to enforce the system that benefits the ruling class. It was decades of militarization of law enforcement and lies circulating on corporate and social media (about the intent and nature of the protestors) combining to create an environment in which traitors to the working class used stunning brutality to enforce the system that benefits the ruling class.

The U.S. fascist state deploys military and intelligence forces overseas to install compliant regimes and prevent worker and other Left movements from arising, to keep natural resources flowing into the hands of multinational corporations, and because war itself is profitable activity. Similarly, it deploys law enforcement and intelligence forces at home in order to prevent the growth of movements that would redirect government resources to public need, to make sure natural resources flow and labor stays obedient, and because war is profitable. U.S. fascism tackles the far enemy and the near enemy.

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Militancy

The United States is the financial center of the world, the U.S. dollar the global reserve currency. U.S. economic sanctions—known formally as “unilateral coercive measures”—harm a person, business, group, or country in order to change their behavior. U.S. sanctions come in the form of embargos preventing companies from doing business with this enemy or parts of the enemy’s economy, travel restrictions, and/or a financial freeze. Washington uses economic warfare—sanctions increase unemployment, cause the targeted country’s currency to inflate, and create shortages of food, fuel, medicine, water—as collective punishment.

Eight countries under U.S. sanctions (China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela), comprising roughly one-quarter of all humans on the planet, sent a statement early in the pandemic to the United Nations’ leadership, including the World Health Organization director-general, stating that such economic warfare, illegal under international law, was hindering an effective pandemic response. No matter. The Trump administration in 2020 and the Biden administration in 2021 imposed crushing sanctions harming peasants, workers, and families worldwide. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) led the charge with 777 new sanction designations in 2020 and 765 in 2021, compared to 785 in 2019 prior to the pandemic.1 A nod to the public relations savviness of the Democratic faction, the Biden administration emphasized “human rights” when waging this economic warfare.

On Wednesday, 22 April 2020, 60 organizations from across the United States sent a letter to congressional leadership, pleading, do not fund the Pentagon anymore for the year. The wide range of signatories included Franciscan Action Network, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Just Foreign Policy, Social Security Works, Veterans for Peace, and Win Without War. The money saved could go toward combating the pandemic, the organizations asserted. Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) meanwhile put forth a House resolution detailing how to find $350 billion in savings within the military budget. Her straightforward fixes included eliminating Space Force to save $15.2 billion, cutting corporate contracting by fifteen percent to save $26 billion, and eliminating some unnecessary, obsolete, or excessive weapons systems to save $57.9 billion. The fascist structure ignored all.

In May, the U.S. government prevented the United Nations Security Council from voting on a resolution that called for a worldwide ceasefire. In September, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution calling for a worldwide suspension of economic sanctions during the pandemic, noting that international cooperation was the best way to defeat the virus. Only the United States and Israel voted against the resolution.

Around this time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that U.S. government surveillance of the public’s phone records, which NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had revealed seven years prior, was unlawful, and, in the words of Reuters, that “the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.” In between the Snowden revelations (mid-summer 2013) and the time of this ruling (late summer 2020), U.S. fascism had adapted well: Enhanced legal protections abetting government surveillance of the public’s communications, more “privacy officers” throughout intelligence agencies (not protecting the public’s privacy), and larger budgets. So, when the Court of Appeals ruled that the mass surveillance program was illegal, it had no effect on ongoing mass surveillance.

Cold War 2.0

The military-industrial complex began its “pivot” to Asia during the Obama administration’s first term2 as part of its broader elective Cold War against Russia and China known as “great power competition” or “strategic competition.” The pivot entailed positioning greater military and industrial infrastructure in Europe, in and around the Pacific Ocean, and in space. A particularly brutal step was the Wolf Amendment of 2011, which prohibited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from cooperating with Chinese organizations without approval from U.S. Congress and the FBI. The Pentagon enshrined Russia and China as enemies in the National Defense Strategy of 2018, emphasizing “inter-state strategic competition” as “now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford explained in November of that year that great power competition demanded new military funding priorities and weapons development. Dunford was speaking at the Halifax International Security Forum, which was sponsored by U.S. war corporations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and energy conglomerates. The National Defense Industrial Association later presented Dunford with its most prestigious award. In his acceptance speech, Dunford unsurprisingly inflated the threat of Russian and Chinese technological advancements. Dunford soon retired and joined the board of Lockheed Martin.

In the calculus of fascism’s big business component, a war on terror was no longer enough to justify ongoing extreme spending on cyber, submarines, satellites, nuclear weaponry, hypersonic technology, artificial intelligence, new command and control systems, and aircraft carriers. Competition with a major industrial country or two provided a better pretext. Moreover, competition against Beijing and Moscow further militarizes U.S. society, channeling frustration (which might otherwise manifest itself as class consciousness and/or physical protest against capitalist exploitation) into outrage against a new stereotyped enemy that resides overseas. With the new Cold War in the forefront and a roiling war on terror, the state’s armed bureaucracies were able to sustain and expand their budgets and legal authorities.

Government- and industry-affiliated media and think tanks demonized Beijing during the pandemic, as threat inflation is baked into the military-industrial complex’s daily operations. A partnership between the New America think tank, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine set the tone early, berating Beijing for its (often epidemiologically effective) efforts to cordon off cities. Michael Fuchs, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which received substantial funding from the war industry and capitalist foundations, took to the Guardian six days after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic to explain the “wide array of national security threats” facing the United States and to demonize China. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, funded by the Australian and U.S. governments and the war industry, itemized select information regarding COVID-19 and the Chinese government’s response. The U.S. Marine Corps would continue to adapt for great power competition against China, a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made clear fourteen days into the pandemic. Five days later, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is housed within a D.C. think tank known as the German Marshall Fund of the United States, published “Five Things to Know About Beijing’s Disinformation Approach.” Such slanted coverage saturated the media during the pandemic.

The Pentagon even went as far as implementing a classified propaganda operation aimed at sowing doubt online among Asian audiences about the vaccines and protective equipment that China was manufacturing. The Pentagon still stands by this operation.

As the pandemic wound down, NBC News’ Meet the Press hosted pundits from the Center for a New American Security to simulate war with China over Taiwan! The think tank’s co-founder, revolving door expert Michèle Flournoy, appeared in the segment.

The New York Times a couple weeks into the pandemic conveyed the assertion of U.S. officials that Beijing and Moscow were waging a campaign that was sowing doubt about the U.S. government’s handling of the pandemic. Less than a month later, the Times relayed U.S. officials’ assertion that China-amplified disinformation was reaching the U.S. public.3 Twitter soon deleted over 170,000 accounts deemed to have spread pro-China messages. The U.S. public’s view of China became increasingly negative as the days went on. The workers of the world, however, still viewed the U.S. government as biggest threat to democracy.

Amid public outrage that the U.S. government wouldn’t make corporations temporarily suspend “intellectual property rights” regarding how to make COVID-19 vaccines,4 which would have allowed countries rich and poor to manufacture generic vaccines and therapeutics to confront the pandemic together, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations read the political climate in Washington and adopted a new approach in their messaging: Assert that temporary suspension of intellectual property rights would strengthen China and Russia. The Financial Times reported, “Vaccine makers have warned US officials that temporarily scrapping patents for COVID-19 shots would risk handing novel technology to China and Russia, according to people familiar with the talks.” Corporate officials warned in private meetings with U.S. government officials that suspending intellectual property rights could, in the words of the Financial Times, “allow China and Russia to exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in the future.”

Yes, in order to keep corporate profits high, corporate operatives plucked Washington’s Cold War strings, warning politicians that sharing knowledge might lead other countries, the official bad guys, to develop life-saving medical treatments.5

Repositioning

Afghanistan’s socialist government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, established in April 1978, took steps toward helping the working class, empowering women, and improving healthcare and education. Founded to crush the workers of the world and pave the way for capitalism, CIA set about to destroy this Afghan government. To do so, the U.S. government and a few allies armed and financed an insurgency of religious conservatives.6 (This environment later gave birth to Pashtu fundamentalists known as the Taliban.) The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to keep the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in authority. The Soviets withdrew during 1988-89 after years of fighting, and the socialist government in Kabul fell. The remnants of the Saudi-Pakistani-U.S. effort to recruit, arm, and fund fighters from around the Arab world and send them into Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets became al-Qaeda.

After intervening sporadically, 1988-2001, in Afghanistan’s civil wars and instability, Washington seized upon the 9-11 attacks in order to invade and occupy Afghanistan. (There were no Afghans on the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Taliban was open to negotiating with Washington after 9-11 and to help arrest and try Osama bin Laden if Washington could provide proof of his involvement in the attacks.) Troops drawn from the U.S. working class were sent to fight in Afghanistan, 2001-2021. Thousands of them died. Thousands more were crippled, mentally or physically. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died. Millions were displaced internally and abroad.

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was designed to profit U.S. corporations.7

Throughout the 20-year occupation, U.S. military and political leadership consistently lied to the U.S. public, the troops, and the world, painting a positive picture of a dismal situation in Afghanistan. The Washington Post’s 2019 award-winning investigative series The Afghanistan Papers documented these official lies.

The medieval Taliban proved to have more popular legitimacy than Washington’s puppet government. The Taliban officially returned to power in August 2021, seventeen months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Writing in the Kansas City Star on 23 August 2021, former Marine officer Lucas Kunce wrote:

“What we are seeing in Afghanistan right now shouldn’t shock you. It only seems that way because our institutions are steeped in systematic dishonesty. It doesn’t require a dissertation to explain what you’re seeing. Just two sentences. One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.”

Amid the massive August 2021 evacuation of U.S. forces, allies, and proxies, an armed group attacked outside of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday the 26th. The attack killed close to 200 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. troops.8

The Islamic State, an enemy of the Taliban and one of the excuses Washington used to spread troops across the Middle East and Africa, claimed responsibility.

Three days later, as the U.S. evacuation waned, the U.S. government launched an airstrike (using a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone, which are assembled in Poway, California, armed with Lockheed Martin Hellfire missiles, which are manufactured a stone’s throw south of Universal Orlando Resort, Florida) against a residential neighborhood in Kabul, killing ten humans. The Pentagon claimed that the people targeted were ferrying suicide bombers to the airport. Though cracks immediately appeared in this official narrative, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, affirmed on 3 September that at least one of the dead was an Islamic State “facilitator” and that the strike was based on good intelligence.

The official lies crumbled in the face of investigative reporting and eyewitness testimony. On Friday, 17 September, U.S. military leaders conceded that the 29 August drone strike had indeed killed an aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and nine of his family members, including seven children. Explosives in the car, which the U.S. government had previously referenced when justifying the drone strike, turned out to be water jugs. Aimal Ahmadi, whose three-year-old daughter was murdered in the drone strike, mourned: It “is not enough… to say sorry. The U.S. should find the person who did this.”9

Former Australian Army major David McBride, on trial in Australia for leaking information to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan,10 summarized:

“For twenty years we said it was going well, publicly. Everyone in the military knew it wasn’t. We were pumping out things that had no relation to the truth. And that in itself was a crime… Our allies were often criminals, drug dealers, pedophiles. But we pretended that they weren’t in order to sell a good-news message.”

McBride continued: “It was a bit like the war was a huge military Enron in that we were putting out good-news information that things were going well, but it was a house of cards.” Enron had been a U.S. energy corporation whose executives had committed massive accounting fraud.

In early November, the Pentagon held a press conference presenting its review of the 29 August drone strike. It blamed rushed decision-making, communication bias, bad intelligence, and an “aggregate process breakdown.” Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami Said, who led the review, was quick to state, “It's not criminal conduct or negligence.” (In the words of the New York Times, “Nearly everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, then days and weeks, after the drone strike has turned out to be false.”) The full review was classified, per fascist custom, preventing the public from understanding all the conclusions that the military investigators had reached.

The following month, the Pentagon announced that no U.S. personnel would be punished for the drone strike. Spokesperson John Kirby stated, “There was not a strong enough case to be made for personal accountability.”

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Money in the Bank

Modeled after the U.S. Federal Reserve, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) focuses on stabilizing the country’s currency and consumer prices. DAB monies belong to the Afghan people. Citing ongoing sanctions against the Taliban, the U.S. government froze DAB monies in the U.S. ($7.1 billion) and stopped all financial and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan shortly after Taliban returned to authority in Kabul in 2021. Freezing DAB monies prevented proper economic function and inflated the currency.

For years, some—not all—families of the 9-11 victims had filed lawsuits against different people and groups across the greater Middle East. Many of these people and groups did not get along with one another and outright opposed al-Qaeda. Defendants included but were not limited to deceased Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the armed Lebanese political movement Hezbollah, and Iranian leader Ali Khamenei. Exemplifying traits of a society living under fascism (potent nationalism, scapegoats as a unifying cause, and the dumbing down of political discourse), some of the 9-11 families looking to cash in turned their attention to the frozen DAB monies.

U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order in February 2022 dividing the frozen DAB monies into two: half for possible humanitarian aid for Afghanistan to be put in a trust bypassing the Afghan government and half for some of the aforementioned 9-11 families. These families would now “have the opportunity to sue for access to the frozen Afghan assets,” Agence France-Press reported. Plaintiffs would be able “to have their claims heard in court," the White House stated. The lawyers involved in the cases stood to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, Murtaza Hussain reported. Afghan-American Bilal Askaryar explained, what Biden proposed “is not justice” for 9-11 families, “it is theft of public funds from an impoverished nation already on the brink of famine and starvation…” A different group of 9-11 families concurred, urging President Biden to not use any of the DAB funds to pay 9-11 victims’ families.

The Biden administration soon allowed people and businesses to engage in financial transactions (e.g., duties, fees, taxes) with civil servants in the Afghan government in most circumstances. The Afghan people’s DAB funds remained frozen, and DAB was still unable to process most international transactions. Fourteen independent U.N. experts affirmed that Washington’s seizing of Kabul’s billions harmed Afghan women. The U.S.-exacerbated humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan had forced roughly 60% of the Afghan population to be reliant on food aid, with disproportionate impact on women and children. Regarding widespread hunger in Afghanistan, the Washington Post summarized, “The economic isolation of Afghanistan has done little to moderate the Taliban’s hardline rule. But the consequences have been devastating for the Afghan people, especially the poor.”

More greedy humans, invoking nationalism and employing punch-drunk political discourse against a unifying scapegoat, eyed pay dirt: A group of hundreds of U.S. veterans and military families asked the Armed Services committees in the Senate and House to consider expanding the award scope of the half of the frozen DAB funds beyond just 9-11 victims. (The Taliban hadn’t perpetrated the 9-11 attacks, and these veterans and families were not even victims of the 9-11 attacks, mind you.) These veterans and families argued that broadening the distribution of Afghanistan’s seized funds to include them would recognize military personnel “who were killed or severely injured as a result of state-sponsored terrorist attacks while serving our country around the world…”

A few months later, CIA launched a drone strike on a home in Kabul, reportedly killing the elderly nominal leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who had come to support violence only after being tortured in Egypt by the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime.

One month after killing al-Zawahiri, the Biden administration indicated that it would transfer $3.5 billion of the seized DAB monies into a trust housed at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. The fund's board—a U.S. official, a Swiss official, and two Afghan economists—could then direct the funds to pay for imports to Afghanistan, the printing of Afghan currency, and debt payments to international financial institutions, the administration stated. Not one red cent would go to DAB or the Taliban-run Afghan government.

D.C. continued to funnel tax dollars into opaque activities in Afghanistan after the August 2021 withdrawal: more than $1.1 billion to date, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) indicated in autumn 2022. Brazen stonewalling or minimal cooperation from several government bodies, including State, Treasury, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), meant that SIGAR was for the first time unable “to provide Congress and the American people with a full accounting of this U.S. government spending…” (pdf).

In harming Afghanistan via economic warfare instead of open military force, the fascist state was able to focus more fully on its elective Cold War against Beijing and Moscow.

One Particular Proxy War

The U.S. militarization of Eastern Europe was comprehensive.

The military-industrial pivot against Moscow and Beijing, which was initiated during the Obama administration and continued during the Trump administration,11 required extensive infrastructure. The Pentagon invested heavily—increasing its already sizeable presence—in military construction in Eastern Europe, contracting announcements indicated.12

Additionally, the U.S. military’s new $360-million-plus prepositioned stock site in Powidz, Poland, was one of the largest infrastructure projects funded by NATO members in over three decades. Prepositioned stock is some of the big stuff needed for fighting wars. The project complemented existing prepositioned stock elsewhere in Europe (Poland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands), Asia, and at sea.

In addition to building and expanding its military infrastructure, the U.S. government signed agreements with individual governments to use their military bases. In 2020, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a deal with the Polish Defense Minister to increase the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland. In 2021, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin signed a deal with the Georgian Defense Minister to expand U.S. training of Georgian troops. On February 9, 2022, Slovakia approved a deal pushed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that allowed the Pentagon to use two Slovak air bases for ten years in exchange for $100 million in U.S. tax dollars to upgrade the bases. These are just a few examples. Steady encroachment upon Russia was the name of the game.

U.S. fascism also rejected arms control agreements. Washington left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies treaty in 2020, and worked to undermine the popular Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. government rejected offers (2008 and again in 2014) from Beijing and Moscow to establish a treaty banning weapons in outer space. The U.S. continued to store nuclear weaponry in at least five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey), and evidence indicated that England was getting ready to once again host these U.S. weapons of mass destruction.

Brokered by France and Germany, the Minsk agreements were a way to end the war in Ukraine prior to Russia’s February 24, 2022, invasion. Minsk I was a 12-point deal to which Kiev and Ukrainian separatists in the east of the country agreed in September 2014. Each side quickly accused the other of violating the agreement. Minsk II, signed in February 2015, was a 13-point pact covering a ceasefire, demilitarization, diplomacy, prisoner exchange, humanitarian assistance, withdrawal of foreign armed forces, and more. Minsk II was never implemented, due in part to Moscow’s stance that it was not a direct party to the conflict, and Washington’s ongoing meddling in Ukraine and refusal to agree that Ukraine would never join NATO.

The U.S. military and NATO conducted regular, provocative operations and exercises on the continent—indeed, many were along Russia’s border—as U.S. fascism ramped up the elective Cold War long before Russia’s 2022 invasion: Agile Sprit, Allied Sprit, Atlantic Resolve, BALTOPS, Defender Europe, Formidable Shield, Global Thunder, Justice Eagle, Resolute Castle, Saber Guardian, Spring Storm, Swift Response, Thracian Summer. The list goes on. Deployment of threatening aircraft, including Boeing B-1 bombers over the Baltic Sea, General Atomics MQ-9 drones in Greece, Romania, and Estonia, and Boeing B-52 bombers hugging Russia’s border from inside Ukraine, was a key component of Washington’s belligerence.

U.S. military and industry worked in tandem when militarizing the region. Discrete instances included EPS Corp. of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, and the U.S. Navy developing underwater weapon systems in Montenegro and Bulgaria, and Gomez Research Associates of Huntsville, Alabama, and the U.S. Navy in Bulgaria and Ukraine working (e.g., A, B) to use drones to detect improvised explosive devices. Despite Moscow’s repeated protests, multiple corporations (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Vectrus) established and ran U.S. military installations featuring “missile defense” batteries and radar in Poland and Romania.13

The U.S. government conducted cyber operations against Russia and its people. The New York Times reported in 2019:

“Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid. But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before.”

In parallel, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted cyber operations against multiple countries, including Russia, since obtaining expanded legal authority in 2018.

Foreign military sales (FMS), in which the U.S. government acts as the intermediary between a corporation and a foreign customer, are one way that the U.S. war industry sells goods and services around the world. (The other is direct commercial sales, which are negotiated behind closed doors between a corporation and a foreign government without the U.S. government’s direct mediation, though the U.S. government does have to approve the sale.) Sales via FMS to European governments were thorough in the fifteen years prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, contracting announcements indicated. Every single Eastern European country except for Belarus was a frequent customer of the U.S. war industry. Foreign military sales are a “fundamental tool of U.S. foreign policy,” the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency affirms.

U.S. interference in Ukraine was comprehensive. After backing the notorious 2014 coup in Kiev, the U.S. government committed “over $2.7 billion in training and equipment” to Ukraine through January 2022. Embracing standard euphemism, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in January 2022, “We provided more defensive security systems in the past year than any year previous.” The relevant State Department fact sheet stated, “Ukraine has undertaken significant efforts to reform and modernize its defense sector in line with NATO principles and standards.” Standardization with NATO is a stipulation for many countries to receive foreign military financing (FMF), U.S. government grants or loans to a country so it can buy from the U.S. war industry. The U.S. government also trained Ukrainian military and intel forces,14 expanded propaganda networks, and pumped weaponry into Ukraine long before the Russian invasion. In November 2021, the U.S. Secretary of State and the Ukrainian Foreign Minister signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership to deepen the “strategic partnership by expanding bilateral cooperation in political, security, defense, development, economic, energy, scientific, educational, cultural, and humanitarian spheres.”15

After Moscow responded to U.S. militarization of Eastern Europe by invading Ukraine at the end of February 2022, the U.S. war industry won again, flooding Ukraine and European allies with even more weaponry. This is how the system works. The military-industrial complex is always the top bad guy, a fact many who suddenly flew the Ukrainian flag missed entirely.

Conclusion

The U.S. government kept its eye on the ball during the pandemic, spending 7.5 times more money on nuclear weaponry than on global vaccine donations.16

More U.S. citizens and residents died from COVID-19 than from all the major U.S. wars of the twentieth century.

One week after the United States officially reached 1,000,000 deaths from COVID-19, U.S. President Joe Biden indicated that the U.S. government would use the U.S. military to defend Taiwan if the People’s Republic of China ever attacked the island.17

The proposed fiscal 2023 budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was roughly $10 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s? Roughly $12 billion. “National security”? Roughly $1.4 trillion. Money talks, and U.S. fascism prioritizes neither public health during a pandemic nor environmental health during a climate catastrophe.

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Small Business

The Paycheck Protection Program shows how the working class is not cared for, even in times of crisis.

U.S. Congress presented the Small Business Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was passed in 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act during the Trump administration and then expanded during the Biden administration, as a multi-billion-dollar loan program to help small businesses cover rent, payroll, and utilities. The banks in charge of distributing the loans quickly “gave much of the money to publicly traded chains that were allowed to claim small business status under a loophole written into the bill by their lobbyists,” law professor Leonard C. Goodman explained two months into the pandemic. The banks that handled and processed the program’s loan applications charged—and got away with!—$10 billion in fees.

Though PPP was funded with tax dollars, the taxpayer was not prioritized. The banks acting as intermediaries gave VIP service to their richest clients. Perks for the wealthy included step-by-step help filling out the requisite paperwork, priority access foregoing the buggy online portal, and expedited processing. Genuine small business borrowers were often confused about the fine print, Reuters reported. Instead of tackling the daunting PPP and keeping employees on staff, many small business owners laid off workers and avoided the federal aid altogether. Most PPP money went to the capitalist ruling class and very rich households.

Small business trickery is par for the course in military contracting.

The Pentagon sets aside billions of dollars each year just for small business contracting. Dedicated military offices throughout the country help small businesses contract with the military, further steering the U.S. economy toward war. Some sizeable corporations, such as Atlantic Diving Supply (ADS), have been accused of classifying themselves as small businesses in order to access the reduced competition inherent to small business contracting. As the pandemic progressed, top war corporations gobbled up at least $339 million that had been set aside for small businesses in a military program unrelated to the pandemic, the Project on Government Oversight reported in 2022.1

View from Wall Street

Low interest rates, cheap money, and unregulated, risky business practices caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. To save the capitalist financial markets, the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”), which creates and manages U.S. currency, pumped trillions of new dollars into U.S. financial institutions and large corporations.2 These policies ballooned financial markets and, in turn, the wealth of the one percent of society that owned most stock and property.3

When the U.S. stock market took a nosedive very early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fed again injected trillions of new dollars into the market. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a hedge-fund tycoon, spoke to CNBC: “I look back at people who bought stocks after the crash in 1987, people who bought stocks after the financial crisis… For long-term investors, this will be a great investment opportunity.” (Mnuchin’s sentiments were similar to what Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, had said in 2018: “I don't look at a recession as a bad thing. I mean, it's bad for America. It's bad for the people that are unemployed. It's usually an opportunity for J.P. Morgan.”)

The Fed cut interests rates to nearly zero on Sunday, 15 March, and initiated a massive program of quantitative easing—purchasing bonds and long-term securities from banks. “The actions by the Fed appeared to be the largest single day set of moves the bank had ever taken, mirroring in many ways its efforts during the [2007-8] financial crisis that were rolled out over several months. Sunday’s move includes multiple programs, rate cuts and QE, but all in a single day,” journalist Steve Liesman reported. The Fed also coordinated with allied central banks (e.g., Canada, England, the European Union, Japan) to increase the availability of currency for commercial banks. The quantitative easing during the pandemic averaged out to roughly $120 billion per month.4

The world’s largest financial corporation, BlackRock, not the U.S. government, was program advisor and asset manager in the Fed’s purchasing of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. In the words of investigative journalist Jeanna Smialek, emails obtained through a records request, along with public calendar records, “show the extent to which economic policymakers worked with a private company as they were drawing up a response to the financial meltdown and how intertwined BlackRock has become with the federal government.”

Stocks soared. The New York Times on 30 April 2020 announced, “Unemployment claims top 30 million while Wall Street has best month in decades.” On 8 May, Bloomberg News’ Lu Wang and Vildana Hajric reported, “[A]t 22 times forecast profits, the S&P 500 is trading at a multiple not seen since the dot-com bubble.” In July, JPMorgan Chase’s “corporate and investment bank posted a record $5.5 billion profit for the second quarter, which is more money than most entire banks typically generated before the coronavirus pandemic,” explained CNBC. On 14 October, the Wall Street Journal’s Liz Hoffman reported, Goldman Sachs’ “Pandemic Hot Streak Continues in Third Quarter.” In January of the new year, Reuters reported, “Market capitalization of world stocks surged to a record $88 trillion, a whopping $33 trillion jump from the March [2020] bottom.”5

Senior officials at the Fed allegedly invested in financial markets while the Fed was pumping money into those markets during the pandemic! The man leading the Federal Reserve during the pandemic was Jerome Powell. He had previously made a fortune in the financial industry, including as a director of the Carlyle Group, the private equity behemoth known to invest heavily in military industry. A Trump appointee, Powell was reappointed by President Joe Biden in November 2021.

Rich Richer

Top capitalists such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and BlackRock’s Larry Fink sold approximately $9.2 billion in shares of their own corporations between the beginning of February 2020 and the end of the third week in March 2020, the Wall Street Journal noted. The Journal did not suggest impropriety or insider trading, though the executives’ timing was immaculate. The superrich dove back into stock investment once the Fed had revived the market. In just two months, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $434 billion as thousands of workers died and more than 38 million workers filed for unemployment. The greediest (Bezos, Buffett, Ellison, Gates, Zuckerberg) quickly gained $75.5 billion.6

By early December 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth had increased by $1 trillion. What might $1 trillion have paid for? More than double two years of budget shortfalls of U.S. local and state governments. After one year of the pandemic, the richest fifteen billionaires had gained $563 billion.

The political class in D.C. also took time to profit. In December 2021, Business Insider published its Conflicted Congress exposé. The five-month review of thousands of financial-disclosure reports, covering all federal lawmakers and their top staff, supplemented with extensive interviews, revealed widespread profiteering. Dozens upon dozens of federal lawmakers from both sides of the aisle had profited from stock investments in corporations making COVID-19 vaccines and personal protective equipment. Insider put it gently: “Lawmakers' trading stocks of companies that have been profiting from their response to the pandemic has raised concerns about ethics and conflicts of interest…”7

Such profiteering was not an anomaly. Members of Congress profit from the business of war.8

The workers were disposable. Former CEO of Wells Fargo, Dick Kovacevich, spoke early in the pandemic about healthy workers under 55 years of age:

“We'll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know… Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you'll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein), former head of Goldman Sachs, tweeted on 22 March 2020: “Extreme measures to flatten the virus ‘curve’ is [sic] sensible—for a time—to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue—and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.” Economist and White House advisor Kevin Hassett spoke to CNN on 25 May: “Our human capital stock is ready to go back to work.” The phrase “human capital” was not just trendy corporate lingo. The phrase, common in the war industry,9 reflected the extent to which a profit-over-people mentality had infected the federal government.

No paid sick leave. No universal rapid testing. Work or starve. This was the choice the ruling class gave the working class during the pandemic, author Jon Schwarz concluded.

“The short-term danger is that Americans will resist the push from business to get us back on the job and making money for them. Their plan is simple: Starve us out. They know we can’t survive indefinitely without a continuing government bailout focused on regular people’s needs. So they’re going to stop that bailout from happening.”

Schwarz continued:

“The longer-term danger they face is that we’ll make the government work for us in the short term — and then we will realize we could make it work for us all the time by removing the threat of starvation from their arsenal. This would totally change the balance of power in society. This is their deepest fear, one that’s consumed them since World War II, the first time in history that everyday people gained consciousness that it was possible for them to use the government to create a world that puts them first, not their bosses.”

Poor Poorer

Expanded unemployment insurance in the United States during the pandemic (a process so heavily regulated and convoluted, under the guise of making sure money only went to people who really needed it, that benefits were denied or delayed to people in dire straits) often incentivized corporations to lay off workers instead of retaining them. If a worker didn’t come back to work, a capitalist could then report the worker as deliberately staying home and hence not eligible for the benefits.

Worldwide, workers’ wages fell by $3.7 trillion in 2020, the United Nations’ International Labor Organization reported. This huge drop was partially because corporations had eliminated millions of full-time jobs. The workers of the world were starving. Heading into winter 2021-22, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that more than 21 million Americans did not have enough to eat.

The number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 8 million from May to October 2020, with child poverty rising rapidly, researchers at Columbia University indicated. The second half of 2020 saw the sharpest rise in the poverty rate since the 1960s. Roughly thirty-four percent of population was struggling to afford basic necessities—rent, food, medicine—as of December 2020. Millions of workers could never afford to retire. Poor people died from COVID-19 at twice the rate of wealthy people, and people of color were more likely to die than whites.10

People of color were hit hard by corporate layoffs and Washington’s policies. The Guardian reported in summer 2020 that the share of households of color with zero or ‘negative’ wealth (debt exceeding the value of assets) was “much higher than the share of white households.” Generation after generation of discriminatory policy—the slave trade, Jim Crow law, separate and unequal, predatory lending, and other forms of systematic discrimination—created this racial wealth gap, noted Darrick Hamilton, professor at Ohio State University. Some undocumented workers did receive limited assistance in the form of the brief expanded child tax credit program of 2021, but the federal government largely excluded them from pandemic relief programs. Writing for The Marshall Project in December 2021, journalists Julia Preston and Ariel Goodman concluded, “Immigrants were left out of thousands of dollars of vital payments, even though they were working in an essential food industry and paying taxes. Their exclusion meant that aid did not reach an especially vulnerable group of Americans: their children, most of whom are citizens because they were born in the United States.”

Societal maladies advanced. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that more than 100,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses during April 2020 through April 2021, the country’s highest ever yearly death toll from drugs. Experts attributed the rise in overdose deaths to individual isolation, synthetic opioids, and decreased access to treatment and recovery. To this one must add: the mental health crisis that comes from being atomized workers (creating profit for the ruling class, which hoards that wealth) in the core capitalist country, where there is a steep price on all necessities of life, including housing and healthcare. Data indicated that teenagers dying from opioid overdoses increased by 94% during 2019-2020 and by an additional twenty percent during 2020-2021. More than 45,000 people in the U.S. died from gun-related incidents in 2020, a thirty-five percent increase from the year before. This “was the highest number of firearm homicides in twenty years,” the head of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, pointed out.

Polluting, instead of disposing of toxins in a safe manner, is one of the easiest ways for capitalists (and the large corporations they lead) to save money. Two weeks into the pandemic, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a relaxation of regulations, letting owners of factories and power plants determine for themselves if they’re able to meet the requirements regarding reporting of air and water pollution. (Self-monitoring is common in the war industry and among top users of war-industry products.11) Who suffers the most from pollution? The poor and working class.12

The Supreme Court soon hindered the legal ability of states and tribes to block polluting industrial projects such as fossil fuel pipelines. Shortly thereafter, the court limited the EPA’s power to regulate power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. Money from fossil fuel tycoons had helped some of the judges ascend to their current rank. Corporations and the wealthy also access the court’s justices via the Supreme Court Historical Society, a nonprofit charity that solicits money from corporations, law firms, and the wealthy, even while the court is deciding on matters affecting corporate interest.

Philanthropy

Top capitalists accrue money by taking the profit that workers create, seriously underpaying workers in the process. They also stash their riches in tax havens and influence government in order to water down labor law, dilute regulation, and obtain tax breaks. They then present their donations (“philanthropy”) as the solution to many of the ills that their economic system causes. They get a tax write-off, whitewash their harmful behavior, and often get to control how the receiving program uses the donated funds. Sometimes they openly exploit their donation, like when the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot called a top scientist at the hospital bearing his name, New York University Langone Health, with a question about the coronavirus early in the pandemic. Philanthropy is far better, in billionaire eyes, than paying an equivalent amount in taxes that go to the public good. The superrich look generous while they continue to hoard wealth.

Top capitalists were adept philanthropists prior to the pandemic. Infamous examples included Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman funding the College of Computing at MIT and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink funding the Center for Finance at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Leaders of the war industry also played the game. Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin at the time, gave millions to the University of Alabama, the owners of Sierra Nevada Corporation gave millions to the University of Nevada-Reno College of Business, and David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave millions to Harvard University. Bill Gates delivered the master stroke when establishing The Giving Pledge, wherein the greediest promise to eventually donate most of their hoarded wealth to charitable causes. Bill Gates was richer in 2021 than he was in 2010 when he established the pledge.

The executives in charge of healthcare facilities across the country accepted billions of dollars in government assistance for their facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic while laying off or cutting the pay of thousands of workers. These executives, of course, continued to pay themselves millions.

Profiting off the pandemic, capitalists tried to use philanthropy to soothe the restive masses. The for-profit hospital juggernaut HCA Healthcare fed at the taxpayer-funded bailout. HCA executives then demanded that workers comply with wage freezes and the halting of payments to pensions, otherwise, executives indicated, they’d have no choice but to fire workers by the thousands. When the press caught wind of these demands, the corporation’s CEO donated two months’ worth of his $1.4 million salary to a workers’ fund. It sounded generous until workers realized that the executive’s salary was only a small portion of his total compensation (salary, bonuses, and stock options). The executive’s two-month donation ended up being less than one percent of his total compensation. And he’d likely write that donation off his taxes, political analyst Jim Hightower surmised. “That means we taxpayers — including the nurses and others he’s knocking down — not only underwrite his fat take-home pay, but we also subsidize his face-saving philanthropic gimmick. What we have here is a raging virus of executive suite greed doing deeper damage to our society than COVID-19 ever could,” Hightower concluded.

Executives in the business of war pulled the same trick. The Leidos chief executive reportedly donated a portion of his 2020 salary to the corporation’s COVID-19 relief fund. Indicating that the corporation’s business troubles were “worse than anything we’ve seen,” including the business disruption that followed the 9-11 attacks, the chief executive of CAE said he and his executive team were taking a 50 percent cut in salary. The corporate consultancy and regular military contractor McKinsey & Co. offered the government “philanthropic prices” on its normally expensive fees, with reduced rates ranging “from $125,000 per week (for the two-consultant package) to $178,000 (for five),” ProPublica reported. Lockheed Martin reportedly pledged early in the pandemic at least $18 million to charity and protective equipment manufacturing, as it lobbied heavily to keep the war machine churning.13

Essential and Critical

The bureaucrats and executives in leadership positions within the fascist bundle known as the military-industrial complex reacted to the pandemic by doing what they’re structurally bound to do: care for big business. Ellen Lord, a former Textron executive, was Pentagon undersecretary of acquisition and sustainment at the start of the pandemic. In the words of a Pentagon spokesperson, Lord was committed “to daily communication and collaboration with the defense industrial base, especially the defense industry trade associations.” Such associations include the National Defense Industrial Association, the Aerospace Industries Association, and the Air and Space Forces Association. In a letter (pdf) dated Thursday, 19 March, to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association defined industry’s wish list. Atop the list was “a federal exemption from state and local orders restricting facility access for businesses doing required national defense activities.” In a letter (pdf) dated Friday, 20 March, to the Secretary of Defense, executives from the Aerospace Industries Association pushed for the federal government to designate the industry “essential.”

Washington was already on the ball. In collaboration with industry, the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) division issued an advisory list on 19 March identifying critical industries. The “defense industry” made the short list. (War corporations were running DHS’ CISA division, a conflict of interest that went unreported.) The following day, the Pentagon declared war corporations and their suppliers to be “critical infrastructure,” helping executives order the workers back to work. Undersecretary Lord issued a memo on the same day, emphasizing, “If you work in a critical infrastructure industry, as designated by the Department of Homeland Security, you have a special responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule.” Her rhetoric could be described as fascist: “We need your support and dedication in these trying times to ensure the security of this Nation. I understand that this national emergency presents a challenge and we are dedicated to working closely with you to ensure the safety of the workforce and accomplishments of the national security mission.” The Pentagon then coordinated with state governors to ensure that local restrictions didn’t impede the war industry.

Workers were scared. The president of a machinist’ union in Fort Worth, Texas, directed the blame at Washington: “I wish the people up there on Capitol Hill would get busy and be proactive and shut it down for a couple of weeks and give them time to do a deep cleaning.” In summarizing the situation at a General Dynamics shipyard in Maine, the Washington Post noted, union leaders “said the workforce is being used ‘as sacrificial lambs to meet the needs of our customer.’ Temporarily closing the plant would not hurt national defense, they wrote.” Journalist Sarah Lazare spoke with a worker at a subcontractor of Lockheed Martin, who feared, “We are not able to maintain social distancing… There are no dividers between desks or anything… They’ve increased the amount of cleaning they’re doing. They’ve brought in plastic dividers. They’re trying to mitigate things, but in the environment we’re in, it could spread pretty quickly.”

When pressed about the danger of keeping these workplaces open, corporate executives washed their hands of the matter by pointing to the U.S. government. In the words of the Washington Post, the corporations “said they have no choice — the Pentagon is their main customer. It sets the rules.” Stellar trickery! One portion of the fascist structure, industry, had asked another portion, the Pentagon, for industry to be considered “critical infrastructure” and then, once government eagerly made it so, dodged responsibility. Industry executives have a history of dodging responsibility after influencing policy.14

The Pentagon did not track COVID-19 deaths among workers in the war industry.

Industry executives, particularly those leading corporations that had regular business with commercial airlines, tossed workers aside. On Wednesday, 18 March, Textron Aviation announced it was furloughing over 7,000 workers (23 March-29 May). As the public stopped flying the friendly skies, Boeing announced it would cut around 16,000 workers, mostly in the corporation’s commercial aviation wing. General Dynamics’ Gulfstream division laid off around 700 workers in Savannah, Georgia, according to information filed with the Georgia Department of Labor. Militaries use Gulfstream aircraft for VIP travel and intelligence gathering. On 28 July, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes told investors that the corporation had already cut 8,000 jobs. “Some of those will come back with volume, some of them will be permanently reduced.” Roughly a month and a half later, Hayes stated that his corporation had shed 15,000 jobs so far during the pandemic (while he raked in an estimated $12.5 million in total compensation for 2020).15

While some corporate executives took advantage of the pandemic to trim the workforce, the nonstop flow of money from military and intelligence budgets and a desperate working class meant that corporations could continue hiring in business segments that worked on technology underpinning the new elective Cold War against Beijing and Moscow: cybersecurity, nuclear and conventional ordnance, intelligence software, hypersonic propulsion, satellites, and space launch. Thousands of working-class positions were available in the large war corporations during spring 2020.

War corporations, like all large U.S.-based multinationals, move jobs to where labor is cheaper and regulations weaker. Textron, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon were among the corporations reportedly outsourcing to Mexico. Top officials in the fascist structure were quick to react when U.S. war-industry suppliers in Mexico shut down. Undersecretary Lord discussed the closures with the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and then wrote to the Mexican Foreign Secretary regarding reopening those businesses. On 22 April, the U.S. National Manufacturers Association sent an open letter to the Mexican President, urging him to get the relevant suppliers back to work. Fourteen of the letter’s fifteen pages were just the names of all the U.S. corporate executives who had signed on. On 24 April, the U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State briefed reporters: “Our embassy and here in Washington has been working very closely with Mexico, advocating for American firms that are part of the—some of this is just very difficult to understand for people in government to drill down and see what activity actually affects the supply chain for a different activity.” The pressure worked, and the facilities in Mexico soon reopened.

Work stoppages were few, far between, and brief. On 22 June, Undersecretary Lord confirmed that all locations of the war industry, which had closed during the early days of the pandemic, were now open for business. “Obviously for manufacturing we need people on the line, so we’re doing things differently in terms of following [CDC] guidelines and so forth.”16

Sustaining the Racket

Axios explained the overall capitalist mood that autumn: “Judging by their stated expectations, CEO confidence is not a good sign for workers.” The president of Raytheon’s intelligence and space division later boasted, not one “of our customers suffered an interruption because we couldn't get our employees to do their work. And that's a big win for us, for our employees, for the corporation.”

Military contracting didn’t skip a beat, though no weapon of war—no fighter jet, submarine, tank, bomb, missile, or software—could combat a virus. U.S. military contract announcements issued during the five workdays that followed the pandemic declaration of 11 March 2020 included $1.75 billion for naval nuclear propulsion, $319.7 million for engines that power the troubled F-35 aircraft, and $104 million for one year of aircraft maintenance at a large naval aviation unit. (There were 73 distinct contract announcements—for contracts, contract modifications, or task orders—issued during the five duty-days spanning 12-18 March 2020.)

Work continued on the program developing new land-based nuclear weapons, new rockets with which to launch spy satellites, and new submarines and aircraft carriers. All was well in profit and war.

Back in the undersecretariat in charge of acquisition and sustainment, Ellen Lord increased the progress payment rate on industry work: from 90% to 95% of costs incurred for small businesses, and from 80% to 90% for larger corporations. A “cost incurred” could be any spending on labor or materials. Billions of dollars flowed to the war industry. The largest corporations (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman) scarfed up most of these accelerated progress payments.

Prior to the pandemic, the U.S. military had regularly paid corporations that missed deadlines, delivered mediocre products, or underperformed.17 Now, after receiving accelerated progress payments, there was even less incentive to do a good job and finish on time.18

Did the Pentagon’s leaders believe that large war corporations were being open and honest about where they were allocating cash? “I believe they are,” said Undersecretary Lord. Betraying the dominance of industry within the fascist state, Lord stated, “I need to rely on CEOs of major primes to come forth with that data.” The accelerated payment program, which started under the Trump administration in March 2020, was extended under the Biden administration in February 2021. On what did many war corporations end up spending funds from this program? Buying back their stock, which increases the share price and therefore the wealth of shareholders.

Knowing that the CARES Act was must-pass legislation, U.S. Congress packed it with corporate giveaways, some of which had nothing to do with the coronavirus. Congress allocated $17 billion for “businesses critical to maintaining national security,” the New York Times reported. (Congress also stuffed in tax cuts benefitting the wealthy.) Signed into law on 27 March 2020, the CARES Act included $454 billion for the Treasury Department to give to the Fed. Flush with money it could leverage up to ten times, the Fed purchased bonds from Corporate America, even if the corporation hadn’t requested or needed assistance. Naturally, as part of this program the Fed purchased the bonds of ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and other giants, including such prominent military contractors as AT&T, Boeing, and Caterpillar.19 Fed chief Jerome Powell explained that when companies have access to credit “they're less likely to take cost-cutting measures,” such as shedding workers. But the Fed’s bond-purchasing program did not require the corporations involved to keep workers employed.

Congress also gave the Pentagon roughly $1 billion—allocated under the Defense Production Act as part of the CARES Act—to increase U.S. supplies of medical equipment. The Pentagon’s leaders allocated most of these funds to corporations producing jet-engine parts, body armor, uniforms, drones, and satellite technology, the Washington Post reported.

After caring for industry and guiding Pentagon acquisition through the year,20 Ellen Lord gathered her belongings and returned to the war industry, joining at least seven corporations as advisor, fellow, or director.21

2020 turned out to be more profitable for the war industry than 2019.22 And U.S. corporations continued to dominate international sales of war goods and services: $285 billion, an increase of 1.9 percent over 2019.23

One year into the pandemic, Defense News asked how the large war corporations (“defense contractors”) were doing. Across the board, industry responded: It’s been business as usual. Industry analyst Byron Callan concurred: “Financially, it’s great. Companies have positive cash flow and no company suffered major trauma… There are a lot of congratulations to go around for the department and industry for managing this thing.” Industry analyst Jim McAleese noted that the larger corporations are “swimming in excess cash.”24

Neoliberal Contagion

A given hospital in the U.S. was once controlled by a board of people from the surrounding community. Viewing healthcare as another way to make a profit, private equity firms in the 1990s started purchasing more and more healthcare facilities, including emergency rooms, hospitals, and nursing homes. Their capture of healthcare skyrocketed from $250 million in 2009 to $10.4 billion in 2018.25 Hospitals were about turnover, not healthcare: Get patients in and out while offering expensive elective procedures for the rich. The U.S. was incredibly vulnerable to any major health emergency.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the U.S. government encouraged industry to perform governmental tasks. The Department of Defense, the source of horrific violence worldwide, was the lead U.S. government unit contracting with corporations for COVID-19 response.26 While DOD did deploy military medical personnel to civilian medical facilities around the country to work alongside or temporarily replace overworked hospital staff, corporations contracting with DOD deployed far more personnel in the pandemic response. Core to this response were large project management and engineering corporations such as AECOM and Parsons and rising giants such as PAE, which, while continuing their military contracting, contracted through DOD for domestic, civilian COVID-19 response, including the establishment of alternate care facilities across the country.27

The flow of money from government to corporations was immense. For example, on 9 and 17 April 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued funding—$5 billion and $586 million, respectively—in support of “the presidential national emergency declaration concerning the novel coronavirus disease.” Corporate recipients, seventeen total on these two dates, included such regular military contractors as General Dynamics, Emcor, J&J, and Sodexo, as well as smaller consultancies, such as Red Cedar Corporation of Brentwood, Tennessee.

The U.S. government (the Departments of Defense and Health & Human Services) contracted with the corporation Palantir to develop a product known as Tiberius for tracking vaccine distribution. The government fed data (“deidentified,” i.e. no information could reveal a person’s identity) to Tiberius from many different sources, including logistics corporations, the U.S. Census, and the CDC’s Vaccine Tracking System.28 Palantir also sold datamining and coronavirus tracking services to other U.S. government departments (Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security), as well as the United Nations and the governments of Austria, Canada, Greece, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Space Force and Air Force also purchased Palantir products, for crunching data about personnel and matériel.29

Some public health advocates and state politicians worried that the corporation’s substantial work in military, intelligence, and law enforcement might access the health information of undocumented immigrants that was gathered during the corporation’s COVID-19 response.

Like many large consulting firms, McKinsey & Co. had been expanding its U.S. military contracting in the years prior to the pandemic. Its work included analyzing military spending efficiency, working on supply chain logistics, supporting the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter “affordability campaign,” and managing some Air Force “strategic transformation initiatives.” Elsewhere, McKinsey reportedly aided the absolutist Saudi regime,30 helped facilitate the opioid epidemic,31 and was a stop on the revolving door between military and industry (officials such as Eric Chewning, Jesse Salazar, and retired Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney had recently revolved through McKinsey and government).

McKinsey’s corporate offices pounced early in the pandemic, snagging customers from the federal (DOD, FEMA, FDA) to the municipal (Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles). ProPublica summarized, “Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.” McKinsey often charged very high prices and used multiple employees to do the work that a single government civilian had been doing, and its work was regularly mediocre and unoriginal, ProPublica reported. A separate consultancy-cum-contractor, Deloitte, built the CDC’s costly, error-ridden Vaccine Administration Management System website, which was pitched to states as capable of handling scheduling, inventory, and reporting for COVID-19 vaccine jabs.

Bailing Out Complementary Industries

Under immense pressures deep below the Earth’s surface, dead animals and plants transformed over millions of years into fossil fuels. Capitalists gradually designed U.S. society around the use of these fuels, burned to produce electricity and engine power or refined into plastics. Underpaying the working class to mine the coal, drill the oil, and capture the natural gas, the capitalists pocketed the profit created by the workers, and then pocketed the profit from the economies that fossil fuels created and propped up. No effort was made to use such immense energy in an organized, deliberate fashion benefitting all of humanity. Fossil fuel soon underpinned daily life in the U.S., including food fertilization, production, transportation, and preservation.

A major exporter of fossil fuel and possessing the largest network of oil and gas pipelines of any country,32 the U.S. government subsidizes the fossil fuel industry to the tune of roughly $20 billion per year and does not require the industry to pay for deaths caused by its pollution (including its microplastics) or for any changes to Earth’s climate caused by carbon released during fossil fuel combustion. The U.S. military is the fossil fuel industry’s biggest single customer. It burns fossil fuels to train personnel, sustain its global infrastructure, and intimidate and harm governments and civilian populations.33

Given how crucial these fuels were to U.S. society, it was no surprise to see the Fed change its own rules to benefit fossil fuel corporations during the pandemic: On the last day of April 2020, the Fed expanded its lending program “to allow more debt, looser standards and bigger loan amounts,” journalist Alexis Goldstein reported. This rule change permitted oil corporations to use emergency relief funds (backed by the taxpayer) to reduce debt and repay creditors, the big banks. In the month following the Fed’s rule change some fossil fuel corporations paid their executives handsomely, even if the corporate stock was not performing well.34

The world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations soon made record profits.35 Guess where executives funneled profits! Industry infrastructure, executive compensation, and buying back stock.36

Commercial airlines help sustain the flows of U.S. capital and military transportation. They received three rounds of government assistance. Under terms of the deals, the airlines were supposed to limit executive compensation and not furlough workers involuntarily or reduce pay or benefits. Airline executives, however, implemented furloughs and early retirements, canning thousands of workers. Executives received bonuses, the Washington Post reported based on regulatory filings.37

Conclusion

The cost of vaccinating the world would have been five times cheaper if the corporations manufacturing vaccines weren’t reaping billions in profits, the People’s Vaccine Alliance calculated in July 2021. Three corporations—Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna—were charging governments worldwide up to $41 billion more than estimated production costs.38

Addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the following summer, the White House coronavirus response coordinator promised more neoliberal gold: “Getting us out of that acute emergency phase, where the U.S. government is buying the vaccines, buying the treatments, buying the diagnostic tests—we need to get out of that business over the long run. And so, my hope is that in 2023 you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products. Some of it is actually going to begin this fall.”39

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Unrestrained Growth

Washington eagerly showered money upon military and intelligence—money raised via taxes and the sale of Treasury marketable securities—following the 9-11 attacks. Investigative journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin contextualize the bloat: “Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force.” Two to three dozen new organizations working on highly-classified matters—counterterrorism, support of overseas espionage, monitoring financial flows, and tracking sundry populations—sprouted up each year between 2001 and 2010. CIA spilled out of its headquarters and into dozens of buildings in the greater Washington area.1 The facilities of all seventeen major U.S. intelligence units in the U.S.—from the Defense Intelligence Agency at Bolling Air Force Base to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at Liberty Crossing—were renovated or built anew during the two decades following 2001.

Annual funding for the military command in charge of special operations grew from $3.1 billion to $13.1 billion in those same years, its 43,000 personnel expanding to roughly 74,000. The military command in charge of warfare in cyberspace grew from a few hundred personnel at its 2010 founding to more than 6,000 a decade later. The unit in charge of guiding military adoption of artificial intelligence was enjoying a $1.3 billion annual budget two years into its 2018 establishment.2 The budget for the military branch in charge of operations in space, which had been established at the end of 2019, grew every year by the billions. Growing units need more physical space and demand bigger budgets—factors that, along with the corporate need to increase profits, push for even more growth of the military-industrial complex.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanded fascism’s inward focus. Created to be an organization focused on domestic counterterrorism, DHS became operational in 2003. Its mission soon covered cyber security, election security, and domestic intelligence, and its annual budget topped $50 billion. Aside from the fearful context of DHS’ establishment and its role widening the federal government’s surveillance of the public, the fascist nature of the department was evident in the overwhelming presence of big business: corporate goods and services swarm and swamp DHS and its subsidiary units.

Many of the war industry’s goods and services—drones, piloted aircraft, information technology, force protection, cyber—are applicable to the “homeland,” and thus DHS’ top contractors are military contractors.3 They include the famous (Boeing, General Dynamics, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman); IT and intel behemoths (Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, SAIC); large engineering and project management corporations (AECOM, Fluor, Jacobs); corporations the public wouldn’t traditionally view as involved in war (Amazon, Motorola, IBM); corporations in the hands of private equity (Amentum, ManTech, Peraton); and British firms with a sizeable presence in the U.S. (BAE Systems, Serco).

This massive bureaucracy, propelled by the war industry, looked inward for targets. DHS helped states establish fusion centers after 9-11. Fusion centers compile information from public and classified sources and share this information across local, state, and federal law enforcement. These centers are now funded through state and local taxes (68% of funding in 2021), federal grants (19%), federal taxes (11%), and tribal, territorial, private, and other funds (2%). Fusion centers cost roughly $337 million in 2018, over $403 million in 2021. Ambiguous lines of authority create an environment ripe for officials to “manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight,” the ACLU notes. The Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the Executive Branch from utilizing the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement, was not designed to apply to fusion centers. Indeed, fusion centers did not exist when the Act was passed in 1878.

Given a broad mandate and no genuine sustained Muslim terrorist threat to the United States,4 fusion centers dive deep into public life. Journalist Ken Klippenstein gathered the titles of hundreds of intel reports compiled by fusion centers, offering a glimpse into what they were up to during 2019-2020: the humdrum and the idiotic. One in Florida investigated “Criminal and Violent Extremist Use of Emojis” as well as musical collaboration among “Subscribers of Black Extremism,” one near the nation’s capital dug into viral social media challenges, and one in Washington state covered such suburban hell as a man working on cars in his driveway and letting the motor oil run into a creek. A fusion center in Austin, Texas, reportedly monitored peaceful cultural events, including a meditation gathering, a music festival, and a candlelight vigil.

Fusion centers exhibit fascist traits: group belief in the need to defend against an ever-changing threat, militant government mindset, corporate saturation, nationalist justification, and mass monitoring of innocents. Staffed by mediocrity and emitting plenty of redundant and privacy-invading information, fusion centers have yet to reach their full potential. If the state is able to access competent personnel (difficult given the consumer mindset of U.S. society—a mindset largely created by Corporate America itself), fusion centers could pose an even greater threat to the public.

Fascism turns public services against the people. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is an independent agency of the Executive Branch, authorized in the Constitution to serve the public. USPS scans the metadata of all snail mail—address, return address, names, time—and puts this information into government databases, accessible by federal agencies for an undisclosed amount of time, the New York Times reported in 2013. The Times quoted a former FBI agent who said, “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena… It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”5

The Postal Service even surveils the public’s online activity: Likely established as early as 2018, its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) has gathered images off public websites and created a database of billions of images then used for investigations. Corporate software allows the unit to “run keyword searches on social media event pages,” investigative reporter Jana Winter reported based on USPS documents. Authorities justify these searches as helping to guard against potential threats. iCOP personnel also create and manage social media bots. The program reportedly feeds its information into a digital portal shared with DHS, which can then distribute the information wherever it sees fit, including to law enforcement and NSA.

Legal Foundations

Opaque practices inherent to classified military- and civilian-intelligence budgets violate the Constitution’s requirement that U.S. Congress publish an accounting of the receipts and expenditures of all public money: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time,” reads Article I, Section 9, Clause 7. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, to which the U.S. government is a party, bans using war as a way to solve international disagreements. Since the military-industrial complex’s entire existence is predicated on secrecy and profitable war, it just ignores these laws.

It also uses laws and legal instruments adeptly.

A waiver is a legal instrument that bureaucrats within the fascist structure issue in order to dodge what few restrictions remain. The U.S. government regularly invokes “national security” and “extraordinary circumstance” when implementing a blanket waiver permitting the war industry to sell to foreign governments that violate human rights.6 In the same vein, to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to allied governments in the name of “security assistance,” the White House frequently waives legal restrictions set forth in the Child Soldiers Prevention Acts.7 President Barack Obama reportedly approved a classified waiver allowing CIA to kill people via drone strikes in Pakistan based on their “pattern of life” instead of concrete information that they were planning an imminent attack. The White House and DHS invoke “national security,” including legal code set forth in the Real ID Act of 2005, to issue waivers (e.g., A, B) expediting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, devastating wilderness and wildlife. These are just some of the waiver’s greatest hits.

Congress sooths the public while refining government espionage. President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 after the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies were engaged in systematic surveillance of trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, peaceful dissidents, and political activists. FISA did not impede the fascist state. It codified how the federal government could leverage the technological superiority of the U.S. war industry for espionage purposes. It also created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to facilitate government use of warrants for surveilling the public. The court’s proceedings are classified, and it only hears from one side: government. Its judges are appointed by the fortress of capitalist law, the chief justice of the Supreme Court.8

U.S. Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing the Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—the USA PATRIOT Act—in bipartisan unity following the 9-11 attacks. This act allowed greater government surveillance of the public while reducing judicial oversight and the ability to challenge the federal government’s searches in court. It shredded the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Privacy was no more,9 just as Corporate America began placing surveillance software in everything from home appliances to automobiles.

The fascist state claims self-defense when attacking. Military-industrial aggression worldwide from 1945 through 1990 was justified as defense against communism. The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on 18 September 2001, which all U.S. Presidents have since used to deploy the troops worldwide, including in the Middle East, the Philippines, and East Africa, states, “Whereas, such acts [as the attacks of 11 September 2001] render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad…” The U.S. government has also justified its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 by citing Article 51 of the United Nations’ Charter, which states, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations…” The U.S. government justified its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 as a preemptive attack, defending against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government kills people overseas via airstrikes, claiming self-defense: the victims pose an “imminent threat.”10 The ordnance killing people in post-9-11 wars is made in such locations as Garland, Texas (General Dynamics), Holston, Tennessee (BAE Systems), Orlando, Florida (Lockheed Martin), Radford, Virginia (BAE Systems), St. Charles, Missouri (Boeing), and Tucson, Arizona (RTX).

Legal manipulation harms those who’ve been kidnapped. The military tribunal procedures aboard U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, allow prosecutors to determine what classified evidence from CIA black sites the defense needs in trial preparation, even though the defense lawyers have the clearance—Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI)—needed to determine for themselves. Classification even prevents a torture victim languishing there from discussing whether he remembers the CIA official who oversaw his torture at black sites overseas.11 Most people imprisoned aboard Naval Station Guantánamo Bay were captured by U.S. allies, not U.S. forces.

You see, fascist institutions ignore human rights in certain cases, particularly when it comes to “national security” and protecting the country from a murky enemy. Select application of human rights allows the state to engage in assassination (drone strikes, cruise-missile strikes, high-altitude bombing, house raids), torture (CIA and JSOC overseas, solitary confinement at home in U.S.), and lengthy imprisonment without charge or trial (Guantánamo, black sites, the U.S. prison system, asylum applicants at the border). Some politicians claim to support human rights, but those rights apply neither to the overseas victims of the wars nor to the working class in the U.S., which lacks democracy in the workplace and whose labor the ruling class exploits in order to become fantastically rich.

Legal Secrecy

Fascist regimes are obsessed with secrecy. Early in the Cold War, the United States’ top nuclear physicists signed a report arguing against attacking Japan with nuclear weapons. The Pentagon seized this Franck Report of 1945, classified it, and only declassified it after using those weapons against Japan. Later in the Truman administration, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, an organization of hundreds of civilian experts, composed a forceful warning about the dangers of a nuclear arms race and the need for international control of nuclear weaponry. The White House quickly classified the document.12 Toward the end of the Cold War, Congress tasked former nuclear launch control officer Bruce Blair with studying U.S. nuclear plans and networks. Blair concluded that the government’s complicated command system might actually increase the risk of nuclear war. The Pentagon seized the study, classified it at the highest level, and destroyed all but a few copies.13

Fascist regimes conceal information as naturally as the human heart beats. “Turns out that everything that’s bad news has been classified over the last few years,” the top government watchdog overseeing U.S.-led “reconstruction” of Afghanistan testified regarding routine U.S. government deceit. The Pentagon even buried an internal study that had identified a potential $125 billion in savings (achievable over five years through early retirements, personnel attrition, trimming some high-priced corporate activity, and shrewder use of information technology), fearing some in Congress might use the report to cut the military budget. Evidence (sitting on government servers) of U.S. airstrikes that killed civilians in the Middle East remains classified.

The White House can use “state secrets privilege” to invoke national security as a way of thwarting public requests for information. After corporate contractors from RCA died in a Boeing aircraft crash in the southern U.S. early in the Cold War, their widows filed a wrongful death action and requested the relevant accident reports. The Executive Branch argued that it couldn’t disclose the reports because they contained state secrets—information regarding classified technology aboard the aircraft. When the accident reports were finally declassified in 2004, they didn’t contain any details about classified equipment.

Law demanding silence facilitates federal investigation of the public. Armed federal bureaucracies can use classified administrative subpoenas, such as National Security Letters, to obtain the public’s metadata (location, duration, sender, recipient, time). The recipient of these Letters, typically a technology corporation—most with long histories of contracting with the federal government and/or utilizing technology originally developed through federal funding—is not allowed to inform the person being monitored that it is cooperating with the federal government. Elsewhere in the fascist state, classified rules govern the latest watchlist (authorized through classified Attorney General order)—the watchlist was developed during the Obama administration and implemented during the Trump administration—that allows the U.S. government to track and monitor members of the public without a warrant.

Separately, law enforcement, after receiving a discrete tip from a unit within the federal government, works backwards to arrange normal investigative procedures that create a path to the suspect. The federal unit that tipped off law enforcement is nowhere to be seen—not in affidavits, disclosure, courtroom testimony. This procedure, known as “parallel construction,” is used frequently. Reuters summarized the situation in 2013: “A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.” Most cases have nothing to do with terrorism or potential armed attack from individuals or states. Tips are disseminated in the name of combating informal gangs, organized crime, and drug traffickers.14

In 2008, U.S. Congress gave immunity to fascism’s corporate component: the telecoms helping the U.S. government carry out electronic espionage. This FISA Amendments Act also formally codified the federal government’s ability to search and track the U.S. public’s online communications without a warrant. Under Section 702 of the Act, NSA cannot deliberately collect the communications of U.S. persons (i.e. residents or citizens). It can, however, collect on foreigners overseas who are in communication with U.S. persons. Without needing a warrant, federal employees, including corporate contractors, can then search the databases that contain these communications (e.g., emails, texts, messages). Citing national security and counterterrorism, CIA and the FBI may query the data. The FBI may also search the data for evidence of a crime. In 2021, the FBI reportedly conducted at least 3.4 million warrantless searches of the U.S. public’s private electronic data.15

In the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015, Congress switched the responsibility for collecting the public’s metadata from government to corporation.

U.S. Congress leads the way in crafting the legal code for militant purposes when it teams up with corporate lobbyists and D.C. law firms to draft combative foreign policy, as exemplified in the various sections of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Offices of legal counsel in the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and general counsel in CIA and NSA issue further legal foundations (opinion, memorandum, and/or directive), which are often classified, before making a move home or abroad. Privacy Officers within these bureaucracies do not protect the public’s privacy; they find ways to skirt or exploit what little privacy protections exist. In the event of rare public inquiry, leadership cites their legal foundation, their armor.

Everyone a Suspect

In both outward expressions of the fascist state (e.g., the first Cold War, the global “war on terrorism,” today’s aggression against Beijing and Moscow) and inward expressions (e.g., war on drugs, the surveillance state), the working class is viewed as a threat. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden describes this everyone-is-a-suspect logic with respect to domestic surveillance: “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even a president.” He continued, “Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with.”

The FBI can separately use assessments to monitor the public. An FBI assessment differs from an FBI investigation in that the Bureau does not need evidence of criminality or a verified threat to the state in order to conduct it. In the words of investigative journalist Alice Speri, assessments need “only to be authorized for a specific purpose, such as recruiting new informants.” Conducting open assessments, FBI agents can tail people, deploy informants into one’s circle of friends, lie in order to prompt incriminating statements in interviews, and monitor social media. This is nothing new. Often, as Nelson Blackstock pointed out in his seminal book about the FBI’s war against political freedom, no “specific illegal acts were charged against those ‘targeted’ by the FBI” during broad monitoring and suppression of worker organizing and Left political activity in the mid-twentieth century, “though a vague ‘propensity for violence’ and unspecified violent acts” were alleged (p. 35).

Circumventing due process and ignoring the freedom of association, a watchlist indicates to personnel in law enforcement or intelligence that a given human, X, is of interest. Seeing that X is on a watchlist, federal personnel can limit their travel, confiscate their possessions during travel, and further monitor them and their associates in person and online. Only reasonable suspicion, not evidence, is required to add someone’s name to the primary watchlist established after 9-11, the Terrorist Screening Database. The fascist state then devised (during the Obama administration) and launched (during the Trump administration) a new watchlist: Transnational Organized Crime (TOC), which authorizes government agencies to gather information on the public even when there is no evidence of a crime (or intent to commit a crime!), as journalists E.D. Cauchi and William M. Arkin reported in 2020. Any human in law enforcement—local, tribal, state, federal—can nominate someone to be on TOC. One can be put on the list if suspected of affiliation with gangs, cartels, syndicates; political dissent and activism; unapproved weapons dealing; human trafficking; visiting certain foreign websites; or contacting family living overseas.

More ratings and tallies await the public. At the state and local level, police use software products that ingest numerous data (from social media, arrest records, property documents, commercial databases) to assign humans a “threat score,” the Washington Post has reported.16 The corporations that sell the software do not disclose how they calculate a threat score, citing legal grounds that enhance corporate greed (i.e., trade secrecy and intellectual property). At the same time, credit agencies—for-profit corporations that collect, monitor, compile, and maintain information about one’s lending and credit past—present their three-digit credit score as an indicator of how trustworthy one is financially.

Subject to surveillance, assessments, watchlists, and scores, everyone is considered a suspect.

Bars and Borders

Some workers in the U.S. turn to crime after corporate executives deindustrialize their town and send jobs overseas where labor is relatively cheaper. Some turn to crime when an executive automates their manufacturing job. Other workers turn to illegal activities after being rejected by or leaving big business for their unwillingness to engage in the sociopathic behavior (deceit, incapacity for remorse, manipulation of others, lack of empathy, self-importance, superficial charm) required to ascend the corporate ladder. With every single aspect of life in the United States commodified—that is, corporations putting a price, a steep price, on such human needs as food, water, and housing—still more people turn to degrading or illegal means to make ends meet.

Federal policy—racist sentencing discrepancies, the war on drugs, the defunding of mental healthcare—has pushed more of the poor and working class into prisons and funneled the public’s money into this infrastructure of confinement.17

Instead of investing in communities through education, public transportation, and a social safety net, and redistributing wealth as part of that investment, federal and state officials choose to imprison their fellow humans. Generally, jail is where suspects are temporarily confined, often awaiting the legal process, while prison is where convicts are placed. People with certain criminal convictions on their record cannot receive student loans or access certain social programs (food stamps, public housing, welfare), so they are again pushed toward illegal activity. Thanks to this two-fold attack on the poor and working class—neglecting programs of social uplift while building up a brutal prison system—the United States now leads the world in imprisonment per capita.18

Tens of thousands of people suffer in solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system. Communications management units are one type of solitary confinement. Established by the Justice Department in the name of counterterrorism following 9-11, these units monitor and restrict the snail mail, face-to-face visits, and electronic communications of the undesirables housed within. Undesirables have included members of the demonized group: Arab Muslims (many imprisoned via entrapment19), animal rights activists (such as Daniel McGowan), and whistleblowers (such as Daniel Hale, who allegedly leaked information to the press about the U.S. government’s assassination-by-drone program).

The state has yet to exercise its full authority: Section 1021 of the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act codified indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens and residents without charge or trial.

The millions of humans behind bars in the U.S. lack physical freedom and personal freedom. The millions outside of prison—everyone is only provisionally outside of prison in the practice of the fascist state—also lack freedom: A single medical emergency or the whim of a corporate executive could send the hardest worker into poverty. There is no freedom to obtain necessities (food, shelter) without capitalists profiting from them, to make economic decisions without being coerced, or to engage in sufficient rest and personal passion. Freedom is healthcare and humane treatment for all, protection of the natural world, and democracy in the workplace.

Corralled by corporate goods and penned in by an intricate prison system, the working class faces a larger cage: constricting borders.

Families from across Latin America flee their homes in order to get away from Washington’s wars, covert activity, and economic warfare and the devastation that comes from extractive industries (oil, logging, palm, coffee, biofuels, fruit, minerals). Prior to the 9-11 attacks, people living along the U.S.-Mexico border could cross back and forth with relative ease. Fort Bliss, USA, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for example, had been one community, united through language, commerce, and family. U.S. fascism—that blend of corporate power and government authority, justified via nationalism—soon digitized the border, i.e. loaded it up with digital technology: fixed towers with radar and networked sensors to detect people miles away, day or night; license plate readers; terrain mapping programs; mobile video surveillance at staggered intervals and depths; and costly software and artificial intelligence products to identify and classify whatever crosses the field of view. Border patrol can compile and compare biometrics (face, iris, fingerprints, tattoos, scars and blemishes, even DNA) and other identifying information held in databases across federal, state, and local law enforcement. A massive new database, a Northrop Grumman and Amazon product known as Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART), is now up and running.20

The overlapping aims of government authority and corporate profit incentivize expansion of the fascist structure. Therefore, officials administering the fascist state guide the digital border inward. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers can search any vehicle within “a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States.” Government regulations define this distance as 100 miles, as the crow flies, from any boundary, including the ocean. Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population fall within this 100-mile zone. A former chief privacy officer at DHS explains, “The Fourth Amendment, even for U.S. citizens, doesn’t apply at the border… That’s under case law that goes back 150 years.” Courtesy of DHS’ legal teams, CBP Directive #3340-049A permits DHS personnel to search devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops) without reason. If one does not surrender passwords, CBP can take the device(s) and use corporate hacking products (such as those sold by Israel’s Cellebrite, USA’s Grayshift, and Canada’s Magnet Forensics) to break in and copy the contents for later analysis. A federal appeals court ruled in 2021 that DHS does not need a warrant to search the public’s mobile devices at land, ocean, and air borders.

A No-Fly List, compiled by multiple government agencies, prohibits thousands of people from flying on commercial airlines. Federal authorities then use corporate software to track the air travel of those who are permitted to fly. On top of this, the state physically monitors passengers on domestic flights. Federal air marshals observe humans who are flagged by a corporate algorithm. These passengers are not on federal watchlists, accused of any crime, or told when they are being monitored. A TSA spokesperson explained to BBC News, “The purpose of this program is to ensure passengers and flight crew are protected during air travel… This program’s core design is no different than putting a police officer on a beat where intelligence and other information presents the need for watch and deterrence.”21

Fascist components then cite immigration as a fear-inducing pretext in order to allocate even more money toward warfare abroad and at home, including the constriction of digital borders. Stoking fear of immigrants, U.S. fascism divides the workers of the world, pitting desperate U.S. workers against desperate immigrant workers.

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Militarized Law Enforcement

Law enforcement professionals (federal, state, and local) are recruited from the working class to enforce the laws of the ruling class. When the working class goes on strike or engages in other acts of disobedience, who does the ruling class call? Law enforcement. These police are strike breakers, defenders of property (corporate and super-rich), and protest dispersers. The ruling class does not hesitate to deploy law enforcement, even military force, to crush worker organizing, as happened during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, the Battle of Blair Mountain of 1921, the Minneapolis truckers’ strike of 1934, the Little Steel Strike of 1937, the postal workers’ strike of 1970, and beyond. Policing is a key part of an economic system that forces people (under threats of starvation, violence, and poverty) into labor from which the ruling class profits.

To militarize is to equip with military gear and an armed forces’ mentality. The militarization of U.S. police forces increased after the launch of the war on drugs during the Nixon administration. Through the 1033 Program (a.k.a. the Law Enforcement Support Office program), the U.S. military’s Defense Logistics Agency transfers surplus military equipment and technology (previously purchased from war corporations and used or stored by the U.S. military) to local and state law enforcement. The 1033 Program transferred more than $7.2 billion of military equipment and technology to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies between 1997 and 2020. It requires that law enforcement “make[s] use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.” In other words, law enforcement is institutionally encouraged to equip itself with military gear and turn it against the public. The separate 1122 Program allows local and state law enforcement to use their own funds to purchase new military equipment at the same discount that the federal government gets. Other sources of money, such as federal grants and seizure of the public’s possessions (“asset forfeiture”), allow law enforcement to purchase more and more gear and weaponry and to develop new militant tactics with minimal federal oversight.

The war industry long ago mastered the marketing of goods and services to the U.S. military as “solutions,” “saving lives,” and “giving” those on the front lines “the tools they need.” It employs the same strategy when marketing to law enforcement. The militarization of law enforcement comprises roughly $5 billion of the annual $20 billion “homeland security market,” CNBC reported in 2020. The typical police kit can now feature armored vehicles, assault rifles, batons, tear gas, combat knives, tactical gloves, body armor, camouflage, grenade launchers, night-vision equipment, espionage software, helicopters, and small drones.

Corporations also sell training courses and products. Businesses have slick names featuring vogue words: dynamic, tactical, patriot, solutions, American.22 Course offerings are soldierly in nature: knife fighting, parachuting, sniper training, and advanced driving skills. Many have a “special operations” flair, tapping into wells of emotion among police who’ve steadily imbibed government and Hollywood glorification of special operations forces. The International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), a major source of training materials for state and local police departments, is sponsored by a wide variety of corporations, including those that sell to the military, such as L3Harris and Day & Zimmermann. ILEETA training materials have stated that Black Lives Matter and anti-fascists are “revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the US government” and planning “extreme violence.”

Corporations craft policy for law enforcement and the military.23

Those implementing ruling-class policy often buy the lies hook, line, and sinker: Domestic law enforcement professionals view themselves as the good guys holding the line, while many members of the U.S. military believe they “fight for freedom” and “spread democracy.” A commander of U.S. Africa Command said it best when telling the troops, “All of you have been steady professionals, holding the line, and that is exactly what has been needed.” Symbols—the goose-stepping and the swastika (back in the day), and the flyovers, pledges of allegiance, Old Glory, and blue-line flags (now)—are disseminated to the public for rational reasons: Symbols help to keep the wars going, destroy working-class movements, and expand big business.

Many police bureaucracies view military experience as an asset. Police who previously deployed overseas in the military, often disturbed by the wars in which they participated, could bring their trauma home and inflict it upon the civilian populations. Sometimes, troops-turned-police bask in the veteran-worship that permeates U.S. society, adding another layer that prevents personal reflection let alone institutional reform. (This mentality of “break shit and kill people”—a mantra I heard both non-commissioned officers and field-grade officers repeat when I was in the military—contrasts starkly with the gumshoe diligence needed to prevent or solve crime.) Police who never joined the military are afflicted differently: The glorification of the military on corporate media and in Hollywood film distorts the non-veteran police officer’s understanding of war. In addition to this distortion, the police officer can suffer from a quasi-guilt for not being a veteran, sometimes resulting in a more aggressive approach to policing than those with actual military experience. In policing, these non-veterans get to act out the adored roles that they see on TV and the big screen.

Though many jobs are more dangerous than state and local law enforcement (including farmer, fisherman, garbage collector, iron worker, landscaper, logger, roofer, and truck driver), police academies reportedly average 110 hours on learning how to shoot and defensive tactics and just eight on conflict management. The training process, in emphasizing violence over steady community interaction and conflict resolution, bakes aggression into recruits. Positioning the streets as a battlefield, training courses emphasize, “Make it home to your family at night” and “Do not become a statistic.” Eric Tang, professor at the University of Texas-Austin, explains, “If you are convinced that the people you keep safe are actually the enemy, then your work as a police officer will proceed with that in mind… You can’t have it both ways: On one hand you can’t talk about being an officer of the ‘peace,’ and on the other hand, describe yourself as someone who is at war.” The public’s experience can be summarized in the popular refrain: Imagine if you call the fire department and they just beat the shit out of you instead of putting out the fire.

The disconnect is real: In any given U.S. city, law enforcement personnel do not live in and are not a part of most neighborhoods that they police. Kitted up in military garb and emotionally conditioned to view the public as hostile, police often behave as troops confronting enemy combatants. Law enforcement in military kit are more likely to behave violently, research has shown. Militarized law enforcement personnel throw themselves into situations where a subtler approach would suffice. In an ACLU study of more than 800 local and state paramilitary raids using weapons of war, 80 percent were “for ordinary law enforcement purposes like serving search warrants on people’s homes,” with only seven percent used in genuine emergencies like hostage crises. According to Dr. Pete Kraska, military-style special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units carry out roughly 50,000 such raids across the United States each year. Police can raid a person’s home if they merely suspect criminal activity.

Occupy and Black Lives

“A democracy works best when the people know what their government is doing. They must have access to the policies and rules by which departments and agencies operate. Government officials should not be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. Good government functions best in the full light of day.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson had his press secretary, Bill Moyers, trim this portion of the signing statement of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The ensuing final draft was quite different: A “democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation permits. No one should be able to pull the curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest” (emphasis mine). Most of the overall statement then ensured the withholding—not disclosure—of information. A master of ceremony, President Johnson signed the Act without one.

Invoking classification, statute, or trade secrets allows the federal government to stifle the release of documents when faced with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Some parts of the federal government are wilier. John Stockwell explains how his former employer, CIA, dodges a request: “Since the Freedom of Information Act, the agency increasingly uses a system of ‘soft,’ ‘unofficial,’ or ‘convenience’ files for sensitive subjects, especially any involving surveillance of Americans. Such files are not registered in the agency’s official records system, and hence can never be disclosed under the FOIA” (p. 228).

The distended bureaucracies of the fascist state nonetheless sometimes respond to FOIA requests with documentation, however meager. Occupy Wall Street, which sprang up in 2011, was a geographically distributed movement that rejected the financial industry’s domination of public life and the profit-over-people way that society is organized. In response to a FOIA request from a non-profit legal organization, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, DHS coughed up some documents, heavily redacted. Independent analysis of these documents revealed deep federal coordination aimed at suppressing and dismantling Occupy.

The state coordinated and centralized its activity against Occupy through the DHS National Operations Center, government documents indicated. DHS described this National Operations Center—the main “conduit for the White House Situation Room”—as the “primary national-level hub” for sharing and coordinating information (across industry and federal, state, tribal, and local government) related to terrorist attacks and “domestic incident management.”24 The Occupy movement endured for about one year nationwide, roughly autumn 2011 through 2012, before the coordinated federal effort won out and the movement fizzled.

The New York Police Department, utilizing compartmented units, premeditated “counterterrorism measures,” and weeks of planning, cleared Zuccotti Park of an Occupy encampment in November 2011. Of the NYPD’s broader daily fusion-center operations, the commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command later stated approvingly, “They have gone to extraordinary pains to group and mass as much data as possible… for their police operators, their policemen on the watch” (14:00).

Law enforcement in the U.S. kills the public at rates far higher than law enforcement in any other country, and is far more likely to kill black than white people, even though black people constitute a far smaller percentage of the population. After a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black man, much of the city rose up in protest. These popular uprisings, which endured summer 2014 through summer 2015, saw federal monitoring and stifling of civil rights and black political activity. Demonstrators were met with a brutal crackdown from law enforcement, which included DHS vehicles, uniformed and plain-clothed federal officials, FBI agents and FBI police officers, and state and local police forces in head-to-toe military kit. Regarding this militarized response, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri famously remarked, “Ferguson resembles Fallujah more than it does Ferguson.” DHS planned to “plug” federal officers into Ferguson protests in order collect intelligence, investigative journalist Jason Leopold reported after piecing together hundreds of pages of government documents. Redacted heavily, the documents did not indicate whether DHS ever implemented the plan.

A fascist state views the public as a threat. The Missouri National Guard, which was deployed to Ferguson, offhandedly referred to protestors as “adversaries” and even “enemy forces.” NSA documents referred to members of the public who oppose the federal government’s assassination-by-drone-strike program as “adversaries” and “threats.” In disseminating propaganda, the U.S. government views its citizens and residents as an opposition that must be manipulated.25

State and local law enforcement are now in the espionage game. In an analysis published by the Brennan Center, former FBI agent Michael German summarized law enforcement’s broader transformation into domestic intelligence units: Through constant contact and collaboration, the tactics, techniques, procedures, and attitudes of federal intelligence apparatuses permeate state and local law enforcement.

Law enforcement knows where to place surveillance technology for full coverage. Vehicles, buildings, and public structures (such as traffic lights) offer points of observation. Cameras on police bodies and vehicles—more for monitoring protestors than documenting police violence—provide mobile coverage. Cameras, license-plate readers, cell-phone exploitation devices stand at entrance and exit points, along anticipated protest routes, and at distant lots and alleys where protestors might park. The air offers total freedom to maneuver with fixed-wing piloted planes, large and small drones, and helicopters. Knowledge about the public that the state obtains from surveillance can be fed into law enforcement databases. Federal intelligence units regularly access one another’s databases.26

The federal government, including DHS, thoroughly monitors—online and in person—the civil rights movement known as Black Lives Matter. (This broad, decentralized movement is distinct from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Many local civil rights organizers, affiliated or unaffiliated with the Foundation, haven’t seen a dime from the Foundation’s sizeable coffers.) Everything from vigils and music parades to breast cancer walks are reportedly surveilled. DHS “frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts,” journalist George Joseph concluded in 2015 after reviewing hundreds of government documents.

In November 2014, a grand jury declined to indict the law enforcement professional who had murdered Michael Brown. Roughly four months later, the Department of Justice also declined to prosecute the officer, even while simultaneously releasing a report (pdf) that found systematic, racist police activity in Ferguson.

“Two young men were found [shot] dead inside torched cars. Three others died in apparent suicides. Another collapsed on a bus, his death ruled an overdose,” the Associated Press later reported regarding the death of men tied to the Ferguson protests. Danye Jones, one of the alleged to have died by suicide, was found hanging from a tree in the front of his home. No arrests were made. Civil rights activists across the country were subjected to ongoing in-person and online monitoring, including FBI visits to their homes.

Stifling black-led progress has always been a fascist priority. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a mid-century FBI-led program to eliminate political activity and popular movements that deviated strongly from political orthodoxy. Modeled upon earlier federal efforts to harm socialists, communists, anarchists, and robust trade-union activity, COINTELPRO achieved its goals through methodical disruption, agents provocateurs, intimidation, violence, and terror. The program targeted peace activists, the civil rights movement, black nationalists, students and academics, the Puerto Rico independence movement, and people assertively Left of center. The state ran COINTELPRO successfully across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, crushing working-class political movements and shattering black political momentum.27

The fascist state claims it's fighting terrorism when it uses war-industry products to monitor, attack, and snuff out various groups overseas: independence movements, takfiri zealots once supported by CIA, people who want to control their own resources, and any other that dissents from Washington’s implementation of capitalist rule.28 Fighting terrorism is also a justification that the state uses domestically when monitoring the public and stifling movements that want to change the miserable system. The FBI runs Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which it describes as “our nation’s front line of defense against terrorism, both international and domestic. They are groups of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, and other specialists from dozens of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. When it comes to investigating terrorism, they do it all: chase down leads, gather evidence, make arrests, provide security for special events, collect and share intelligence, and respond to threats and incidents at a moment’s notice.” As these task forces are run by the FBI, journalist Alice Speri notes, they operate “under FBI guidelines, which provide fewer protections for speech, privacy, and civil liberties than the rules governing local police and other law enforcement.”

The federal government approached Black Lives as a counterterrorism matter, from coast to coast.29 Journalist and media critic Adam Johnson summarized his study of government documents: “Beyond a few PR tweaks, there doesn’t seem to be… an ounce of doubt or hesitation as to whether or not using systems set up ostensibly to combat al-Qaeda should be so quickly turned on domestic activism.” Citing one of the best descriptions of the fascist state—that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail—Johnson continued: “We’ve given our hyper-militarized police and the FBI the hammer of coordinated mass surveillance, infiltration, and monitoring in the name of fighting a phenomenon that kills fewer people a year than bee stings. It was only a matter of time, therefore, that mass protests would begin to look like a nail in the eyes” of the officials who have risen to the top of the state. One must remember, in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, organized working-class movements that want to change the system must always be crushed.

In this environment, some personnel within the fascist structure have tried to tie dissidents of color living in the U.S. to overseas groups already successfully designated as terrorists. DHS officials wrote that the so-called Islamic State might “use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool” or call upon the “rioters” of 2015 to join them, internal government documents obtained by the transparency group Property of the People indicated. In a July 2016 memo, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that a foreign pro-Jihadist social media user looked to take advantage of the protests to encourage black Americans “to take up arms” and “start armed war against the U.S. government.” A CIA official, having reportedly misread information from a detainee, asked the alleged planner of the 9-11 attacks, who was being tortured overseas in a CIA black site, about his supposed plans to recruit black people in the United States to participate in terrorism.

Historian Jefferson Morley, in his biography of James Jesus Angleton, asserted that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had created COINTELPRO with Angleton’s assistance, and it had functioned as a joint FBI-CIA operation: “The Bureau took the lead in targeting dissident Americans inside the United States. The Agency took the lead outside the country” (p. 84). Former CIA case officer John Stockwell has referred to CIA’s spying on U.S. “black radicals” as they traveled abroad as “one of the Agency’s most explosively sensitive and closely held operations against Americans” (p. 75).30

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover regularly used the phrase “black extremists” in the 1960s to describe movements for black liberation and self-defense. The “Black Panther party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” he snookered. United Press International put it lightly: “Hoover said in his fiscal 1969 annual report the increased activity of ‘violence-prone black extremists group’ had put more investigative responsibilities on the FBI.” Members of the Black Panther party, Hoover asserted, “travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”

Chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, meanwhile emphasized, “We’re gonna fight racism not with racism, but… with solidarity. We said we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We stood up and said we’re not gonna fight reactionary pigs and reactionary states attorneys… with any other reactions on our part. We’re gonna fight their reaction with all us people to get together and have an international proletarian revolution. And that’s saying all power to the people.” Such an emphasis on working-class unity frightens fascists. Chicago law enforcement under FBI direction assassinated Fred Hampton on 4 December 1969.

By late summer 2017, the FBI’s counterterrorism division had come up with a new designation: black identity extremists. To pursue black political activity and obtain the requisite legal authorities, the FBI framed the matter as defending against possible premeditated violence against police.31 Self-defense. In the wake of Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger’s Foreign Policy reporting on the FBI’s view of “black identity extremism,” journalists, elected officials, and the members of the public filed lawsuits and records requests with the FBI in an attempt to understand the government’s rationale. Though the government withheld information and redacted much, the documents it released illustrated just how much time and effort it was dedicating to surveilling and assessing black activists and civil rights advocates during 2015-2018. One tranche of FBI documents obtained by MediaJustice and the ACLU indicated that the federal government held numerous strategy meetings with local and state law enforcement and encouraged local law enforcement to collect intelligence on “black separatist extremists,” with a hive of FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinating the efforts.

Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein meanwhile obtained portions of the FBI’s Consolidated Strategy Guide for fiscal years 2018-2020. The official document offered “threat guidance” to Bureau personnel and referenced a program, Iron Fist, designed to mitigate “black identity extremism” through enhanced intelligence collection and recruitment of informants. As the FBI’s designation “black identity extremists” conflated uncompromising civil rights activity with violence against law enforcement, the Strategy Guide stated that many black identity extremists “are convicted felons who are prohibited possessors [of guns], therefore the FBI will continue to use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”

By early 2019, the savvy FBI affirmed that it had stopped using the term “black identity extremists.” It then started to use the term “racially motivated violent extremists,” which placed the black-led movement for civil rights and white terrorism into the same category.

Conclusion

President Barack Obama’s successor would soon utilize the lessons learned from suppressing Occupy and Ferguson to further crack down on civil rights. In a leaked transcript of President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr conversing with state governors, Trump stated, “This is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster until one day somebody said, ‘That’s enough.’ And they just went in and wiped them out. And it’s the last time I heard the name Occupy Wall Street.” Barr then outlined the government’s broad plan: Use existing infrastructure, which had been deployed so effectively against Occupy and Ferguson, to stifle the ongoing uprising: “The structure we’re going to use is the Joint Terrorist [sic] Task Force, which I know most of you are familiar with. Tried and true system. It’s worked for domestic and homegrown terrorists, and we’re going to employ that model.”

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Big Business

The working class comprises everyone who puts in a day’s labor for a wage. Known as the 99%, the working class creates a corporation’s profit but is not allowed to make the decisions in a given corporation.

The ruling class is in charge. Known as the 1%, its goal is to maximize profit. When it comes to the military-industrial complex, the ruling class is mostly comprised of:

• Executives and the board. The job of the corporate executive is to maximize short-term corporate profit. The board of directors makes sure the executive does this.

• Leaders of financial firms.

  • Most war corporations (“defense companies”) are public, i.e., they issue stock that is traded on exchanges. Large banks and asset management firms (e.g., BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard) hold a lot of this stock. These banks and firms are the institutional stockholders at the top of the war industry. Banks also provide loans and lines of credit to war corporations and advise in mergers and acquisitions.

  • A private equity firm is a different kind of financial organization. It is composed of a few wealthy people who buy a corporation, restructure it, and try to sell it at a profit. Private equity has in its hands everything from news media to grocery stores to war corporations.

• Billionaires and tycoons.

Elected officials and top bureaucrats cater to the 1% and help steer the ship.

• Elected officials on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees in the Senate and House, and the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House and the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. Instead of exercising strict oversight of military and espionage activities, they accept campaign funding from the war industry, coordinate with the industry’s main tools (e.g., lobbying firms), and pass legislation expanding and empowering armed bureaucracies and enriching industry. Politicians come and go. The structure endures.

• Top bureaucrats administering military and intelligence organizations. A California Congressman, for example, became a White House insider in the 1990s, and then a presidential appointee in the 2000s administering CIA and then the Pentagon. Meanwhile, most U.S. military officers who ascend to the highest rank (inflating threats all the while) retire with six figure pensions and then grab more money by joining war corporations, lobbying firms, or financial institutions.

The industry forms a mighty bloc—some members are notorious, others relatively unknown.1

Sure, the war industry sells bombs, tanks, ships, and aircraft. It also sells base operations, espionage software, physical security, artificial intelligence, nuclear weaponry, border sensors, ways to knock drones out of the sky, information technology, cloud computing, satellites, satellite launch, office administration, construction, missile defense systems, warehousing and distribution, ordnance disposal, small arms, radar, maintenance and cataloguing of prepositioned matériel, logistics and consulting, training and simulation, and more.

Corporations don’t just sell such products and call it a day. They fabricate, test, evaluate, qualify, assemble, inspect, package, deliver, maintain, upgrade, and monitor products—all billable activities. Additionally, these corporations regularly charge their military and intelligence customers for such services as configuration management, data, documentation, incidental materials, integration, “obsolescence management,” operational security, parts, spares, support equipment, and technical order updates. Industry can’t help but view a U.S. military installation as a dollar sign. All such installations, whether located in the United States or abroad, are avenues through which corporations route goods and services. The troops (soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian) are mostly not cannon fodder, as was the case in World War I. They are users of corporate goods and services.

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Fascist Brew

The capitalists at the helm of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies learned over time how to secure the interests of big business. Doing so requires squashing independent-minded governments, installing pliant regimes, and even invading countries to forcibly create new markets. Major General Smedley Butler did just that during his military career, which spanned the military occupation of the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, and multiple invasions of Latin American countries, including the occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). He was, in his own words, a “racketeer for capitalism” and a “high-class muscle man for Big Business.” His firsthand understanding that big U.S. businesses and banks were profiting through war gradually radicalized him.

General Butler understood that the ruling class doesn’t actually care about the troops. In the early 1930s, U.S. veterans of World War I and their families marched across the country to the nation’s capital and pitched their tents in protest. Their demand? That Washington finally pay them a bonus promised to them after winning that war. By summer 1932, the protest had become a large, diverse working-class coalition united by a common cause. In forcibly removing the veterans from their encampments, local law enforcement maimed many and killed two. President Herbert Hoover then called in the U.S. Army, including tanks and cavalry, who burned the veterans’ shelters and fired chemical weapons at them and their families. Only in 1936 did these troops at last receive the money owed to them.

General Butler understood fascism’s roots. As he testified to U.S. Congress in November 1934, a prominent Wall Street brokerage had tried to recruit him to help overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to end the New Deal. The plotting capitalists reportedly included J.P. Morgan Jr., Wall Street broker Gerald C. MacGuire, and banker Grayson M. P. Murphy. Though President Roosevelt’s New Deal would ultimately extend capitalism’s life for another hundred years, these bankers and industrialists were furious with the president for implementing social programs and financial regulation. The plot failed, but the fascist brew—big business—remained.

The fascists’ aircraft in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) ran on Texas oil. The founders of the Third Reich, meanwhile, looked toward the racist marvels of the U.S. ruling class (extermination of the indigenous population, chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws) when crafting their own fascist state. Big U.S. businesses, reportedly including IBM and General Motors, helped German fascism rise. Upon the collapse of the Third Reich, largely thanks to the immense sacrifices of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government swooped in and recruited many prominent Nazi scientists to populate its nascent rocket program headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. CIA also recruited top Nazis, such as Reinhard Gehlen, to help run post-war espionage in Eastern Europe.2

Entrenching

Riding high after World War II, U.S. fascism—the U.S. military-industrial complex—was the most powerful force on the planet in terms of technological prowess and political mobilization. The complex positioned the USSR, which was devastated after the war, as an aggressive power bent on world domination. This threat inflation, a tactic military and industry would use again and again, increased military and intelligence budgets, upon which industry feasted, and justified invasive legal authorities.3

Demonizing any strong political ideologies that rejected big business in favor of mutual aid and community, U.S. government and industry expanded worldwide, using as an excuse the imminent arrival of dreaded communist hordes. From Greece and the Philippines in the 1940s through Central America in the 1980s, no country was off-limits.

The system builds momentum for ongoing military and economic warfare, home and abroad, through propaganda. Propaganda is “the dissemination of biased or false information to promote a political cause.” It manipulates “the beliefs of the recipient to align with the aims of the propagandist,” professors Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall explain in Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror.4 U.S. propaganda precedes, is amplified during, and follows open physical warfare. It is issued by different groups, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and CIA. Often overlooked or dismissed, U.S. propaganda sways the species in favor of fascist objectives.

Fearing the massive labor unrest that rocked the U.S. following World War II, the diverse peoples clambering for democratic representation within the country, and the ongoing attempt at a worker-first society in the Soviet Union, U.S. government officials implemented U.S. fascism’s foundational legislation: The Labor Management Relations Act and the National Security Act, both of 1947. The former banned many practices that the working class could use to organize and resist capitalist greed and successfully foiled socialist and communist organizing within union spaces. The National Security Act then reorganized and expanded the Armed Forces and formally established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. While many countries would obtain independence from European colonial powers during the mid-twentieth century, none have obtained independence from Western financial institutions, let alone Five Eyes monitoring of their electronic communications.

Neoliberalism is an economic policy that hands governmental functions to corporations. This process of “privatization” turns public space into corporate profit. Neoliberalism also deregulates industries, leading to widespread pollution, and often reduces federal spending on programs of social uplift, such as healthcare and public housing. Capitalists launched neoliberalism in the late 1960s in order to revive their profits, which had been weakened slightly through union organizing, working-class consciousness, and environmental awareness. In embracing neoliberalism, the two capitalist political factions—Republican and Democratic—abandoned any remaining intention to care for the U.S. working class. Public relations specialists presented neoliberal economics as just letting “the market” do its thing.

The fascist structure adjusted as it wound down one war, Vietnam, in favor of others in Angola, Latin America, and the Eastern Mediterranean. A charismatic investment banker and former Pentagon chief, Thomas Gates, led a fifteen-person commission during the Nixon administration to study the pros and cons of ending the military draft. The commission was largely a rogues’ gallery of capitalists, including shock-doctrine economist Milton Friedman, former DuPont president Crawford Greenewalt, future Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, and the first black member of the board of the New York Stock Exchange, Jerome Holland. Gates wined and dined top military and civilian leaders before introducing the commission’s report. In February 1970, he formally presented President Richard Nixon with the commission’s recommendation to end the draft.

The All-Volunteer Force was then established in 1973. The poor and working class would be the ones fighting the wars. No more illusions of shared sacrifice. The All-Volunteer Force and accompanying propaganda have rendered the U.S. military one of the most trusted institutions in the country. A leap in class warfare, ending the draft has reduced the likelihood of an internal military revolt, the likes of which the U.S. military experienced during the latter half of the Vietnam War when enlisted infantry disobeyed orders, refused to fight, and even killed officers who ordered them on patrol.

Democratic Party Significance

Moscow and Washington distorted their respective economies in the arms race and proxy wars of the Cold War. Moscow’s buckled first. General Secretary of the Soviet Union Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, contributed by prying open portions of authority in Moscow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S.- and U.K.-based financial firms leapt into action, plundering the economies of the former Soviet Union and turning 1990s’ Russia into one of the worst peacetime economic depressions on record.

In giving the military-industrial complex immense legal authorities at a time when it should have been stomped out, the William J. Clinton White House, 1993-2000, demonstrated how crucial the Democratic faction is to the fascist structure.

In the name of security, fascist regimes persuade the public that human rights do not apply to certain groups.

• The 1994 policy of Prevention Through Deterrence funneled undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border into the inhospitable Sonoran Desert and further militarized the boundary between Mexico and the U.S.

• The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act allowed greater use of classified evidence in court and the deportation of immigrants convicted of a minor crime.

• The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded the “crime of moral turpitude” catch-all in U.S. immigration law, which authorities can use to remove immigrants from the country.

• The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 made it very difficult for prisoners to file lawsuits in federal court, giving prison administrators more room to violate constitutional rights.

Fascist regimes prioritize law and order and give law enforcement loose rein.

• The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 expanded federal policing authority, ballooned law enforcement’s ranks, allocated billions of dollars to the prison system, and eliminated basic grants for federal and state prisoner education, making it practically impossible for the poor and working class to receive a higher education while behind bars.

• The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division was also created in 1994 as the White House was ramping up the war on drugs.

• The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act expanded the 1033 Program, through which the U.S. military transfers excess military equipment to local and state law enforcement, to include “counterterrorism” products.

Fascist regimes guard and enhance the power of big business while the enabling the exploitation of the working class.

• The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1993 helped multinational corporations better exploit worker and land, eliminating many barriers to corporate activity across the continent.

• The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 gutted welfare, brutalizing the poor and working class.

• The Telecommunications Act of the same year deregulated the telecoms, leading to the further propagandizing of the public with capitalist thought while consolidating news media into the hands of a relative few massive corporations and tycoons. And, instead of regulating the nascent internet like a public utility (e.g., radio, telephone), Washington allowed large corporations to guide the internet’s infancy and adolescence.

• The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 further deregulated and removed oversight from Wall Street, permitting the risky and predatory behavior that would later crash the economy. (No top banker who oversaw the push for such policies or implemented those policies prior to the crash received a second of jailtime.)

Fascists regimes carry out dangerous policies in the name of “national security.”

• The 1973 War Powers Resolution states that if a president deploys troops into hostilities and does not get Congressional authorization within two months, the president must withdraw those troops. In June 1993, the Clinton administration’s Office of Legal Counsel flavored this 60-day clock as unconstitutional in extreme circumstances, giving the Executive Branch more elbowroom to deploy troops without Congressional approval.

• The war industry, meanwhile, was doubling down on the corporatization of the military; jobs once carried out by the troops, such as base operations and training, were further delivered to corporate hands.

• In 1994, U.S. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires U.S. communications corporations to “engineer their facilities so their network can easily be monitored” by the U.S. government, explains James Bamford, foremost expert on the National Security Agency. The Act even requires corporations to “install the eavesdropping devices themselves if necessary, and then never reveal their existence,” Bamford notes (pp. 210-211). CALEA’s passage helped create a large market for corporations selling domestic surveillance products (p. 236).

• The Clinton administration wrapped up its tenure by ushering the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alliance’s standardization of weaponry guarantees regular European purchases from the U.S. war industry.

Fascist regimes rally the public over the need to eliminate a common threat.

• Executive Order 12957 of 1995 expanded sanctions against Iran’s oil sector and declared that “the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 punished any U.S. business that dared to deal with those two countries.

• The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (“Helms-Burton Act”) of 1996 expanded and tightened the U.S. embargo (more accurately described as a siege) of Cuba and bullied the Cuban people. These acts further strangled the island nation that had dared to forge a different economic model.

• The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act weakened habeas corpus, increased penalties for people convicted of terrorism, and created the U.S. government’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

• Military, industry, and their respective and overlapping think tanks and media inflated Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a threat, which the Pentagon used to maintain a constellation of bases across the Persian Gulf. Hussein was an Arab leader who occasionally deviated from Washington’s edicts, though Washington had enjoyed a tight relationship with him as it played both sides during the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988.

• The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 made regime change in Baghdad official U.S. government policy.

• President Clinton approved the launch of ordnance at multiple countries, killing civilians in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, and Sudan. Highlights included the 1998 bombing of the Shifa’ pharmaceutical factory in greater Khartoum, Sudan, and the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia.

Fascist regimes are obsessed with secrecy and pretend that it is a matter of “national security.”

• President Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 in April 1995, refining special access programs. These programs put in place safeguards and “access requirements that exceed those normally required for information at the same classification level,” the Executive Order explained. The subsequent proliferation of special access programs greatly decreased transparency while expanding the permanent warfare state. Within fifteen years, the Pentagon’s list of special access program names—just the list of the names—had grown to 300 pages.5

U.S. military and industry never let the military budget fall below $280 billion (roughly $570 billion in 2022 dollars) during the 1990s. Industry also pursued more sales overseas, including to Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, the House of Saud, and Israel.

Corporations merged and acquired one another during the 1990s. Larger moves included Boeing merging with McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed merging with Martin Marietta, and Raytheon acquiring Hughes Aircraft. Campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures increased. And more and more titans of capital revolved through corporate suites, the civilian offices of armed bureaucracies, and back. The military contracting system was further rigged in favor of corporations in part because, after decades of neoliberal economic policies shoving government function into corporate hands, the U.S. government that fundamentally lacked any real, independent capability to produce weapons of war.

The way legal teams and public relations specialists present a corporation today does not reflect the corporation’s actual activities. A given war corporation postures as a “defense company,” a leading provider of “solutions” to the U.S. government. A dedicated innovator, it enhances and accelerates the customer’s ability to ensure future success. More than just a company, it is a partner dedicated to integrity and excellence. Reality, however, is not so rosy. The corporation’s personnel and products can be found analyzing detailed maps of the Earth using proprietary software, running computer networks for portions of military intelligence, managing satellite control networks and tracking stations, overseeing military medical logistics, training counterintelligence personnel for the Defense Intelligence Agency, upgrading the system that the U.S. Army uses to pay its soldiers, and contributing to decisions regarding the production of an overbudget and underperforming class of warship.

Structural Imperative

President Clinton was not unique. Gerald Ford got the railroad-deregulation ball rolling by signing the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976. Jimmy Carter furthered his work with the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, deregulated the airline industry (1978 Airline Deregulation Act) and the trucking industry (1980 Motor Carrier Act), and helped coax the Egyptian government into making peace with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Carter also signed into law the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities and nonprofits to file patents on technologies developed through projects funded with federal money. Corporations leapt into action after this removal of public-licensing restrictions, further swarming military and espionage research.

Ronald Reagan crushed the federal air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and in the same year signed Executive Order 12333, which became the preferred legal foundation governing much of NSA’s overseas surveillance (and some domestic). Espionage under EO 12333 is not subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. More on that in a bit. Reagan also ballooned military and intelligence budgets and unleashed dirty wars throughout Central America. In 1987 his Federal Communications Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which until then had required media to attempt to present matters of public interest through multiple viewpoints. George H. W. Bush sent troops to Panamá and Iraq, oversaw Cold War victory, and expanded NATO. George W. Bush unleashed the profitable “war on terror,” which Barack Obama later expanded. Obama then facilitated the military-industrial pivot against Beijing and Moscow and allowed greater government propaganda in U.S. media.6

U.S. presidents are under immense structural pressure. They channel this pressure, for example, by launching drone strikes, increasing deportations, or approving massive military and intelligence budgets. A president cannot spend limited political capital on dismantling the fascist structure that exerts this pressure. If any president dared to do so, assuming that such a person hadn’t thoroughly compromised all morals when ascending to the top of federal authority, military and big business would turn up the heat (igniting congress via lobbying and campaign finance, strengthening media and think tank operations against the president’s policies, and stoking fear via corporate media) and wait that president out.

Historian Daniel Immerwahr has calculated that from World War II through 2020 the U.S. government engaged in open armed conflict during all but two years, 1977 and 1979.7 The U.S. government, however, was engaged in worldwide covert operations against workers, trade unionists, and leftist movements, particularly a dirty war in Angola and Operation Condor in Latin America during the late 1970s. So, really, at no point after World War II has the U.S. government chosen peace. Fascism can’t choose peace.

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Corporate Ascent

Corporate ceremony and legal documentation are the foundation of big business. If a certified lawyer follows the proper rituals, writes the required assurances and principles on an ornate piece of paper, and signs formally at the bottom, then presto—a new business is incorporated. When successful, such ritual and formality gives business incredible power, because it helps millions of strangers work toward a common goal, as explained well in Yuval Harari’s Sapiens (pp. 30-31). Unfortunately for human and planetary health, the singular goal of a corporation is maximization of short-term profit. A corporation is a fabricated entity legally distinct from the people who establish it, run it, or invest money in it. A corporation is dealt with, legally, as a person.8

The strengthening of corporate authority enhanced the fascist state. Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, lobbyist, and future Supreme Court Justice, wrote a memo in 1971—a confidential call to arms titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System—to U.S. business executives. It reflected corporate leaders’ fears of the democratic gains the public had attained during the 1960s. After demonizing the Left and misrepresenting the existing nature of U.S. government, the memo outlined tactics to increase corporate authority, including but not limited to flooding media, academic journals, and universities with capitalist ideology; eradicating existing regulation and preventing new regulation that might infringe on maximization of profits (e.g., legislation improving water quality or reducing pollution); increasing scope and intensity of federal lobbying; and stacking the courts with uncompromising capitalists. The Business Roundtable, the lobbying association steered by top executives, was established the year after Powell issued his memo. The ensuing five decades were defined by corporate success: establishing prosperous think tanks to spread information helpful to those who fund the think tanks, shrinking union membership, adding more “right to work” states, stifling wages, funneling jobs overseas, and transferring more and more wealth to the richest humans in society.

A billion is one thousand million. The United States has more billionaires than any other country. Top billionaires use their money to influence the political process. Prominent among them are men who’ve obtained their billions in the U.S. financial system. Billionaire financial tycoons who have reportedly allocated money to the political process include Seth Klarman, Daniel Loeb, Robert Mercer, Stephen Schwarzman, Jim Simons, Paul Singer, and S. Donald Sussman. Billionaire military-industrial-complex tycoons include David Rubenstein of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Fatih and Eren Ozmen of Sierra Nevada Corporation, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Peter Thiel of Palantir, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Some billionaires are very hands-on. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reportedly funded startups in the war industry, toured military bases, chaired such influential bodies as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Board, and accessed the White House during the Obama and Biden administrations. Hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin has reportedly funded Chicago police units that use big-data technologies in investigations. Sometimes billionaires actively help U.S. intelligence agencies, like when Ross Perot provided funds for Oliver North’s scheme within the Reagan administration to buy the freedom of U.S. citizens who had been taken hostage during Lebanon’s civil war, as documented in Tim Weiner’s Blank Check (p. 207).

The U.S. Supreme Court regularly boosts corporate authority. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that limits on election spending were unconstitutional. Money was henceforth free speech. In 1978, the court determined that corporations had a First Amendment right to put money toward ballot initiatives, striking down a Massachusetts law designed to protect voters from corporate influence. In 1986, the court gave corporations more elbow room to influence the political process by utilizing nonprofits. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, such as Business Executives for National Security or the National Defense Industrial Association, does have to file a Form 990 each year with the Internal Revenue Service but does not have to disclose the identity of its donors. In 2010, the court further distorted the First Amendment’s free speech clause by allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political contributions. In 2014, it got rid of limits on the total number of political contributions one could give over a two-year period. A corporation (corporate person) now enjoys far more legal rights and political influence than a human person.

A united working class is the only real threat to fascism. Therefore, labor unions must be suppressed. In May 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could prohibit employees from joining forces and taking a corporation to court (Epic Systems v. Lewis). In June 2018, it ruled that workers could get union benefits without paying dues—in other words, non-union workers who benefitted from union-negotiated contracts didn’t have to pay dues to the unions that had negotiated the contracts (Janus v. AFSCME). Unionization rates are at their lowest in the United States since 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available. Wages are stagnant.9 U.S. corporations, from Amazon through Walmart, stifle worker organizing. Corporate crime goes largely unpunished.

Elections in fascist countries are often rigged. In the United States, it is money from big business rigging the show. Both capitalist factions (Red and Blue) are awash in dark money, untraceable money funneled through nonprofits. Public opinion has little to no effect on federal policy, as explained in the famous study by Gilens and Page. The Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporation comprised of operatives from the two main capitalist political factions, long ago stopped allowing third parties to participate. Factions engage in massive gerrymandering and negative advertising to gain political edge. Occasionally, the highest court in the land weighs in to help one of the two capitalist factions, as it did in Bush v. Gore.

Funneling Creativity

The largest technological project in the United States since World War II has been war- and espionage-related research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. No other technological endeavor comes close in terms of dollars and human effort. The U.S. military budget was roughly $740 billion in fiscal 2021, roughly $750 billion the following year, and, as of this writing in 2022, an expected $850 billion for fiscal 2023. Over half of this money goes to corporations, including academic institutions.

The war industry funnels the creativity of workers (programmers, engineers, scientists) into instruments useful to the fascist state. The working class—people who put in a day’s work for a wage—is directed to research, develop, and manufacture the goods, and deliver the services. These workers are in a tight spot: As corporate executives and politicians have automated and outsourced jobs and defunded the social safety net, a job in the war industry is often the only decent option in town. With so many people unemployed and underemployed, capitalists get to pick relatively passive laborers for war-industry jobs: the ones who keep their heads down and do not raise a fuss. Purchasing the expensive necessities of life (e.g. food, healthcare, rent, utilities) requires that those workers continue to sell their labor (the products of which maim and kill the working class in other countries), enriching the ruling class.

Jobs for workers in the war industry range from manual labor (blaster, electrician, machinist, pipefitter, painter, rigger, shipwright, welder) to office employee (public relations specialist, paralegal, lawyer, lobbyist) to brain (computer programmer, engineer, physicist, chemist, mathematician). The profit that the workers create goes to the ruling class: executive greed (CEO pay at the top five war corporations totaled almost half a billion dollars during 2015-2019); dividends for shareholders; stock buybacks; and building new facilities through which to create more profit.

The ruling class inundates the working class with advertising, propaganda, and disinformation in order to keep the workers, who greatly outnumber the capitalists, passive and compliant. To what propaganda do the workers cling in order to justify working in the war industry?

• Civilian use. Employees of war corporations invoke the civilian application of military technology: The internet, the jet engine, and radar came from military funding. But these are ancillary benefits. And unlike products from other industries, the public cannot eat, consume, play with, learn from, or interact with most products sold by the war industry. Imagine what technological benefits society could achieve if hundreds of billions of dollars per year were directed intentionally toward development of technology that benefitted human wellbeing and the natural world, not war and espionage.

• Distancing. Theoretical physicist Edward Teller after guiding the creation of the hydrogen bomb stated, “The use of weapons is none of my business, and I will have none of it” (Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 99). Distancing helps people focus on their daily tasks. They rarely take the time to understand how harmful the military-industrial complex truly is.

• Traditional patriotism rallies a person around the flag. It divides the workers of the world along arbitrary borders. And it never makes the MIC accountable or changes government when it is polluted and destructive.

• Supporting the troops. Some people justify working for the war industry by saying they do it for the troops. Journalist Jeffrey Stern describes how one machinist at a missile factory rationalizes his role: Believing his work helped to keep the troops safe, the machinist derives great pride in his work. Raytheon “makes a point of hiring veterans with combat injuries, which reminds him of whom he’s working for and why,” Jeffrey Stern explains. “He feels it when he sees the gigantic photos of service members”—relatives of Raytheon workers—which “the company hangs in the most prominent parts of the plant.” When the machinist is in the factory, “the notion of helping American servicemen and women is not abstract. It’s almost tactile.”

• Some people have no morals and therefore need no pretense to work in such a destructive industry. Many, blissfully comfortable with the paycheck that the war industry offers, are simply selfish.

A few people within military and industry recognize the gravity of the situation—that funneling so much toward war and espionage harms U.S. security because these pursuits drain human effort, time, and public funds, and forestall social care—but are afraid of the consequences of speaking up. Group think, compartmentation, economic incentive, nondisclosure agreements, the allure of secrecy, and the chain of command enforce the status quo. Violence and social isolation deter the few who think about pushing back against the machinery of war. The minor whistleblower is ostracized and demoted, the leaker locked up.

Effective creativity is based on free, open discussion. The secrecy (compartmentation, classification, near-term deadlines, stovepiped fields) inherent to war-industry production stifles that free and open discussion. The free thinker and the uninhibited tinkerer do not thrive in the confines of the military-industrial complex. Although it lures many brilliant programmers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians with its financial and emotional appeal, U.S. fascism cannot focus on the breakthroughs that society needs.

The working class suffocates together: families whose countries the U.S. military irradiated and poisoned using industry’s munitions, as it did with depleted uranium in Iraq; civilians in New York City who contracted respiratory ailments and cancer after breathing near Ground Zero; people, who joined the U.S. military because it was one of the few paths remaining for socioeconomic advancement, and now suffer respiratory ailments and cancer after being exposed to burn pits during overseas deployments;10 and families who lived in the vicinity of U.S. military bases or industry factories that have produced or discharged toxins (e.g., per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, toxic sludge, radioactive waste).

Clearance

As capitalism is the overarching ideological propellant of U.S. fascism, the security clearance (intertwined with money) is the core conceptual glue of participants in the fascist state. A clearance is official authorization to access classified information—CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, TOP SECRET. The higher the classification the greater the supposed damage to “national security” if the world were to know the information.

When determining whether an individual is to be granted a security clearance, investigators first look for money problems. Are there any major red flags, such as a pattern of reckless gambling? Has the person repeatedly racked up large debts? Investigators want to see a person who would likely not be susceptible to bribery by a foreign government. The second main quality an investigator looks for is deviation from political-economic orthodoxy. Partisan red/blue affiliation and libertarianism are acceptable. Socialism, communism, and anarchism are not. This immediately weeds out people who dare to think beyond how they’re conditioned and people who operate in favor of intraspecies cooperation. Strong work against D.C.’s wars, home or abroad, is also an automatic disqualifier.

Today, background investigations of persons seeking clearance or clearance renewal are largely done by corporations (contracting often with the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency) and corporate products, including algorithms. Well over one million people have SECRET clearance. Hundreds of thousands have TOP SECRET. It is not an exclusive club. People who have obtained a security clearance know their meal ticket. (When I was in the military, I was told repeatedly by contractors and senior enlisted personnel that their clearance was their meal ticket. Most described their clearance as the way to a lifetime of solid wealth.) They do not risk speaking out resolutely against prevailing groupthink, particularly against the dominant lens of U.S. international relations (e.g., Cold War, war on terror). Rigid are the boundaries confining those with clearance, which all top MIC officials have.

The Community

The fascist nature of the Central Intelligence Agency needs no introduction: aggressive nationalism; disdain for democratic rule after attaining authority through a nominally democratic system; support from members of the working class for whom things have gone awry; and inflating the threat of villains (Iran, North Korea, “terror,” Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China) against which it flexes. CIA’s case officers recruit individuals who are likely to rise within military, economic, political, or entertainment positions in their home countries. These recruits are the spies who provide information to the Agency. When the locals inevitably rally in a given country to reassert control over their government and/or resources, CIA tries to get rid of them (sometimes via coup or assassination) in order to maintain capitalists in, or return capitalists to, authority. The successful destruction of worker groups around the world—from demolishing Greek and Italian socialists and anarchists in the 1940s, to implementing anti-worker coups in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, to the mass killing of the political Left in Indonesia in the 1960s—positions CIA as the premier fascist organization harming the working class.

While CIA doesn’t openly embrace racial superiority, it considers Latin America its “backyard” and has successfully supported or installed brutal regimes from Bogotá to Amman to Taipei, assassinated African leaders, sympathized with the whites of Apartheid South Africa,11 killed brown and black people via drones, and contributed to the slaughter of millions of brown people. CIA is constantly adapting in order to stay relevant and alluring for public relations and recruitment purposes.

CIA’s fascism is also evident in its use of proprietaries, which are businesses it owns directly or indirectly: an airline, a bank, a logistics firm, a lumber mill, a publishing house—anything useful in espionage or covert activity. For example, say you, an Agency official, wanted greater access to the Arab world. One way to achieve this would be to establish a nonprofit that focused on providing educational services, such as English language training, test administration, academic scholarships to Western universities, and study abroad. You set up offices in most major cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Your nonprofit becomes the go-to means of getting into the United States for high school or university. Thousands of teenagers and young adults pass through your program each year. You have information on all of them. As an added bonus, CIA’s proprietaries can earn revenue outside of official federal budgets.

U.S. intelligence more broadly is fascist in that it has embraced the bundling, gradually allowing much of its workload to be taken over by business—the “contractors” of the war industry. Some intelligence organizations, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of designing and launching satellites, are more corporatized than others.

Every portion of the massive U.S. intelligence apparatus (the U.S. “intelligence community,” in official euphemism) offers a way to monitor or harm the workers of the world. The Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, for example, cuts off any person and any group that firmly or violently opposes U.S. foreign policy. The National Security Agency penetrates and monitors electronic communications. DEA’s Office of National Security Intelligence and FBI’s Intelligence Branch monitor and stifle the working class within the U.S. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence manages the apparatus.12

The military-industrial complex adeptly allies with other governments. It offers financing, military training, arms sales, and more to convince the hesitant. It dominates the primary English-speaking intelligence-sharing group known as Five Eyes (Washington, Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington). It allies separately with regimes in the Middle East, primary among them Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. These regimes employ their own intelligence agencies, Western technology, coordination with U.S. intelligence, and patronage networks in order to stifle democracy in their respective countries.

U.S. fascism is allied with the Israeli state. Israel offers its intelligence abilities, particularly covert action, to U.S. government. This relationship blossomed during James Angleton’s reign as head of CIA counterintelligence (1954-75). Israel’s alliance with U.S. fascism also involves the annual receipt of billions of U.S. tax dollars, which it uses to purchase from U.S. industry. The Israeli war industry sells goods and services to the instruments of the U.S. ruling class (FBI, CIA, DHS, DOD), just as the U.S. war industry sells to Israel. The Christian Right in the U.S., believing that Jews must control Palestine before the battle of Armageddon can take place, supports Israel fervently.13 While the Christian Right is nationalist and open to authoritarian leadership, it is not the core fascist movement. The military-industrial complex is.

Faking It

Fascist leaders seize any attack—genuine, staged, or invented—against the U.S. in order to push for war. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964 is one such attack that never happened, but which paved the way for war. Under Operation Northwoods of 1962, which was never implemented, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to attack targets within the U.S., including a civilian airliner, and blame the attacks on Cuba, thereby justifying U.S. military action against the Caribbean island. District attorney Jim Garrison described the visceral nature of fascism at the Southern California Broadcasters 1967 award dinner: It’s the “situation you have when a government is allowed to lie with equanimity…” It is “what you have when the fraud perpetrated by the government, and the big lie, becomes acceptable, because the government is so powerful that individuals and even many publications are afraid to oppose it.”

In times of perceived danger, the public looks to the state for protection. This protection comes in the form of enhanced fascist activity: greater global military deployment, expanded legal authorities for government bureaucracies, further militarization of law enforcement, a bigger crackdown on dissent, and increased military and espionage expenditures.

The lies used to start a war are brazen. In the lead-up to the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, the Reagan administration presented the press with satellite photos of a large airfield being built on the island, inflated the number of Cubans there, and lied about the goals of the country’s ruling New Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation (New JEWEL). To push the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panamá, the Bush administration painted Panamanian General Manuel Noriega as a cunning drug trafficker and money launderer, lied about the nature of the December 16th death of a U.S. Marine who had tried to run a Panamanian roadblock, and didn’t mention the fact that Noriega had been on CIA’s payroll. The young woman who told U.S. Congress in 1990 that Saddam Hussein’s troops took “babies out of the incubators… and left the children to die on the cold floor” of a Kuwaiti hospital later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton had reportedly helped coordinate her testimony. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell testified in 2003 to the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice testified to the same forum roughly eight years later that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was supplying his troops with Viagra so they could commit mass rape.

Conclusion

The military-industrial complex is a behemoth. Its greatest advantage is public ignorance of its fascist nature.

The structure had survived the loss of its ostensible reason for being, the Soviet Union, and was sitting pretty heading into a crisp autumn day.

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The U.S. military-industrial complex is textbook fascism: the nationalist bundling of government authority (the U.S. military establishment and intelligence agencies) and big business (the war industry, which is comprised of the corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies).

Built on stolen land and black labor, the United States of America was always a country designed to benefit a wealthy few, but it didn’t become fascist until, ironically, the Second World War. The military-industrial complex took root when the War Production Board coordinated the conversion of hundreds of companies into the business of war.1 Instead of dismantling the military-industrial complex after the war, the U.S. government solidified it via the 1947 National Security Act. Fascism has been with us ever since.

Existing Scholarship

There are plenty of books about fascism. F.L. Carsten’s The Rise of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, and Kevin Passmore’s Fascism: A Very Short Introduction teach us about twentieth century Europe. Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works and Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning cover this European history and apply an expansive definition of fascism to the authoritarian leaders around the world today. Theo Horesh’s The Fascism this Time and the Global Future of Democracy and Brynn Tannehill’s American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy equate a mainstream U.S. political party and/or its followers with a rising fascism. While many of these books offer valuable information, all ignore the bipartisan militancy of U.S. foreign policy and the elephant in the room: the military-industrial complex.

Authors Naomi Wolf, Clara Mattei, Cornel West, and Sheldon Wolin inch us closer to this elephant. Naomi Wolf cautions in The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot that the George W. Bush administration steered the country toward fascism. Among the steps the administration took, according to Wolf, were the invocation of an internal and external enemy, the expansion of a massive surveillance dragnet, and the cooptation of mass media, though Wolf errors in placing the starting date during the Bush administration and in asserting that she herself was “born in freedom” in the United States. Clara Mattei demonstrates in Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism how fascists new to authority implement austerity as a way of cozying up to the liberal capitalists who run financial institutions. She helps us understand the military-industrial complex insofar as she centers the class conflict inherent to capitalism and notes that austerity indeed involves increasing expenditures on areas that profit the ruling class, such as war. In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, Cornel West shows how racism is essential to the wars that the U.S. ruling class launches. Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism contributes by explaining how U.S. government and educational institutions are antidemocratic in nature; how feelings of patriotism, as routed through mass media, militarize and distract the exhausted working class; and how cold bureaucratic procedures grind down and smother any attempts at changing the system from within.

Existing studies, Carsten through Wolin, do not diagnose the root of the problem. Only by understanding how the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) is a fascist structure can one understand the full scope of the challenges facing humanity.

Structural Fascism

Do not confuse fascism with corporatism. In corporatism, large corporations capture and steer the federal government via, for example, lobbying Congress and financing political campaigns. While U.S. war corporations do exert heavy pressure within the federal government, the latter does not push back against this pressure. In fact, the Pentagon embraces the war industry as part of a “total force.” Fascism is further distinct from corporatism in that it invokes nationalism in its operations, and nationalism is not part of run-of-the-mill corporate capture.

Lastly, the MIC is fascist, not corporatist, in how it has shaped the temperament of the body politic. Decades of manufacturing consent for war and funneling public funds (away from such programs as education, infrastructure, and healthcare) into war have turned the U.S. public into a desperate swarm. Instead of existing as mere consumers, as would happen under a corporatist government, large portions of the public are in dire economic straits, taught to hate a range of enemies, and conditioned to support a structure that promotes warfare.

The fascist structure known as the military-industrial complex utilizes multiple tools, not just violence, to stifle and harm the working class. It adeptly employs legal expertise and runs stellar public relations. While the fascist European states of the twentieth century were largely dominated by white men, the military-industrial complex incorporates women and people of color into its governing structures. This gives the impression that military and industry are inclusive and caring, while the wars at home and abroad and the neglect of the public at home actively kill children, people of color, and the poor and working class more broadly.

U.S. fascism developed through gradual, silent advances and massive boosts, justified by invoking alleged threats (e.g., Koreans, Vietnamese, Soviets, Arabs). The structure itself is fascist; no change in personnel at any level can alter its course. U.S. fascism is more durable than a fascism that revolves around a single figurehead; removing an entire system is far more difficult than getting rid of one human. U.S. citizens and residents are free to speak their minds as long as they don’t coalesce to pose a genuine threat to the military-industrial complex.

This study, written during 2021-2022, will be released here on Substack during summer 2024. It references the political Left and Right in a different way from how these terms are used in popular political discourse. The Left is anti-capitalist, and includes socialists, communists, and anarchists, among others. The Right is capitalist, and includes both capitalist political factions, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Acronyms and initialisms are used throughout this text.

• ACLU    American Civil Liberties Union

• CARES  Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security

• CBP      Customs and Border Protection

• CDC      Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• DHS      Department of Homeland Security

• DOD     Department of Defense

• FBI        Federal Bureau of Investigation

• FISA      Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

• FISC      Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

• FOIA     Freedom of Information Act

• ICE        Immigration and Customs Enforcement

• JSOC     Joint Special Operations Command

• MIC      military-industrial complex

• NATO   North Atlantic Treaty Organization

• NDAA   National Defense Authorization Act

• NYPD    New York Police Department

• PPP      Paycheck Protection Program

• TSA      Transportation Security Administration

Initialisms are used in footnotes.

• AP        Associated Press

• NPR      National Public Radio

• NYT      New York Times

• WP       Washington Post

• WSJ      Wall Street Journal

All citations refer to online content, unless indicated as print. Citations of military contracts refer to military contracting announcements, unless otherwise indicated. Any errors are the author’s alone, not the fault of any editors, associates, or Substack.

Chapter One lays out fascism’s development. Chapter Two covers its expansion following the attacks of 11 September 2001 (stylized herein as “9-11”). Chapter Three illustrates how government took care of industry when confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter Four shows how this government prioritized militancy during the pandemic. Chapter Five chronicles the fascist response to the summer 2020 protests, and Chapter Six details fascism’s ongoing fortification. The Conclusion then offers a glimmer of hope.

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