An international outcry is mounting against multi-billionaire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, hatched in Silicon Valley and nurtured by In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture capital fund created by the CIA. Palantir is a computer software provider that has chalked up billions of dollars in management contracts—many of them highly classified—from agencies of the U.S. government and allied governments. Cited by media, stock market analysts, and aroused foreign government officials as a highly secretive, aggressive, and invasive example of what some call “surveillance capitalism,” Palantir has contracted with the Pentagon, anti-terror divisions of the National Security Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, a contract they lost to a rival at year end), local police departments in the U.S. and Europe, and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) operations overseeing the COVID-19 crisis. Palantir also has security-related contracts with the French and UK governments.
An associated company called Valar Ventures has extensive international ties, and through Thiel’s partner, a veritable Mad Hatter named Alex Karp, Palantir is vying to expand business into countries “allied with the U.S.” Palantir makes clear that it excludes the leading targets of the warhawk fanatics, namely Russia and China.
In focusing on Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Palantir, this report unveils the ongoing process by which the Military-Industrial Complex, warned against by President Eisenhower in 1961, has evolved into the true threat to Americans and humanity at large, as opposed to fraudulently alleged foreign adversaries. Silicon Valley, where research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the creation of the Internet was centered, houses a circuit of “old money” and elite investment outlets that surround Stanford University and have emerged as a channel for private lending to the war economy. As AI and other electronic innovations were promoted, the money interests in the area spawned a system of spitting out “start-up” billionaires through a highly speculative racket connected to worldwide hedge funds, the 1990s NASDAQ bubble, and other private sources. As the capabilities of data management grew, this new class of billionaires—typified by Thiel’s seminal role in financing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—were integrated into the U.S. intelligence and military establishments.
Former General of the Army President Eisenhower warned in his 1961 Farewell Address that the maintenance of a vast military production system “during peacetime” as never existed before, was a challenge fraught with danger for the United States after World War II. The Cold War—which had been deliberately orchestrated by the Anglo-American elites, notably including the brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles—compelled the United States, Eisenhower stated, “to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” President Eisenhower added, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The Palantir circle is to be viewed as a most significant, present-day case of such disastrous “misplaced power.” Since no later than his association with Stanford, Thiel has been groomed to adapt to explicitly fascist ideology. This was well known when he and Karp were selected by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel to provide data services to the intelligence community, and then advanced to more influence. The interface of such financially-linked ideologues to our military system poses a dire threat to the very existence of government based on the U.S. Constitution.
There is already a blowback underway against Palantir, as documented below. That blowback must grow into a full-scale battle against the underlying policy driving this atrocity, which is called “privatization of the military,” and which was greatly advanced by two icons of the Anglo-American Establishment, the Hoover Institution’s George Shultz and New York banker Felix Rohatyn. The threads tying them to Palantir are elaborated here. (more...)
A Truly Evil Golem: Billionaire Peter Thiel and his Palantir
No comments:
Post a Comment