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America’s sorrowful world: Dumb at home and dumber abroad

April 21st, 2015

By John Stanton.

 



“I should tell you that homosexuality in our country has been overcome once and for all but not entirely. Or entirely but not completely. Or else entirely and completely but not once and for all. What do people think about now? Nothing but homosexuality. That and the Middle East, Israel, the Golan Heights. Moshe Dayan. So, if they chase Moshe Dayan off the Golan Heights and the Arabs make peace with the Jews? Nothing but homosexuality pure and simple.” (Moscow to the End of the Line, Venedikt Erofeev, 1969)

“and freedom thus remains a phantom on that continent of sorrow [the United States of America] and the people, thus, have become so used to it that they almost don’t notice…On every rotten face there is as much dignity expressed in a minute as would last us for our whole great Seven Year Plan. How come? I thought, and turned off Manhattan onto Fifth Avenue and answered my own question. Because of their vile self-satisfaction—nothing else. But where do they get their self-satisfaction? I froze in the middle of the Avenue in order to resolve the thought: In the world of propagandistic fictions and advertising vagaries, where do they get their self-satisfaction? I was heading into Harlem and shrugged my shoulders. Where? The playthings of monopoly’s ideologues, the marionettes of the arms kings, where do they get such appetite? They gorge five times a day and always with the same endless dignity—but can a man have a real appetite in the States? (Moscow to the End of the Line, Venedikt Erofeev, 1969)

Media Stooges Analyze Three Stooges Methodology

The ghastly spectacle of presidential debates on issues overly cooked in the media for decades (Israel and sexual preference, for example) will befall Americans within the blink of an eye. Of course they are not debates but well-rehearsed professional theater with the candidates, media questioners and audiences all acting out their assigned roles, on queue. Who has the appetite for it all? It is a hollow, unreal process and a rather sickening charade unless one is on some measure of hallucinogenic drug or drunk. At the proper stage of hallucination or inebriation the show turns into a sort of Looney Tunes cartoon making the time spent on the theater that is the American presidential election process somewhat tolerable.

A few more hits or swigs are necessary to endure the post-debate commentary on Fox, CNN, CBS, PBS or ABC. Depending on the mind altering substance used, the airhead punditry takes on the persona of the Three Stooges/Tractor Pull announcers. Caked in makeup and attached by wireless earphone to assistants who tell them what to say—the talking heads try to convince the audience that what they saw/heard was not what they saw/heard: In short, they try to spin sense on the nonsense uttered by this and that candidate. The media stooges extol the glorious exceptionalism of democratic style and process of the American presidential election process-and US elections in general—as though no other nation on earth actually holds elections.

Scary Monster

Americans know (or should know) that the presidential candidates–like all US politicians—have brains made of Silly Putty. They are bent and molded by the interests that fund them and, of course, tell them how to think/vote. Yet the American voting public typically runs a fool’s errand every four years with the false notion that “voting matters”. Voters proudly place stickers on ties and lapels stating an in-your-face “I Voted!” as if that is some sort of intellectual badge of courage that matters. But it doesn’t when the Democrats and Republicans are a sort of two-headed Grendel hungry for money and power.

It’s a well fed monster that works on behalf of those political and military leaders who designed the carnage underway in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan and seek more. Displaced human beings in those countries seeking a non-violent life and some measure of security to practice their faith (Christian, Sunni, and Shia) have been forced to flee their long-time homes due to war and the reprisals it brings. There are millions of displaced now. They drown at sea, are slaughtered by splinter groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda or by errant air strikes courtesy of US targeting intelligence or US military hardware sold to the likes of Saudi Arabia.

The story in the USA is dismal in its own way: Austerity, local law enforcement gunning down unarmed suspects; the Supreme Court through Citizens United opening the floodgates for corporate cash donations to political candidates; a bankruptcy judge in Detroit, Michigan claiming that clean water is not a “right”; drought in the state of California; one in three US children living in poverty; and the slashing of funding for Social Security and Medicare. These woes do not include the unemployed culled from government statistics, homelessness, or the care and cost of taking care of Americans returning from battlefields the world over. And yet some lunatics in the USA still want to go to war with Iran, Russia and China.

And go figure! The USA is a country with 243 million adults 18 and over, and is indoctrinated from an early age by its educational system to believe, nearly religiously, in an open competitive market, based on an equally competitive democratic/economic system of government. Yet in the current presidential cycle the USA can only produce two viable presidential candidates who just so happen to represent America’s wealthiest and political powerful families: Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Jeb Bush (Republican). The two families are so close that George W. Bush called Bill Clinton “the brother from another mother.” Both campaigns combined will likely spend $5 billion dollars on a science fiction movie titled The 2016 Presidential Swindle.

Dumb it down for the People

So how do the policy makers, military leaders, corporate heads, pollsters, pundits and campaign managers see the American public?

Consider Michael Glennon, Tufts University Fletcher School, and author of Double Government, on the intellectual ability of the American public. Turns out the American public mind is one giant mass of Silly Putty! “…the economic and educational realities remain stark [in the USA]. Nearly fifty million Americans—more than 16% of the population and almost 20% of American children—live in poverty. A 2009 federal study estimated that thirty-two million American adults, about one in seven, are unable to read anything more challenging than a children’s picture book and are unable to understand the side effects of medication listed on a pill bottle. The Council on Foreign Relations reported that the United States has ‘slipped ten spots in both high school and college graduation rates over the past three decades.’ One poll found that nearly 25% of Americans do not know that the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. A 2011 Newsweek survey disclosed that 80% did not know who was president during World War I; 40% did not know who the United States fought in World War II; 29% could not identify the current Vice President of the United States; 70% did not know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; 65% did not know what happened at the constitutional convention; 88% could not identify any of the writers of the Federalist Papers; 27% did not know that the President is in charge of the Executive Branch; 61% did not know the length of a Senate term; 81% could not name one power conferred on the federal government by the Constitution; 59% could not name the Speaker of the House; and 63% did not know how many justices are on the Supreme Court.

Far more Americans can name the Three Stooges than any member of the Supreme Court. Other polls have found that 71% of Americans believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons and that 33% believed in 2007 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. In 2006, at the height of U.S. military involvement in the region, 88% of American 18- to 24- year-olds could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia, and 63% could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East. Three quarters could not find Iran or Israel, and 70% could not find North Korea. The ‘over-vote’ ballots of several thousand voters—greater in number than the margin of difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore—were rejected in Florida in the 2000 presidential election because voters did not understand that they could vote for only one candidate. There is, accordingly, little need for purposeful deception to induce generalized deference…in contemporary America…President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, not renowned for bluntness, let slip his own similar assessment of America’s electorate. ‘If you truly had a democracy and did what the people wanted,’ he said, ‘you’d go wrong every time.’ Acheson’s views were shared by other influential foreign policy experts, as well as government officials; thus emerged America’s ‘efficient’ national security institution.”

Oh well. Who cares? That’s the way it is. It is what it is. It has always been this way. Nothing you can do about it.

“People don’t see clearly unless they want to. Nowadays everyone quietly accepts the inevitable. Newspapers are no help, they censored themselves little by little until they perfected the art of saying absolutely nothing. Television is monitored by official censors. Even if it weren’t monitored there is nothing on of interest. The news bulletins are completely innocuous…How can anyone believe a word these officials say?” (And Still the Earth, Ignacio De Loyola Brandao, 1985)

The United States is surely becoming a “continent of sorrow.”

John Stanton is a writer living in Virginia. His latest book is Media Trolls, Technology Shamans and Diabolical Political, Economic and Military Leaders available at Amazon. Reach him at captainkong22@gmail.com.

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Fascism, American-Style

February 9th, 2015

By John Stanton.

 



“Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.”

— Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).

A bit of irony, perhaps, that on November 4, 2014—as Americans go to the polls to cast their ballots for a slate of politicians at the local, state and federal levels—the august citizens of the United States will also celebrate the birth of the National Security Agency (NSA).

On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman’s state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the “Iran oil situation”, and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected “leftist” governments.

In 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the American presidency and with him came John Foster and Allan Dulles, two political appointees who would, it turns out, seek the counsel and expertise of “former” Nazi executioners, scientists and intelligence operatives. J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was already on the case using whatever resources were at his disposal—including Nazis–to hunt down unionists, communists, dissenters and radicals wherever they might be. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Truman had this to say about Hoover and his FBI, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”

From 1953-1961, Eisenhower, as Commander in Chief, constructed a nascent military-intelligence-law enforcement-industrial complex influenced directly by Nazi ideology and technological know-how. No wonder he warned the world about his creation, the military-industrial complex. At one time in the early 21^st Century it was uncomfortable to call out America’s ties to the Nazis. But that has changed particularly with the release of Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door (2014) and The Collaboration by Ben Urwand. It has also been confirmed by the overthrow of a nationally elected leader in Ukraine—Victor Yanukovych–and the open support of neo-Nazi groups largely responsible for that event. Is it a coincidence that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited with the neo-Nazi usurpers not long after the coup given the CIA’s history?

Do You Want to Know a Secret, do, da, do?

According to Lichtblau, writing in the New York Times, “The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher’, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian…but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible. U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes, he said. Information was readily available that these were compromised men. The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.”

Over at Antiwar.com, in “Federal Agencies Just Doing Whatever They Want Now”, Lucy Steigerwald comments wryly on Lichtblau’s findings. “…the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted.

Famously, Nazi rocket scientists were picked up by America to prevent their expertise from falling into Soviet hands. Maybe an exception to the prickly feeling that letting heinous war criminals off the hook is not what America was supposed to be doing when it won the good war in a heroically-sepia montage could be made for geniuses like Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun was a rocket scientist and “honorary” SS member under the Nazis, and he helped America get to the moon (which is neat, so that apparently makes his debated level of involvement/enthusiasm for the party acceptable.) What exactly did von Bolschwing contribute to America after happily joining the SS in 1933 to make ignoring his crimes worthwhile? What’s the purpose of this kind of grim revelation? There are several.

One, they diminish the moral high ground about the Second World War that the US clings to desperately to this day. Yes, everyone who isn’t literally Adolph Hitler gets to feel pretty good about themselves, so anyone not allied with Hitler must be doing the right thing. Yet, helping to plan the Final Solution is forgivable if the CIA really wants you around. Another more contemporary reason to be horrified by this revelation is that it is just one outrage of many. Sharing the CIA’s dark corner is most of the other big-name, secretive agencies. For the past 18 months, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive campaign of spying has been big news. Less prominent were stories that suggest the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are also playing the part of secretive, unaccountable rulers.”

Welcome to the Reich, American Style

William Binney, former NSA employee and whistleblower, stated that the NSA had gone “totalitarian”. In an interview with DW he likened the NSA and the US government to the Third Reich.

Binney: “Sure, they haven’t gone that far yet [as the Nazis and East German Stassi], but they tried to shut down newspaper reporters like Jim Risen…Look at the NDAA Section 1021, that gave President Obama the ability to define someone as a terrorist threat and have the military incarcerate them indefinitely without due process. That’s the same as the special order 48 issued in 1933 by the Nazis, [the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree]. Read that – it says exactly the same thing. These were totalitarian processes that were instituted…Totalitarianism comes in the form first of knowledge of people and what they’re doing, and then it starts to transition into using that power against people. That’s what’s happening – in terms of newspaper reporters, in terms of crimes. That’s a direct violation of our constitution.

DW: But surely the difference is that there was an ideological regime behind the Stasi and the Nazis.

Binney: You mean like putting people like John Kiriakou in prison for exposing torture and giving the torturers immunity? That’s what our country’s coming to. That’s what we did. That’s disgraceful. The motives of totalitarian states are not exactly the same every time, but they’re very similar: power, control and money…We’re focusing now on everyone on the planet – that’s a change from focusing on organizations that were attempting to do nasty things. When you focus on everybody, you’re moving down that path towards population control.”

Ingeniously Produced from Concentration Camps: Data “Comes to Light”

Many advances in warfare can be traced to Nazi innovations built on the backs of tortured souls. For example, air and ship crew survivability in frigid seas is just one of them: “…the Germans noted the terrible loss of critical personnel in sudden cold water immersion accidents. The sinking of the Bismarck and loss of airmen who bailed out alive and well into the cold North Sea during the Battle of Britain caused their physiologists and aviation medicine physicians to examine the problem. They commenced a large Research and Development program, which in part was the cause for the infamous Dachau experiments. They were the first to observe the “after drop” or continuation in reduction of body core temperature after being withdrawn from the cold water. They also experimented with survival suits and the Deutsches Textilforschunginstitut in München-Gladbach, ingeniously produced one that provided the insulation using soap bubbles which appears to have gone into limited service.”

Another example is the development of the military aircraft “ejection seat”. In Achtung! Schleuder-Sitzaparat by Chris Carry, German engineering was far afield of American efforts in pilot safety. “With the acquisition by the US of both German databases in egress research and actual examples of the German Heinkel explosive cartridge ejection seat immediately after the war had ended, the US began to vigorously attempt to gain greater knowledge in this overlooked area of aviation technology. The new American developmental research spurred on by acquisition of German wartime data branched off into two distinctly different approaches towards the same end, one taken by the US Air Force and one by the US Navy.”

Exceptionalism and Innovative Torture Techniques Led to Technological Advances

How could human beings engage in such hideous experiments on other human beings? Well, that is a time tested formula: Indoctrinate the masses into thinking that all others besides, say, Americans, are inferior, unexceptional, demons and insects. The world is witnessing just that as the US government, its allies and its media and academic proxies seek to reduce the Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Iranians, and the immigrants, unemployed and impoverished in the United States down to the level of parasitic microbes.

Just how does that mentality work?

For that answer we turn to the UK’s Telegraph for an article written in 2008 by Richard Evans. “The answer springs from the fact that medicine was both dominant in the world of science under the Third Reich, and closely allied to the Nazi project… After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well? What underpinned this behavior was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy – or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing – indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it.”

Evans continues on describing the torture: “SS doctors used inmates to test treatments for injuries sustained in battle, cutting open their calves and sewing bits of glass or wood or gauze impregnated with bacteria into the wounds, sometimes even smashing the prisoners’ bones with hammers to create a more realistic effect; again, the results were presented to scientific conferences without anyone offering any criticism of the methods employed. Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of human guinea pigs was the ambitious young SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, who employed camp inmates at Dachau to test the human body’s reactions to rapid decompression and lack of oxygen, in an attempt to help pilots forced to parachute out of their planes at high altitudes. He called some of his research sessions “terminal experiments”. He measured the time it took his subjects to die as their air supply was gradually thinned out. He showed his work, which led to the deaths of between 70 and 80 prisoners, to a conference of Luftwaffe medical experts in September 1942. The following month, Rascher presented the results of another experiment to a conference of 95 medical scientists in Nuremberg. This time, he showed how long inmates dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms and life jackets could survive in cold water, simulating conditions in the North Sea. The average time that elapsed before death, he reported, was 70 minutes. None of those listening to him raised any ethical objections.”

Albert Camus offers a sort of prayer for these dark times. “All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”

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Welcome to Whitehead’s Cannibal War Machine: 21st Century Hell

October 9th, 2014

 

 

By John Stanton.



“At the same time the progressive evacuation in the 20th century of the nation-state as a means of class domination and the advent of a nomadic pirate class of financial capital, means that the practice of endemic global war has become indifferent to national territory and so functionally infinite in its horizons for future conflict The cannibal war-machine thus consumes persons and ecologies through forms of commodity production and price speculation that profit from the systematic creation of social chaos and its re-ordering through the violence and destruction of high-tech military performance and the enforced disciplines of emergency or pandemic management and homeland security…And this mystique is consciously promoted by military and police world-wide, entering a global cultural imaginary that ceaselessly replays the violent performances of both military and insurgent, police and criminal, Such virtual experiences circulate incessantly through electronic media whose consumption mesmerizes, stupefies and enchains individual subjectivities to The Cannibal War Machine.” Neil Whitehead, Divine Hunger

Sad that Neil Whitehead is not around to provide insights into the machinations underway from Ukraine to Syria. He’d likely point out that the world can’t focus solely on the Holy Wars underway in Eurasia and that the Divine Cannibal War Machine is on the move—in some fashion—on every continent. Indeed it is.

It is increasingly difficult to stomach the propaganda and demonization of a bunch of nihilists wearing the mask of Islam by a bunch of destructive capitalists wearing the mask of Christianity (or should we say the mask of Judaism since the destructive capitalists have stood by as Christians in the Middle East are purged and displaced). The nihilists and the destructive capitalists are flip-sides of Janus-faced Saudi Arabia and its vile Wahhabi, capitalist-influenced doctrine. All three groupings are distinguished by their psychopathic and sociopathic leadership that views the bulk of humanity as non-recyclable material.

For those Americans mesmerized into supporting another US military invasion of Iraq—to include Syria—to bring peace and love to the region, take a look at the US homeland where citizens in Detroit are deemed to have “no fundamental right to water”. There are millions of Americans (including US military Veterans) who are homeless and impoverished. The economy is not recovering unless one thinks that thousands of newly created part-time service industry work, with no benefits, is the sign of an economy on the rise. The actor Jeff Daniels in HBO’s The Newsroom sums up the dire situation in the USA better than any “reality” American news reader, academic, politician, flag officer or pundit. What does it say when the actor playing a part is more believable than the “real” experts and leaders?

Cannibals Leave a Legacy

The world has been inundated with videos of the Islamic Caliphate removing the heads of Westerners fool hardy enough to think that they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the brutality of a war zone. They receive a hero’s funeral in the global mainstream media and are lauded for their humanitarianism on behalf of the “civilized” world.

Let’s take a look at some of the activity of the “civilized” Divine Cannibal War Machine and see if it reaches the level of horror that the Islamic Caliphate is charged with. First up, the legacy of the US military’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam. The UK Daily Mail has a photo essay on the matter that deals with birth defects caused by the lingering effect of the toxin. The report was published in April of 2014: “A new series of heartbreaking pictures has revealed even babies 40 years on are suffering the horrific effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Canterbury born Francis Wade captured the distressing images at the Thi Nghe and Thien Phuoc orphanages in Saigon, which are home to children born decades after the war. Yet despite the conflict ending in 1971, the orphanages are caring for children suffering disabilities thought to be caused by a chemical used by U.S forces, which was sprayed on crops, plants and trees.”

According to the Vietnam Veterans Association, “Agent Orange was a combination of two defoliants, 2-4-5-T and 2-4-D contaminated by dioxin (TCDD), a toxic byproduct of the chemical production process.

More than 19 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971. More than 11.2 million gallons sprayed after 1965 were dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange. Agents Purple, Pink, and Green used before 1965 were even more highly contaminated with dioxin. “My father passed away in 1998. He had many health problems, including type II diabetes. He was only 50 years old. Agent Orange has been a part of my life from the moment I was born. I was born without my right leg, several of my fingers, and my big toe on my left foot. My mother had three miscarriages. My younger brother (age 29) has to wear bifocals and suffers from chronic joint pain.”

You Don’t Need Your Life or that Pinky Finger

The Stanford Daily offers a critical view of the documentary The Kill Team based on the murder, by American soldiers, of three Afghan nationals unlucky enough to have encountered thugs masquerading as uniformed soldiers. The film reviewer notes wryly that in such instances, the US military uses the “few bad apples” clause to indicate that the murder and mutilation of civilians is just a hiccup and not part of the indoctrination that seeks to teach humans to kill without consciousness. It’s the same mentality that was at work during the My Lai Massacre and other mass killings undertaken by US military/contractor personnel in Vietnam.

“Murder victims included a disabled man, an Islamic mullah and a 15-year old boy, Gul Mudin, who was working on his father’s farm. American soldiers stripped Mudin’s corpse, severed the boy’s pinky finger as a trophy and posed for photos with his mutilated body. Krauss makes no move to explore the effects of these killings on Afghan communities…. Following the Maywand District murders, government officials portrayed the atrocities as the product of a few bad apples rather than systemic issues within the armed forces. It is laudable that director Dan Krauss sought to interrogate, or at least contextualize, this framing of the crimes. In all likelihood, there is a documentary to be made about the institutional conditions and leadership vacuum that made the crimes possible. But “The Kill Team” is not that movie.”

“You Might Say He Lost His Head” (Austin Powers)

In 1994 a soldier in the US Army cut off a fellow soldier’s head for sleeping with his wife. The infuriated married man then took his comrade’s head to the hospital where is wife was resting in expectation of giving birth to a child. The miffed red-blooded American husband placed the head on her bedroom nightstand and left. At any rate, Saudi Arabia has beheaded 54 humans thus far in 2014, according to NDTV. Two of the crimes include witchcraft and drug trafficking. There is an upside to beheading as opposed to being vaporized by an atom bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) or Hellfire missile: There is evidence to suggest that when the head is cut off consciousness remains for some length of time. “…the brain can continue to produce thoughts and experience sensations for at least several seconds following decapitation — in rats, at least. Although findings in rats are commonly extrapolated onto humans, we may never fully know if a human remains similarly conscious after the head is lost. As author Alan Bellows points out, ‘Further scientific observation of human decapitation is unlikely.’”

While Americans are not fond of beheadings—that’d be too much work for lazy Americans—they do prefer to shoot people with firearms: Periscopic has an excellent animated graphic showing the number of murders by gun in 2013 (11, 419) and adjacent to that number is the total years of life lost (505, 025).

So the American’s (Europe is NATO and NATO is run by the USA so there is no distinct Europe) and Saudi’s are whining about the practices in the Islamic Caliphate? It is ludicrous to believe that Saudi and American strategists are shocked by the Islamic Caliphate’s tactics. The Americans and Saudi’s were responsible for the Caliphate’s creation through misguided invasions of Iraq, ham-handed regime change efforts in Syria and Egypt (USA assisted in the overthrow of Egypt’s Morsi), and reckless favoritism of the Sunni over the Shia. The opportunist strategy and tactics used by Americans to destabilize Syria, and attempted in Iran (assassinations, sanctions, and cyberwar), were brazenly employed in the Ukraine. It’s all of a piece with the objective of creating enough chaos on/in the borders of Russia and China so that the spillover floods and destabilizes the governments of those nation-states.

Perhaps it is not worth caring about the self-destruction of the human species. Maybe it’s the nihilists, destructive capitalists, and Wahhabi’s who’ve got it right. They always have the upper hand it seems justifying the wanton destruction of life by couching it in mystical religion backed by monetary power (or maybe it should be the other way around). The Cannibal War Machine is flourishing, chewing up humanity and all life on Earth. No, you say? Consider Whitehead’s description of the present historical moment:

“The tortured animal subjects of neuro-scientific experiments, the suffering of the unemployed, the displaced, the impoverished are all an acceptable price for progress towards modernity, they are unavoidable casualties in our wars for freedom, democracy and prosperity, the spiritual mimesis of which is of course the tortured Christ. Moreover our assumption that there is a linear progress in this death-march towards the modern also closes off alternative histories, so that our recollection of the past becomes merely a curiosity that allows us to marvel at our progress from those savage origins. The savages then become exemplars of not just ignorance but also illegitimate violence, violence which does not stem from Reason and a desire for Progress, but violence that is atavistic, primitive and animalistic. More widely, the project of modernity was also enabled by the possibility that war itself could become fabulously profitable and in so doing also made State-sponsored warfare a means for the Sacred Empowerment of the colonial and eventually global social order…Violence also links to the sacred as a systematic and historically evolved means for the accumulation of power and wealth through war and violence, for which the sacrifice of bodies and lives is necessary…The idea of the “war machine” references relentless and un-merciless force, constructed by civil society but always escaping its control – driven by the search for profit from even the most brutal kinds of economic and financial production.”

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U.S. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence: A Fusion Center for United Against Nuclear Iran & Foundation for Defense of Democracies?

September 18th, 2014

 

By John Stanton.



“The Justice department would like to the see the UANI lawsuit go away as it is aware that what is being described as “law enforcement” documents would include both privileged and classified Treasury Department work product relating to individuals and companies that it has investigated for sanctions busting. Passing either intelligence related or law enforcement documents to a private organization is illegal but the Justice Department’s only apparent concern is that the activity might be exposed. There is no indication that it would go after UANI for having acquired the information and it perhaps should be presumed that the source of the leak is the Treasury Department itself.” Phil Giraldi.

“Enforcing those AIPAC-endorsed sanctions has been the happy task of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Created in early 2004 after intensive lobbying by AIPAC and its associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the TFI unit has been aptly described as “a sharp-edged tool forged principally to serve the Israel lobby.”

With David S. Cohen succeeding Stuart Levey as Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in January 2011, a leading journalist on the Middle East was later prompted to call the position “a job which seems reserved for pro-Israeli neo-cons to wage economic warfare against Tehran.” In recent days, Cohen’s TFI unit has been eagerly waging economic warfare against Damascus. Daniel L. Glaser, the Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing, has just completed a tour of Lebanon and Jordan to secure their compliance with economic sanctions against the Assad government. In Beirut, the U.S. Embassy announced that Glaser was pressing the authorities to “remain vigilant against attempts by the Syrian regime to evade U.S. and EU sanctions.” Maidc O Cathail.

So now that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has invoked the U.S. States Secret privilege in the matter of Victor Restis & EST v United Against Nuclear Iran, American citizens might come to understand why foreign nations like China, Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates treat American non-profits or non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) with scorn. Some of these U.S. Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt, 501C3 .org’s, or “Associations”, operating overseas are nearly the equivalent of U.S. embassies: U.S. intelligence operatives and free market ideologues populate leadership and staff positions. Funding for their operations are a mix of U.S. government and corporate largesse. Private donations figure as well. In some cases they are not-so-subtle advocates for regime-change.

Robert Merry’s piece April 2012 piece in The Atlantic does a fine job of pointing out some of the more nefarious activities of NGO’s and non-profits. In Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much? Merry opines: “For anyone trying to understand why this anger is welling up in those countries, it might be helpful to contemplate how Americans would feel if similar organizations from China or Russia or India were to pop up in Washington, with hundreds of millions of dollars given to them by those governments, bent on influencing our politics. One supposes it would generate substantial anger among Americans if these groups tried to tilt our elections toward one party or another. But suppose they were trying to upend our very system of government, as U.S.-financed NGOs are trying to do these days in various countries–and have done in recent years in numerous locations.

Americans have a network of Israel-First organizations in the United States that are “bent on influencing our politics”. They constitute a Deep State that has no remorse in sacrificing American lives and security for the benefit of Israel. Two of these non-profits are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). They are part of the local, state and federal matrix of Israel-First non-profits in the U.S.

UANI has managed to get 40 American state legislatures to pass, nearly unopposed, draconian sanctions on Iran which clearly are meant to instigate the general populace to revolt. UANI claims credit for many pieces of federal legislation designed to strangle the Iranians and inflict damage of the type that sanctions leveled on the Iraqi civilian populace caused.
“UANI develops model legislation for adoption by the federal government and U.S. state governments to sever Iran from international trade and financial markets and prohibit investment in Iran. UANI’s model legislation provisions were included in the federal government’s Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA), and in debarment legislation adopted in California, Florida, New York, Indiana, Maryland and Connecticut that bars companies with Iran business from receiving taxpayer dollars.”

FDD spearheads a similar program: “FDD’s work has informed numerous pieces of Iran sanctions legislation, which were passed with overwhelming bipartisan congressional support, and which are now U.S. law, including the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act of 2012 (included as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013); the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012; Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012; and, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010.

These laws target Iran’s energy, financial, shipping, insurance, commercial, and proliferation activities, and the regime’s human rights abuses. The legislative measures are widely viewed as the most robust U.S. measures yet imposed against the Iranian regime. European and Canadian officials also relied on FDD research to inform their complementary sanctions policies. Beyond gasoline, the Iran Energy Project also seeks to reduce the amount of oil revenue the Iranian regime can devote to advancing its illicit nuclear program and repressing its citizens. As part of this effort, FDD has performed studies on sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank, the role of the IRGC in Iran’s energy sector, and the impact of a worldwide Iranian Oil Free Zone.”

According to Phillip Weiss, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were prophetic: “In late 1947, the JCS had written that ‘A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East to the point that United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.’ That is to say, the concern of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not with the security of Israel-but with the security of American lives.”

And so it has come to pass that the U.S. has sustained the existence of Israel through trillions (US dollars) in foreign assistance (since 1947). The U.S. has tolerated espionage and the theft of American technology, military secrets and nuclear weapons design. The U.S. government and media have been so bent by Israel-First influence that it is nearly impossible to openly criticize Israel about its thinly disguised destruction of the Palestinian people.

It just does not seem enough for the Israel-First network. How much more must Americans sacrifice for the sake of Israel? When will the big dog set things right and get the tail to begin to obey? Few Americans want to abandon Israel but to see the United States of America getting bent over the knee by Israel is unsettling.

And with the U.S. Attorney’s invocation of the State Secrets privilege now providing cover for UANI’s operations, it is obvious what is afoot. Circumstantially, the evidence is damning: U.S. and Israel intelligence data seems to be moving between UANI, FDD and the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the U.S. Treasury. The three organizations form a sort of a privatized sanctions enforcement regime apparently benefiting from government intelligence operatives and/or business intelligence snoops. Where you find David S. Cohen of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence you will also find some link to UANI or FDD. And then there is the fear factor: Financial sanctions, loss of business in Israel, and loss of political office in the U.S. How two non-profits became so powerful and feared is a testimony to the strength of the Israel-First organizations and their ability to bend the political consciousness of the United States of America

Some Items for “You” to Explore

“From: Bart Mongoven  To: Reva Bhalla
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 2:49:34 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central

Our mission (in the short term) is to determine how much flexibility is in the seemingly inflexible demand that the client…Client is Honeywell, which makes surveillance equipment Iran uses to monitor/secure pipelines and (allegedly) nuclear reactors…get out of Iran “right now.” The client says that it will not sign another contract but that it does not want to breach contracts that are in place. This is the position that Ingersoll Rand and Siemens have taken, and it seemed ok with UANI. At the same time, UANI is telling our client that the same pledge isn’t good enough. Is UANI still in talks or putting similar pressure on those who have pledged that they will leave when current contracts are up?…How did they decide to start targeting corporations — is there a model it is following (like the Save Darfur coalition or something else)? How do they choose their small list of targets since there are so many companies operating in Iran? Do they know people at the corporations they target? How closely do UANI and FDD work? Are there any deadlines in Iran — elections, feared nuke tests, coming deaths of really sick clerics, etc., that requires FDD and UANI show progress quickly?”

“As for the Marc Rich case, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy accurately described it as “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of the Justice Department.” Congressional investigators called it “unconscionable.” Fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, on the run for evading nearly $50 million in taxes, found the best lawyer he could buy: former Democratic White House counsel and intimate friend of Eric Holder, Jack Quinn. Despite his denials, memos showed Holder knew of the pardon in advance, failed to notify prosecutors and the FBI that it was coming, “and even gave Quinn public-relations advice on getting out the ‘legal merits of the case.’” The evidence clearly shows Holder and Quinn violated department protocols and colluded to keep the Justice Department out of the pardon deal.’

“The central issue in this case involves an allegation that the defendants, as senior officers, managers, agents and nominees for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (“BCCI”1), illegally and secretly sought to acquire ownership and maintain control of First American Corporation: FIRST AMERICAN CORP., et al., Plaintiffs, v. Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan AL-NAHYAN, et al., Defendants….United States District Court, District of Columbia. November 26, 1996. William Horace Jeffress, Jr., Herbert John Miller, Jr., Douglas Frank Curtis, Martin David Minsker, David S. Cohen, Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P., Washington, DC, William B. Shields, Washington, DC, for defendants Clark M. Clifford, Robert Alan Altman.”
“David S. Cohen…Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, who oversees the OFAC sanctions effort, reportedly following meetings with Israeli officials, said last week’s actions were meant to “tighten the screws and intensify the economic pressure against the Iranian regime. ”The US is counting on the Iranian people to turn against and overthrow their government because of sanctions-induced hardships…In reality, the sanctions target the civilian population and the “Iranian regime” won’t be much affected… Despite the public relations language that “food and medicine are exempted from the brutal US-led sanctions, as OFAC well knows, the reality is something else.

They know well the chilling effects of the sanctions on international suppliers of medicines and food stuffs with respect to a targeted country. The US Treasury department has thousands of gigabytes of data confirming that the boards of directors of international business do not, and will not allow their companies to risk millions of dollars in profits by technically violating any of the thousands of details in the sanctions — many of which are subject to interpretation — for the sake of doing business with Iran or Syria.”

“More about Stuart Levey’s intimate connections to both the US Treasury and the Justice Department: After leaving the Treasury Department, Mr. Levey was a Senior Fellow for National Security and Financial Integrity at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to his Treasury appointment, Mr. Levey served as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General at the US Department of Justice, having previously served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General and as the Chief of Staff of the Deputy Attorney General.

Where is Stuart Levey today? Why, he’s on the HSBC Board of Directors as the Chief Legal Officer of HSBC Holdings plc, the parent company of HSBC operations worldwide. We got all this information about Mr. Levey from his HSBC bio page. There we learned that he has been the drug money-laundering megabank’s Chief Legal Officer since January 2012. Thus, he would have been intimately involved in (and legally responsible for) the crafting of HSBC’s December 2012 Get Out of Jail Free settlement with the Justice Department. Intelligence from David S. Cohen’s group at Treasury must have also played a role in advising Justice on the historic settlement.”

David S. Cohen, Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence: “Increasing Iran’s Isolation…First, we will continue to identify ways to isolate Iran from the international financial system. We will do so by maintaining our aggressive campaign of applying sanctions against individuals and entities engaged in, or supporting, illicit Iranian activities and by engaging with the private sector and foreign governments to amplify the impact of these measures. As part of this effort we will also target Iran’s attempts to evade international sanctions through the use of non-bank financial institutions, such as exchange houses and money services businesses. And we will explore new measures to expand our ability to target Iran’s remaining links to the global financial sector.

In particular, we are looking carefully at actions that could increase pressure on the value of the rial. In that connection, we will continue to actively investigate any sale of gold to the Government of Iran, which can be used to prop up its currency and to compensate for the difficulty it faces in accessing its foreign reserves. We currently have authority under E.O. 13622 to target those who provide gold to the Iranian government and, as of July I, IFCA will expand that authority to target for sanctions the sale of gold to or from anyone in Iran for any purpose.
John Stanton can be reached at captainkong22@gmail.com.

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America’s Deep State: Foreign Agents, Lobbyists, Corporations, Military-Intel

August 4th, 2014

 

 

By John Stanton.

 

“In the period between the end of World War Two and Marshall’s meeting with Truman [May 12, 1948], the Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued no less than sixteen (by my count) papers on the Palestine issue. The most important of these was issued on March 31, 1948 and entitled “Force Requirements for Palestine.” In that paper, the JCS predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.”

The JCS speculated that these objectives included: initial Jewish sovereignty over a portion of Palestine, acceptance by the great powers of the right to unlimited immigration, the extension of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine and the expansion of “Eretz Israel” into Transjordan and into portions of Lebanon and Syria.This was not the only time the JCS expressed this worry. In late 1947, the JCS had written that “A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East” to the point that “United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.” That is to say, the concern of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not with the security of Israel- but with the security of American lives.” Philip Weiss

On July 31, 2014 Wikipedia patrolman PlotSpoiler substantially altered this writer’s minor Wikipedia entry placing tags questioning the legitimacy of the profile’s presence on Wikipedia, and removing a number of entries.  No problem there. Wiki’s guidelines supported many of the edits made to the entry. When Steve Martin’s character Navin, in the movie the Jerk, discovers that his name had been listed in a telephone book, he gets excited. In like fashion, I was pleased like Navin–some time back–when I saw my Wiki entry. Now an afterthought I rarely look at it.

But after the latest piece appeared online at Cryptome (United Against Nuclear Iran Donors Identified), I was curious. Are there really pro-Israel types who spend their days on the World Wide Web looking for detractors or critics? Given Israel’s current military operation, Israel’s information warriors had to have carefully constructed their military information support operations (MISO) knowing that they would be hammered in the media. On that score they have performed marvelously: Pushing the success of the Iron Dome which does, in fact, not work as promoted, and focusing on tunnel destruction as the core objective when it is not.

At any rate the Wiki profile had not been substantially modified since August of 2013. Within a day or so of the previous version of this article PlotSpoiler appeared and revised the Wiki profile. Wikipedia maintains extraordinary records of revisions located under the “view history” tab. The “talk” tab sometimes leads to remarkable debates over verbiage and meanings.

So all of this would be unremarkable except for the fact that Plot Spoiler’s track record indicates that he trolls Wiki to find and edit/annul, any bias or the appearance of legitimate criticism of Israel and the history and personalities that have led Israel to where it is today: Engaged in a military campaign to drive the Palestinians in Gaza into the sea.

It’s Foggy

Conscious Americans should do themselves a favor and watch The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara (Erol Morris). Commit those lessons to memory and get out on the World Wide Web and do some digging. That task is vitally important as America’s leaders are taking the nation into wars that can’t be won: Not against Russia, China or Iran. At home American citizens are denied access to water (Detroit) and infrastructure is in disrepair (Los Angeles). The US Constitution is broken as the CIA (executive branch) covers up torture and murder (“we tortured some folks” said President Obama) by blackmailing members of the US Senate (legislative branch). The US Supreme Court has given the American electoral process to the wealthy and corporations via its Citizens United decision.

And what can be said about the US support for the slaughter in Gaza. It’s disgusting on so many levels, not the least of which is the fear that US politicians, musicians, artists, publishers, reporters and editors have of the pro-Israeli lobby here in the USA. Moreover, US military commanders like General Martin Dempsy seem to be gleeful about the prospects of waging total war against Russia just as they are about supporting Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Americans do not have a government by and for “the American people.”

Foreign Power Operating in the USA: Jewish Federation, United Fund

“We have since worked with a broad coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish groups as well as with United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) to support legislative and regulatory actions requiring divestment from companies that do business with Iran, as well other sanctions. ‘Florida has been a leader in adopting strong measures to isolate the Iranian regime in the areas of procurement, divestment and banking. We encourage local communities across the U.S to join Florida to pass similar measures” said Tara Laxer, Florida Director of United Against a Nuclear Iran.’ Greater Miami Jewish Federation
The Jewish Federation and the Jewish United Fund are two of the donors to UANI. These nonprofit organizations are part of the wider US-based, pro-Israel juggernaut that shapes American national security strategy for Israel. Through connections, money, position and power they seek to immunize Israel from criticism for its mendacious, militaristic policies. They have succeeded in marginalizing discussion of America’s dangerously pro-Israel policies to the extent that the subject is taboo: Criticize Israel and automatically receive the badge of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile US warfighters have an additional cross to bear in the world of Islam as they are seen as pawns of Israel. More’s the pity American foes are energized by America’s blind support of a tiny nation, strategically insignificant but with a stranglehold over American national security interests.

Matt Apuzzo writing for the New York Times recently reported that the US Department of Justice has asked that United Against a Nuclear Iran’s donor lists and dollar amounts not be turned over in litigation involving a defamation lawsuit. “The Justice Department has temporarily blocked the group from having to reveal its donor list and other internal documents in a defamation lawsuit filed by a Greek shipping magnate the group accused of doing business with Iran. Government lawyers said they had a “good faith basis to believe that certain information” would jeopardize law enforcement investigations, reveal investigative techniques or identify confidential sources if released.”

Alex Kane of Mondoweiss wrote a piece titled “‘New York Times’ profile of group bent on sanctioning Iran fails to mention Israel connections,” back in June 2013. With a bit of effort he was able to find a number of UNAI’s contributors.
Many of UNAI’s donors can easily be found by doing some research on the World Wide Web. And what one finds, of course, is a superbly networked Jewish community, most on message advocating for the interests of the Israeli government. These pro-Israel nonprofits serve as the eyes and ears for Israel in the USA and as fundraisers/donors for groups like UNAI, who themselves take guidance from the Israeli government.

Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish United Fund of Israel

Americans know about the American Israel Political Action Committee and the influence they can bring to bear on American politicians and, through JINSA, American military commanders.

But fewer know about organizations like the Jewish Agency for Israel. Its annual report lists the 156 groups that make up the Jewish Federations of North America. They are located in nearly every major city in the USA.

The Jewish Agency for Israel had $478 million in revenue for 2013, according to its annual report. In that reports trends section it indicates that the Jewish Agency will work with the government of Israeli to enhance the identity of young Jews around the world. Its donor list must be the envy of every nonprofit in America. The list includes the Tisch Foundation (movies), IKEA (furniture), Rothschild Foundation (banking), Charles E. Smith (construction in Washington, DC), Larry Ellison (Cisco Systems), John Hagee (Christian evangelical), and Siemens (telecommunications).

UANI received $25,000 in funding from the Jewish United Fund of Chicago (JUF), a powerhouse fundraising organization connecting those of the Jewish community in Chicago. According to the organization’s board meeting minutes from early 2013 (readily available online), JUF has revenues of $206 million dollars. Of interest in those meeting minutes is a quote by Colonel Danny Tirza, the designer of the Security Fence that splits Israelis and Palestinians: “Not a single Palestinian home was damaged by the process [of building the fence].”

JUF allocated $30 million for Israel and Overseas Operations according to the board minutes.

JUF was one of the founders of the Israeli Action Network—along with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Jewish Federations of North America–whose mission is to fight against the boycott, divestiture and sanctions movement in the United States. JUF indicated in its board meeting minutes that although the American Studies Association (ASA) passed a resolution in 2013 in favor of boycotting Israeli academic institutions, the Israeli Action Network made a number of non-Jewish contacts and were able to convince a number of American university presidents to condemn the ASA resolution.

The ASA described the outcome of the vote for the resolution thus: “The members of the American Studies Association have endorsed the Association’s participation in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. In an election that attracted 1252 voters, the largest number of participants in the organization’s history, 66.05% of voters endorsed the resolution, while 30.5% of voters voted no and 3.43% abstained. The election was a response to the ASA National Council’s announcement on December 4 that it supported the academic boycott and, in an unprecedented action to ensure a democratic process, asked its membership for their approval.”

What’s UANI got that Obama’s justice department does not want released?

Ask the FBI and other American counterintelligence agencies two questions: How deep have Israeli operatives penetrated into America’s critical infrastructure sectors, American intelligence agencies, and the US military? Who are the members of the American Deep State?

As MC Hammer once said, “Can’t touch this.”

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The Obama Doctrine: Up Yours!

May 29th, 2014

 

By John Stanton.

The Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015 (Defense Authorization Act) should be renamed the Howard P. “Buck” McKeon Global Manifest Destiny Act of FY2015. The Defense Authorization Act reads like something that the Biffer-Baum Birds in Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book might have written. And the image that most accurately depicts the collective efforts of President Obama, the Pentagon and the US Congress in the design of American national security strategy is Dr. Seuss’ illustration of the Biffer-Baum Birds constructing their nest out of bricks and threads: a precarious construction indeed.

The Defense Authorization Act, and the President’s recent speech to West Point Cadets, provides unshakeable evidence that the political-military-corporate leadership learned no lessons from one unnecessarily prolonged war (Afghanistan) and one needless conflict (Iraq). The millions displaced in Iraq and Afghanistan spilling into neighboring countries like Lebanon and Pakistan; the thousands of Americans and civilians killed, wounded or collateralized (with families left adrift); the creation of failed states in Syria and Libya, and the scam that is the “promise to American combat veterans” to take care of them upon return to an increasingly dilapidated homeland are all mere lint to be brushed off the shoulders of America’s elite.

Schemers

In the midst of horrific treatment of former US military personnel at the hands of the Veterans Administration and assorted military programs–and the fact that America’s political and military leaders never prepared its warfighters or its citizens for over a decade of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and “on terror”—this statement from the US Congress is totally hollow. “The committee remains committed to providing America’s warfighters, veterans, and their families with the care and support they need, deserve, and have earned. This bill would authorize an extension of a wide array of bonuses, special and incentive pays for the Nation’s men and women in uniform.”

Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight was right about “authority.” Buck McKeon and his ilk “are all schemers.”

The President and his handlers seek to do it all over again this time against Russia and China through the Asia Pivot. There is some sort of weird neoconservative, neoliberal monster that now seems to exist in the form of President Obama (who is this guy, really?). And that means it’s “in your face” foreign and domestic policy. American activity in Ukraine serves as the best example of this “up yours” Obama Doctrine.

Up Yours! = Obama Doctrine

The Obama Doctrine narrative goes something like this: “Yeah, so we are going to brazenly assist in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected-though controversial president–with help from Brown Shirt fascist groups and the CIA and assorted NGO’s. Our senior US State Department officials and senators are going to openly serve tea and crumpets to coup supporters in Maiden Square in Kiev. Once we have succeeded in toppling the elected government (nullifying the prior votes in Eastern Ukraine) we will then rob you of your Black Sea port of naval operations. Next we are going to send our vice president and CIA director to provide legitimacy to our marionettes in Kiev. After that we are going to have US military advisors/contractors assist in designing operations to destroy insurgent uprisings in Eastern Ukraine that oppose Kiev’s will. As this US government backed coup is a military operation, military information support operations (MISO) will be required and that means shaping opinion in the USA and Ukraine and the EU, which, in turn means propaganda to legitimize the coup. Yeah, you will try to get your propaganda out but it will not matter. Anyway we will trot out the Hitler ghosts for our purposes and will we get our legacy media outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times to vilify Russia (China too). And do you know what? There is nothing you can do about it. Oh, and for good measure we are going to ensure that member of the world’s richest club ascends to the presidency of the new Ukraine amidst a rigged election. And we are going to do the same thing in other countries. Up yours, man.”

Forget tribal, realist, idealist, neoconservative and neoliberal theories of international relations. The world is in the midst of some sort of emergent Gang Theory of international relations in which there is no Concert of Nations, or United Nations, but a Gang of Cultures. The USA’s culture of violence has made it ideally suited for such a world.

Coup’s for All!

The USA has given the green light to the coups in Ukraine, Thailand and Egypt. In doing so it has remained historically consistent in its debasement of representative democracy, hiding the real agenda.  There was a time when the US government, in collaboration with the mainstream media, could control the flow of information about such coups comparing them to the glorious American Revolution. The Internet and World Wide Web has changed the dynamic. America’s leaders have exhausted their supply of credibility. The world has learned from Assange/Wikileaks; Edward Snowden/Glenn Greenwald; and NSA/CIA whistleblowers like John Kiriakou that the grand brains running America into the ground do so for money, power and market-share–nothing more. The ruthlessness of their buy-sell ideology is plain sight.

For example, note the similarity of the mercenary verbiage of Reuters and the Defense Authorization Act’s authors in the US Congress. The 21st Century version of Idi Amin, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, grabbed the presidency there recently. Al-Sisi led the military coup that toppled the former president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi. The turnout for Morsi was 52 percent, for al-Sisi 46 percent.

Reuters: “One of Sisi’s biggest tests will be the politically-sensitive issue of energy subsidies which drain billions of dollars from the state budget every year. Businessmen have urged Sisi to raise energy prices even though that may trigger protests, or risk sinking the economy. Investors want Sisi to end energy subsidies, impose a clear tax regime and give guidance on the direction of the exchange rate.”

US Congress Defense Authorization Act: “This bill would also recognize the President’s determination that the Arab Republic of Egypt is progressing in its democratic transition and supports the President’s decision to deliver 10 Apache helicopters to Egypt for counterterrorism operations.”

In short, pillage Egypt’s middle and lower classes and use the money extracted from them to bow before investors and buy weapons ostensibly for counterterrorism. In fact, when the riots over rising food and energy prices take place in Egypt, or Ukraine or Thailand, those US Apache helicopters—and other American made military/law enforcement equipment– will be used to drive women, children and other protestors from the streets.

Will the day arrive in the USA when local and state law enforcement is absorbed completely by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security? Will officers of the National Police Department have licenses to kill?

Perhaps Ukraine is a window to the future of the USA’s Republic—maybe even Thailand or Egypt.

Secret Weapon for Asia Pivot: Diplomatic Functions to the US Military

How did the Human Terrain System (HTS) emerge as one of Obama’s secret weapons for the Asia Pivot?  Apparently Secretary of the Army John McHugh is a proponent of the program.  According to the Defense Authorization Act, PACOM gets the privilege of a Pilot Program for the Human Terrain System.  “This section would require the Secretary of the Army to conduct a pilot program to utilize Human Terrain System assets in the U.S. Pacific Command area of responsibility to support Phase 0 shaping operations and to support the theater security cooperation plans of the geographic combatant commander.”

Phase Zero Shaping, according to the Center for Global Development, can be seen as part of the Pentagon’s absorption of US diplomatic functions normally undertaken by the US State Department. The resources and latitude that the Pentagon provides to its Geographic Combatant Commanders is very broad. “The danger in this scheme is that it puts the Pentagon in the driver’s seat and threatens to militarize U.S. engagement… Interagency coordination is one thing, but assigning leadership for this integration to the Pentagon is a risky proposition… What the Pentagon is calling ‘Phase Zero’ sounds suspiciously like what some of us still quaintly refer to as ‘diplomacy’ and ‘development assistance.’ Given the Pentagon’s massive resources compared to civilian agencies, any ‘shaping’ activities that emerge…are likely to reflect U.S. military priorities and give short shrift to broader political and developmental considerations. After all, DOD’s primary concern in weak and failing states is to build the capacity of local security forces. Whether those forces are under effective and accountable civilian control is a secondary concern,” said the Center for Global Development.

The ultimate “Up Yours” just might be saddling PACOM with the US Army’s HTS.

At any rate, the Defense Authorization Act–buttressed by Obama’s recent West Point speech–has put the world on notice that “The Yanks are coming for your markets and your land!” That, of course, means more coups and, with the US national fear factor dropping, perhaps a false flag operation or two.

Starship Troopers: Kill the Bug!

The movie Starship Troopers depicts galactic traveling insects fighting against humans for domination of the vast void of space. But one need not go to the movies to understand what a clear and present danger bugs or “invasive species” are to the US Homeland and the US military. The Defense Authorization Act recognizes this. “The committee notes that in the fall of 2013, the coconut rhinoceros beetle, an invasive species to the Hawaiian Islands and Guam, was discovered on the island of Oahu and has been found on Guam since 2007. While it is unknown how the species came to Hawaii or Guam, the committee is aware that a coconut rhinoceros beetle population was identified on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, which is in close proximity to Honolulu International Airport. Since discovering the existence of this invasive species on Hawaii, the committee notes that the Department of Agriculture has been leading the effort, jointly with the Department of Defense and appropriate State agencies, to eliminate breeding sites, and monitor and control the spread of the coconut rhinoceros beetle on the island of Oahu.”

According to the US Navy’s Shipboard Pest Management Manual, the German cockroach is the most common insect on US Navy surface vessels and submarines. They infest kitchen areas and lurk in the dark negatively impacting the morale of the sailors. There are scores of insects, like the Dermestid Beetle, that make their homes on US Navy vessels. Just a subtle reminder from the Earth that the most advanced American technology/weaponry literally has bugs living and breeding in and on it.

So what’s the point with “invasive species”? Post-911 hysteria led to a paper in the US Army magazine Parameters discussing the use of insects by terrorists to disrupt/damage daily life in the USA. In that paper (Invasive Threats to the American Homeland by Robert Pratt), prefaced by a quote from President George W. Bush, we learn that “A 1999 study by Cornell University estimated that approximately 50,000 foreign species have invaded the United States since the 1700s, and the number in the last 30 years has increased at an alarming rate.”

It is one thing to invest and engage in “pest management” but a war on terrorists and their bugs?”

Such is the warped mentality of American culture reflected in the authors of the Defense Authorization Act and, sadly, President Obama.

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USA a Sinkhole: What’s Worth Fighting For?

May 7th, 2014

 

By John Stanton.

“Now come on Wall Street don’t be slow, why man this war is a-go-go. There’s plenty good money to be made, supplying the army with the tools of the trade. Now come on generals let’s move fast, your big chance is here at last. Time you got out and get those Reds, because the only good commie is one that’s dead. You know that peace can only be won, when you blow ‘em all to kingdom come.” Vietnam Song, Country Joe and the Fish, 1969

“Corruption is strangling the land. The police force is watching the people, and the people just can’t understand. We don’t know how to mind our own business, ’cause the whole world’s got to be just like us. Now we are fighting a war over there, no matter who’s the winner we can’t pay the cost. ‘Cause there’s a monster on the loose, it has got our heads into the noose. And it just sits there watching. America, where are you now, don’t you care about your sons and daughters. Don’t you know we need you now, we can’t fight alone against the Monster.” Monster by Steppenwolf, 1969

First, Reduce the Masses Ability to Reproduce

A nation that refuses to take care of all of its mothers and all of its young children has no future.

“The United States was among just eight countries that experienced an increase in maternal death rates since 2003 – joining countries including Afghanistan and El Salvador….’There’s no reason that a country with the resources and the medical expertise that the US has should see maternal deaths going up,’ said Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation and a co-founder of the Global Burden of Disease. ‘The next step would be to examine local-level differences in maternal deaths to look for patterns and the drivers behind those patterns,’ reports Jennifer Abel writing in Consumer Affairs. Actually there is a very good reason why the maternal deaths are rising in the USA. Most American leaders really don’t care who in America lives or dies—or why–and neither does the bulk of the American population. The elected representatives are merely a reflection of the callous, hollow nature of a long warring republic.

Emergency preparedness is no longer just for the tornado or snowstorm but for the misery of austerity, job loss, and the aging relative with Alzheimer’s who must move home with the newlyweds because federal benefits have been cut, or, more likely, the diversion of more US resources to the nation’s national security apparatus and its defense industrial base. Mattress savings techniques are coming back.

If there were fully functional representative democracy in the USA—and with that a coherent US National Security Strategy that includes the health and welfare of its domestic infrastructure and its people—the USA would not be collapsing from within even as it stirs up mayhem, enmity and civil war nearly everywhere around the globe: Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Egypt, Pakistan and Xinjiang (PRC) are home to scores of overt and covert US officials, if not activity duty foreign internal defense operators. Dozens of 501C3, not for profit, non-governmental organizations–funded directly by the US government or subsidized indirectly through federal tax exemptions–are a key part of the shape-shifting mix of American ideologues abroad that instigate/lobby for “democracy” in capitals around the world: The Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy are two of the most well-known rabble rousers.

It is laughable that they proclaim as their mission “the teaching” of American values to foreigners. More’s the pity is the millions of US dollars being given to the usurper government in Ukraine to ensure a “free and fair” election in that country. President Obama says this: “The United States is contributing an $11.4 million package to support the integrity of the May 25 elections.   These funds are being used to advance democratic processes – not to support a particular candidate or electoral outcome.  These efforts include voter education programs, transparent election administration, effective oversight of the election process, election security and a redress of infractions, and a diverse, balanced and policy-focused media environment.” In short, American law firms, press relation groups and assorted consultants will be under contract to make sure the USA gets the outcome it wants in Ukraine. Some of those organizations that have done business in Ukraine are listed in the Foreign Agents Registration database. Wiley Rein and Tauzin Associates are among them.

Just what are those American values? Maternal death rates on the rise in 2014; 16 million children on some sort of food aid in 2014; 8.2 percent of children born below 2500 grams; 14 percent of Americans unemployed; and crushing debt loads for the bulk of students graduating from America’s colleges and universities. One would never know that the USA has severe structural issues with both its physical and mental infrastructure. Yet those problems are normally blamed not on American citizens/government but rather on the Russians, Climate Change, Immigrants, the Chinese, “unqualified American workers,” Big Government, and Welfare Moms.

Second, Take Away the People’s Livelihood (but legalize pot first)

According to Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (1972):  “Our Nation is being challenged by a set of new issues having to do, in one way or another, with the quality of life. This theme emerges from the alienation and disenchantment of blue-collar workers, from the demands of minorities for equitable participation in “the system,” from the search by women for a new identity and by the quest of the aged for a respected and useful social role, from the youth who seek a voice in their society, and from almost everyone who suffers from the frustrations of life in a mass society. Rhetorical, ideological, and partisan responses to these issues abound. But truly effective responses are far more likely to be made if the obscure and complex sources of discontent are sorted out, and the lever of public policy is appropriately placed.

Atonie is a condition of deracination–a feeling of rootlessness, lifelessness and dissociation–a word which in the original Greek meant a string that does not vibrate, that has lost its vitality. Besides lending vitality to existence, work helps establish the regularity of life, its basic rhythms and cyclical patterns of day, week, month, and year. Without work, time patterns become confused. One recalls the drifting in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: What shall I do. . . .What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do? When duration of unemployment has been prolonged, unemployed workers progress from optimism through pessimism to fatalism. Attitudes toward the future and toward the community and home deteriorate. Children of long-term unemployed and marginally employed workers uniformly show poorer school grades.  There are so many unconscious and group needs that work meets that unemployment may lead not only to generalized anxiety, but to free-floating hostility, somatic symptoms and the unconscious selection of some serious illnesses.

Albert Camus wrote that ‘Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.’ Our analyses of Work in America leads to much the same conclusion: Because work is central to the lives of so many Americans, either the absence of work or employment in meaningless work is creating an increasingly intolerable situation. The human costs of this state of affairs are manifested in worker alienation, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other symptoms of poor mental health. Moreover, much of our tax money is expended in an effort to compensate for problems with at least a part of their genesis in the world of work. A great part of the staggering national bill in the areas of crime and delinquency, mental and physical health, manpower and welfare are generated in our national policies and attitudes towards work.”

Third, Create War and Send the People to Fight and Die

Well come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. He got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam. Put down your books and pick up a gun, we’re going have a whole lot of fun. And its 1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, the next stop is Vietnam. And its 5, 6, 7 open up the pearly gates. Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, we’re all going die (Vietnam Song, Country Joe and the Fish).

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FIDO and General Wes Clark in Ukraine: US Advisors on the Ground, Deadly Messenger

April 22nd, 2014

 

By John Stanton.

“Oh my God, I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it! You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

That’s the dialogue that accompanies the final scene of the classic movie Planet of the Apes, starring the fine actor Charlton Heston.  As Heston’s character (Taylor) finally escapes from Ape Society, he is seen riding a horse along a beach with his female, human companion.  A wide shadow appears in front of the horse Heston is riding and he is seen dismounting. He then falls to his knees overcome by grief, pounding the sand whilst uttering the dialogue above. The camera then cuts to the top third of the Statue of Liberty, the remainder buried in the sand.

News that General Wesley Clark, USA (Ret.) visited the Ukraine at the behest of the National Security Advisor there-and also a senior member of Ukraine’s parliament—should be a cause for alarm. A nonprofit foundation was involved in this exercise (more below). There is a sense of open, almost joyful viciousness in all this pro-war, anti-Russian sentiments on opinion pages and television broadcasts. It is certainly racist and demeaning in tone. Such is the first step in convincing the public that the “transgressor” is equivalent to a retrovirus.

Interim Report #1: Immediate Improvements Needed in Rapidly Implementing Non-Lethal US Military Assistance for Defense of Ukraine is available at Cryptome (and the New York Times) for viewing. General Clark and a former strategy advisor to Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger named Dr. Phillip Karber, indicates that the two “participated in 35 meeting [sic] with senior officials, military commanders and various politicians; with Karber visiting front line formations on the Northern, Eastern and Southern Fronts.”  The two aging Cold War Warriors recommend immediate shipments of American Body Armor, Night Vision Devices, Communications Equipment, Aviation Fuel and “to maximize their defense potential” Clark and Karber recommend the acquisition of Mig-29’s, T-72 tanks, Man-Portable Air Defenses, and Anti-Tank weapons.

Partial expenses for the Clark and Karber expedition were paid for by the Potomac Foundation, a nonprofit foundation in Vienna, Virginia. According to three of its Form 990’s, over the years it has received grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Soros/Open Society Fund, and Boeing. According to an official at the Potomac Foundation, some support is provided to Georgetown University, in particular, to Karber (the Chinese Tunnel guy). The official stated that the group does not have a website.

The Potomac Foundations also runs China Vitae as a charitable activity. According to China Vitae’s website it “was founded in 2001 with two objectives: to raise the quality and quantity of English language, biographical information on China’s top leadership; and to create a centralized repository of such information available to a worldwide audience.” China Vitae is run by husband and wife team David and Susan Gries. David Gries is on the board of the Washington Institute for Foreign Affairs and has affiliations to the CIA and Georgetown University. Members listed on the China Vitae website have an assortment of affiliations to universities, corporations and the US government.

The Sith Order Returns from the Dark Side: The General who wanted war with Russia

According to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, writing in 1999, General Clark is a madman. “…anyone seeking to understand the bloody fiasco od the Serbian war need hardly look any further than the person of the beribboned Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley K. Clark…A vain, pompous brownnoser, and the poster child for everything that is wrong with the GO (general officer corps)…”

In Wesley Clark: The Guy Who Almost Started World War III by Stella Jatras, “No sooner are we told by Britain’s top generals that the Russians played a crucial role in ending the West’s war against Yugoslavia than we learn that if NATO’s supreme commander, the American General Wesley Clark, had had his way, British paratroopers would have stormed Pristina airport, threatening to unleash the most frightening crisis with Moscow since the end of the Cold War. ‘I’m not going to start the third world war for you,’ General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international KFOR peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen.

Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo’s provincial capital. The Times of London reported on 23 May 2001 in an article titled, ‘Kosovo clash of allied generals,’ that ‘General Sir Michael Jackson [was] told that he would have to resign if he refused to obey an order by the American commander of NATO’s forces during the Kosovo war to stop the Russians from seizing control of Pristina airport in June 1999. If General Clark had had his way, we might have gone to war with Russia, or at least resurrected vestiges of the Cold War and we certainly would have had hundreds if not thousands of casualties in an ill-conceived ground war”

Foreign Internal Defense Operations (FIDO): Standard Playbook

Given that US President Obama has blessed the new Kiev government with legitimacy, America now seeks to stabilize the country with infusions of cash, arms and advisors. And that means that FIDO is likely underway there. Former special operations soldiers—now defense contractors—are on the ground in Ukraine, and so are active duty special operators/advisors perhaps out of US Special Operations Command. They are training/tutoring Ukrainian security personnel.

The execution of US national security/military strategy, operations, tactics are very predictable and based on using the impressive US Instruments of National Power to shape the target environment in America’s favor. There are many simultaneous operations underway both covert and quite overt. In particular, military information support operations (MISO) begin with manipulating the public consciousness through cyber and meat-space means. That effort is clearly seen in the hyper-hypocritical statements on Russia’s annexation of Crimea made by all top national security officials and members of the US Congress. The official words-of-war are gleefully reproduced by the mainstream media and assorted NGO’s for a public seemingly unaware or uncaring of such serious international matters. There is little opposition to the anti-Russian, pro-war madness.

Then again American infrastructure is crumbling from sea-to-shining sea and so there is a solid rational that can be made for not caring about foreign affairs.

But Americans have seen this movie over and over again since the end of World War II. The script is the same, the bullshit propaganda/myth making is the same, the goals and objectives are the same, and the demonization of the adversary is the same. It is just so formulaic: the USA instigates and creatively destroys; Russia (or any opponent) attempts to counterpunch; China waits for the USA/Russia to commit suicide; and the rest of the world cowers, as they should, selecting to side with whatever one of the three giants can give them the best financial deal or “muscle.”

At any rate, according to Joint Publication 3-22, Foreign Internal Defense, 12 July 2010, “…joint operations, involving the application of all instruments of national power, support host nation efforts to build capability and capacity to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency… An internal defense and development program (IDAD) program blends four interdependent functions to prevent or counter internal threats. Balanced development attempts to achieve national goals through political, social, and economic programs, allowing all individuals and groups in the society to share in the rewards of development, thus alleviating frustration.

The security function includes all activities implemented in order to protect the populace from violence and to provide a safe environment for national development. The security effort should establish an environment in which the HN can provide for its own security with limited US support. Neutralization, a political concept, physically and psychologically separates an insurgent or criminal element from the population, thereby making threatening elements irrelevant to the political process. It includes all lawful measures (except those that degrade the government’s legitimacy) to discredit, disrupt, preempt, disorganize, and defeat the insurgent organization. Mobilization provides organized manpower and materiel resources and includes all activities to motivate and organize popular support of the government. Mobilization allows the government to strengthen existing institutions, to develop new ones to respond to demands, and promotes the government’s legitimacy…”

The ideals stated in the American Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution are currently being crushed by those addicted to warfare, power, money and a view that “they” are the anointed ones, the ones that know what’s best for the masses. Great leaders—with all their faults—do not exist any longer in America, nor does a citizenry that vigorously debates and then instructs their representatives to compromise for the sake of the nation, not an ideology.  The efforts of George Washington, George C. Marshall, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt may one day be viewed by future historians/generations as folly.

The maniacs are in charge. “God damn them all to hell!”

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Culling the Human Herd in the 21st Century: The Savage Sorting

April 9th, 2014

 

By John Stanton.

“There is a de facto redefinition of “the economy” when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything…easily fall off the edge of what is defined as “the economy” and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing number of well-educated students and professionals who leave…all together. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and poor from standard measures. Such a redefinition makes “the economy” presentable, so to speak, allowing it to show a slight growth of GDP per capita.

The reality at the ground level is more akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them. This shrinking and redefinition of economic space so that economies can be represented as being “back on track” holds for a growing number of economies in the European Union and elsewhere [like the United  States]… One indication of a people’s economic despair is a sharp rise in suicide. This trend is evident in several countries worldwide from India to the United States…

The channels for expulsion vary greatly. They include austerity policies that have helped shrink the economies of Greece and Spain, environmental policies that overlook toxic emissions from enormous mining operations in Norilsk, Russia and the American state of Montana…if our concern is environmental destruction rather that interstate politics, the fact that both these mining operations are heavy polluters matters more than the fact that one is in Russia and the other in the United States…The diverse processes and conditions I include under the notion of expulsion all share one aspect: they are acute. While the abjectly poor worldwide are  the most extreme instance, I do include such diverse conditions as the  impoverishment of the middle classes in rich countries, the evictions of millions of small farmers in poor countries…Then there are the countless displaced people warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, the minoritized groups in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons and the able bodied unemployed men and women warehoused in ghettoes and slums…Some are new types of expulsions, such as the 9 million households in the United  States whose homes were foreclosed…”

Saskia Sassen’s forthcoming book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard-Belknap Press, May 2014) begins its sobering journey with an Introduction titled, “The Savage Sorting.”  The Savage Sorting seems destined to become the short-form description of 21^st Century to be remembered, if at all, in some distant future by a genetically reengineered humanity (and biosphere).

Most television watchers are familiar with programming on National Geographic or Animal Planet that depicts “life in the wild” for non-human animals. Typical scenes from “nature” programming include lions and hyenas hunting down young, old and infirm wildebeests or zebras. Ultimately successful, they engage in a feeding frenzy. Sometimes the prey is still alive as it is being disemboweled by the predators. Chimpanzees attack, kill and eat rivals whilst emitting screams that unsettle the viewer’s nerves. Aging grizzly bears are observed losing their prized hunting spots to the young and are left to feed on scraps, themselves destined to be prey for creatures large and small. As the “nature” show goes on, the soothing voice of the human narrator assures the audience that it is all part of the “natural order of things.”

That “natural order of things” also includes human-on-human expulsion and extermination. But before touching a bit on the 21^st Century culling of the human herd, it is worth noting that human-on-non-human carnage continues into this “modern” century. One of the practices of this new age of enlightenment is “Canned Hunting” in South Africa. European, North Americans and Chinese big game hunters, according to the Guardian newspaper, sometimes sit on the back of pickup trucks and wait for lions—bred for a “guaranteed kill”–to run by or walk up to the truck.  In the Guardian’s “The lions bred for slaughter: Canned hunting is a fast-growing business in South Africa, where thousands of lions are being bred on farms to be shot by wealthy foreign trophy-hunters,” the reader is confronted with a repulsive picture of a happy hunter gloating over a dead lion.

Humans Don’t Discriminate, They Eliminate Non-Humans and Humans Equally

Then there is the case of the Gray Wolf in the United States. According to The Wolf that Changed America, “Wolves have been feared, hated, and persecuted for hundreds of years in North America. Before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans incorporated wolves into their legends and rituals, portraying them as ferocious warriors in some traditions and thieving spirits in others. European Americans, however, simply despised wolves. Many, including celebrated painter and naturalist John James Audubon, believed wolves ought to be eradicated for the threat they posed to valuable livestock. This attitude enabled a centuries-long extermination campaign that nearly wiped out the gray wolf in the continental United States by 1950.”

Now that Grey Wolf populations are increasing—thanks to the work of some bright humans–denizens in American states like Idaho, Wyoming and Michigan want to get back to the way things were in the good old 1950’s. Killing a wolf and taking a “selfie” with the fur that once adorned its body is still an acceptable practice in some quarters. Those quarters are typically dominated by weekend warriors (take another look at the canned hunter on display in the Guardian for the classic “smirk”). Then again American hunters assisted in the near elimination of the America’s mascot: the Bald Eagle.

But it is not just Americans that seek the death penalty for the Gray Wolf (or are crushing the biosphere that that supports life on Earth). It is the same story, for example, in France. According to the Telegraph, UK, “Conservation groups are furious. To return to wolf hunts as if we were in the Middle Ages is scandalous. That the local authorities are organizing them is even worse, said Jean-François Darmstaedter, president of Ferus, who threatened to challenge their legality in the European courts.

We call them ‘political killings’ as their only aim is to allow farmers to let off steam but they will solve nothing. Blindly shooting wolves will have no effect other than to exacerbate the problem. If you kill the alpha male, you can split up a pack, which will cause far more damage. The only solution, he said, was to protect flocks properly by using fierce Pyrenean Patou mountain dogs, penning sheep inside high electrified fences at night and firing warning shots if wolves approach. These measures can reduce predation to almost nil, he insisted.”

Just Like the Wolves: Humans Negated, Written off, Warehoused, Displaced

There is a statement in the comment section on PBS’ The Wolf that Changed America. It serves as a brutal reminder of the willingness of humanity to expel through genocide, war, and economic/statistical cleansing many collections of human and non-human beings. Those expulsed rarely have the honor of even being lost to recorded history. America’s Native Americans provide an example. “The context omitted by this film [The Wolf that Changed America] is the conquest and colonization of New Mexico by the United States and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Americans to make way for cattle ranching, to which the wolves were a threat. Now we speak of the conservation of the “wilderness” and its wild inhabitants. But why are the human inhabitants denied and negated?”

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), there are nearly 30 million internally displaced people (IDP’s) around the globe who are, essentially, homeless. War is a primary cause. Making war is a conscious decision by politicians and military leaders who rarely consider the destructive consequences for the indigenous population, culture and infrastructure. As Sassen has pointed out, expulsions are “made” and war may be the ultimate form of expulsion.  For example, America’s covert actions in the Syrian civil war and its two invasions of Iraq have contributed significantly to the IDP numbers. Remarkably, as a consequence of US war-making the Christian cultures of Iraq and Syria have nearly vanished.

IDMC notes that IDP’s are the result of “conflict, generalized violence, human rights violations and natural hazard-induced disasters. It should be noted that these figures do not include all IDP situations by other causes, such as development projects. Furthermore, while the figures have been presented separately here, our analysis shows that conflict, disasters and resulting displacement have multiple and often overlapping root causes and impacts. Over half of the countries affected by conflict since 1970 were also affected by disaster-induced displacement in the last five years alone. This is an important consideration for those tasked with policy-making, protection and assistance.” IDMC reports that there are another 37 million IDP’s due to “disasters”. The USA accounts for 900,000 of that number. Where do they go?

If You Want a Good Job, Commit a Crime and Go to Prison

The invisible laborers in America’s prisons reduce the costs for goods and services offered by many large US corporations. Skilled and captive prison labor is used by business and state governments on a regular basis ostensibly to cover the costs of incarceration. There is irony here: What does it say about a society that allows government and business to hire prisoners rather than employing law abiding citizens who are equal to the task?  What’s the point of being a “good citizen” when there is little reward in playing by the rules of the State-Corporate designed system of life?

Sassen notes that “Mass incarceration has long been present in extreme dictatorships. But today it is emerging as inextricably linked to advanced capitalism…Most of the people who are being incarcerated  are also the people who do not have work and from whom work will not be found in our current epoch…today’s prisoners in the United  States and United Kingdom are increasingly today’s version of the surplus laboring population common in the brutal beginnings of modern capitalism…many transnational corporations have set up satellite factories inside prisons…Available evidence suggests that the majority of corporations profiting [in some form] from prison labor [include] Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, Starbucks and Walmart…the profits of private prisons are represented are represented as a positive addition to a country’s GDP even as they are a government cost; in contrast, government run prisons are only represented as government debt.”

The State-Corporate Complex consciously makes decisions that “expel” one collective group and incorporates another.  According to Sassen, “One familiar example in the West that is both complex and extreme is the expelling of low income workers and the unemployed from government social welfare and health programs, as well as from corporate insurance and unemployment support…These expulsion are made. The instruments for this making range from elementary policies to complex institutions, systems and techniques that require specialized knowledge and intricate organizational formats.”

Fight the Power! OK! But Where is It Located?

“People as consumers and workers play a diminished role in the profits of a range of economic sectors… This tells us that our period is not quite like earlier forms of capitalism that thrived on the on the accelerated expansion of prosperous working and middle classes…What is next? Historically the oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive at a great distance from their “oppressors”. Further, the oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks and machines with no obvious center” notes Sassen.

The worst elements of capitalism/globalization are everyone’s problem. Destruction of the biosphere and much of human and non-human life, and expulsion from society and the record books is a transnational matter. Someone has to care and someone has to remember. It is no coincidence that wherever on the planet one finds one of the tentacles of the globalized State-Corporate System, Expulsions of every kind take place.

Culling the human herd is, of course, best accomplished through a regional or global conflagration pitting one state, or proxy, versus another. In such a conflict everything “is game” (non-humans too).The preeminent warring power on the planet, the United States, is—in a case of acute irony– threatening military action and stiffer economic sanctions on Russia if it proceeds under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to “save” Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine. And for good measure the US recently warned China not to look to Russia’s annexing of the Crimea as a model for an invasion and occupation of the disputed Diaoyu Islands that Japan claims.

How About a Canned War with Humans?

So is the State-Corporate System. designed and led by the USA, gearing up for a shooting/economic war against both Russia and China? Can you say tactical nuclear weapons? The reality is that there are too many people in the world. A large number of them are a drag on economic performance. Many of them are “old” and blocking opportunities for the young. There simply is not enough work and the State-Corporate System does not want to pay “living wages.” Why should they when prison labor is widely available.

Odd that the centenary of World War I takes place in 2014.

Humans can only hope that the mystical deity “God” does not become a reality. Worse still would be the appearance of an extraterrestrial species that arrives and demands an accounting of humanity’s stewardship of the Earth and the life it supports.

Being expelled from the planet would be quite painful.

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Obama’s web portal contractor runs the US Army’s Human Terrain System: CGI Federal everywhere

December 23rd, 2013

By John Stanton.



Who knew?

President Obama should have made sure that his staff checked out the performance credentials of CGI Federal before awarding it millions of dollars to push out a key element of the president’s signature healthcare initiative.

The Washington Post, Daily Caller, New York Times, Probublica, Wall Street Journal and, well, hell!, all of the legacy and non-legacy media, have now reported widely on the flaky technical work of CGI Federal and the journey that led to the healthcare’s website flop. That of course refers to the debacle that is Obama’s Affordable Care Act web portal which was to have allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans to register for various health care plans.

CGI Federal has a bumpy performance track record that also includes US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) which remains a controversial and troubled program with ongoing allegations of time card fraud and employee harassment.

PolicMic has listed the US Army’s HTS program as number four in its top five list of most wasteful government programs. One of the comments attached to that piece by “Beau” implies that the HTS troubles date only to the launch of the that program and a year or so after that. That is wildly incorrect as articles reporting on the continued woes of the Human Terrain program—as late as 2013—have appeared in publications in the United States and abroad.

In an intriguing twist it seems that the Affordable Care Act web portal and the Army’s Human Terrain System were awarded to CGI Federal based, in large part, on having friends in high places. According to the The Daily Caller, “Toni Townes-Whitley, who worked alongside her classmate Michelle Obama in multiple Princeton University student groups, became senior vice president of CGI Federal in May 2010. CGI was the only eligible company considered for the contract to build the disastrous HealthCare.gov Obamacare enrollment site.

Over at the Army’s HTS, there is a nagging belief that CGI Federal received the HTS award largely thanks to a friendship between former HTS head Colonel Sharon Hamilton, USA (Ret.) and one of the founders of Oberon Associates, a subsidiary of CGI Federal (earlier Oberon was a division of Stanley which itself was purchased by CGI). Some also hold the view that some personnel in BAE (former HTS contractor) conspired to steer the contract towards CGI.

The saddest element in both these cases is that the personnel who work in the weeds each and every day—and those citizens/foreigners who are suppose to be the beneficiaries of these efforts—get screwed: there is no polite way to put it. The exact same thing is happening over at the US Army’s Center for Substance Abuse Programs. And these days, no one in these programs dare speak out about corruption or program flaws as that is now treated as a security breach.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer. Reach him at captainkong22@gmail.com.

– See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/11546#sthash.peHYS1JY.dpuf

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President Obama Channels Lord Cromwell: Great Statesmen Tamper with Packets

July 10th, 2013

 

by John Stanton.

Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden dossier concerning the American Leviathan’s practice of harvesting, storing and analyzing the information/conversations of its own and the world’s political, military, economic and cultural gate keepers is fascinating. This is so not due to the technological sophistication and global reach of the USA’s intelligence capabilities, but for what it implies about the current state and future of the collective nation-states known as Western Democracies. And it undercuts nearly every ideal in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, leaving the dry, functional and core text of the US Constitution as the last mooring line to—paraphrasing Russell Crowe in the movie the Gladiator—“The dream that was once the United States.” It also challenges the foundations of the “free” market and “free will”: but more on that in a moment.

Critics of surveillance technologies and intelligence gathering–and advocates of the nebulous concept of selfhood and privacy– would do well to school themselves by studying the documents that outline America’s

national security strategy

. Most all of these are publically available at a collection of websites: DTIC, Cryptome, Public Intelligence, Cryptocomb, and the National Defense University, et al. If critics do not understand their opponents and their thinking—as Sun Tzu once advised—then building a convincing case against the ills of the world is a Vaudevillian exercise. Further, the willful ignorance by proponents and opponents of the history of spying, surveillance and even privacy cripples the thinking of both sides. Absent availing oneself of learning, there can be no meaningful discussion on matters of this import.
It is absolutely vital to visit with the historical literary record as it is critical to understanding the philosophy and foundations of the Western world’s approach to intelligence gathering, surveillance and the role of the state/church, corporation and individual in that process. Brushing off this vast literary goldmine is done at one’s own peril.

Literature to the Rescue!

As authors David Rosen and Aaron Santesso point out in the exceptional The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature and Personhood (Yale 2013), the matter of individuality or personhood—and how much “others” (state, society) should legitimately know about that individual–is a centuries old matter dating, at least, back to the Middle Ages. The topic was the subject of some of the Western world’s top practitioners of poetry and prose, along with heavyweight political and cultural philosophers and critics. Among them: Swift, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Richardson (Clarissa), Hume, Mill. James, Adam Smith, Pope, Defoe, Locke, Bentham, Thomas More, Goffman (dramaturgy).

Is President Barack Obama’s—or for that matter G.W. Bush and W.J. Clinton’s–thinking all that different from Cromwell? Is it a surprise that the US Postal Service, Telecoms and ISP’s collect metadata? Sure, the speed of exchange has changed and the human geospatial landscape has altered, but the core thinking remains the same. It is important, of course, not reach-back and pulling forward thoughts that are out of place in the 21st Century. But, as evolutionary social animals, one core absolute appears to hold: What in the world are other people thinking about me or us? Who is watching?

According to Rosen and Santesso, “For [England’s }Cromwell it had been perfectly clear that a state
controlled post ‘might be made the agent in discovering and preventing many wicked designs daily contrived against the piece and welfare of the commonwealth, the intelligence whereof could not be communicated except by letters’…Samuel Moreland in the service of Charles II subsequently helped develop a system of opening , copying and resealing letters passed through the post office…The [Secret Office] ‘had tricks to open letters more skillfully than anywhere in the world…It was not possible to be a great statesman without tampering with packets.” And, as Rosen and Santesso point out, it is to Elizabeth the First’s Francis Walsingham that history turns for “the beginnings of a surveillance bureaucracy ahead of its time.”
It bears repeating. America’s national security apparatus has made very clear its intention—through Military Information Support Operations (MISO)—to favorably shape the civilian consciousness of those who seek to burden America’s national interests as defined though America’s Instruments of National Power (DIMEFLIP). In short there are no other interests in the world except for those that favor the United States of America. And that is stated as plain as day in President Obama’s National Security Strategy of the USA, “The United States will protect its people and advance our prosperity irrespective of the actions of any other nation…”
What clearer statement of audacity or of Empire does one need? With this in mind, the Snowden revelations transmitted through The Guardian (UK), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El Globo (Brazil) do not nearly move to the level of shock and awe. With an informed knowledge of the relevant history, one would expect this activity from the Lord Protector of the United States Republic, President Obama.
The immediate threat, as it has been throughout Western history, to the status quo is how to prevent 85 percent of the public from realizing that their collective role amounts to little more than stage hands (voters, consumers) and stunt doubles (soldiers, intelligence operators) that allow the great actors (politicians, military leaders, academics, corporate bosses, legacy journalists) to flit across the global stage armed with the tools of egotistical of noblesse oblige to stop, or start, the next act in human suffering—maybe even one that may involve American lives. These individuals would become cannibals to maintain their respective positions of power. Do we not have enough to fix in the USA? Can we divert at least some small portion of the national security budget to American education, dying cities, hungry and homeless people? Can some of the corporate loopholes be closed?
Pat Buchanan of the very readable American Conservative put it best. “This is thus their [Egypt’s] problem, not ours, most Americans believe, and our influence is receding there, even as that of the British, French and Russians did before us. Let them work it out. Testifying to this truth is the tape of Secretary of State John Kerry inspecting his yacht off Nantucket as the Egyptian regime fell, and Obama, after a brief National Security Council conclave, heading off for the golf course on the July 4 weekend, then on to Camp David.”
Now What? THINK!!!
Assuming the United States national security apparatus can collect and analyze the thoughts, conversations, strategies and tactics of its own leaders/citizens, and nation states, transnational enterprises the world over, what are the implications for Western representative democracies (fragile prospects anyway)? With worldwide anti-austerity protests increasing each year, there is much for yacht owners like John Kerry to worry about. Controlling the citizen rabble by homogenizing them via uniformed dress, divining their thoughts–and potential revolts—and filling their minds with ideological or consumerist propaganda is something that Thomas More thought about long ago in his work Utopia.
 Can Western corporate nation states, led by the American national security and money printing machinery, homogenize and reshape citizenry to adapt to a collective and individual life of austerity? As the nation state like the USA is stripped clean of any powers save those of national security and the servicing and protection of commerce, who or what center of gravity holds the States of the Union together? Is the US national and corporate machinery—with the assistance of media, academia and cultural leaders—now in a position to fit an American president with the mask of all seeing divine monarch?

And if the Americans have the dirt and thoughts on everyone in their own country (credit scores, medical procedures, party affiliation, sexual orientation, habits, travel) what is the point of the false dram of elections other than an elaborate charade? Does diplomacy matter anymore? With full spectrum knowledge attained by American’s, what is negotiation, treaty or summit other than a theatrical production? And what becomes of opinion and identity? Who is one really but what one consumes from what society, the “Other”, provides? Just where is that information floating in the electromagnetic spectrum coming from and why is it there?

Fomenting social tyranny in order to get “thinkers” to comply with the narrative of the moment becomes a simple task it seems. One can hear it: “Did you hear about that statement in the court room drama on CNN? Nope, did not. What’s wrong with you, don’t you watch TV? Did you at least see the article in the Post or the Times? Nope, did not. Then how can you know what you are talking about?”

So what could be done with a database that housed the lives of a generation of domestic and foreign citizens, say from age 18-56, and was analyzed some years hence using supercomputing machinery and software programs that would provide predictable pattern analysis for the control of an entire society? Match that treasure trove of information with oncoming revolutions in evolutionary psychology, genetic engineering and pharmaceuticals (on the latter see Insatiability by S. Witkiewicz and Murti-Bing pills) and the formula for the redesign of humanity, and the utopian dream of a

managed society

, will be realized. That development may be a necessity. The way the human species is destroying itself and the Earth there may likely be no other choice. Living on another planet in current evolutionary form is not an option. Perhaps the human animal is evolution’s idea of a joke.
But wait! This just in!

Sources report that a new American interstellar space probe known under the code name Lancelot Link Wind (LLW) will be launched in the hopes of defending the Earth from an alien invasion. The spacecraft with its dark matter propulsion system is designed like the black granite monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Inside the monolith lives an aquatic resident cyber database known as Submariner Clapper (SC) and consists of a mix of video, audio, text, and pictures of six billion human beings collected over a ten year period. According to a member of the Beyond the Director of National Intelligence (BDNIC), “We recognize here at BDNIC that there is a chance that LLW [Lancelot Link Wind] may float around in space forever. It may not even make it out of the damn solar system! But we have our EIM {Earth in Mind] here. Do you remember that scene in 2001 when everyone is jumping around the monolith screaming and throwing bones in the air? Well, we figure that if an alien species finds LLW and activates the SC, and listens in, it’ll drive em *&^%#@! crazy and they’ll avoid this watering hole forever. After all, we have no greater mission than the protection of the American people and some other people too.”

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

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America’s Continuity of Government Plan: The Cronyism of the Revolving Door

July 7th, 2013

 

 

By John Stanton.

 



 

All the media bluster and folly surrounding whistle blower Edward Snowden is detracting from critic a thinking that Americans must engage in and act upon. At this moment, benefits from the Snowden data dump appear to be accruing to the US government and its assorted defense related corporate interests.

If the American national security apparatus is to be checked and balanced,structural changes must take place. Substance must be ascendant, form can come later.

The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been bypassed by the Cronyism of the Revolving Door. It is an inept practice hardly useful for designing comprehensive national security strategies, policies, operations or tactics(SOCOM stands out though) that protect the American people.

The civilian side of the coin is even worse. What has the Cronyism of the Revolving Door produced? The Great Recession of 2008,the destruction of Iraq and Syria,the unleashing of Sunni Takfiri,the decay of America’s education infrastructure and the chasm that separates American leadership from the majority of American citizens.

This is the stuff of authoritarian regimes. It does not matter whether the form is capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever mix exists between them. Put bluntly, the Cronyism of the Revolving Door is a shitty form of government. And it is not confined to US government leaders.

It is the same story in academia,media, industry, and finance. America’ss logan these days is, Who Gives a Shit?
Here are some suggestions for recovery.

First: whistleblowers must provide more substantive information that leadsto a complete overhaul of the US civilian and military intelligence apparatus. Publicizing the names of all US intelligence and military operatives/assets working in corporations, financial institutions, academia, media and foreign governments would force a restructure.

The names and locations of all college students in the USA and abroad on the US intelligence community payroll (including scholarships)should be publicized. A listing of all government approved secret clearances held by American university and US business personnel and a listing of all Brass Plate organizations should be made public.

Information must be dumped rapidly in raw form. The slow‐leak practice by the Guardian and Washington Post (Snowden) is all about readership numbers, advertising and profit—nothing more.

Second: substance over form. Asking the right questions is important. The more questions the better. “Shots on Goal”, as the saying goes. Who is the Pentagon‐Industry partnership group that runs the NSA and the private defense corporations that design, deploy and operate PRISM‐like programs?

There are far too many complexities involved in massive data harvesting for one organization, civilian or military, to run global operations. Who are the representatives/senators—and their senior staffs‐‐in the US Congress who oversee the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice?

What group is pushing President Obama to put a freeze on national security reporting and ramp up Insider Threat programs in the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Commerce, et al? This is a coordinated effort by many, not one person in the Oval Office.

Third: eliminate the revolving door,stop deifying military. Fundamental changes in the Pentagon, the US Congress, and the Defense Industrial Base are desperately needed. This means wiping away the Strange love i an Culture that prevails at the highest echelons of America’s ruling class. And let’s face it.

There is, indeed, a ruling class in the United States. That extraordinary wealthy, interconnected and influential “class” has particular views about the world and what it should look and think like. All of us are its targets.

The Washington, DC, revolving door that allows retired generals and admirals to move effortlessly from uniformed military assignments to employment with private defense companies, or with defense associations, must be eliminated. The revolving door leads into what is affectionately known as the “Fifth Service” which is another term for America’s defense industry and its assorted non‐profit associations, consultants and think tanks like the Institute for Defense Analysis.

The Fifth Service also includes US military specific non‐profits(the Association of the US Army and Navy League, for example).
These are powerful interest groups normally headed by former Flag Officers flush with retirement cash, sort of the One Percent version of the US military.

This minority protects its self‐interest aggressively whilst those soldiers that engage in the bulk of combat see little rewards. “Only 17 percent of the all‐ volunteer force serves for 20 years and they are endowed with a lifetime benefit.”

So off they go with their hefty military pensions—healthcare plan in tow‐‐with them to Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, the National Defense Industrial Association or the Aerospace Industries Association. Many end up in lucrative federal government positions or they start their own consulting firms making money off the same people they once commanded.

The same revolving door situation exists in the US Congress. Senators and Representatives retire or are defeated in elections and move on to start lobbying firms or consultancies. Their skills are for sale to corporations and foreign governments alike. Senior national security congressional staffers rotate in and out of the Pentagon and defense industry with ease.

Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative national security political appointees seem to always land on their feet as consultants with the mainstream media, association heads (the American Turkish Council, for example) or as scholars at
prominent think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The revolving door needs to be closed and demolished. Lt. Colonel to Flag Rank officers should be forbidden to rotate to private defense industry or defense non‐profits, the latter of which are simply lobbying and meeting planning firms where deal cutting takes place.

Former members of congress should be forbidden to lobby for foreign governments or establish consultancies whose primary purpose is to influence the votes of active members of the US Congress (The Cohen Group comes to mind).

Staffers and political appointees should be stopped from rotating from the US Congress, to the Pentagon and to defense related corporations. And by all means the deification of military personnel by corporations, politicians and pizza franchises should cease.

Most military personnel don’t like the practice and they prefer to remain silent about their efforts.Fourth: set term limits. The record is clear. The longer the term the more likely it is that a US representative or senator will become beholden to moneyed national security interests.

Both the House and Senate continue to be populated by those who have little experience studying national security or working within it. They and their staffers are easily mesmerized by gee‐whiz technology and a uniform full of ribbons and stars. The only way to minimize the damage to the USA is to limit the time they have in office.

The President of the United States should have a term set at six years, the US House at five years and the US Senate at seven years. Campaign financing should be nationalized, Citizen United revoked.

It is duty of the American people to find and promote new candidates. Thomas Jefferson commented on just that in the Declaration of Independence. Further, Supreme Court vacancies should be filled by a national referendum, not a rubber stamping Senate Judiciary Committee that, in line with the Cronyism of the Revolving Door, approves its own kind, its own class to a lifetime position.

Potential justices should be required to explain their views to the national electorate. And their terms should be limited to a 15 year term.

Fifth, require national service. Americans need to regain their civic pride and contribute to the rebuilding of the America’s infrastructure. Not the critical infrastructure as defined by the national security community, but the reconstitution of decaying cities and communities across the land, the morale of the country, and the educational infrastructure of the USA. National Service programs should be a requirement for all 18‐21 year old’s males and females.

Whirlwind, overseas travel to visit and work in other cultures should be a mandatory component of national service. Exposure to US military culture should be a requirement. Synergistic civilian and military tracks could be designed for those qualified
and who want to continue in National Service.

Sixth, ignore US history at your own risk. Was it really that surprising that the USA/Pentagon has been vacuuming up data from networks across the Continents for so long? Below is what Leon Trotsky had to say about the United States in 1922. Viewed through his lenses, the Pentagon is merely following through.

“Nobody believes at present…in the inviolability of frontiers or the stability of regimes…The US progressively gobbles up the shares which will give her control of the human race; assuredly, a great undertaking, but a risky one. The Americans will not be long in convincing themselves of it.

This American pacifist program of putting the whole world under her control is not at all a program of peace; on the contrary, it is pregnant with wars, and with the greatest revolutionary convulsions. It is not very likely that the bourgeoisie of all countries will consent to be shoved into the background, to become vassals of America without at least trying to resist.

The contradictions are too great, the appetites are too monstrous, the urge to preserve old ruler ship is too great, the habits of world domination are too powerful…Military conflicts are inevitable.

The era of pacifist Americanism that seems to be opening up at this time is only a preparation for new wars of unprecedented scope and unimaginable monstrosity.

The United States, you see, lacks many things of which others have no lack. In this connection American newspapers have published a map showing the distribution of raw materials over the whole globe. They now talk and think in terms of whole continents… Americans think in terms of continents: it simplifies the study of geography, and, what is most important, it provides ample room for robbery.

And so, American newspapers have published a map of the world with ten black spots on it, the ten major deficiencies of the US economy in raw materials:rubber, coffee ,nitrates, tin, potash,sisal and other less important raw materials…But American capitalism is no longer self‐sufficing. It cannot maintain itself on an internal equilibrium.

It needs world equilibrium…In military art there is a saying that whoever moves into the enemy’s rear in order to cut off, is often cut off himself. In economy something analogous takes place: the more the United States puts the whole world under its dependence, all the more does it become dependent upon the whole world, with all its contradiction sand threatening upheavals…

Already today, revolution in Europe means convulsion sin Wall Street; tomorrow, when the investments of American capital in European economy have increased, it will mean a profound upheaval…In order to maintain its internal equilibrium the United States requires a larger and larger outlet abroad; but its outlet abroad introduces into its economic order more and more elements of European and Asiatic disorder…

We know that when its own skin is at stake, American capitalism will unleash the fiercest energy in the struggle. It is quite possible that all that books and our own experience have taught us about the fight of the privileged classes for their domination will pale before the violence that American capital will try to inflict.”

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