Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, corporatocracy, manipulation, Occupy, Tea Party
Submit To Propeller
posted by profmarcus at
7/08/2015
Will U.S., the World’s Largest Arms Manufacturer, Back Landmark U.N. Arms Trade Treaty?
Labels: Atrios, corporate military industrial government complex, Democracy Now, U.S. arms sales, U.S. interests
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
7/03/2012
Labels: accountability, Bernie Sanders, bought-and-paid-for, corporate military industrial government complex, criminal bankers, elites, peasant class, recession, super-rich, thrall, unemployment
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
7/01/2012
Labels: atrocities, Barack Obama, bipartisanship, collateral damage, corporate military industrial government complex, GOP, kill list, predator drones, Republicans
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
6/24/2012
US Sets Another Record on Defense Sales, Already
The United States is set to far surpass previous records for defence sales this year, according to U.S. officials.
"Despite the global economic strain, demand for U.S. defence products and services is stronger than ever," Andrew J. Shapiro, an assistant secretary in the U.S. State Department, said on Thursday.
He confirmed that the U.S., long the world's largest weapons exporter, has already seen more than 50 billion dollars in government-to-government military sales this fiscal year.
"This represents at least a 20-billion-dollar increase over fiscal year 2011, and we still have more than a quarter of the fiscal year left," Shapiro said, speaking with reporters. The current fiscal year will end in September.
"To put this in context, fiscal year 2011 was a record-setting year at just over 30 billion. This fiscal year will be at least 70 percent greater."
Observers noted the administration's evident pride at the high numbers.
"An Obama arms bazaar is going on – this is further evidence of that," Jeff Abramson, director of Control Arms, an international civil-society alliance based in Washington, told IPS.
"This administration has made defence trade an economic rather than just a security issue – part of the agenda in terms of keeping the U.S. economy going. I think human rights issues should trump those concerns. Selling to countries such as Saudi Arabia, people need to ask whether the U.S. is living up to its promises on rights obligations."
Shapiro, who noted that the U.S. only allows a sale "after we carefully examine issues like human rights", spoke a week after the launch of the newest edition of the 655 Report, an annual compilation of defence products and services authorised for export.
Many have cautioned that the U.S. defence trade is notoriously difficult to estimate, given the numerous ways available to calculate the figure. Several point to a lower number of 30 billion dollars worth of actual transfers, rather than the larger sales number, not all of which may ultimately take place.
[...]
In a major priority for the U.S. government today, Shapiro noted that the Saudi Arabia deal alone would support more than 50,000 jobs.
[...]
According to Amnesty International, a watchdog group, today it is easier to trade in weapons than in bananas.
Labels: Amnesty International, corporate military industrial government complex, defense industry, economy, jobs, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
6/17/2012
The primary fear-mongering agenda item for the National Security and Surveillance State industry is now cyberwarfare. The Washington cadre of former military officials who seek to personally profit by exploiting national security issues — represented by Adm. Michael McConnell and Gen. Michael Hayden — has been running around for several years shrilly warning that cyberwarfare is the greatest threat posed by Terrorists and other of America’s enemies (and, just coincidentally, they also argue that it’s urgent that the U.S. Government purchase wildly expensive cyber-security technology from their private-sector clients as well as seize greater control over the Internet to protect against the threat).
But — as is usually true when it comes to Washington warnings about the evils of Others — this is pure projection. The U.S. is the leading developer and perpetrator of cyberwarfare, not the leading target. The New York Times this morning has a long excerpt from a new book by its hawkish national security reporter David Sanger — the book is entitled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power” — which reveals that President Obama personally oversaw the development, and ordered the deployment, of the world’s most sophisticated computer virus, unleashed (in cooperation with Israel) on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility.
[...]
Isn’t it amazing how the U.S. is constantly the world’s first nation to use new, highly destructive weapons — at the same time that it bombs, invades, and kills more than any other country by far — and yet it still somehow gets its media to tell its citizenry that it is America’s Enemies who are the aggressors and the U.S. is simply a nation of peace seeking to defend itself.
Needless to say, if any cyber-attack is directed at the U.S. — rather than by the U.S. — it will be instantly depicted as an act of unparalleled aggression and evil: Terrorism. Just last year, the Pentagon decreed that any cyberattack on the U.S. would be deemed “an act of war.” As Rudy Giuliani said about whether waterboarding is torture: “It depends on who does it.”
Labels: Booz Allen Hamilton, corporate military industrial government complex, cybersecurity, cyberwar, Glenn Greenwald, Iran, Michael McConnell, National Security State, NYT, state-sponsored terrorism, terrorism
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
6/01/2012
TACTICAL BRIEFING #31 – GUT CHECK
Hey you nimble dreamers, believers and jammer tacticians out there.
Three challenges Occupy must overcome
Our movement has reemerged from winter hibernation to find that this spring we are different but so too is the political and tactical situation. Occupy now faces a series of existential challenges that will define the month of May and set the tone for our long-term future.
#1 challenge: Jump over the corporate media
It took the New York Times two weeks last year to wake up to the insurrection percolating in their own backyard. This May Day, we saw an insidious attempt to ignore and discredit us right across the mainstream media. Time to jam the corpo-commercial lie machine and shift the way information flows and meaning is produced. Here is occupier Charles Young’s take on the blackout:
“I know. It’s just a coincidence. Or conspiracy theory. The .01% who rule the United States would never stoop to such stunts to knock Occupy Wall Street off the front page and surround it with mentions of terrorism… But Occupy wasn’t on the Times’ front page, online or in print, either.” Read more at Counterpunch.
#2 challenge: Block the co-optation of our movement
Last September, the old left didn’t want to touch us. Then Occupy captured the world’s imagination and now they are jumping in to channel our energy into electoral politics and symbolic actions. Founding Zuccotti Marisa Holmes warns that the co-opters are a deep threat to our movement:
“This is an election year. Everything is at stake. There will be many more attempts like The 99% Spring to come. The 1% … seek to manage social movements via foundations thru resource allocation, top-down structures, and co-opting language. In the past this strategy has proven effective at dividing, conquering, and integrating movements into respectable forms of activism, and it’s starting to take hold… We must not be pacified!” Read more in the Occupy! Gazette #4.
#3 challenge: Occupy the future
Our most difficult task of all is to describe, build and sustain the post-capitalist future we want to live in. Here is Slavoj Žižek’s stab to get your juices flowing:
“It is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work.” Read more at the Guardian.
Hey occupiers: the old world has no future; their leaders have no solutions. Now everything from how we live to how we love and how the world is governed is up for grabs. Can we rise to the challenge? Let the tactical brainstorm begin.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
Labels: Adbusters, Chicago, corporate military industrial government complex, NATO Summit, Occupy
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
5/04/2012
In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008, they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year. This year it’s barely a pretense.
The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector.
[...]
[I]n the United States [candidates] have to be vetted by high concentrations of private capital. You can’t run in an election unless you can collect millions of dollars.
Labels: 2012 election, Barack Obama, campaign fund-raising, corporate military industrial government complex, Counterpunch, elites, Laura Flanders, Noam Chomsky, Republicans, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
5/01/2012
Labels: 2012 election, Barack Obama, corporate military industrial government complex, Mitt Romney, Mr. Fish
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/28/2012
What the Laws of War Allow
Do the WikiLeaks War Logs Reveal War Crimes -- Or the Poverty of International Law?
[...]
“International humanitarian law,” or IHL, is the trying-too-hard euphemism for the laws of war. And as it happens, IHL turns out to be less concerned with restraining military violence than licensing it. As applied to America’s recent wars, this body of law turns out to be wonderfully accommodating when it comes to the prerogatives of an occupying army.
[...]
Here is where the WikiLeaks disclosures were so revealing. They remind us, once again, that the humanitarian dream of “clean warfare” -- military violence that is smoothly regulated by laws that spare civilians -- is usually a sick joke. We need to wean ourselves from the false comfort that the law is always on the side of civilians. We need to scrap our tendency to assume that international law is inherently virtuous, and that anything that shocks our conscience -- that helicopter video or widespread torture in Iraq under the noses of U.S. soldiers -- must be a violation of this system, rather than its logical and predictable consequence.
[...]
Who, after all, writes the laws of war? Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to “regulatory capture” by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more. Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out “legal” ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?
[...]
[Bradley Manning] saw very clearly what so many professors and generals take pains to deny: that the primary function of the laws of war is not to restrain violence, but to justify it, often with the greatest lawyerly ingenuity.
Labels: Chase Madar, corporate military industrial government complex, crimes against humanity, Human rights, humanitarian intervention, laws of war, TomDispatch
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/15/2012
The decision to send young men and women to kill and die in foreign lands is one which is often taken without much real thought for the welfare of these individuals, often barely past the age of adulthood, despite the massive amount of rhetoric and jingoism which surrounds their deployments. Soldiers are killed and maimed with depressing regularity, registering as a brief news story and then in most cases disappearing from the public consciousness forever.
[...]
Those in the United States who advocate war often cite the need to Support the Troops, ostensibly to show them legitimate support, but in practice usually as a means to stifle debate in order to further their own agendas. “Supporting the Troops” is an end-all response and bludgeon to any criticism of the massive, opaque wars being fought around the world; but how much does it really correspond to reality?
[...]
Of those whose lives are ultimately affected by war, the overwhelming majority have little or no say in the popular discourse yet are made to bear the brunt of others ill-thought out or malicious decisions. [...] Those who continue to call for more young men and women to be sent into the abyss of war but who choose never to pay the cost of these grave decisions themselves are the modern iterations of Henry Kissinger who in a moment of candor famously described soldiers as “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns of foreign policy.”
Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, elites, endless war, militarization, Murtaza Hussain, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/13/2012
If even preschoolers or wheelchaired farts on their last legs must be frisked for underwear bombs, box cutters and ninja stars, not to mention contraband copies of the Constitution, is it any wonder that our cops are becoming more trigger happy? Post 9/11, the United States has entered a permanent state of psychotic paranoia, all to justify our endless war (profiteering) for oil, and with a host of new laws enabling the state to harass, eavesdrop, strip search, arrest or even kill you without charge, that is, without presumption of innocence before proven guilty, supposedly a bedrock of our democracy and what separates us from all the other nightmare states we’ve always been warned about.
As we sleep, America has become one of those nightmares, I’m afraid, although all still seems relatively normal, for now. The home runs still fly, and the inane commercials still sing. All is normal until you find yourself on the wrong side of an increasingly brutal and arbitrary set of laws, or none at all, just whatever our President, local cop or security guard decides is right, for him, at that moment. You see, a nightmare is when you’re at the total mercy of another man, without recourse to remedy whatever wrong he may inflict on you, without the law or your fellow humans ever coming to your aid. Our tortured foreign detainees have long been acquainted with this evil, but we have looked the other way, because we are not them, you see, at least not yet.
[...]
This Obama presidency has been a brilliant move by our ruling class, for this black, personable decoy has managed to pacify vast swaths of an otherwise restless constituency, while enraging others for the wrong reason. Although Obama’s blackness is irrelevant, it has become a fixation to both his detractors and supporters, so that it has become a point of honor to defend or depose this man for his blackness alone, when in truth his race does not factor at all in any of his decisions. One should not care that he is black, because Obama does not care that he is black, and not in a good way either. Obama is not here to rectify whatever ails the black or any other community. He is only here to facilitate the wishes of the Military Banking Complex, and he’s willing to trample on you all, black, white, brown or yellow, to achieve their goals.
Labels: Barack Obama, corporate military industrial government complex, house of cards, Linh Dinh, National Security State, war profiteers
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/10/2012
The overall self-dealing problem can hopefully begin to be reformed based on the knowledge gained from the accumulation of many examples of self-dealing in the system. The American public senses that the problem is there and hears about the deluge of corrupting money in the system, but they need individual examples to understand just how destructive this self-dealing is to our democracy.
Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, corruption, Dina Rasor, house of cards, influence industry, Truthout
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
3/01/2012
Bill Moyers believes that capitalism is out of control and there can be no people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
Labels: Bill Moyers, campaign fund-raising, capitalism, Citizens United, comedy, corporate military industrial government complex, Molly Ivins, Stephen Colbert
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
1/11/2012
What Endless War looks like
The key trick of Endless War is to permanently maintain two contradictory official premises: (1) we’re on the verge of Victory!; and (2) the threat is grave and we cannot let up. Without both of those premises, the citizenry will wonder why endless war is necessary or wise. That’s been the dual-track propaganda that has sustained the Drug War for four decades and counting (yes, we’ve been waging this war for 40 years, but we’re making real progress, but the threat is still so severe that the war must continue into the foreseeable future), and it has been and continues to be the core propaganda that fuels the Terror War. Hence, (1) we have made Al Qaeda “operationally ineffective” and (2) they “will remain a major security threat for years.”
Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, endless war, fear-mongering, Glenn Greenwald, war on drugs, war on terror
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/23/2011
Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:
1. It names the source of the crisis.
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in.2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want.
We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.3. It sets a new standard for public debate.
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually “trickle down.”
4. It presents a new narrative.
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.5. It creates a big tent.
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.6. It offers everyone a chance to create change.
No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.7. It is a movement, not a list of demands.
The call for deep change—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—is the movement’s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.8. It combines the local and the global.
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community.
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.10. We have reclaimed our power.
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.
Labels: 1%, 99%, austerity, class warfare, communities, corporate military industrial government complex, empowerment, greed, leaderless, Occupy Wall Street
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/12/2011
Labels: Anonymous, banksters, corporate military industrial government complex, Occupy Wall Street, Tumbler
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/07/2011
Washington is Wall Street, Wall Street is Washington
Occupy protesters demonstrate resilience to crackdowns and cynicism in the media but it is still unclear what lies ahead for the movement. While camping out and singing songs is one thing, getting the right politicians elected quite another. The movement is unified and people are waking up to the two-party dictatorship, and realizing that the political system does not represent them anymore.
Labels: Barack Obama, corporate military industrial government complex, Gerald Celente, Goldman Sachs, Occupy Wall Street, Russia Today
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/04/2011
The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.
[...]
In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.
With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.
Labels: Bahrain, corporate military industrial government complex, empire in decline, GCC, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/30/2011
Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
Labels: banksters, Barack Obama, Civil liberties, corporate military industrial government complex, extrajudicial executions, Glenn Greenwald, military drones, MOTU
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/20/2011
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