Americans should not think the kind of behavior we have just described is relegated solely to foreign cultures or worlds in crisis. The U.S. has had its own version of American oligarchs staring at a map of another country and contemplating what to do with that nation’s most lucrative industries.
Many experts believe that Iraq’s untested oil reserves are among the most valuable on the planet. In early 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney met with a number of top U.S. oil executives. He showed them a map featuring Iraq’s oil fields and facilities. (The map is available online.) He also listed for them the firms to which Saddam Hussein had promised those oil sites. No U.S. firms were on that list.
It was clear to all present that they would not gain control of that oil unless the U.S. took those facilities from Saddam, and two years later the Bush team invaded Iraq. There is ample evidence to support the contention that the Bush team wanted to expropriate Iraq’s oil. To argue otherwise is fundamentally naïve.
Nor has America’s propensity for predatory avarice diminished. As I pointed out in the novel, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, attempted to sell the Saudis and a number of their Arab neighbors forty nuclear power plants. (Politico reports that Flynn made such a pitch to the king of Jordan in the presence of two other top Trump officials.) Such plants bring the possessor nation dangerously close to developing a nuclear weapons program. The next few steps are strictly low-tech and shockingly simple to execute. Furthermore, the Saudis have a long history of bankrolling ISIS/al Qaeda-style terrorism, are drenched in sun, rich in oil and have no need for nuclear power plants—unless they view them as a starter kit for a nuclear weapons program. Solar power plants would be far more cost-effective for them.
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Of course, such oligarchic coups d’état require control of the electoral process as well as the economic takeovers of major industries. Still such electoral coups are easier to achieve than most people realize, and, once more, Russia is a master of those dark arts. The evidence that Russia engages in all sorts of electoral meddling is overwhelming, and so I tried hard to keep those parts of the book authoritative.
In researching electoral sabotage, I owe an inestimable debt to Sue Halpern’s reportage on voter hacking in The New York Review of Books and to Bev Harris’s marvelous documentary, Hacking Democracy, as well as to her website www.BlackBoxVoting.org. The New York Times, Politico and Wired also covered the subject in great detail. I am likewise obliged to the Times for its excellent coverage of the bot-wars Putin waged against Hillary Clinton.
So in the novel when Putilov describes how, through his cyber-hacking, he threw the election to J. T. Tower, I tried to show how Putilov could have actually accomplished that feat. I attempted to base all of Putilov’s assertions on demonstrable fact:
… Putilov had many reasons for despising democracies. First and foremost, it was too damn easy for men like himself to overturn their democratic elections. The stupid Americans had proven that point at a Las Vegas computer convention. At one exhibition, U.S. cyber-experts changed the voter tabulations on thirty different voting machines, turning thirty mock-election losers into winners. The experts changed those election outcomes in mere minutes. Furthermore, they left no trace, no evidence of their criminal manipulations.
Putilov had, of course, done the same thing during America’s last presidential election. Unfortunately, Putilov’s hackers weren’t as good as the Vegas cyber-experts, and U.S. investigators were able to confirm that Russia had fooled with America’s voting systems. To counter those charges, Putilov immediately launched a disinformation campaign. He ordered one of his stooges—that country’s idiotic FBI director, Jonathan Conley—to issue a statement claiming that the U.S. voting system was too spread out, too diffuse and too diverse for hacking to succeed. That statement was of course a flagrant lie. The voting machines’ software could be compromised in a heartbeat—as the Vegas conference had proved—and, anyway, the main tabulators, which counted the votes, were connected to the internet. The average smartphone had more anti-hacking protection in it than your typical voting machine, and the cyber-tools necessary for stealing elections—especially those needed to purge voter registration lists and to falsify absentee ballot requests—were readily available online. Consequently, Putilov could hack into the U.S. voting system at will and with a vengeance. Likewise, the systems’ manufacturers and support technicians could plant vote-altering malware any time they wanted. Nor were the manufacturers interested in stopping Putilov’s election hacking. When the Princeton Group began testing voting machines, one manufacturer threatened them with a lawsuit, and when, in the documentary Hacking Democracy, cyber-expert Bev Harris proved how vulnerable they were, the machines’ manufacturers—instead of thanking her for tracking down the flaws in their equipment—had threatened to sue her.
You got off lucky, bitch, Putilov thought to himself. In my country, I’d have had you jailed, killed—or both!
God, Putilov hated that documentary. He was sure that after it came out the Americans would build a cybersecurity firewall around their voting systems. In that documentary and on her website, www.BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris had described defect after defect after defect in America’s voting systems. For instance, she showed how touch screens could be programmed to register one’s vote for the opposite candidate. She laid out how incredibly simple it was to flip absentee and mail-in ballots and make them register as votes for a candidate’s rival. She pointed out how in one district votes for Al Gore in Florida had been subtracted from Gore’s final tally instead of being added to it. She demonstrated how—after voting systems had been hacked and the vote tabulations changed to elect the loser—forensic investigators lacked the technological means to detect and prove the system had been hacked and the outcome reversed … the same thing the Vegas experts had proved. She laid out for the world how hackable U.S. elections were.
But the moronic Americans did … nothing.
So Putilov had waged an all-out cyber-attack on America’s last political race, and after more than twenty years of hacking elections—both in his country and in those of his neighbors—there was nothing Putilov and his experts did not know about rigging a country’s electronic voting systems. So they penetrated and plundered every aspect of America’s state, local, and national elections, and those vote thefts had been as easy for them as stealing milk bottles from sick babies. In fact, they had faced no obstacles at all. The voting machine vendors refused to work with the anti-hacking experts, because they knew that they could be held liable, when their voting equipment was proven faulty and that their stock price could very well plunge precipitously. The states, who had absolute control over all elections within their borders, also refused to let the Department of Homeland Security help them insure the integrity of their elections. They had stonewalled them when they offered to help prevent election hacking. Many of those states were already in the business of rigging elections through voter suppression laws and voter registration purges, and they did not want the feds looking over their shoulders. The state politicians also feared that their ineptitude in the face of proven cyber-attacks would become a political issue. In the coming elections, their opponents would accuse them of gross incompetence, and their opponents would, of course, be right. Thus, the states, like the private firms, ignored almost all outside cyber-security help. Putilov recalled how The New York Times had described in painful detail the states’ refusal to cooperate with these federal anti-hacking experts. The Times reported that the states would not allow the cyber-cops—both from within and without the U.S. government—to sort through voter databases, searching for vulnerabilities or attempts to phony up voter data, even though such intrusions had already been spotted in elections in over twenty-one states. Instead the states and the private companies rebuffed offers of almost all in-depth forensic investigations into their blatantly hacked elections. They had made sure that government couldn’t probe and monitor U.S. elections and that ther
e was almost no way to audit the vote tabulations afterward. Only two out of America’s fifty states created systems that allowed for accurate vote recounts. Putilov and his allies could even kill many of their opponents’ votes in the cradle before their ballots could be cast. Putilov and his U.S. allies could purge any and all voters who were ex-felons, who had the same names as other voters in the registry or who had failed to vote in recent elections.
Putilov allowed himself a small, malicious smile, as he recalled how he and his military spy agency, the GRU, had pillaged the providers of electronic election equipment and services and the anachronistic voting machines themselves as well as how he had exploited the states’ laughably ludicrous recount procedures. Putilov and his henchmen had raided the private vendors and state-run voting systems in almost half of the country and reversed the nation’s election results with breathtaking facility.
Of course, the GRU’s manipulations did not go utterly undiscovered, but it did not matter. When cyber-irregularities were occasionally detected, Putilov’s good buddies, J. T. Tower and Jonathan Conley, saw to it that his electoral sabotage was quickly debunked and deflected. Even before the election, when the FBI caught Putilov’s people hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Conley saw to it that the Bureau bungled and delayed informing the DNC of the cyber-attacks. Consequently, Putilov had every file and email that he needed—with which to discredit the Democratic Party and its candidates—long before the DNC realized the seriousness of the breach.
Putilov’s hackers now knew how to overturn any and all U.S. elections at the state, local and national level with impunity. There was nothing America could do about it. As Wired magazine had titled one of its articles, “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy to Target.”
The memory of those cyber-assaults forced the Russian dictator to laugh out loud. When North Korea had hacked the electronics/media firm, Sony, the U.S. had done more the punish the Hermit Kingdom than that country had done to Putilov, and he had overturned many of their last state, local and national elections. He had even made J. T. Tower the American president.
And now with the help of J. T. Tower and their Saudi allies, he and an elite cadre of global oligarchs were poised to purge the earth of all its so-called democracies. The pernicious plague of “one person, one vote” would be flung down the planet’s “memory hole” for all time to come.
You can’t help but love capitalism, can you? Putilov thought, grinning. It had made him the richest man in the world, and now the Old Free Enterprise System was about to help him wipe all those reprehensible representative democracies off the face of the earth.
Putilov couldn’t wait to hack America’s coming election. He would be even better at it next time. After that election his band of merry cyber-thieves would leave no evidence whatsoever …
And last but not least, I am indebted to The Daily Beast for their marvelous work on Donald J. Trump and his profiteering off the Russian birth-tourism business in Miami.
9
The problem of malignant greed has haunted humanity since the invention of hard currency. Avarice was a menace then, and it’s a menace today. In describing the cause of the Peloponnesian War, the cataclysmic conflict that destroyed the world’s first and arguably greatest democracy, Thucydides writes: “But as the power of Hellas grew, and the acquisition of wealth became more an objective, the revenues of the states increasing, tyrannies were established almost everywhere [throughout that nation].…” Thucydides also informs us that “war is a matter not so much of arms as of money.” When Athens demands tribute from the Melians—which they simply do not have and cannot pay—the Athenian emissary explains that if they don’t pay, the Athenian soldiers will kill every man and enslave every woman in their land. When asked why, the emissary explains: “The strong will do what they can do, and the weak will suffer as they must.”
Thucydides believed that financial rapacity eventually destroyed Athens—arguably the greatest democracy in world history.
Plato wrote 2,500 years ago in The Laws: “[T]here should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” He wrote again in The Republic: “Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.”
Plato’s student, Aristotle, informed us: “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
Jesus tells His disciples that while the rich may reign on earth, in His Heavenly City: “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.”
The Apostle Paul writes: “Love of money is the root of all evil.”
In Revelation, John of Patmos warned that human greed leads to Armageddon and the destruction of the planet.
Plutarch warned us over a hundred years after Christ: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
Gibbon explained that two of the top causes of Rome’s fall were a “widening disparity between very rich and very poor” and a passion for “displaying affluence.”
Dante told us that the problem with greedy people is that they “are ill-givers and ill-takers.”
Shakespeare speaks out on income inequality in King Lear, saying: “So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.”
Thomas Jefferson warned Americans: “Banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
Oliver Goldsmith believed: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
Balzac told us: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.”
And as I quoted at this book’s beginning, Keynes predicted: “The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will [one day] be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
The great 20th-century historian A. J. P. Taylor feared avarice like hell itself, believing it was even the primary cause of that greatest of all human evils, war, saying:
“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”
And as Nicholas Kristof said:
“Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.”
I wrote in another book:
“In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler tried to make some sense of all this financial destruction. He prophesied that Western democracy would not escape the curse of greed. It too would devolve into ‘a dictatorship of money’ and go the way of both democratic Athens and republican Rome. Nor did he believe ‘the dictatorship of money’ would go gentle. At the close of his book, Spengler wrote, ‘Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood.’”
In his A Study of History, Sir Arnold Toynbee discovered a pattern in all this economic predation. He analyzed the rise and fall of twenty-two civilizations, and found their demise always followed the same basic paradigm. While these great realms were all eventually invaded, what the barbarians found was Oz—a hollow shell. Through economic exploitation of their people at home and through imperialist wars abroad—all of which were designed to line the coffers of the monied classes—their rulers had bled their once grand and glorious civilization white. Toynbee said these great empires had died through “suicidal statecraft” and that he was “a coroner-historian.”
Perhaps worst of all, Toynbee felt that the U.S. was headed into the same downward spiral as the twenty-two previous civilizations, which had, as he put it, “passed through the door of death.” Back in the 20th century, Toynbee explained where America was at in its stage of development:
“Of the twenty-t
wo civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”
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On the other hand, Toynbee, unlike his contemporary historian Oswald Spengler, believed that civilizations always had choices. They did not have to end up on the ash heap of history. He also believed, however, that the choices were ethical ones. Suppose Toynbee is right, and our world does not have to pass through Toynbee’s “door of death.” What choices will we make?
… Why must we leave our bounty to the dead? Shall blood fail?
Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise?
—adapted from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”
BOOKS BY ROBERT GLEASON
Wrath of God
End of Days
The Nuclear Terrorist: His Financial Backers and Political Patrons in the U.S. and Abroad
And Into the Fire
The Evil That Men Do
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
“As always, Gleason stays ahead of the pack, firing on all cylinders, with a take-no-prisoners attitude. This one isn’t inspired by the headlines, IT IS THE HEADLINES.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Order
“Gleason goes straight for the jugular. Lurking behind the characters’ thinly veiled pseudonyms are the thugs, celebrities, and superstars who dominate today’s headlines: Trump, Putin, Jim Comey, and Bill Maher are all there in effigy, primed and skewered, waiting to be burned. Unfortunately for Gleason, I doubt this bunch will take his assault lying down. His targets will want him drawn and quartered after reading this book … except perhaps Bill Maher, whose literary avatar finds himself kidnapped, tortured, then lewdly and lasciviously seduced by two gorgeous female Islamic terrorists. And then there’s Jules Meredith, the intrepid reporter who exposes Trump—I mean, J. T. Tower—and his band of billionare black-money political donors, including Vladimir Putin … or rather, Mikhail Putilov. Could Jules’s book, Filthy Lucre, have been inspired by Jane Mayer’s Dark Money? Those with no upside include Trump, Putin, and Comey: they will be furious, and likely won’t rest until they’re stretching Gleason’s hide on a high rack and seeing his deeply troubled soul in hell.”
The Evil That Men Do Page 42
