Freezing Our Assets Off
by John Kendall Hawkins
A while back, when I worked for the Social Security Administration (SSA) out of the Rockville, Maryland office, I met a woman who worked at the State Department in DC. There was a handy bar across from my office that I frequented, often eating my dinner there at the bar, watching a game on TV, before sliding over to the other side of the bar to watch morons like me perform karaoke tunes, while I got shitfaced. Lorraine, the woman from State, came in one evening after work when there was a live band (so it must have been a Friday) that did a great rendition of "One Ton Tomato," one of those songs people do that finger dance thing to. I don't know why.
One drink led to another, a smile became 'a look' became a touch, and before long we were back at her place putting the finishing touches on our spontaneous combustion of 'affection,' a series of steps, I must say, she seemed well-rehearsed in, but which I discovered later was typical behavior for the bedroom communities filled with bureaucrats and spooks in the greater DC Beltway area. I hammered and cracked my first crabs with Lorraine, eyes looking up at the coming slaughter and realizing their shells can't save them, at a restaurant where, while dancing (sidling), some woman she knew said to her, "He looks like a keeper." Lorraine smiled; I touched her.
A week later, she dragged me over to meet her parents. As soon as I saw her dad's eyes (Auschwitz searchlights barbed wire the smell of Schnell ) I almost laughed, and I knew I was in trouble when he seemed to take umbrage at a simple pun about periwinkles. Turns out, like the movie with Ben Stiller, Dad was an ex-spook. Lorraine smiled; I touched her, Dad's eyes following my hand down. I don't remember her Mom at all and her sister said Hi and that's it. Sitting at the dinner table, I longed for a seat at the bar listening to "One Ton Tomato." Lorraine toed me under the table; I smiled, and toed back.
As our 'relationship' grew I nicknamed her Kitsch Lorraine for reasons I needn't go into here (email me). I think she had a nickname for me too, but she'd say it walking away, and when I'd go, "What's that?" She'd say, "Nothing." Lorraine's job at State was to freeze assets of foreign adversaries or 'hostiles.' She could literally make it so someone at the other end would get humiliated at a bank counter in Europe, like they suddenly went from preferred customer to deadbeat, dark wet clouds gathering in their eyes, fury squeezed. I could imagine the look on their faces. The pretty fille from yesterday today answering his request for money with Nei-ei-gh. And, in bed together, smoking ciggies, Lorraine would retell her stories of conquest with such mischief in her eyes, her father's daughter, that I was five-alarmed. Then one night at a restaurant she began asking me financial questions and seemed to know the answers already. The rhetorical questions became a didactic interrogation of my private life away from her family jewels, a safe already long cracked, I reckon, and we broke up after a brief exchange of expletives.
I was already a deadbeat when it came to student loans, which I'd needed to finance my philosophy degree, with distinction (existentialism, if you're wondering, from which now I can only remember that Mersault shot an Arab on the beach and told a priest to go f*ck himself. Wouldn't you?). Kitsch Lorraine taught me just how personal the money-chasers could be -- how much like runaway slaves we are to them (Hey, where you going?) -- how much fun it would be to give chase on the Serengeti plain of personal finances. The ferocity and predatory lending habits of Das Kapital. The one place where there is true equal opportunity for the class-climbing whites and the African-Americans alike -- debt slaves all. Mo-ther-f*ckers. Did they sit down and work it all out one night at a crab cracking joint on the Chesapeake, eyes looking up at them?
Now I read -- and here we go again -- that Joe Biden is gonna lay a fiscal whammy on Vladimir "Pooty Cat" Putin for crossing the Imagin-ot line and sending "peace troops" into a war zone in Ukraine. Once again -- how do "we" put it? -- America intends to make Russia's economy scream, as Herr Doktor Kissinger put it before the 9/11 1973 Chile coup. We've been Enhanced Interrogation Techniquing (i.e., torturing) the economies of other nations ever since. Iran, China, Russia (again, they're recidivists), Syria, Libya, South Africa, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico (threatened), Afghanistan. For all I know, Lorraine has been in a state of pinball ecstasy since I left her banging away at nation-states -- because she can -- and finger dancing to "One Ton Tomato" with a new fool on Friday nights. Probably a new fool every Friday night. New look, new touches. The capitol of Capitalism. So it's to be neo-liberal bombardment of nations -- carpetbombing other nations's carpetbaggers by keystroke --that don't kow-tow to the bully pulpit Americans. Marilyn Monroe doctrinaires.
In 2010, this 'technique' enjoined corporate interests. No longer satisfied with merely clown dunking nation-states at the un-fair grounds of circus commerce, the US government loudly announced that it would go after non-state hostile entities. After the Aussie Julian Assange dropped a deuce on the State department, releasing around 250,000 pages of cables at Wikileaks that deeply embarrassed the US government and questioned what was left of their intergovernmental transactional integrity -- State Department personnel were told to gather the credit card and frequent-flier numbers, schedules and other personal data of foreign officials, the NYT reported -- they became wilders.
Hillary famously wondered aloud, in a kind of sardonic go at Rodney King, to fellow neo-fascists, "Can't we just drone this guy?" This immediately revealed her super-predator side and made some of the men in the room think she might be a good president after all. Smooth democratic operators already thinking summer interns for Hillary, a harmonica-playing riff-off to the tune of "Oh Those Sweet Summer Giblets," to decide which some lucky young man would be playing her blues as she bombs, say, Havana. I thought of Kitsch Lorraine and the love we had made together. I touched myself; I smiled.
In on the financial kill were a number of banks and corpos who removed any doubt that the MIC was alive and well. VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, and the Bank of America, and Amazon all went after Wikileaks to cut off donations to the site and make it exceedingly difficult to operate. They froze their assets off. This money squeeze can also affect independent news online news outlets, presumably independent of direct government interdiction, yet on the same page. Back in 2016, a collective of "media analysts" known as PropOrNot provided to the Washington Post, a list of some 200 alternate media sites targeted as places of mis- or disinformation, including solid news sites Truthdig, Counterpunch, Truthout, Naked Capitalism, and the Black Agenda Report. (OEN's petition to get on the list failed.) The PropOrNot slam led to the sites being, in some cases, removed from social media platforms, resulting in lost revenue for those fledgling sites. It took RT News to soberly set the story right. Sober Russians: Be scared.
Now, according to his Substack article and Rumble presentation from Glenn Greenwald today, there is a real danger that MIC forces are beginning to put the clamps on individual dissidents. In his Substack piece, "The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West," Greenwald posits what is probably obvious by now: The clamp down on Assange is the beginning of the end of dissent. Or as he puts it:
The decade-long repression of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, standing alone, demonstrates how grave neoliberal attacks on dissent have become. Many are aware of key parts of this repression particularly the decade-long effective detention of Assange but have forgotten or, due to media malfeasance, never knew several of the most extreme aspects.
A war on dissent is a war on the First Amendment -- with the whole Bill of Rights at stake thereafter.
Greenwald goes into more detail about how some of the payment vendors for Wikileaks were coerced into cooperating with government authorities. He makes them sound reluctant:
While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks' accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills.
In his Rumble presentation he notes that, in particular, PayPal was sent "a Letter" from the government.
In a Sydney Morning Herald account of the freeze, "Hackers strike back to support WikiLeaks," an executive from PayPal describes the action this way:
PayPal's vice-president of platform, Osama Bedier, said the company froze WikiLeaks' account after receiving a letter from the US State Department "saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States."
Of course, they weren't found 'criminal' in a courtroom. "Deemed" means jack. And that's what Greenwald's on about in these related pieces. He once again cites the way the popular social media app Parler was handled by operatives of the Democratic party -- "deemed" dangerous and taken down without recourse. Greenwald writes,
This is something very similar that was done to Parler when it became the most downloaded app in January of Twenty Twenty One, and then AOC went on to Twitter and said, Hey, Google and Apple, why are you allowing Parler to be downloaded through your store and Amazon? Why are you hosting Parler on your site? And within forty eight hours, those companies obeyed her demands and the demands of other Democratic politicians to destroy Parler.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reportedly had been threatened by MAGA types using Parler on Jan 6, but should she have been granted the unilateral right to demand the freeze on the app downloads?
Greenwald goes to discuss the Ottawa truckers protest at the border, which has caused so much frustration, regardless of whether you support the event or not. Greenwald's dismayed -- and probably rightly so -- that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "deemed" the truckers's protest as illegal. The Super Blogger writes,
Trudeau's government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process. The "charity" fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution.
Greenwald has long been critical of the growing trend of heads of democratic governments over-riding law by issuing fiats or executive orders. He was especially 'scathing' about Obama's use of them, noting the precedent being set for future presidents to abuse. Hello, DJ.
But getting back to PayPal, Greenwald's presentation of the company's need to comply to a letter seems a bit defensive -- maybe because he earns six figures fronting for the currently right wing leaning platform Rumble, which is significantly bankrolled by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. A Libertarian like this can probably get away with the presence there. However, the letter from the government PayPal claims it was sent would ordinarily be secret and not to be mentioned to the press. (I thought I learned this fact from Greenwald a few years ago regarding Google's transmission of data to the NSA.) But more importantly, the Osama Bedier claim above is contradicted by the State Department in a Foreign Policy piece, "State Department: We did not ask PayPal to cut off WikiLeaks" just after Bedier declaration.
But really the problem with PayPal remains the same: Peter Thiel and his politics. His partnership with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook is suspect and filled with episodes of cooperation with "the authorities." He was there for the CambridgeAnalytica scandal that assisted Trump's ascendancy. He was there for Facebook's facial recognition "controversy." He is a founder of Palantir Technology, a data collection company, which has been sued for fraud, and for going after Wikileaks -- and even Greenwald, for his defense of Wikileaks. Thiel recently resigned from Facebook/Meta to involve himself in the coming midterm elections on the side of the right wing. And, again drawing suspicion on the motivations of PayPal to help freeze out Wikileaks, "After The Regretsy and Diaspora Account Freezes, We've Lost Confidence In PayPal," a piece in TechCrunch, a year after the freeze, disses PayPal for freezing other accounts. the piece begins,
Hey PayPal, do you realize people no longer trust you? By heartlessly freezing the accounts of legitimate causes, you've shaken our confidence. By releasing the funds only in response to public pressure, you've shown that your policy enforcement is erratic and our money can disappear on a whim.
The Letter excuse doesn't cut the mustard, bucko.
But Greenwald's larger point is well-taken. Since 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state to new heights, we have seen aggression applied in economic spheres with the US government gradually moving from freezing nation-state bank accounts -- especially those that use the international SWIFT mechanism -- to non-state entities and organizations, like Wikileaks, to dissidents. It's a worrying trend. It is also augmented by other non-political financial squeezing, such as the Credit Report industry, which can sideline a life in a hurry -- making it impossible to get loans, cars, phones, and apartments. More and more lists are being made of "deadbeats" and political dissidents and placed in fusion databases, along with other algorithmically-determined "suspects." All of them have the potential to see their assets frozen off.
Speaking to Greenwald's worry, Edward Snowden, in his 2019 memoir, Permanent Record (consider for a moment the title) has expressed his growing panic at the state of intrusiveness into privacy, with its obvious concern for the future of democracy. Snowden points to the cynical opportunism that fed the engine of power after 9/11:
The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in "counterterror": the panicked actions of a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unco ncerned about u pholding the rule of law. After 9/11, the IC's orders had been ("never again,^ a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
Authoritarianism appears to be the direction we are moving in rapidly. It doesn't help that Joe Biden comes from Delaware, a free zone state that hosts several predatory banking institutions that enjoy usurious credit rates and the consequent debt slavery. 20 years of schoolin and they turn you into debt slave, as Dylan would say.
Dissent is our birthright, it propels all else we strive for in our other freedoms. There are nations that don't have a Bill of Rights and are not better off for it. We need to defend it with our lives against the terror of state control.
If you're out with some Lorraine some night in some crab joint on the Chesapeake in some conger line in the ballroom singing One Ton Tomato as the Empire falls, kiss her once for me (she's yours, I'm free), and, as Dylan says, if you go down in the Flood it's gonna be your fault.
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