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Arms Dealers, Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Joseph Biden, Luis J. Rodriguez, Military Industrial Complex, Mitt Romney, Obama, Paul Ryan, Resource Wars, War for Profit, War on Terror, William Blum
The U.S. military industrial complex is the single biggest leech upon society. Both parties unquestioningly support it. While many view a Romney in the White House would be like adding an accelerant to the flame of U.S. militarism, Obama has proven himself one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades. The military industrial complex sucks up more than half of every tax dollar and enriches weapons manufacturers at the expense of this country’s citizens. If you look back in history and read some of the essays of William Blum, you’ll have all the proof you need that the capitalists of America are not a stabilizing force in the world, but a destabilizing one. As others have noted, empires collapse from within. While they continue expanding outward and investing in their reach of hegemony, the needs of the citizens back at home are overlooked and neglected. We have an empire at the expense of democracy:
…In the first minutes of the debate, Biden gloated about how the economic blockade of Iran orchestrated by Washington had devastated the Iranian economy and caused widespread suffering among the people. He boasted of the US role in aiding the Syrian forces seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. And he repeatedly defended the administration by declaring that it had the full support of the Pentagon brass—accepting Ryan’s premise that the generals should have veto power over foreign policy.
The questions offered by debate moderator Martha Raddatz—an ABC News foreign correspondent with close ties to the US military-intelligence apparatus—took as their point of departure the unchallengeable legitimacy of the operations of American imperialism abroad and the profit system at home.
Many of them touched on foreign and military policy, in every case tacitly assuming that the United States has the right to bomb, invade and conquer any country it chooses. The discussion between the candidates dealt with the expediency of such military actions, not whether they were legally or morally justifiable.
Similarly, the parts of the debate that touched on domestic policy—the economy, health care, taxes and social issues like abortion—took for granted the existing division of the wealth of society between the tiny minority that controls nearly all of it and the large majority who are struggling to survive.
In the entire 90 minutes, there was not a single question or answer about the conditions of life of the working class—about cuts in wages, pensions and other benefits; the growth of poverty, homelessness and hunger; the spreading plague of evictions and foreclosures; the deterioration of public services such as education; the collapse of the social infrastructure…
Do you see a problem with this picture of the U.S.?
Other threats loom larger than the boogeyman terrorist. While we create enemies to fight, real manmade dangers like global warming and climate change are growing, threatening to wipe all of humanity off the face of the Earth. Humans don’t have that much time left on this planet, so it would probably be a wise decision to ratchet back all the war mongering, move away from a war-based economy, and try another approach to how we interact with the rest of the world before it all ends in more and more resource wars and the plume of a mushroom cloud.
A moment of truth-telling by Luis J. Rodriguez:
Iran appears to be next on our bombing agenda. If we had not covertly overthrown their democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953 because he wanted to nationalize their oil resources, could we have averted this impending war?…
Mike,
As you know, I read quite a number of books per month.
One such book was handed to me by a friend a week ago. I read it avidly.
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones should be on everyones required reading list:
http://www.amazon.com/Kabul-Winter-Without-Peace-Afghanistan/dp/0805078843/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
The book slingshots you into yet another angle – beyond your article – to what the negative impact, applied value and hidden aim of “US aid” is really used for through empiric hedgemony.
Digging around on the net today then, I found an article referring to the book that I sense will hold weight to my appeal to your readers.
Information Clearing House:
How U.S. Aid Puts A Happy Face On Afghan Occupation
By James A. Lucas
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25466.htm
The White House tells us that we are releasing funds to rebuild Afghanistan. The reality, however, is that very little of the money actually will benefit the Afghan people. We are told that our nation is being very generous, mostly as a balm to our collective conscience to convince us to give our stamp of approval for that war which so far has cost over $260 billion in U.S. taxpayers’ money. This deception also helps to put a happy face on this war so that our attention is diverted from the people who are dying and wounded there.
Ann Jones, a former humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, not long ago blew the whistle on this scam. The author of Kabul in Winter, she reported that between 2002 and 2008 the U.S. pledged $10.4 billion for development but delivered only $5 billion of that amount, 47 percent of which was paid to American experts, who often were unqualified, instead of going to unemployed Afghans who were supposed to benefit from this aid.
Even when aid reaches the people of Afghanistan, it often brings undesirable results, since contractors pay much higher salaries than do the Afghan school systems; teachers and administrators have abandoned their jobs to take positions with these private contractors who get money to start literacy programs. Afghan institutions are supposed to be strengthened, not eviscerated as has been done in this case.
Seventy percent of our aid is tied to the purchase of American products in preference to those that originate in Afghanistan, compelling Afghans to buy American agricultural products, thus putting Afghan farmers out of business or driving even more of them into the poppy trade. This forces many of them to join the 40 percent of the Afghan workforce that is already unemployed.
But these revelations should not be surprising, since reports in prior years uncovered similar major deficiencies in the delivery of U.S. aid to Afghanistan.
In a report in 2002 for the Overseas Development Institute, Ashraf Ghani, the chancellor of Kabul University, stated that about 90 percent of the $1 billion spent on 400 aid projects was wasted.
The country’s 280,000 civil servants earn an average of $50 per month, while about 50,000 Afghans work for aid organizations where they may earn up to $1000 a month. With more than 2,400 aid agencies and NGOs registered in that country, the government has had difficulty trying to retain its staff.
Also, this disparity of incomes means that foreign staff (3 – 4,000 foreign civilians), can afford to pay more for housing, and this raises rents to levels that ordinary people can’t afford – in some areas up to 1,000 percent.
The Afghan government estimated in 2006 that it could build a highway between Kabul and Kandahar for $35 million, however it was eventually built by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID} at a cost of more than $190 million.
In 2005 the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported that U.S. clinics might be only a mile away, but it was hard for sick people to get to them. While a handful of health clinics were built the year before, they were placed where no trained doctors were located, because contractors did not consult with local officials or the Ministry of Health. These errors could be life-threatening in a nation where the average life expectancy is 43 years, which has the 4th worst child mortality rate in the world. and where the maternal mortality rate is the second worst in the world.
USAID projected that it would build 286 schools by the end of 2004, but only eight were completed. Although the Afghan government could build a school for about $40,000, an international aid agency undertook the task of building 500 schools, at a cost of $250,000 each. It should be kept in mind that Afghanistan’s average educational level is 1.7 years.
Not only is little of this U.S. humanitarian aid very helpful to ordinary Afghans, but it is often subverted by the U.S. policy of using aid as an integral part of its military counterinsurgency program under which Afghan civilians are given aid if they help the Americans’ war efforts, although this purpose is couched in benign terminology which masks its true purpose. Many of the reconstruction teams see their role as providing services in exchange for intelligence-gathering and political activity directed against the insurgents.
UN officials in Afghanistan earlier this year criticized NATO forces and said that UN agencies would not participate in the military’s reconstruction strategy as part of the offensive that was planned against Marja.
Wael Haj-Ibrahim, head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, observed that “if that aid is being delivered as part of a military strategy, the counterstrategy is to destroy that aid.”
Eight leading humanitarian organizations working in Afghanistan, including Oxfam and ActionAid, issued a joint report that was highly critical of the International Security Assistance Force, as the American-led NATO force is known, because of ‘the international militaries’ use of aid as a ‘nonlethal’ weapon of war,” a term coined by the U.S. military.
Territory changes occur during a war. If projects are associated with a particular group, often they will be destroyed as territory changes hands. That has happened frequently with projects like schools and clinics around the country.
Half the country is now inaccessible to UN aid workers. Attacks on aid workers have risen 400% since 2005, possibly as reprisals by the Taliban, who suspected that those workers were furnishing the U.S. military and others with information about the Taliban. Many humanitarian agencies have scaled back their programs.
This makes it difficult for UN aid workers to do their work. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban.”
But the most effective humanitarian action the U.S. could take is to end the war. Killing and maiming Afghans is anti-humanitarian.
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Ann Jones “Kabul in Winter” connection Special
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Suffice to say that three posts in a line as a stream of thought should be enough for one day – as I wonder just exactly how long we have left with opposing views to our corporate/politically funded media – even if the NDAA was something of a success over the past month thanks to the tireless work of Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, among others.
The proof in this article – We Won-For Now – should be yet another reason to rise and put our shoulders to the wheel in keeping sites such as this alive and into the future:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_won_–_for_now_20120917/
But then the media circus continues its conditioning of the populous, as proven with this recent powerful interview of George Farah by Democracy Now!
As Amy Goodman states in the interview:
[..]one issue that will not be covered is the actual structure of the debate itself. The Obama and Romney campaigns have secretly negotiated a detailed contract that dictates many of the terms of the 2012 presidential debates. This includes who gets to participate, as well as the topics raised during the debates.”
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Thanks for your input Paul.
I was looking for some sort of official guage of America’s escalating corruption and found this from a couple months ago:
A striking fact from Eduardo Porter:
Whether or not your government works effectively is probably more important than the wisdom or lack thereof of any stated policy. As I wrote yesterday this is the biggest weakness in the philosophy of profit-maximization and shareholder value. A well-functioning market economy in many ways depends on a normative superstructure that’s eroded by the ethic of money-making by any means necessary. When firm managers believe it is not only permissable but obligatory to engage in fraudulent and corrupt practices and to exert time and energy into rent-seeking, you ultimately destroy the background conditions of prosperity.
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Mike,
Thank you.
I’ve great respect for William Blum – who you’ve linked to in your main article – especially toward his book: Rogue States: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.
I’ll return to him in a moment.
I’ve long found in my discussions with many an unaware American that they believe their revisionist history holds greater water when they find I’m born British – especially when my facts counter theirs as more worldly.
Worse, that they assume I am defending my country in my opinion, not just my experience of trawling facts to hold opinion – neither am I in defense of England – as though that fucking mattered!
I have as much loathing of British foreign policy as American, but your site is written from the American stance, and so …
I have found that most Americans – and British by point of fact – defend themselves as though their very honour is at stake when they find too many home truths in an article over military interventions, with too many proven facts to refute.
The returned volley of attack becomes a personal one against me, because the proof’ I write about American policy are beyond question to counter.
The illusive nature of nationalism and being a patriot are embilicle twins joined at the hip, it woulld seem.
This is why I would like you to read a chapter of British author Mark Curtis’ 2002 book: Web of Deceit: Britains Real Role in the World – particularly the chapter : Overthrowing the Government of Iran:
The Web of Deceit
There is more detail of the British collusion than you’ll find with the average almost generic argument that it was – in almost all appearances – an American lead invasion. There is far more detail in Curtis’ book than I have found anywhere else, because of his research of official legal government data released to the British public in the late 90’s.
I’ve known few authors to have researched in such detail.
To end on William Blum then, in 2006 Osama Bin Laden – in a press statement to the world – quoted from the forward of Blum’s 2002 publication of Rogue State, raising sales of the book through the roof:
“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now — oddly enough — a foreign country.
I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”
Ironic of Bin Laden, and of his assassination without trial and his burial at sea?
Ahead of that though, there are the amounts of yearly expenditure by the American Military Industrial Complex, that by 2009 had escalated to the better part of five times the 330 billion dollar yearly bill of 2002.
This then, is now equal to a wage of $90,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born …
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Mike,
Sorry for being like a rash on your present article, but I opened up my computer this morning and found that the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper is backing a ‘public relations’ campaign on the ‘supposedly’ ugly side of military profits and sales.
The usual hand-picked brace of top obsolete war horse’ as rolling heads in a countered infurence to the UK alluding a benign force for justice, honour, freedom, altruism and democracy, it would seem.
There’ll be plenty of mileage in political spin for this pickle over the next few days, to be sure …
Ex-Forces Chiefs In Arms Deal Investigation
Retired military officers have been secretly filmed claiming they can influence arms deals worth millions of pounds, according to The Sunday Times.
The paper claims the results of a three-month investigation have revealed several former military generals are available for hire as lobbyists, despite official rules banning the practice.
Sunday Times reporters claim they posed as representatives of arms firms and arranged meetings with several senior military officials and recorded them offering their influence and contacts with ministers and in return for six-figure sums.
The rules governming lobbying by former military personnel stipulate there must be a moratorium of two years before they can become involved in any activity which might be helped by their previous role.
According to the paper, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, former head of the Defence Academy, claimed he could use his role as president of the Royal British Legion to influence his clients’ agenda with the Prime Minister.
Lieutenant General Richard Applegate, a former Ministry of Defence procurement chief, reportedly described a secret lobbying campaign in parliament for a £500m military programme on behalf of an Israeli arms company.
The paper claimed Lt Gen Applegate was prohibited from lobbying at the time because he had recently retired.
Britain’s General the Lord Richard Dannatt, Constable of the Tower of London, holds the Olympic Flame after its arrival by helicopter at the Tower of London Lord Dannatt allegedly spoke about ignoring the lobbying ban
It was also reported that Admiral Sir Trevor Soar, Commander of the naval fleet until March 2011, told undercover reporters he would “ignore” the two-year ban imposed on lobbying ministers.
Lord Dannatt, the former head of the army, also talked about ignoring a ban on discussion of a £400m contract by “targeting” the MoD’s top civil servant, with whom he went to school.
The official watchdog that vets the private jobs taken by departing public officials last night described the allegations as “very serious” and called on ministers and the head of the civil service to consider taking urgent action.
When confronted by the paper, all four men strongly denied having breached any rules. They added their actions were motivated by having at heart the best interests of the armed services.
In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said: “We will be looking to see if any of these individuals have broken any rules.
“It is clear that former chiefs acting in a commercial capacity should not have any privileged access to the MoD and we will be putting in place measures to ensure this.”
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond denied former military personnel were able to use their contacts to influence arms deals.
“Equipment is procured in the interests of our Armed Forces and not in the interests of retired personnel,” he said.
“Former military officers have no influence over what MoD contracts are awarded.”
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In America it’s common practice for former generals to go to work for the arms manufacturers because they can influence sales, contracts, and defense legislation due to their former contacts in government and insider knowledge.
“Today, generals command as many contractors as they do soldiers, so it’s no wonder they go into the defense contracting field as soon as they retire. The money is so good for these former 3- and 4-star generals, their lust for cash far outweighs their conflict of interest. But they are able to get away with it all, and say with a straight face they are doing nothing wrong. They’re splitting hairs on legalities, and everyone knows it, most of all them. They are going straight into private industry in what has become one of the biggest conflict of interest scams going. The only ones who beat them are retired members of Congress who become lobbyists…”
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