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Steve Ballmer, Monopoly, Greenwashing, and the Media’s Favorite Fairy Tale
The former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner’s scandal shows how media culture hails billionaires as visionaries while their fortunes rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion.
Sep 10, 2025
Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is at the center of an NBA investigation into whether a bankrupt “green finance” startup secretly funneled tens of millions of dollars to Kawhi Leonard in a scheme to dodge the salary cap. Ballmer insists he was duped, not complicit. But even if he escapes punishment, this scandal is less about basketball than about a larger truth: Ballmer’s rise, like that of so many billionaires, rests not on genius but on monopoly, exploitation, and a media culture eager to turn raw power into the illusion of “superhuman brilliance.”
Steve Ballmer’s story is not just about one executive’s choices. It is about the deeper rot in a system that rewards monopoly, celebrates exploitation, and dresses up greed as genius. If we want to build a just and sustainable world, the first step is to stop believing the fairy tale.
How Ballmer Perfected the Monopoly Playbook
Ballmer’s career at Microsoft is often painted as the story of a bold leader guiding a tech giant through the new millennium. In reality, it was a case study in how to crush rivals and protect a monopoly. Under his watch, Microsoft racked up record fines from regulators; perfected its notorious strategy of “embrace, extend, extinguish;” and enforced a cutthroat internal culture that stifled collaboration. This wasn’t innovation. It was domination dressed up as genius.
When Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, the company was already facing a bruising US antitrust case over its efforts to crush competitors like Netscape and RealNetworks. European regulators soon followed, hitting Microsoft with record fines for abusing its monopoly. The Commission found that Microsoft had deliberately abused its dominant position by tying Windows Media Player to its operating system and undermining competition in server software.
At the center of these cases was a clear pattern: Microsoft used its dominance not to compete fairly but to block competitors, extend its monopoly, and extract rents from consumers and developers.
If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
Ballmer did not invent these practices, but he perfected and defended them. The company’s infamous “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy thrived during his reign: Adopt an open standard, add proprietary extensions, then use those extensions to break competitors’ products or force users into Microsoft’s ecosystem. A series of leaked internal memos known as the “Halloween Documents” revealed how Microsoft viewed open source software as a threat and laid out strategies to undermine it. Far from being a story of daring innovation, Microsoft under Ballmer became a story of protecting monopoly turf at any cost.
Internally, Ballmer presided over the now-notorious “stack ranking” system, in which managers were forced to rank employees against each other, ensuring that some were always labeled failures regardless of performance. Vanity Fair reported that this system was described by employees as “the most destructive process inside of Microsoft.” It encouraged backstabbing, punished collaboration, and destroyed morale.
Yet Ballmer’s reputation in the business press was rarely tarnished. Microsoft’s aggressive tactics and toxic culture were downplayed as part of the “rough and tumble” of the tech industry. Instead of being recognized as symptoms of a deeply flawed corporate ethos, they were cast as evidence of toughness, discipline, or even strategic brilliance.
Genius by Headline, Not by Record
This discrepancy points to a larger cultural problem: the way American media routinely turns billionaires into celebrities and treats monopolists as “innovators.” Stories often described Ballmer as a “visionary,” even while acknowledging that he missed entire waves of innovation—from mobile phones and search engines to social media. For example, he later admitted that Microsoft “missed mobile by clinging to Windows.” In interviews, he reflected that the early 2000s were defined by “missed opportunities,” and critics pointed out that he “missed every major trend in technology”
But this is not just about Ballmer. Consider how the press has lionized figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and the Silicon Valley founders of Google, Facebook, and Uber. Musk is often portrayed as a world-changing genius, yet his real talent lies in projecting an aura of promise rather than delivering consistent transformation. Bezos is hailed as the visionary who built Amazon into a global empire, but the company’s rise is grounded in widespread worker exploitation, aggressive union busting, and what Jacobin bluntly calls a legacy of exploitation. These examples show how easily media culture crowns billionaires as “visionaries” while overlooking the systemic harms that make their fortunes possible.
The mythology of the “genius CEO” is not harmless flattery. It is an ideological weapon. It convinces us that billionaires deserve their fortunes because they are smarter, bolder, and more visionary than everyone else. It hides the truth that their wealth comes from structural advantages, monopolies, and an economy rigged to socialize risk while privatizing reward.
Ballmer’s career is a perfect case in point. Few in the press asked whether Microsoft’s dominance strangled innovation or whether his leadership undermined workers and consumers. Instead, the coverage painted him as a colorful eccentric, a lovable billionaire, and above all a success story—as if his rise were earned brilliance rather than brute monopoly power.
Pablo Torre’s remarkable reporting on the Aspiration scandal is a reminder of what real journalism can do when it asks hard questions instead of recycling corporate talking points. His work not only exposes the hidden machinery of sports business but also shows why we need the same relentless scrutiny of CEOs and executives across industries. If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
The Aspiration Illusion
The irony of Ballmer’s current predicament is almost too sharp. The company at the center of the scandal, Aspiration, branded itself as an “ethical financial” startup, promising consumers the ability to save the planet while banking. Its pitch was slick and appealing: Open an account, round up your debit-card purchases, and the company would plant trees or invest in clean energy The company even raised $135 million to expand its “conscious consumerism” model, promoting debit cards that supposedly planted a tree with every swipe. But investigations later showed that the green promises were exaggerated, with ProPublica revealing that the company counted trees not yet planted and diverted some consumer funds toward administrative costs rather than reforestation.
Indeed, Despite the glossy promises, testimony from former employees and bankruptcy filings exposed a starkly different reality. It was less an environmental company than a marketing engine, spending lavishly on celebrity endorsements such as the $28 million Kawhi Leonard deal now under scrutiny, while delivering little measurable benefit to the climate. The startup positioned itself as a sustainable alternative to traditional banks, promoting tree-planting debit cards. Behind the branding, however, its financial practices were shaky. Aspiration relied on questionable deals to inflate its revenue and set up a high-profile IPO, even as its business model was already beginning to unravel.
Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth?
If Ballmer was indeed duped by Aspiration, as he claims, it only highlights how easily billionaires buy into glossy branding that flatters their image as progressive leaders. After the scandal broke, Ballmer admitted he felt “embarrassed and kind of silly” for not seeing through the company’s flaws. Yet Aspiration’s collapse alongside a multimillion-dollar “no-show” endorsement deal is not an outlier. It is a symptom of how much of today’s tech and finance sector manufactures a fraudulent sense of progress and value, dressing up speculation and extraction as innovation. In this world of legalized scams and corporate greenwashing, Ballmer’s embarrassment is less an excuse than a reminder of how disconnected billionaire investors are from the human and ecological costs of their money.
Aspiration’s story also echoes a broader pattern. Theranos promised a revolution in blood testing, WeWork styled itself as the future of work, and FTX declared it would reinvent finance. Each was celebrated as visionary until the façade collapsed, leaving behind fraud, debt, and disillusionment. These high-profile failures reveal how the mythology of innovation is repeatedly weaponized to disguise little more than hype, speculation, and exploitation. The media and investors continue to fall for it, again and again.
A Deeper Reckoning
The NBA investigation may or may not conclude that Ballmer violated the rules. But the larger scandal here is not limited to basketball. It is about how our culture treats men like Ballmer as role models—how we conflate wealth with competence, market share with innovation, and ruthless opportunism with genius.
It is also about how the very firms that claim to be solving our most urgent crises, from the climate emergency to economic inequality, are often vehicles for speculation and greenwashing, not solutions. They promise progress but deliver only shareholder returns and a deeper entrenchment of the same unequal and unsustainable order.
The Ballmer story forces us to ask harder questions. Why do we accept that billionaires should own sports teams at all, turning civic institutions into vanity projects for the ultra rich? Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth? Why do we allow financial startups to market themselves as saviors of the planet while continuing to accelerate ecological collapse?
Breaking the Billionaire Spell
The real lesson of this scandal is that we must break the spell of billionaire mythology. Ballmer is not a singular villain; he is an emblem of an age in which billionaires are lauded as saviors while their empires rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion. The media has played a crucial role in maintaining this façade, selling the public a narrative of “genius” to justify inequality.
A more honest narrative would recognize that the wealth of men like Ballmer was built on systems of exclusion, not innovation. It would expose the ways that corporate culture, whether in Big Tech or in the world of “ethical finance,” uses the language of progress to mask exploitation. And it would challenge the very legitimacy of an economy in which billionaires can fail upward, celebrated as geniuses even as their companies and investments leave wreckage behind.
What we need are not more billionaire idols but real accountability. It is long past time to stop confusing power with brilliance and to recognize that genuine progress will never come from self-styled saviors at the top. It will come from democratic action, collective struggle, and the hard work of reshaping our economy around justice rather than monopoly and the myth of capitalist progress.
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I’ve Seen States Collapse; Now I See It Happening Here
After years reporting from post-authoritarian states, I now see the same patterns in my own backyard—where justice has collapsed, truth is suppressed, and power no longer answers to the people.
Sep 07, 2025
I’ve seen the aftermath of collapsed nations—now I see it happening here.
As a journalist and analyst, I’ve spent the last several years living and reporting in regions that have undergone massive political transformations. I lived for years in the Czech Republic, where I met many people with direct ties to the Velvet Revolution. I walked the streets of Prague with those who once occupied them in protest. I studied the Russian language, traveled extensively through the former Eastern Bloc, and listened closely to the survivors of failed regimes—those who remember the slow unraveling of authority, trust, and truth.
I’ve also spent significant time in South America, where I witnessed a very different kind of collapse—and rebirth. In Bolivia, I spoke with officials and journalists who lived through the 2019 coup and saw their country fight its way back to democracy. I’ve walked with communities who understand, firsthand, how empires and juntas collapse—and how people organize in the rubble.
Now I believe this country is collapsing.
Not in the dramatic, Hollywood fashion we tend to imagine—there are no tanks in the streets, no blackout zones or food lines. But what I am witnessing now in Northern Kentucky, through my work with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project (NKTAP), is unmistakable: a slow-motion institutional implosion. And it mirrors what I have seen in failed or failing states around the world.
In Northern Kentucky, I’ve uncovered a network of corruption that spans law enforcement, prosecutorial offices, courts, and local media. I’ve documented how whistleblowers are silenced, public records denied, and criminal cases manipulated to protect the powerful.
Police ignore credible murder leads. Prosecutors bury evidence. Courts issue orders without hearings. And journalists—some out of fear, others out of complicity—refuse to report the truth. In my own case, I’ve faced obstruction, threats, targeted harassment, and retaliatory smears simply for investigating what any decent system should have investigated itself.
Our institutions are no longer capable of self-correction. That means the burden of accountability, truth telling, and justice now falls on us.
The structures of governance still stand. The buildings are still open. But the rule of law has collapsed in all but name. What remains is theater—a simulation of justice that functions to preserve power, not serve the public.
This isn’t just about Northern Kentucky. It’s a microcosm. I’m in touch with colleagues around the country—investigators, reporters, former civil servants—and I hear the same story again and again:
- Entire state agencies captured by private interests;
- Local governments ignoring open records laws;
- Whistleblowers retaliated against without recourse;
- Judges ruling from sealed dockets with no oversight;
- Public health policy shaped by ideology, not science; and
- Independent journalism gutted, bought, or blacklisted.
We are in a moment of mass epistemic failure, where truth itself is destabilized and power no longer answers to reason, law, or fact.
It doesn’t come with a bang. It comes with:
- The quiet refusal to investigate credible crimes;
- The steady normalization of lawlessness;
- The dissolution of public trust; and
- The emergence of parallel systems of truth-telling and justice.
This is what I’ve seen before. In Prague. In La Paz. In the fractured republics of the former USSR. It begins when the official channels of accountability no longer function—and the people must build their own.
That’s what I’m doing with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project. We’re documenting. Archiving. Speaking to victims. Exposing public records that local officials tried to bury. We’re creating a people’s archive—a living record of a regime in decline.
Because when institutions stop telling the truth, the only way forward is to tell it ourselves.
I used to believe that America was “different”—that our legal tradition, constitutional system, and civic institutions would inoculate us from the kinds of collapse I saw abroad. I no longer believe that.
The US is not collapsing because it is uniquely broken. It is collapsing because it is a state like any other, vulnerable to the same corruption, elite decay, and loss of legitimacy that have brought down countless systems before.
The question is not whether collapse is happening. It is. The question is what we do after we accept that reality.
We can pretend this is just “polarization.” We can tell ourselves that if we just wait for the next election, the pendulum will swing back. Or we can admit the truth: Our institutions are no longer capable of self-correction. That means the burden of accountability, truth telling, and justice now falls on us—on journalists, organizers, whistleblowers, and ordinary people with the courage to say: enough.
I’ve seen what happens when people organize. I’ve also seen what happens when they don’t.
And I’m telling you: Now is the time to choose.
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The Palestine Chronicle Case: When Truth Becomes the Crime
What is sought is not justice but intimidation—to cast suspicion on every Palestinian voice, to brand their words as weapons, their witness as crime.
Aug 27, 2025
The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity—grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.
At the heart of this endeavor stands Ramzy Baroud. His career is the antithesis of clandestine. For decades he has written, taught, and spoken in public, producing books translated into multiple languages, contributing columns to international publications, addressing audiences in universities and public forums across continents. He is not a shadowy figure; he is a man whose work has been consistent, transparent, and intellectually rigorous. His life is not untouched by the tragedy he describes: Many members of his family were killed under Israeli bombardments. Yet while mainstream media rushed to amplify unproven allegations against him, they remained deaf to his personal grief. His tragedy was ignored, his integrity overlooked, his voice distorted—because his engagement is unbearable to those who would prefer silence.
A Crime of Conscience, Not of Law
He is an engaged journalist in the noblest sense: independent, lucid, unflinching. His so-called crime is not collusion with violence but fidelity to memory. That is why he is demonized—not for what he has done in law, but for what he represents in conscience. America, unable to silence Palestinian voices through censorship alone, now instrumentalizes its justice system to achieve by indictment what it failed to achieve by argument. Having harassed universities, intimidated students, and punished professors for their solidarity with Gaza, it turns the courtroom into a new battlefield. And Congress, captive to the whims of its Zionist masters, joins the manhunt, targeting a journalist for the sole offense of telling the truth of his people. As for the mainstream press, it chooses cowardice: ignoring his family’s suffering, ignoring the emptiness of the charges, while echoing the accusations of power as if they were evidence.
Law Twisted into Weapon
The complaint filed against Ramzy Baroud and the organization (People Media Project) that runs the Palestine Chronicle rests on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), grotesquely overstretched to criminalize editorial decisions rather than acts of war. It alleges that by publishing articles from Abdallah Aljamal—described by Israel as a Hamas operative killed during a hostage rescue—the Chronicle “aided and abetted” terrorism. But here lies the first fissure: This characterization of Aljamal comes exclusively from Israeli military sources, themselves a belligerent party. It has never been independently verified. The claim that he was both a journalist and a Hamas operative remains an allegation, not an established fact. To treat it as judicial evidence is to replace proof with propaganda.
Even if—hypothetically—Aljamal had, at the demand of a militant group, harbored hostages, such a circumstance would not in itself render him culpable: What ordinary civilian in a war zone can refuse the command of militants under threat of force? And even if it occurred, how could Ramzy Baroud have known of it? Even taken at face value, the allegation collapses upon scrutiny. No evidence demonstrates that the Chronicle or its editor had actual knowledge of Aljamal’s supposed operational role, nor that modest freelance payments—if any at all—bore any causal nexus to hostage taking. The federal judge, in February 2025, dismissed the original complaint precisely for lack of proof of knowledge or intent. The plaintiffs returned with an amended filing, repackaged in rhetoric and pathos, but still devoid of the material elements required under international law: actus reus (a substantial contribution to the crime) and mens rea (intent or knowledge).
To equate the publication of articles with material support for terrorism is not jurisprudence but a juridical contortion. It is the substitution of law by politics, the criminalization of journalism under the mask of counterterrorism. What is sought is not justice but intimidation—to cast suspicion on every Palestinian voice, to brand their words as weapons, their witness as crime.
Thus the legal emptiness is evident:
- Jurisdiction overstretched: the ATS was never intended to criminalize editorial contracts.
- Elements unmet: no proven knowledge, no intent, no substantial assistance.
- Factual foundation unstable: the Hamas label rests on unverified allegations from one warring party.
- Political aim transparent: to silence Palestinians and punish one of their most articulate representatives for his independence.
This case is not justice. It is intimidation. It is not law. It is propaganda dressed in the robes of a courtroom. The allegation against Ramzy Baroud rests not on proof, but on the word of a belligerent army. An army that bombs, besieges, and kills—and then dictates who is journalist, who is terrorist, who is fit to speak. To transform those claims into evidence is to surrender law itself to war.
Ramzy Baroud is not a conspirator. He is a journalist of record, a man of books, a teacher, a witness. His own family has been buried under rubble. And yet, America has not mourned them, has not spoken of them. Instead, it chooses to hunt him—to turn his grief into accusation, his fidelity into crime.
Some congressmen have joined this manhunt, eager to please their Zionist patrons. Universities have been disciplined, their students silenced. The press, that great sentinel of truth, has abandoned him, repeating only the charges while ignoring his suffering. This is not democracy. It is servitude.
The elements of law are absent. There is no actus reus, no mens rea, no causal link. There is only suspicion. There is only the will to silence.
And so the true purpose stands naked: to criminalize the Palestinian word, to punish a journalist for speaking the truth of Gaza, to make an example of him so that others will be afraid to write.
But intimidation is not justice. A trial without evidence is not law. And silencing the witness will not erase the truth.
Law or Servitude
Here one hears Thurgood Marshall’s axiom: “The Constitution does not permit the discrimination of silence.” One hears Cochran’s defiance: “If the proof is not there, the case cannot stand.” One hears Vergès exposing the colonial reflex that brands resistance as terror. One hears Vedel’s warning: that when law is bent to politics, law ceases to exist.
Ramzy Baroud stands here not accused, but accusing. He accuses a system that bends to power, a Congress that bows to lobbyists, a press that betrays its duty, and a nation that dares call itself free while shackling its own justice.
Therefore, the American judicial system has a choice: to lend its authority to propaganda, or to defend the very principle that sustains law—that guilt must be proven, not declared. To condemn Ramzy Baroud would be to condemn journalism itself. To acquit him is to restore some dignity to justice. The choice is clear.
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