Listen to a reading of this article:
❖
The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”
Bloomberg reports:
Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.
US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.
The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.
Scoop: Biden admin officials are discussing whether US should subject some of @elonmusk’s ventures to national security reviews, including his deal for Twitter Inc., and the Starlink satellite network, sources tell @SalehaMohsin and me. @BloombergTV pic.twitter.com/pZx1As8RUZ
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 21, 2022
“Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”
“Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”
“If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.
Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?
Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:
https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1583425927622852608
This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.
It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.
Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
53 responses to “The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine”
Caitlin,
~
More likely, they’re getting exactly what they want from Elon and the rest is Kabuki Theater. Whether he even knows it yet or not, which is the power of modern high tech government systems when they’re running as planned.
~
https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html
~
Jonathan Pratt
“But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?” Still waiting for you to close the loop and figure out that a government shouldn’t have the power to decide who is or is not “allowed” to own Twitter, or anything else for that matter. I always wonder where liberals plan to find a government that will ethically wield the absolute power they want it to have. Never was or will be. Don’t spend most of your time complaining about government if you’re going to spend the rest trying to give it more power.
There are plenty of different factions within the overlord class, all of them evil to the core.
But not necessarily in the same way.
It’s indeed too simple to say that, for example, the globalist billionaires control everything.
The bloodthirsty permanent bureaucrats of the US deep state do have a lot of power on their own, and they are absolutely capable of crushing even a super rich capitalist if he (which is of course exceedingly rare, most of the time their interests align quite nicely, or at least they did almost without fail for many decades) were to hinder (usually out of greed or incompetence, not conviction) their agenda.
There are all sorts of nat sec forces and influential members of the political class (and the politicians have a lot of real power as well, sometimes, when the circumstances favour it even more than their rich donors, especially in a hot war, open war always tends to favour the state side of the power elite over the, make no mistake, every bit as rotten and indeed powerhungry private half), that are not strictly speaking full globalists in the sense the billionaire capitalists tend to be.
They ultimately care about infinite power for the US government, and thus themselves, than about the profits of their corporate allies.
The corporate overlords also obsess about power, in the end most of them too prefer power over money, in an (for them) ideal world they would be de facto totalitarian rulers over all humanity as well, without any state entity to share that power with, without even the US government.
But there attempts to figure out how to achieve ultimate power and keep and defend it without NEEDING the state hasn’t been successful yet, and I doubt very much it ever will.
Corporate power gets blown away like a fart in the wind without state power.
That way one could definitely argue that the state indeed sits at the longer lever (and of course the state has been around millennia longer and has arisen independently in places around the world many, many times, able to work and assert it’s authority in every economic system and at every tech level, while capitalism requires far more necessary preconditions and has arisen only once, arguing for it’s inherent fragility), even if we live in an era where the political class for most of the time tends to be very deferential towards private, corporate power.
Both private corporate power and the national insecurity state are existential threats in their own right, both are utterly irredeemable, and while it is sometimes easy, often very much appropriate and always cathartic and morally justified to mock them, they are unfortunately mostly good at what they are doing.
We would absolutely need to get rid of both, to ensure our survival and any chance of peace.
How, I have no idea and I wish desperately I saw more reason to believe it is a realistic proposal than I do, at least before they murder all of us.
But what I do see is that we are at a point where there is a certain amount of divergence between the nat insec(t) state crew and the corporate/billionaire crowd that are truly globalist.
The former are so obsessed with dominating the world with military power that they don’t really care about an ever greater part of the world becomes increasingly unavailable as markets for American capitalists.
They’d argue that it matters not, because sooner or later the US is going have such total, overwhelming hard power domination over every part of the globe, that nobody will ever be able to refuse any demand of the US Government ever again.
Making any sort of reluctance to accommodate and pander to US corporations a moot point.
This Hitleresque vision of total conquest is of course something that a lot of the corporate crowd is totally on board with, just as they were with Hitler’s war.
This deeply fascist vision may be not necessarily as perfect as the “vision” of an entirely nationless globalist order where limitless power is excercised by plutocrats without even needing any not hundred percent private structure to support and protect them.
But it is the next best thing and an incredibly appealing vision for psychopaths, many private corporate elites simply having been swept up by it and infected by the “enthusiasm” of the neocons.
And significant parts of the citizenry is obviously quite enthused as well, despite not actually sharing in any of the spoils of conquest (much less so, actually than in many historical empires).
Being subject to a powerful, seemingly unstoppable imperial machine has it’s own far beyond any concrete economic benefit.
Far too many american citizens still fully indentify purported american victories in exactly the way common Roman citizens enthusiastically and gleefully indentified with the victories of the Roman legions.
Until the american citizens realize fully that this illusion of vicariously sharing in the Empire’s power and victory is indeed only that, and that they have much more in common with the victims of imperial aggression, there is no chance of them going anti imperialist, at least not until the empire starts to suffer truly crushing defeats, a whole bunch of them, often and severely enough to crush any revanchist sentiment.
How that is supposed to work in these days without global nuclear holocaust is anybody’s guess.
Historical empires have been individually quite different here.
The Roman Empire was very resilient, bouncing back successfully from many, many setbacks and defeats that would have caused many or most other empires to collapse, managing to stay a great military innovator for many centuries, while most empires of the ancient world were one trick ponies who crashed as soon as their rival figured out to counter the one advantage that allowed to to dominate for a brief while (the Macedonians never developed beyond the phalanx, for example, while the Romans successfully managed to fundamentally reinvent their entire military, strategy and tactics and technology over and over and over again).
So, plenty others were far more fragile.
Time will tell into what category the US belongs, certainly at a horrific cost.
But coming back to that hint of a certain split amongst the unified power elite.
Definitely not all members of the private corporate elite are fully convinced of the plan to bank everything on the military omnipotence of the United States, realizing the catastrophy that almost certainly will crush them, should the attempt at world conquest fail.
There won’t be any chance of jumping the sinking ship for american billionaires and corporations if that happens, not when they have lost market access to the parts of the world that the US government has totally alienated, where local companies and elites have long since filled that gap.
If the US military prevails the US corporate elites can of course take whatever they want and eliminate any competition by force, just as IG Farben and co did.
But if the US military fails, they will crumble into nothing.
There will be no place for them in a world where they have nothing to offer than the economies of the US’s victorious rivals cannot do themselves and where they are seen and despised as just one arm of the savage, murderous american fascist empire.
There have to be at least parts of the US corporate elite who would prefer subtler ways of taking over, over this unimaginably risky all or nothing gamble.
Though themselves a relentless force of evil nonetheless, that SHOULD be eliminated, they could perhaps be temporary allies of any force trying to stop the US Empire’s mad and increasingly omnicidal looking rampage.
They lie so much why should we believe anything they say?
Yeah…why? There’ve been too many safe and effectives for me.
Silicon Valley is part of the Trusted News Initiative which brings us this kind of shit through Reuters, a lynchpin of the whole propaganda scam and conflicts of interests are now the norm with grift at every level of government. It’s for these guys that the phrase “rotten to the core” was invented.
I thought we might be at the entrance of a Black Hole; but now I think we are three quarters of the way through. This must be what they were referring to when they said, “you’ve got your head where the sun doesn’t shine!”
Yeah, ‘Green Tomatoes’, got rid of that rotten to the core.
The wheels start coming off the bus when the people driving the bus start believing their own propaganda.
At some point in this progression, Team-US-Deep-State will have kicked-off all of the players who are capable of acting decisively upon their own analysis of events.
I’m sure that will be fine.
The US’ public must own the means of production. Privatization/capitalism (e.g.- Elon Musk et al. Of Tesla) leads to inequality and monopoly. As you’ve recently seen with the US and their dollar as default world economy, the US “weaponized” the dollar (sanctioning), to force subordination. This has backfired for the US. Elon Musk is another example of privatization (he has too much power, and this can be harmful). When only a handful of investors own the means of production, this gives them an exceptional amount of policy making power—most often not in the best interest of the public/working class. The Railroad industry (privately owned/investors) are at loggerheads with the railroad workers. The workers are abused (not surprised, it’s capitalism); they want to work, but expect to be treated fairly. Here’s an example, below:
Railroad Workers Threaten to Strike and Call for Public Takeover of the Rails
A showdown between organized labor and Wall Street looms over the world of freight trains. (truthout.org-10/22/22-Mike Ludwig)
I seem to keep hearing about the uS regime had to strong-arm its (allegedly) reluctant and socially conscious net media platforms to go co-operate. This narrative seems at odds with reality. They dont appear as if they required a whole lot of arm-twisting to get where we are today. Any ‘resistance’ that they might have, seems to because some of washingdums requests might involve actual effort on the tech co’s part. That is to way, work. Nothing I have seen indicates any of them having any real issues participating in censorship, manipulation, spying, eavesdropping or anything along those lines. What few concerns these anti-social networks ownership may have expressed are\were easily nullified by integrating and welcoming them as full-fledged members of the zio-uS security-state. Suckerberg for example, is basically a pentagon contractor and has been for some time. Being a top-tier MIC contractor, has a way of making all but the most trivial of objections one (might) be harboring, disappear.
Hack up the censorship which richly deserves to be hacked up, and then with little or no sense of irony at the close of the hack job promote this:
‘’…if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter…’’
“Preachers say, do as I say, not as I do”
— John Selden (1654)
my guess is she already regards big social media as part of the commons. you can still consider sharing it around. i’m not on twitter or facebook either.
I’ve never had a Twitter or Facebook account. As I have learned, they inhibit honest dialogue through suppression and AI. they are just another tool, for social control, of the regime.
For me, Facebook is fecesbook. Microsoft is microshit. I still haven’t come up with an invective for Google or Twitter.
Here’s my contribution for Google: Gargoyle–a monstrous, evil spirited creature.
Possibly sanctioning Musk shows that the US is not exactly an oligarchy. Certainly not a democracy, but there is consensus on some matters, such as diverting needed resources to the military, leaving a populace without benefits. Another is world domination for corporate profit. This was the case under Bush, Obama and Trump, and will continue under a DeSantis or whichever corporate clown the donkeys put forth. The feds may not be able to harm Musk, but threats serve warning to play ball during wartime, which is all the time. Serfs continuing to belt tighten is a given.
What happened in Vienna (OPEC+) recently proves that much of the world is turning its back on the USA.
After decades of killing, regime change, and invasions, what’d you think we would get, a large screen TV?
For the US, the endgame is global governance, and another century of so-called Pax Americana. Capitalism requires a steady replenishment of resources. If you can’t get them legally, you steal them. The US should discard its feigned Pledge of Allegiance and replace it with the pledge of situational ethics.
i think other oligarchs (mic) would be doing the sanctioning, certainly not ‘the people’.
Sounds gay as all hell, men urinating on each other, men in their 80’s and 90’s still yanking on their meat and always in public, then they want to pass laws that everyone has join the fag parade. Drive down almost any street in the USA and there are naked men and women who no matter what just can’t seem to get enough. Biden and the USA in a nutshell.
Roy, your comment is the weirdest.
Yup, I think it was Reagan who had male prostitutes going to the Whitehouse every night, if Musk goes to the Whitehouse to talk it over then you know Biden was using government property inappropriately, not to mention a lack of proper decorum. They lie so much you can’t even think of them as human anymore.
That concern about Musk not being sufficiently hostile. It is a very legitimate concern, you know.
American culture is hostile culture. It is hostile at all levels, including family.
There is a popular speaker who also is a fellow at Rand corp, Simon Sinek.
I listened to his speech about competition game, and in the very end of his talk he admits that Americans as a culture need adversaries. They cannot live without having enemies.
Musk is from Canada, and I noticed about the Canadians in USA, how different and cultured and all around nicer Canadians are than Americans. In Canadian schools they teach kids to be good people.
In US schools kids start their day from brainwashing pledge of allegiance before the portrait of their war criminal POTUS.
Americans imported violence–attitude/dogma–from the Europeans (e.g.-Iberian World Order…). Americans imported slavery–more violence. Americans conveniently used “Manifest Destiny” as another pretext for conquering and violence. Americans don’t “need” enemies, Capitalism does. Americans are incessantly propagandized about how Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and others, are the enemy. Capitalism is the enemy; and it’s directed by greedy egotists–not altruists. I lived in Vietnam; the Vietnamese are some of the friendliest, most hospitable, people I’ve ever met. They’re not my enemy, but propaganda attempted to convince me otherwise. You were born without beliefs and then indoctrinated through inculcation.
Elon Musk is South African.
He can’t run for POTUS unless he gets a new birth certificate.
Musk could technically become PM of Canada, but even that’s a stretch.
Yeah, you’re right, and that’s the kind of funny part of it, because when Canadian men talk about it they say that’s not true that it’s them who are exporting that evil to the USA, but maybe that’s just because they’re sensitive enough to see it, honest enough to admit it. Rhodes Scholar, Rhodesia, the Great Reset, the New World Order all comes from the mind of the same hate filled bigot, racist, Mr. Rhode, Canadian. White Supremacy and the aristocracy almost died out, but Mr. Rhodes rode in with his great white horse and rescued it, and thank god for him we have Nazis, mafia thugs, ku klux klan, God and his killer tribesmen of thieves ready to annihilate every living thing on earth. Not that someone else wouldn’t have done the same damn thing. But, after all isn’t Canada the place where that little girl did her one hit wonderful song, that even the killer generals of the Empire couldn’t get song out of their heads? Yeah, it was, must have been a.nasty drug because now I can’t remember the tune at all. Just saying, it must just be the species, too much thinking about the meaning of sex. When men have sex with men it almost always has to be abusive because thier culture provides no structure to support it. That story should have been between the covers of let’s say, gay life, or Catholic life, or Jewish life, not life, because it’s mostly death, armies are mostly a bunch of gay men killing each other over unfulfilled sexual urges toward other men. So, I like dogs, cats even rats they’re all cute, even humans can be cute, so last month a great success story human brain cells were injected into a rat’s brain, producing a smart rat, but the real test comes when rat brain cells are injected into a human brain producing a stupid human that can be over worked without complaint and without pay. That wouldn’t be slavery would it? It wouldn’t be human. That’s what humans do with their minds, better that they’d been left as dumb animals along wirh the rest of the animal kingdom, and I’m sorry, but now Biden to me is just another man who rapes orher men.
For the first time, most probably, the US is having a taste of life under a totalitarian dictatorship even if it will be for a short period in the face of the coming midterms. At the same time, this weaponizing of the justice system and federal government policy will help the opposition unless the elections get rigged massively, something which appears most likely as the Dems won’t go to their grave without a fight. As much as Europe is sliding down the dangerous slope, what’s about to happen in the US will be of far bigger consequences the world has ever seen. It would be sensible to think of a civil war in the US more than to think about WWIII which the Yanks know too well that it is a no, no for them ,the Russians and the rest of the world..
i’m not holding my breath, though.
Yes, WWIII interferes with that wonderful Wall Street stock portfolio–such as weapon’s manufacturers, Pfizer jabs, Prison related, and Exxon price gouging. An internal civil war would suit the ruling power just fine, as it would lead to justified killings (the ruling power will fabricate a pretext for justification, and Supreme Court will sanction if necessary), increased social-control measures (lock downs, martial law), and prison inventory maintenance–abundant cheap labor for the capitalists.
poor americans.
The American public -most- are nearly always hung out to dry.
Yeah, you can’t even call the judges, “Your Honor”, anymore, because they have no honor. Cracking me over the head with a filled flower pot tonight just the posts abovementioned, either a sibling ordered attack or a minion acting on Biden’s behalf, that would be the mafia’s proxy and then the other fellow, if he was an innocent bystander which is highly unlikely, the other group will probably end his life, or since I gave him the slip, maybe not, but killing people over cheap cell phones is a bit much, whoever or whatever is watching over me. Judges knowingly sending innocent people away for life, and no free person dares speak up. How can anyone have respect for trash like that?
Its worse than that Cate. The whole web, social media, all the tech was designed by the military. They made the rules. It was designed to be predatory and parasitic. Time to pull our heads out of the game before the trap door shuts. There is a glorious real world out there, lets join the dance of creation. See wrenchinthegears.com
It was started with Dept. of Defense money, that’s true. And staring at little plastic boxes all day doesn’t seem to be making people any smarter.
They are parasites, and they suck. Most of the rest of the world are realizing this and are now coalescing to move in a new direction. Privatization, without good faith regulation, is sick.
no surprise here, I’ve been banned and muzzled on numerous sites and platforms for my opinions on the Ukraine folly (youtube, google, the hill, Vox sports sites, even a chess site) the top down control is constantly expanding.
Yeah, as they lose the narrative, they’ll get worse–trying to hold on to their dominance.
Hellooooo, on 99% Caitlin is preaching to me(the choir). But everything Musk is a rabbit hole. He is likely a non-human run by an AI committee: see Jason Burmas report w video of NASA chief revealing, years ago, that they have thousands of ppl brain chipped w this MRNA, or some such, technology in a continuing ongoing program. “Musk” is the largest CIA, etc., contractor- “he” is the deep state. “he” is a rabbit hole, shadow argument, whatever that MSM users (and many here apparently) are going with.
It’s another example of how the parasite (corporate), and the state (host) have conjoined. Eventually the parasite kills the host. You’ve never had a democracy; but it was a nice dream. The selfish US’ ruling power is unwilling to stop devolving further into dystopia.
While the US is planning its next war, threatening punishments through sanctions, and obstructing real positive change that benefits the US’ public—to push through tax cuts for the rich, China is busy making decisions based on pragmatics and longevity–not fiction, graft and quid pro quo. Here’s an example: China pledges wealth redistribution, full employment, anti-corruption fight in 20th CPC national congress. In its 20th national congress, the Communist Party of China (CPC) pledged to redistribute wealth to reduce inequality, pursue full employment, promote gender equality, expand social security and health care, protect the environment, and fight the “cancer” of corruption. (multipolorista.com-10/21/22-Ben Norton)
“China has kept money creation in the hands of the government itself so that when the government creates money it can finance the creation of factory plants and equipment, dams, transportation infrastructure, public housing.”
Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism should be called the banking economy, because that’s when Wall St seized control of public finance, shut down normal government investment in social needs and blasted the spigot toward corporations and bank bailouts, as explained by Michael Hudson here: https://michael-hudson.com/2022/10/we-do-read-comments-re-nader/
Michael Hudson sure has an artful way of explaining the situation to the lay person.
The Biden regime is an enemy of Free Speech.
The Trump regime is also an enemy, as was Obama and Bush, troll.
Some have suggested that Musk is doing this deliberately, because he doesn’t want to buy Twitter anymore, and he doesn’t want to keep paying for Starlink for Ukraine.
I would! He could cash out and retire, leaving his legal headaches behind him.
According to recently read article (can’t recall), he lost $100B. Ouch…
Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military.
–
Social media is a narrative control center, as are search engines. Search engines keep information from reaching audiences.
–
Caitlin runs her own show, as do I. (click my name) not many people do.
K-DOG,
I like your website. I put it on my favorites list. The (mostly) hexagons at the top look like a Voronoi diagram with the centers having some sort of “strength” that is somehow correlated with the histogram? bars across the top. I still haven’t figured it the Seattle? reference on one of them. I look forward to checking in on it regularly. Good work.
The U.S. is a rogue state, having rejected the rule of law and effectively having repealed our rights of freedom of speech and press. The world war started by the U.S. is a war by the 1% on the rest of us. Our political/electoral system is totally corrupt. Those “elected” officials serving in Washington and throughout the Country are in service to the 1% and are our enemies. These problems will not be solved at the ballot box because our limited democracy has been destroyed by the 1%. By its bullying and criminal acts against other nations (stealing the money belonging to Venezuela, Afghanistan, Russia and invoking illegal sanctions against any and all governments which do not follow US orders, etc.) the US has lost any semblance of credibility or trustworthiness. As a result the majority of the world is rightly turning against the US and struggling to construct a multi-polar world which will, hopefully, provide a more just and reasonable system of governance.
No surprise that the Biden administration is suddenly going after Saudi, since Saudi just refused to arrange oil prices in favor of the U.S. That is how the U.S. empire operates. Anyone who says no to it is automatically demonized and punished. That was also Stalin’s method.
Yeah, it’s not a good way to make friends and influence people; but the US doesn’t have many “real” friends, it just has interests. At the rate the US is going, the Pirates may just have to say, “Parley?”