Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home?
Video Transcript: System Update #68
April 15, 2023
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As the war in Ukraine grinds on into its second year with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy now pledging his full-scale support for President Biden's proxy war and new leaked documents warning the war will likely be fought through 2023 and beyond, we want to pull back the lens a bit on this war and examine an often overlooked component of U.S. involvement, namely, what is the impact on the lives of American citizens from what appears to be an endless commitment of their resources, their money, to fuel this proxy war, $100 billion and counting. We've often covered the geopolitical questions of the war as well as the dangers it poses. Little things like the warning from President Biden himself that his war policies have brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. But here, supporters of the U.S. role in Ukraine tell it Americans pay no price at all for this massive flow of money from the U.S. Treasury into the coffers of U.S. weapons manufacturers, the intelligence community, and into the foggy precincts of Ukraine, which just so happens to be by far the most corrupt country in Europe. 

Can America's commitment to militarism and endless war abroad be separated from the degradation of the lives of Americans at home? Or, as Martin Luther King and so many others throughout the years have insisted, is America's militarism inextricably intertwined with – indeed a key cause of – the visible decline in the quality of life for most Americans? We'll examine all aspects of this critical question.

Then, the fallout from the leak of top-secret documents, which we covered in-depth on last night's show, continues but now the corporate media, led by The New York Times, is exploiting the leak to insist that somehow this shows that we need more censorship of the Internet. We'll show you how they're doing that. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 


One year ago today, there was almost no issue that the media and Washington were discussing other than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our media discourse was subsumed with debates and arguments over what the U.S. role should be, and a consensus quickly emerged, which was that the United States was on Ukraine's side, had viewed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an immoral act, as an act of aggression, but that the role the United States played in that war would necessarily be limited by a whole variety of constraints, including, first and foremost, the desire to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with Russia – the world's largest nuclear stockpile is controlled by Moscow – but also by the geopolitical needs of the United States and the financial needs of the United States not to get sucked back into an endless war only six months or so after we finally got out of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. All sorts of promises were made that the United States would respect a whole variety of limits and then the Biden administration proceeded to blow past one after the next, after the next, and far from a limited role. A year later, the United States has already authorized $100 billion for fueling this proxy war in Ukraine with no end in sight. The leaked documents that we discussed on last night's show warned that this war will almost certainly extend all the way through 2023 and beyond, which means there's at least another year or longer to go and there's no suggestion that the U.S. is going to in any way constrain what it continues to spend on this war. Quite the contrary. Last night we showed you that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who pretended before the midterms to offer Americans an alternative by saying Joe Biden gives in a blank check for Zelenskyy, while I, Kevin McCarthy, don't. And if you elect me and the Republicans to control the House, we will put a stop to this blank check. And he did that because he saw polling data that showed that Americans increasingly are becoming resistant and reluctant about the role the United States is playing in that war, particularly the flow of money and resources with no end to Kyiv, where it's just sort of disappearing with no audit, no oversight, and most of all, no commitment as to when it might stop. And yet, McCarthy yesterday basically admitted that when he said that he really did mean it. His close friend, Michael McCaul, who's the chairman of the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Kevin McCarthy always supported Joe Biden's policies in Ukraine and believes that we, meaning the United States, have to fight and win that war to the very end. So, at this point, the establishment wings of all parties, as usual, are completely united, which means that it's inconceivable that the United States will, at any point in the near future or the mid-term future, start to rein in the amount of money it's giving to Ukraine – and by giving to Ukraine, I mean giving to Raytheon and other arms manufacturers, giving to the CIA and giving to President Zelenskyy and his band of merry men who are ruling Ukraine. 

So, there's no alternative. There's nothing you can do in terms of voting. You might have thought that if you voted Republican in the 2022 election, it meant that you were going to get more constraints on the war in Ukraine but, lo and behold, Kevin McCarthy now acknowledges that he never really meant that, and he supports Joe Biden in full. So, it's time to ask the question, because you may notice that the war in Ukraine is almost never discussed or debated anymore. It's at best an ancillary issue. It's what usually happens when a huge amount of attention, public attention, is devoted to a new event. The government makes all kinds of claims when people aren’t looking. And then when they go back to their lives and start paying attention, the government just runs wild and makes what was supposed to be a temporary or controversial policy permanent and that means that the United States basically has a free hand – the CIA, the Biden White House – to spend all your resources, as much as it wants, generating profit for a tiny sliver of people both in Washington and Kyiv. 

And so, we want to ask the question, not so much what the geopolitical implications of this war are – which is what we typically spend our time focusing on - but instead, what is the actual cost for American citizens, not just the financial cost, but the cost in quality of life and standard of living? And what prompted this question was that last night we recorded an interview with the former professor at DePaul University, Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure as a result of a very ugly battle in 2007 waged against him by Alan Dershowitz, primarily due to Dershowitz’s contempt for Norman Finkelstein’s criticisms of Israel. And he's kind of become one of these people who are not metaphorically canceled, but completely destroyed. He's unemployable. He barely appears in media outlets. And so, we thought about doing a series because everybody, when they launch a show, always says we're going to air views and voices that aren't available elsewhere. And it's well-intentioned. Most people mean it when they say it, but then they end up airing voices that are in full accord with the program that is available in many other places, and the people who are genuinely excluded from mainstream discourse, even though they might have a lot to say, are typically ignored. We put Professor Finkelstein on our show about a month ago or six weeks ago when we interviewed law professor Amy Wax, at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who has her tenure threatened because of views that she defends that are quite radical about race particularly and about related issues. And we put Professor Finkelstein on that show to give his views on academic freedom and what the limits might be, given that he too lost his job in academia due to his views almost 15 years ago now. 

As part of that interview, we did a wide-ranging interview with Professor Finkelstein, not just about academic freedom, but about a variety of other issues. We were interrupted by time constraints. So last night we recorded the second part of the interview, which we intend to air this week, and I asked him about his view on Ukraine, and he said something and described it in a way that is very unusual to hear, and it's up to provoke my desire to spend this evening examining this question. This is what he said as part of the as-of-yet-unaired interview: 

 

(Video)

 

Professor Finkelstein: I don't expect everybody to agree with me, with my opinions on Ukraine. The problem is there's no questioning at all. Just the other day, I recently reached another carriage. I tried to contact Medicare. It's impossible to contact them on the phone. It's absolutely impossible. I challenge anybody to dispute me on that point. Impossible. I finally go down to the Social Security Agency, I'm talking to one of the agents, and she said that “You call Medicare.” I said it was impossible. I said, could you imagine? We're in the 21st century. We have a dozen different forms of communication. We have telephone. We have now, we have fax, we have social media. You can’t contact a government agency. I said to myself, it nauseates me – $100 billion for Ukraine, $100 billion for Ukraine, and it can’t provide a phone service for senior citizens. 

 

People might quibble with that anecdote, especially if you're somebody who's more well-versed on the Internet. I think it's worth remembering that a lot of senior citizens spent most of their life without the Internet even in existence. So, particularly older people are not as adept as younger people are when it comes to performing functions online, but there's certainly no denying his central point, which is that services and quality of life in the United States have degraded and are on the decline in multiple ways over the last, let's say, decade or so. Therefore, I do think it's not just a valid question, but one that ordinary people would instantly ask, which is why, when the government can't do this for me, or why when the country has deprived me of this opportunity, for example, young people can't move out of their parents’ home until they're 30 or beyond in record numbers; couples who are raising young children are often required – not just when they want, but even if they don't – both, to work full time, then pay somebody to raise their children or care for their children during the day. All things that never were part of the American way of life, certainly for the middle class, are almost disappearing. And so, of course, it's a very reasonable and rational question to ask. Why are we sending $100 billion to Ukraine when we can't even clean up a chemical explosion in East Palestine because our government has no resources or can't get organized enough? 

I think a lot of times media outlets don't ask that question because their lives are fine. They come from wealthy families; they went to the best schools. Certainly, people in Washington are overwhelmingly wealthy. Just this last week, I noted that Dianne Feinstein, the five-term senator from the state of California, just happened to have sold one of her vacation homes for $25.5 million, in Aspen, which she and her husband used to entertain foreign policy elites over the past two decades or so. Basically, they are run not just by an oligarchy, but by a gerontocracy, just people in their eighties and nineties who are extremely rich and that's who dominates media as well. People who will come from wealthy families and go to East Coast schools are private schools and colleges that are very prestigious. So don't worry about things like this and they don't think this way. But I think what you heard from Norman Finkelstein is the way that a lot of people speak. And when Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, who, whatever you think of her, is more like a kind of an ordinary person in Congress than most people in Congress, because she's been a politician for about 6 seconds. She's done well in business – she's not poor by any stretch of the imagination but she's somebody who has lived in her Georgia district for many years and was not a professional politician. And so, when she stands up in Congress, she often says things that people mock because it sounds like what Norman Finkelstein said. 

So here is Marjorie Taylor Greene the last time Congress was asked to vote on whether we want to play this role that we're playing in the war in Ukraine, which was last May, almost nine months ago, when Congress took Joe Biden's request for $33 billion, arbitrarily increased it to $40 billion, and then overwhelmingly approved it with the yes vote coming from every single Democrat in Congress, from AOC and Bernie Sanders and the Squad to the House Progressive Caucus and the only no votes were about 60 House Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and about 10 or 11, including Josh Hawley and Mike Lee in the Senate. All Republicans voted out. The only no votes came from Republicans. But overwhelmingly, the establishment wings of both parties united as they always do, to support it. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene rose in the house to explain why she was voting no, here's what she said. 

 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Thank you. I rise in opposition to the Ukrainian supplemental bill: $40 billion. But there's no baby formula for American mothers and babies. An unknown amount of money to the CIA in the Ukraine supplemental bill. But there's no formula for American babies and mothers. $54 million in COVID spending in Ukraine. But there's no formula for American babies and mothers. $900 million for nonprofit organizations in Ukraine. But there's no formula for American babies and mothers. $8.7 billion for economic support and funding in Ukraine. But there's no formula for American mothers and babies. 

 

And so, she chose the lack of formula for women who are facing a supply chain crisis, but also a resource crisis and not being able to have the government help them obtain baby formula. And she was asking, I think, quite reasonably, why are we sending $100 billion to Ukraine when mothers in the United States, American women don't have access to baby formula? Just like Norman Finkelstein said: “Why, if I can't even have public service for the Medicare that I earned as a senior, are we spending $100 billion in Ukraine by sending $100 billion to Zelenskyy, the CIA and Raytheon?” All very good questions. And you can pick any number of metrics that show the decline in the quality of life for American citizens who could definitely use that $100 billion in all sorts of ways. 

From KFF Health News this is a report from March of last year entitled “Desperate for Cash: Programs for People with Disabilities Still Not Seeing Federal Funds.” We have a ton of disabled and special needs people in the United States. They can't work. They're certified as disabled. They cannot get the minimum payments from the government to have a minimum quality of life because the government can't get money to them – while it sends $100 billion to Kyiv. 

From the CDC in August of last year, the headline – from our own government –“Life Expectancy in the U.S. Dropped for the Second Year in a Row in 2021.” They have charts here that say: 

Life expectancy at birth in the United States declined nearly a year from 2020 to 2021, according to new provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

 

That decline – 77.0 to 76.1 years – took the U.S. life expectancy at birth to its lowest level since 1996. The 0.9-year drop in life expectancy in 2021, along with a 1.8-year drop in 2020, was the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923. 

 

Life expectancy at birth for women in the United States dropped 0.8 years from 79.9 years in 2020 to 79.1 in 2021, while life expectancy for men dropped one full year, from 74.2 years in 2020 to 73.2 in 2021. The report shows the disparity in life expectancy between men and women grew in 2021 from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021. From 2000 to 2010, this disparity had narrowed to 4.8 years, but gradually increased from 2010 to 2019 and is now the largest gap since 1996 (Center for Disease Control. August 31, 2022). 



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U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

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If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

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U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

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Federal Court Dismisses & Mocks Lawsuit Brought by Pro-Israel UPenn Student; Dave Portnoy, Crusader Against Cancel Culture, Demands No More Jokes About Jews; Trump's Push to Ban Flag Burning
System Update #466

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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In the first segment, we’ll talk about the victimhood narrative that holds that American Jews, in general, and Jewish students on college campuses in particular, are uniquely threatened, marginalized and endangered. One of the faces of this student victimhood narrative has become Eyal Yakoby, who is a vocal pro-Israel activist and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In 2024, he was invited by House Republicans to stand next to House Speaker Mike Johnson and he proclaimed: I do not feel safe. He said it over and over. “I do not feel safe” has kind of become the motto for his adult life. Now, he seized on those opportunities by initiating a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania seeking damages for what he said was the school's failure to fulfill its duties to keep him safe. Mind you, he was never physically attacked, never physically menaced, never physically threatened, but nonetheless claimed that the school had failed to keep him safe and told the congress in the country that he did not feel safe. 

The federal judge who is presiding over his lawsuit, who just happens to be a Jewish judge, a conservative judge, appointed by George W. Bush, not only dismissed Yakoby's lawsuit as without any basis, but really viciously mocked it, depicting his claims as a little more than petulant entitled demands from a privileged Ivy League student who wants to not be exposed to any ideas or political activism that might upset him – sort of depicting him as the Princess in “The Princess and the Pea,” Andersen’s literary fairytale about a princess who's so sensitive to anything that might concern her, that she's even unable to sleep if there's a pea buried beneath the seventeenth mattress on which she sleeps. 

This judicial decision is worth examining not only for the schadenfreude of watching one of America's whiniest pro-Israel activists be exposed as a self-interested fraud that he is, but also for what it says about the broader narrative that has been so relentlessly pushed and so endlessly exploited from so many corners, insisting that the supreme victim group of the United States is, of all people, American Jews. 

Then: speaking of extreme entitlement, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy made quite a name for himself over many years by ranting against the evils of cancel culture, championing the virtues of free speech, and viciously mocking as snowflakes and as people who are far too sensitive anyone who takes offense at jokes, offensive jokes told by comedians. That is what made it so odd – yet so telling – when this weekend we watched the very same Dave Portnoy viciously berated one of his employees for disagreeing with Portnoy's insistence that while jokes about everyone and every group continue to be appropriate, there must now be one exception: namely, according to Portnoy, jokes about Portnoy's own group,  American Jews,  must now be suspended and deemed too dangerous to permit. 

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There have been really a lot of radical and fundamental changes, first on the political culture and then in our legal landscape as a result of the attack on October 7, and particularly the desire of the United States – by both parties – to arm the Israelis, to fund the Israelis, to protect the Israelis as they went about and destroyed Gaza. 

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