War spending increases; MAGA builds an American digital deep surveillance state

The Economist reports about global defense spending. The US outspends the next nine largest spenders together.

Budgets totalled $2.7 trillion in 2024, which was up by 9.4% from 2023. That is the biggest jump since at least 1988. But if one does the budget analysis based on military purchasing-power parity (military PPP) instead of raw dollar totals or share of GDP, the US is not so far ahead. A US dollar does not buy as much for the US military as it does for the military in other countries including China, India and Russia. The US gets less bang for its buck compared to other many other countries.

 

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Multiple warnings have been posted here about the rise and power of China's deep surveillance dictatorship, e.g., here and here. The Chinese dictators are aggressively using aggressive digital surveillance to control (i) their population, (ii) what the Chinese people see, and (iii) what they think about what they see, real or illusion. As best I can tell, this represents the most serious long-term threat to democracy and the health of the human condition. MAGA elites are fully aware of what China has done and why it did it. MAGA elites want to duplicate that in the US and are now aggressively starting to build an equivalent here to what Chinese tyrants have done there.

Mashable writes about the MAGA effort now getting seriously underway to build an authoritarian American deep surveillance state to control us, what wee see and how we think about what we see:

What is Palantir? The secretive tech company behind 

Trump's data collection efforts

Last Friday, the New York Times published an explosive report on the Trump administration's work with Palantir, which could result in the creation of a master database with information on every single American. Per the Times, if this type of "master list" was created, it would give the president "untold surveillance power."

President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year enabling the federal government to share data on Americans across U.S. agencies. However, we now know more about how the administration intends to do it.

djt selected the tech firm Palantir to carry out the government's data consolidation plan. Palantir's technology would will compile sensitive information from agencies like the DHS, ICE, IRS, SSA and other agencies Government databases that include information on bank account numbers, medical claims, disabilities, and student debt amounts will be centralized. Palantir was co-founded by Republican, djt megadonor and radical MAGA authoritarian Peter Thiel.

What MAGA elites intend to do is a lot like China's intrusive authoritarian social control systems. The US counterpart effort will integrate sensitive personal data from agencies into a unified AI-powered platform. MAGA elites ignore warnings from civil liberties advocates and political scientists about the erosion of democratic norms and privacy. They claim this is an effort to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. That is by now the standard excuse for essentially all of the damage to democracy and democratic institutions that djt and MAGA elites have caused since taking power last January.

Former Palantir employees and democracy advocates have cautioned that such platforms could surveil, target, and silence anyone the government disagrees with. The use of Palantir's advanced data analytics capabilities, Peter Thiel's explicitly anti-democratic ideology, and the documented authoritarian tendencies within MAGA politics creates conditions that enables the development of a surveillance state comparable to China's mass monitoring infrastructure.

Thiel's authoritarianism is well-documented. He criticized universal suffrage and advocated for "technological means" to bypass democratic processes, knowing that most Americans do not want what Thiel wants, i.e., a kleptocratic tyranny. He acknowledged his minority position in a 2010 speech (YouTube video of the speech):

"The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means"

That quote aligns with Thiel’s long-documented objection to democracy. In a 2009 essay, he wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." There, he advocated for technological solutions to bypass democratic processes. Make no mistake here, what djt and MAGA elites are doing is building the infrastructure for an authoritarian deep surveillance state just like China has done. This data centralization effort by MAGA elites has nothing to do with cutting waste fraud and abuse. It is only about cutting democracy, rule of law and civil liberties and accumulating wealth and power for chosen elites.