The promise of a “return to normal” under Joe Biden always meant two possibilities. It could mean a hard break from the obscene, in-your-face corruption and self-dealing that defined Donald Trump’s presidency. Or it could mean going back to the kind of run-of-the-mill, revolving-door Washington corruption that Trump had pledged to clean up, but ended up wallowing in.
According to a new report by the Revolving Door Project, titled “The Military-Industrial-Think Tank Complex: Conflict of Interest at the Center for a New American Security,” it looks to be the latter option that is so far prevailing in the Biden years. Released yesterday, the report charges top Democratic foreign policy think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) of “at best, a serious deficiency of accountability,” and at worst, “a systematically corrupt arrangement” that sees it promote its corporate sponsors’ interests while passing it off as a public good.
The report recounts several examples of this arrangement. In 2009, for instance, CNAS published a report maintaining that the controversial use of private military contractors was essential and “here to stay” in wars like Afghanistan, all while taking money from several different firms providing those very services. One of these firms, DynCorp, was on the receiving end of $2.8 billion of the state department’s Afghanistan operations funding from 2002 to 2013, or 69 percent of the total sum.
In another case, a 2018 CNAS report charged that the Air Force’s plans to buy a hundred B-21 bombers did “not go far enough,” pushing the military to add fifty to seventy-five more jets at an extra cost of $32.8-49.2 billion. Those profits would have gone to the bomber’s maker, Northrop Grumman, an arms manufacturer that also happened to direct more than half of its total think tank donations during the 2014–19 period to CNAS.
A year before that, CNAS had charged the UAE embassy in the United States $250,000 for a report advocating looser rules for exporting US drones (“I think it will help push the debate in the right direction,” the ambassador wrote in a thank you e-mail), before publishing a separate paper calling on Trump to loosen those restrictions. The UAE ended up signing a nearly $200 million deal for the drones with General Atomics, whose billionaire chairman and CEO, Neal Blue, is both a generous donor to CNAS and sits on its board of advisors.
In these and other examples, the report states, the center failed to disclose the conflicts of interest in their reports, despite noting the existence of a policy on such conflicts in their tax filings. It also repeatedly violated the “very clear line” CNAS cofounder Kurt Campbell — then about to serve in Barack Obama’s state department, and now serving on Biden’s national security council — testified about in his 2009 confirmation hearing: that the CNAS doesn’t write about specific products its donors make, but rather stays limited to big picture foreign policy ideas.
The center’s reliance on the corporate sector, particularly military contractors, is extensive, having taken donations from all “big five” such firms in the last decade, along with twenty-four others. According to a Center for International Policy report released last year, CNAS got more defense contractor money than any of the top fifty US think tanks it analyzed. That’s in addition to contributions from NATO, the governments of the United States and eleven other allied countries, and corporate titans spanning fossil fuel, financial, tech, and other sectors, all of whom have given generously to CNAS over the years.
As the report points out, CNAS’s own cofounder — Michèle Flournoy, tipped to be Biden’s defense secretary before her own extensive conflicts of interest derailed her — pointed out the issues with a corporate funding model in a 2014 speech.
“Every funder has intent. They’re giving you money for a reason,” she said. “There are some organizations that call themselves ‘think tanks’ that actually accept money from corporations to do very specific work that tends to advocate the programs those companies produce, and I think that sort of … makes the waters more murky.”
“The scale and scope of conflicts of interest that appear in CNAS’s work and the influence that its donors may be exerting on policy further highlights serious concerns about political corruption,” wrote Brett Heinz, coauthor of the report.
Of course, CNAS is far from unique. A whole host of think tanks, including those in the foreign policy sphere like the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council, regularly overlap their advocacy work with the interests of their well-heeled benefactors. But few have as much influence on the workings of the US government, with at least thirteen of the center’s alumni ending up in the Biden administration to date. As the foreign policy equivalent of the Center for American Progress, this is, after all, why CNAS exists: to serve as the future Democratic administration’s foreign policy team in waiting.
Washington, it seems, is finally back in the guiding hands of the experts who were always meant to be running the show. This also means that, true to Biden’s promise, the city has reverted back to the same, unremarkably money-driven state that Trump first used to take power four years ago.
I’ll repost this whenever I see it on my dashboard.
fuck…
So, one thing you can do is use Firefox instead of Chrome. Another thing you can do is use duck duck go instead of google search. In fact you know what let me get on desktop and make a proper reply, give me about an hour and I’ll hook y’all up with some privacy
ok I took a bit more than an hour, I have time blindness don’t @ me.
It will ask if you want to import all your bookmarks and saved passwords from your current browser/s. Do that. It will also ask if you want to make it your default browser. Do that too.
You will be given the option to create an account, but it’s not mandatory. It’s just a convenience service if you want to access your bookmarks and saved passwords on different devices.
Firefox has a load of built-in privacy protections but we’re going to install some addons to make it EVEN BETTER. Don’t worry they’re all free and once you’ve installed them you don’t have to think about them again.
First, Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials. Firefox does still set your default search engine to Google, we don’t want that. You could manually change it but the Duck Duck Go addon gives you some tracker blocking, encryption, private searching, all set up and ready to go
Do you use farcebook or any related product like instagram? Facebook Container automatically puts those in a little quarantine pen so they can’t follow you around and spy on what else you’re doing
If you have multiple accounts (eg. work/school, family, public, personal, private) you can use Firefox Multi-Account Containers to manage them and keep their footprints separate
Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere are published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and those people are serious as a heart attack when it comes to online privacy.
Privacy Badger sends a do not track signal, and also breaks link tracking by sites like facebook, twitter, etc.
HTTPS Everywhere is… ok there’s a lot to explain here, and we’re already longposting so just, every time you connect to any page it makes it more secure.
You could stop here, that’s pretty good. But you can do more.
You could install NoScript. A big warning with this one, it can break half the internet. It’s a LOT more user friendly than it used to be but if you can’t figure shit out by fucking around you should probably skip it. It blocks scripts from running without permission, protecting you from drive-by scripts that give your computer herpes, but also sometimes protecting you from script-heavy sites working at all.
Lastly an honourable mention for Ghostery. Ghostery has been a solid privacy addon for years, and now has adblocking powers. Honestly I haven’t used it in ages, a long
time ago it conflicted with something else I deemed more important so I
removed it and I never got around to picking it back up, but it has a great reputation and is trusted by a lot of people who I trust.
Now, this all only covers your browser activity, which is a lot but you will still need to manually adjust privacy settings on your google/gmail/youtube account/s if you have any, your facebook/instagram account/s if you have any, and your actual gotdamn operating system if you use windows. I know it seems like a lot of effort, I’m a lazy bitch too, but it’s very set-and-forget, you only need to do it once, and then just review it a couple of times a year.
Here’s some stuff about Windows 10 privacy settings
And here’s an honest explanation of what a VPN really does and does not do, why you don’t actually need one, and the few real reasons you might ever want one
This is by no means the limit of the steps you can take to secure your
online privacy, if you want to go deeper you definitely can. But if you
don’t want to or don’t have the time or aren’t very technically minded,
this will still put you way ahead of the pack. It won’t make you The
Most Private but it will make you Much More Private Than Most, and it should take you less than an hour or two, depending on how many accounts you have on predatory datenkraken sites.
Now go hide your panties from the evil empire.
You can also use Invidious to use youtube privately, and there are extensions like Privacy Redirect that’ll send youtube links directly to it. The subscription page can be a little unreliable, so I just send my youtube notifications to my email with RSS instead
ProtonMail is a free email service that’s not google (already a good start), but also encrypts all your mail so no one but you and the person you’re emailing can read it
From experience, Tor is a lot more user-friendly than you might think. It does take a little bit of fiddling and getting used to, but the payoff is that all of your traffic becomes extremely hard to track. They have a desktop browser that’s built on Firefox and comes pre-installed with many of the extensions listed above. I recommend trying it on without uninstalling your current browser, just to see how you like it
switching.software and privacytools.io have tons of recommendations for privacy-friendly alternatives to google software and tools that can be used to avoid surveillance. But remember that this isn’t yours or any other user’s fault - we shouldn’t be expecting every single person to load their computer up with encryption to avoid surveillance that private companies shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Lay the blame where it belongs, on google and facebook, and hold them responsible
i’m guessing you mean the capitol rioters, and yeah it’s all intertwined with feds and cops. in fact, cops literally supported and participated in the riot, that’s how everyone got in so easily.
law enforcement is not above anyone. they have biases and political leanings just like everyone else, and it effects how they do their job. the sooner everyone realizes this the better.
