Starlink - The global Trojan Horse

This is a just a brief thought. What is Starlink for? Can it become, is it meant to become, something more than advertised?

Elon Musk’s Starlink advertises itself as ‘internet from space’. A planet enclosing cloud of mini satellites that will deliver access to the internet to anywhere, no matter how remote. Access that reaches across every political border with no cables that can be cut. A very powerful technology. A post-national technology that literally looks down on the very idea of borders and governmental control. It’s a technology that has the potential to reach right down out of the sky to anyone holding a phone in any country without that country’s government being able to block, control or monitor. That’s only a potential level of aggressive intrusion. The more polite version would obviously seek and abide by national regulatory agreements. But it needn’t.

And of course Musk’s Starlink is not the only such project. The Guardian recently reported how Amazon (AKA that other US tech billionaire Jeff Bezos) has just launched the first 27 of a planned 3236 satellites of its own rival internet-from-space project, called ‘Kuiper’. The new Barons certainly see the vast economic potential of a technology which is in some ways like the railways of the age of steel and steam; the carrier of everything else.

The prize the Barons see is having a truly global reach without the physical weakness of cables that can be cut or seized. A proprietary network of satellites can’t be impounded or destroyed by revolting peasants or ambitious rival nations. The technology is above all that.

The technology opens huge economic potential for those who own it and those who may chose to use it. And it’s all been in the news recently mainly because of Elon Musk’s very public access to Trump’s White House.

So much one could write about, so many angles reporters could focus upon. So as any news editor would ask, ‘What’s the story?’

The Washington Post ran an article about how the Trump administration had been using the stick of trade tariffs and the carrot of tariff reductions to help ‘persuade’ countries from India to Vietnam and most recently Gambia, to sign up to Starlink and give it regulatory approval. The Post (owned by Bezos) quoted the US State department saying “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” The Trump administration clearly sees this technology as having geopolitical, not just economic significance. So the story here is that this technology is of strategic importance much like semi-conductor design and production. A technology that any U.S. administration, Trump or otherwise, will want to see owned and controlled by ‘America’.

On the one hand this is just business as it has always been done’ from The Dutch and British East India Companies all the way to the spheres of influence and control that were carved up by and for Big Oil. National strategic imperatives aligning with private wealth. Of course the danger of such alignment is that it becomes an entrenched and self perpetuating oligarchy. An aristocracy in all but name. All countries have them to some extent or other. Countries differ largely in how honest they are with themselves about it. America has been at least partially run by such a collusion of big government and big capital for some considerable time now but have been reluctant to admit it. For a certain section of America, part of what horrifies them about Trump is that he has unashamedly paraded this arrangement in public. Part - only part- of Trump’s crassness in the eyes of that section of America is that he doesn’t have the good taste or breeding to keep such things discretely hidden away.

Which brings me to an article in ProPublica, which I regard as a very reliable American, liberal, progressive news organisation. They ran an article on June 4th with the headline,

The Trump Administration Leaned on African Countries. The Goal: Get Business for Elon Musk.

For ProPublica the story is, as they say very explicitly in the article, - Trump administration corruption and crony capitalism. I think it’s a very clear and well researched article. I do not wish to seem to be criticising the authors or in any way suggesting they are dupes or apologists. I just wanted to make that clear.

The article quotes Gambian and American officials saying there had been barely veiled threats to suspend American funding if Gambian government officials didn’t give Starlink approval. The accusations of corruption and crony capitalism come directly from quotes from several former high ranking US officials from previous administrations. The authors do not hide the fact that they agree with this view and offer a clear analysis to support it.

For me they prove their point. But as I say, has it not always been thus? This is not to say it’s morally right or politically and socially without enormous risks and downside. It is a way of doing business I do not like personally.

It’s certainly an important story that needs to be told, but I wonder if the goal really is, as the headline proclaims, just about how Trump helps his mates get richer?

Of course he is helping Musk get richer, just as H.M. gov. helped the owners of the East India Company and in anther age the owners of Shell and BP all get richer. But here is an angle, actually more of a speculation that I think might be worth considering.

If Starlink can handle telephone conversation and internet data it can handle money. Money is just data. The main difference is that you don’t want financial transaction data to be mixed with other data streams in any way that gives anyone access to the banking part of your financial system. Payments, yes, bank details no.

But could Starlink handle micro payments? Yes it could and as I have already pointed out in The Billionaire Boys Bank and the follow up, Musk, inside America has been aggressively getting state banking licenses.

So here’s my speculation. America has a debt problem. Musk has been very vocal about it. It has led him to criticise Trump very publicly. Does this mean they are enemies? Are they not on the same page any more? Or were they never? I don’t think it matters actually. Personally I don’t think they are enemies but it’s not really important. For what it’s worth I think they are both ruthless businessmen who think in terms of using each other. I think Musk imagines himself with a Laurel Crown. But it’s not the point - at least not yet.

America has a debt problem. It’s not just the size of the debt, it’s the size and rate of growth relative to the global demand for dollars. As long as everyone needs dollars for trade then people will buy dollars and dollar debt. But if the need and demand for dollars for global trade should ever falter then the debt load becomes unsustainable. And that has been to worry for well over a decade, maybe two decades.

The global trade in oil and gas was once only in dollars. That is gone. The BRICS settle otherwise. The Euro has made inroads. China and Russia have common cause to advance the decline in the demand for the dollar.

This leaves America, by which I mean its government and big business (industry and finance), needing to reduce the debt to dollar demand/use ratio. One way is to cut spending. Cue the Trump and Musk DOGE show. But that is not the answer. It was never, could never be the answer. It was more theatre than solution.

The real solution, I suggest is to ensure the demand for dollars. And that I suggest can be achieved if the nature of the dollar itself is altered. Or, ‘brought into the 21st century’ - as I imagine Musk and Trump’s headline writers will prefer it described.

Suppose Starlink is used to allow its users not just to access news and entertainment, but to buy and sell. That is step one. Step two, imagine further that rather than deal with the messy and perplexing (to the user) business of exchanging between different national currencies, Starlink operates its own cryptocurrency? This could operate with, either as an option or as a requirement, built-in smart contract. This is such an obvious play for Starlink and is already what Musk is pursuing within America, that I cannot think it is not part of the global plan.

This would mean Starlink would compete with every other online platform as a market place for buyers and sellers. You could buy not just from Amazon (to be cheeky), but something from a local shop and pay for it via Starlink. With global reach into every remote corner it would have the same appeal that the explosive spread of the mobile has already had.

Now tie this new crypto to the dollar. Tether already has such a link so does at least one other crypto. But make it official. This could be via a central bank crypto of the kind every central bank has been busy building and testing. Or, if you are ideologically suspicious of central banks, or simply prefer not to share in your path to world domination with them, then create a private crypto and have a friend in politics chose yours.

The point, the publicly sellable point, would be that this is strengthening the dollar and ensuring its position as THE global currency by making it how anybody, anywhere buys and sells. It would be a change to the nature of the dollar easily as profound as when Nixon ended the gold standard. It would create a vast new demand for the new dollar-tied crypto in every country. It would be handled by an American company and probably adopted by America’s largest banks.

It would tie commerce in every country to the working of this one system. Once widely adopted no government could easily suspend it without vast and, to the users in every village town or hamlet, inexplicable disruption. In many countries having transactions handled by a system that their own, often corrupt governments cannot interfere with, would be a large attraction. Much as black markets in dollars are often preferred to inflation prone local currencies. Once enough transactions were using the system and its dollar-tied crypto that country and its economy would be tied to if not effectively controlled by America. Let’s remember Musk has applied for banking licenses inside America so he can test and run the system before he rolls it out globally.

So this is my speculation. Under Musk and Trump the dollar is saved. Its nature is changed and it’s ‘Brought into the 21st century’. Musk becomes even more powerful and wealthy. The dollar debt crisis, if not actually solved, is no longer pressing. The debt ‘solution’ opens for America’s economic and political aristocracy a new era of dollar demand. That demand gives America enormous political and economic power over other countries. They do it before China, Russia or anyone else can rival them. The red white and blue flies again and a new political and economic order is born.

The technology is a global trojan horse.