Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
As Biden Taps Billionaire Dem to Oversee Ukraine's Business, More Insiders Are Enriched From the War. PLUS: Gabor Maté on the Explosion of Anti-Depressants in the West
Video Transcript
September 19, 2023
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

It's not exactly a secret that while the vast majority of Americans are paying a real price for the endless war in Ukraine – higher energy prices, higher debt and debt servicing, threats to needed domestic programs – there is a tiny sliver of the richest Americans who are profiting greatly and will continue to do so for as long as Congress funds this war with no end in sight. Among them, the lucky ones, are the U.S. armed industry companies like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed, which donate massive amounts of money to both parties and have former top executives running key government agencies, including the Pentagon as well as the CIA and other parts of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies whose budgets, authorities and secret powers always skyrocket during U.S. wars. That illustrious list of those enriching themselves from the U.S.-funded war most definitely includes the various oligarchs, corporate power, corrupt politicians and other hangers-on who populate the power centers of Kiev and are responsible for the country's long-standing reputation as the most corrupt in Europe. The money is flying around and those are the people covering it up. Along with others, we have done substantial reporting on the show, documenting how Western arms dealers and corrupt elements in Kiev are enriching themselves greatly at the expense of the American taxpayer that's funding this war. 

However, there is another very powerful group of profiteers waiting in the wings like vultures to swoop down on Ukraine as soon as there is something resembling peace and they may end up being this war’s most successful profiteers. At the start of the year, it was revealed that the American hedge funds, investment corporations and investment banks such as BlackRock and JPMorgan were not so patiently waiting in the wings to exploit all of the very lucrative deals awaiting what will be called “the reconstruction of Ukraine.” After this war finishes its job of destroying most Ukrainian infrastructure, whenever that is, those financial institutions working in direct partnership with the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian officials under martial law, will swoop down and make hundreds of millions of dollars, probably billions of dollars in fees, by arranging all kinds of capital deals and other financing schemes to rebuild Ukraine. Most, if not all, of that will be accomplished with public monies from the U.S. and the West, of course, and much of it will be headed directly to the pockets and the bottom lines of these Western investment funds who pay millions of dollars each year, donations and other lobbyist activities to ensure their access to and subservience from the establishment wings of both parties exactly for moments like these. 

All of this is far from just a private sector initiative. The U.S. government, which will administer the funds and facilitate these deals using all of its diverse arms of power and influence – in Washington, in New York and Kiev – will be overseeing and controlling all of it and that in turn requires someone who is very comfortable with and welcomed by these oligarchs to grease the wheels of this reconstruction. Today, the Biden administration announced what seems to be the perfect person for that job, at least judging through the framework of all these corrupt interests, to oversee it all. Earlier today, the Biden administration announced the appointment of the so-called special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery – ”In this role,” the government said, “she will work with the Ukrainian government, the G7, the EU, international financial institutions, international partners, and one of our greatest assets, the American private sector, to help forge Ukraine's future as a prosperous, secure European democracy.” For this special role, Biden has tapped the multi-billionaire heiress, Penny Pritzker, who inherited billions of dollars, one of America's richest multigenerational families, the Pritzker's founder of the Hyatt hotel chain. She used her vast wealth to become one of President Obama's earliest and largest funders in the 2008 presidential election, who nonetheless denied her expectation to become appointed secretary of commerce in his first term. That's what she wanted, but he couldn't name her due to all sorts of unpleasantries about her company abusing its labor force and another touchy scandal involving a failed savings and loan that was bailed out by the government under her management and her families. But she finally received her rightful entitlement as commerce secretary. Once Obama was elected for a second term, he no longer needed any votes and then he anointed her to that position. Penny Pritzker, whose brother is the current Democratic governor of Illinois, Democrats really love their oligarchs, and she obviously fits right in. 

Democrats once cared about such tawdry motives for a war, or at least so they said, you may remember. For those of you who lived through the Iraq war, Democrats fixated obsessively on what they believed was a key motive for invading Iraq – namely that Halliburton, a company for which Vice Cheney Dick Cheney had worked years earlier and retained a profit motive, would financially benefit from the invasion and reconstruction. And the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq was indeed a huge boon for Halliburton – to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit – but these days such discussions are considered distasteful, or even, now, “Russian propaganda.” But we will nonetheless look at today's announcement of Penny Pritzker as reconstruction czar to oversee all of this new business in Ukraine to understand how it fits within the broader profiteering aspects of the ongoing war in Ukraine. 

Then: Almost every warning sign for mental health pathologies had already been blinking bright red in the United States and the West for years and that was all before the COVID pandemic and its lockdowns and isolation descended upon hundreds of millions of people. The solution used by the medical and mental health professions seems clear if you look at the data: They wanted to simply dole out more and more anti-depression medications, specifically the class of medications known as SSRI – serotonin reuptake inhibitors – to simply treat these rising mental health problems as little more than chemical imbalances – kind of like what happens when your car doesn't work well – that takes place in the brain and that requires simple medical solutions. You just get medications that adjust the chemical imbalances and send the patient on their way. 

One of the smartest and most interesting critics of this approach is Dr. Gabor Maté, who has worked for over a decade in Vancouver's downtown East Side with patients challenged by both drug addiction and mental illness. He is a bestselling author of four books published in over 30 languages and has really become someone who routinely appears on and is favorably received on all sorts of television, radio programs and online platforms that span the political spectrum. Something not that easy to do these days. We've been a fan of his for quite some time and are very excited to welcome him tonight to our program. It may seem that this topic is a little bit off course for what we usually cover. If that were true, that would be fine. We want to cover a broad range of topics, but we actually see these pathologies that he talks about and works on as directly linked to many of the broader social, political and economic problems we cover on this show. We think that you will see the important connections as well between the mental health problems suffered by more and more Americans, the rotted political system and the rotted society it produces in which they live. 

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

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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
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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.  

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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. 

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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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