Category Archives: Military Industrial Complex

Filling the Skies with Industrial Killing Machines

14 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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What to talk about… Well I could talk about the presidential cufflinks that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon wore to Capital Hill this week. The oligarchs like to show who really runs the show. …Or I could talk about the Fed’s new study showing the evisceration of the Middle Class. Do we really need them telling us how badly we’ve been screwed? …Or the traumatized people of Greece hoarding canned food. We’re all preppers now.

I’d rather talk about something that’s going to create blowback for the U.S. down the road that will make 9-11 look pedestrian by comparison – Drone warfare. Not only are these mindless killing machines causing worldwide anger outside the ivory towers in which our plutocrats sit, but this technology is being turned inwards on the Empire’s own peasants, i.e. you and me. Take a look at this DoD Current and Future U.S. Drone Activities Map. And would you trust these guys operating such weapons?

Before I get to the main article of this post, take a look at how commonplace and ‘user-friendly’ these deadly drone weapons are fast becoming:

Switchblades in the Sky 

The US military has issued soldiers in Afghanistan with a new class of lightweight unmanned drone known as the Switchblade, which can be carried in a backpack and used on the battlefield in place of an air strike.

The Switchblade, manufactured by the AeroVironment Corporation in Monrovia, California, weighs just under six pounds (2.7kg) and can be rapidly launched and sent over the nearest ridge to circle above the battlefield before being sent to zero in on the enemy – usually the chest or head of an enemy combatant.

The weapon, which commanders have dubbed the “Flying Shotgun”, has been widely tested by the US Army, US Marines and US Air Force. It has proved so effective that AeroVironment has announced more than US$14m (£9m) worth of Switchblade systems and related engineering contracts in the past 10 months….

While drone strikes from fixed-wing aircraft have a chain of command that stretches from Afghanistan to the United States, with multiple steps to avoid civilian casualties or friendly fire casualties, these ultra-light, portable drones bring the decision to kill down to the level of platoon commander or even individual soldier….

“Technology is moving at lightning speed and policy is moving at glacial speed,” said PW Singer, the author of Wired for War, a critical analysis of the military use of robotic technologies. “This tech is proliferating, with more than 50 countries now building, buying and using military robotics. The cat is already out of the bag.

These weapons will be as ubiquitous as guns with no more than a single person necessary to operate it. I can imagine these things getting into the hands of people who will want to use them in places other than “battlefields” in order to terrorize a population, but this scenario is already a reality since the U.S. has declared the entire planet a battlefield in its War on Terror. That’s not something we had to really worry about with tanks and jet fighters, but this drone technology is cheap and readily available. The larger drones like the Predator and Reaper require a network of people to operate and keep in the sky, but the smaller ones like the Switchblade do not. Nonetheless, both have the same thing in common – the ability to kill without proper forethought, reason, evidence, or moral compunction. Drones can and do kill innocent people remotely, leaving the operators of the device free from the scene of carnage and the brutal reality of what they have committed. And as you will read, what is even more frightening is that future plans call for drones to be completely autonomous, preprogrammed to find and kill targets using predetermined criteria.

…US major Bryan Callahan say(s) that drone pilots are taught ‘early and often’ to compartmentalise their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend at home. This is perhaps the essence of the problem. The idea that we can separate ourselves off (at the personal and political level) from the economic, political, moral and human consequences of our actions has been taken to a new level by this new way to wage war.

Here is that article from The New Left Project:

 Drones: The Lethal Idiot in the Sky

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, by Medea Benjamin, OR Books, 2012.

The United States, the most prolific user of drones to carry out targeted killings, asserts its attacks are legally justified as it is engaged in a global war against Al Qaeda and associated terrorist groups. By this rationale, the CIA would be justified in dropping a Hellfire missile on a suspected terrorist in an apartment in Hamburg, a restaurant in London or a mosque in upstate New York. Why stop at merely dropping bombs in poor countries dominated by people of color? (page 135)

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.

The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.

Gravesites throughout Asia and the Middle East are filled with testaments to drone attacks gone bad. And drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally – or incidentally – caught in their cross-hairs. Think how terrifying it must be to live under the constant threat of a drone attack. Sometimes you’d see them flying menacingly overhead; sometimes they’d disappear but you could still hear their frightening, buzzing sound. (page 28)

The book’s publication coincides with much huffing and puffing about Barack Obama’s drone war policy, prompted by revelations last month in the New York Times about the president’s personal involvement in picking out targets from the “kill list”, presented to him at the weekly counterterrorism briefing (“Terror Tuesday”). As Dennis Perrin argued during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign,[1] no one can be surprised at the sight of another Democrat president eagerly outdoing his GOP predecessor and rivals in advancing the technological frontiers of industrial-scale death and destruction. Especially as BHO was a noisy advocate of drone strikes during that same campaign.

Even a casual observer will be aware that drones represent a particular, and particularly disturbing, shift. Obama’s weapon of choice in his ever-expanding, but undeclared and secret wars, is attracting increasing opposition from unlikely quarters, including the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne and former CIA counter-terrorism chiefs.

Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are presented by the White House, and by a faithful media, as a new generation of smart weapons, able to spot, target and kill terrorists in remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Yemen, and Somalia, and Gaza, and Libya, and the Philippines, the list goes on) while being controlled remotely from the safety of an Air Force base in the US. Yet, as Benjamin documents in her book, drones are anything but smart.

Of course, by themselves, drones are simply an assembly of metal and high-tech electronics, unable – for the moment – to do anything on their own. They rely on humans to launch, fly, navigate, spy, target and kill. In fact, as Benjamin notes, it takes 168 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours, while the Global Hawk surveillance drone needs 300: some on the ground, in the minority of cases where drones are deployed in a declared battle zone, but most, and more often than not, in bases hundreds and usually thousands of miles away. They collate “intelligence” from various sources, and analyse the 1500 hours of video and 1500 still images which the drones beam back each day. Finally, they make life or death decisions to launch Hellfire missiles from drones on the basis of the real-time images of people fed from the same drones’ spy cameras. Those people may or may not be the targets who got the presidential thumbs down that Tuesday, may or may not be engaged in hostile activity, may or may not be male or female, may or may not be 17 or 75, may be carrying an Improvised Explosive Device or simply walking the dog. The drone doesn’t know. The pilot on a 12 hour shift, sitting watching hour upon hour of blurry blobs on a screen at Creech Air Force base in Nevada, doesn’t know either. Far from being smart, the drone is more like a lunatic with a loaded gun.

What then is driving the shift towards drones? The first thing to understand is the big money that “cheap” drones represent for the weapons manufacturers, the military, the CIA, the JSOC and the private contractors. At $5 million for a Predator and $28.4 million for each Reaper, drones look cheap by comparison to fighter jets which can cost ten times as much. But, according to Benjamin, a drone costs between $2000 and $3500 every hour it is in the air, while usage has shot up – USAF drone flying missions alone increased by 3000 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Add in the cost of Hellfire missiles ($68000 a pop), and the unknown sums in the “black budget” of the CIA, which runs much of the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, and it’s easy to see why drones are so popular among the military-industrial complex and their friends in Washington. Weapons manufacturers such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which has benefited more than any rival from the drone boom, have adopted the “freebie marketing” business model from manufacturers of printers and razors.

 Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011-2020. (page 32)

Competition for that money, most of which goes from federal US budgets to American corporations, is understandably fierce, and drives a relentless wave of technological innovation. Take for example, Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a fighter-sized drone which flies itself – autonomously, in the industry jargon. Or the General Atomics Gray Eagle, which “thinks for itself”, according to a GA press release quoted in the book. Benjamin makes clear that the way is clear for larger, faster, more autonomous drones which will, in the near future, be targeting not only unarmed civilians but conventional aircraft and other military forces of traditional enemies like Iran and China. Their increasing autonomy also heralds a generation of drones that not only fly by themselves, but use software to make the kill decision without any human intervention whatsoever. Meanwhile, pressure is building on the Federal Aviation Administration, not least from the White House in the form of the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Bill, to extend the integration of drones into US airspace beyond areas such as the Mexican border, where surveillance drones have been deployed at a cost of over $7000 for each undocumented immigrant or smuggler caught. Police departments across the country are queuing up to get their hands on the new toy.

Politically, back in the USA, the far-off drone wars play very well. A recent poll put support for Obama’s counter-terrorism policy at 83 per cent among all voters, and no less than 77 per cent among his liberal base. In embracing drone war, Obama has eschewed the messy business of capturing supposed terrorists (all that Guantanamo and rendition business didn’t look good, not that he has closed the former or discontinued the latter), in favour of quick kills which present no risk to American troops and, crucially, leave no evidence behind. As many have pointed out, carefully constructed election-year coverage plays his killer drones up rather than down, which testifies to their political utility.

So far, so depressing. Powerful forces are propelling us into the Drone Age. What to do about it? Benjamin is not without her critics, who accuse CODEPINK of being in the orbit of the Democratic Party. And certainly, there is a whiff of liberal, “awareness raising” activism throughout this book. But Benjamin’s closing chapters set out the serious opposition that is building to the Drone Age, both in the US and internationally. Corporations, governments and universities around the world are complicit in the drone wars, and the book closes with extensive references and links to sources of further information and groups engaged in direct action. A model for the fight against drones, Benjamin argues, is the campaign to ban landmines in the 1990s, which credits its success to “several factors”:

  • It had a clear message and goal. Signature states agreed to six major commitments, among them the destruction of their mine stockpiles within four years and their mine areas cleared within ten years.
  • It had a campaign structure that was non-bureaucratic and strategy that was flexible.
  • It put together an “unusually cohesive and strategic partnership” of non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, and governments.
  • There was a favourable international context.

Benjamin’s sources concede that the forces pushing drones are probably too powerful, and have too much to gain, for a ban on all drones to be a realistic prospect. But the fight to stop the new generation of “autonomous” drones can be won, and needs to start now.

Further information

www.thebureauinvestigates.com

www.codepink.org

www.dronecampaignnetwork.org.uk

www.dronewarsuk.wordpress.com

www.reprieve.org.uk

www.droneswatch.org

“Get ’em Dead!”

11 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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Apparently the Mafia gang in the oval office decided it would be a good idea to employ the same tactics used by those they decide to ‘off’. As in the days of yore when Romans would usurp a foreign army and incorporate the best of that foe’s weapons and tactics, so it is that the American Empire follows in the footsteps of its long deceased predecessor, the Roman Empire. It’s called the “double tap” — sending in a second predator drone strike shortly after the first responders come to the scene of the initial assassination strike to rescue any survivors or retrieve the dead, including the mourners of resultant funerals held days later. This is a policy of treating the population as guilty by association, exterminating any and all who might be linked, however remotely, with the intended target:

According to the NYT, the Administration assumed that, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” and therefore all military age males in a strike zone could be targeted. A former senior counterterrorism official calls earlier drone targeting, “guilt by association.” Of signature strikes in Pakistan, a senior (apparently still-serving) official joked “that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.” And one of Obama’s top political advisors, David Axelrod, was attending targeting meetings, injecting a political taint on the program…

There is no due process for a “suspicious” person to be marked for death by drone. Ask George Zimmerman about that. The only requirement is vague and ethereal intelligence information which, if it’s as reliable as the Iraq WMD intel, appears by all accounts to be radicalizing the affected population tenfold. This boomerang effect will inevitably please our Military Industrial Complex’s constant search for new enemies to grind into profits of war. Death by Drone smacks of a street thug mentality similar to some cheesy gangster movie script. Francine Prose notes :

As drama, the scene is reminiscent of great moments in cable TV: Tony Soprano and his colleagues deciding whom to whack, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell conferring on which of their child employees must be eliminated. But it’s one thing to see murders planned on television and quite another to read that this planning session is occurring in the White House Situation Room in January, 2010, and that President Obama has assumed the grim responsibility of casting the final vote on every death sentence that this jury (so obviously outside traditional legal channels) is handing down…

..[consider] the following quote from Michael Leiter, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center:

You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “These laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.

Get Bin Laden dead? With its execrable grammar, its calculated thuggishness, and, for all that we have been reading about the assumption of personal responsibility, its euphemistic avoidance of what is really at issue (to get dead is not the same as to kill, and it’s never laws but people who get other people dead), the quote suggests a new dispensation in which our government, at the highest level, has given Tony Soprano license to ignore the rule of law and murder actual human beings, some of them harmless civilians. Shouldn’t we feel more frightened than reassured by the knowledge that the leader of our country holds himself accountable for every one of these deaths?

The Nuclear Bomb of Cyberspace

07 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Cyberwarfare, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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For those not fully aware of the new weapon of choice in the 21st century, I’m posting about it to open your eyes to the possible future chaos of cyber-warfare, a Pandora’s box that was officially opened with the admission by the U.S. government that they were behind the Stuxnet virus. It anonymously targets, infects, and sabotages industrial facilities such as nuclear and chemical plants. Many internet security experts, such as Mikko Hypponen, have warned that the introduction of this cyber weapon by the U.S. is something we will regret because we are the most internet-connected economy of the world. Here is a 60 minutes report on it from a few months ago:


Something silent and wicked this way comes…

A dark truth behind humanity’s technological progress is the ability to conduct war in terrifyingly fresh ways, going far beyond sticks and stones to express power.

Today, war is conducted by unmanned robotic planes in the skies, their operators sitting thousands of miles away. Missiles, bullets, and bombs have become more ingenious in their ability to vaporize bodies and buildings. Nuclear bombs, horrifying specters which could abruptly end humanity entirely, lay waiting in hidden silos and undetectable submarines peppered around the world.

During the last few years, cyber-warfare has become the newest weapon in an arsenal of ways for nation-states to overpower each other. This latest instrument has mainly been focused on the west Asian region, the epicenter being Iran.

In the past four years alone, Iran has been directly attacked by three cyber-weapons, each designed to cause havoc and siphon off data in their own unique ways. Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame, the latest of the three, have astonished the cyber-security industry. For experts, the coding and function of these viruses have signified the beginnings of an “early age of cyber-warfare”, one that could become “a common trend in everyday life” in the near future….

Flame: Elevating Cyber-warfare

Flame, discovered this May, is a much more spectacular weapon.

“Flame is a sophisticated attack toolkit, which is a lot more complex than previously encountered malware such as Duqu…[and is] about 20 times larger than Stuxnet,” explained Vitaly Kamluk, Chief Malware Expert of the computer security company Kaspersky Lab that identified the malware.

“[It] has very advanced espionage functionality, including intercepting network traffic, taking screenshots, and recording audio conversations, and this functionality can be extended with the help of additional modules, which can be created by the perpetrators any time. All the gathered data are sent to the authors of Flame via the Internet. Based on the way it works and how it is being deployed, Flame can be classified as a cyber-weapon,” he wrote to Al-Akhbar.

Furthermore, Kamluk noted that Flame can manipulate Bluetooth in order to collect information from nearby devices and even turn the device to service as a beacon.

The malware was first discovered by Kaspersky Lab in the beginning of May after it was contacted by the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to investigate reports that a virus was deleting and stealing large amounts of information from computers in the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company.

Further investigations have found that although less than a thousand computers were infected, most were concentrated in the west Asian region. According to Kamluk, the top seven countries and areas listed are Iran, the West Bank, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

Despite limited infections so far, Kamluk acknowledged that the general public should be concerned.

“Anyone can fall a victim of cyber-attack and even if you are not the prime target of cyber-attack, then perhaps some of your friends or relatives are. Infecting you might be a slightly easier way for attackers to hit a more important target that you might know,” he wrote. “Flame is the next stage in the uncovering of cyber-weapons developed with the support of [a] nation-state.”

“We believe that [we] are in the early age of cyber-warfare. We have just started discovering a cyber-weapon that was created several years ago. It may take some more years for it to become common trend in everyday life…

With everything going on in the world right now showing how unstable our global civilization is, the unleashing of this cyber-warfare simply adds a whole new dimension of fragility to the system. Like Drone technology, these Trojan horse viruses are affordable technology to those wishing to cause chaos, as pointed out by John Robb:

The technologies used in these system aren’t just available to big countries (like nuclear technology is).  This is tech anybody can use and configure in new ways.  In some cases, like Stuxnet and Flame, the software itself is freely available, and is now being analyzed and copied by people all across the world.

The demonstration of these technologies in warfare takes them out of the realm of science fiction and makes them real.  It also goads any country with even a modest budget to develop their own.

Another worry is that the opening of this box is occurring at the very same time the global financial system is coming unglued.   In an environment like that, almost all countries will become hollow states.  Hollow versions of what they once were. These technologies, in the hands of a hollow state, scream repression.

So, that’s where we are.

Good luck.

The Parasitic War Profiteers Continue to Grow while the Masses are Targeted for Austerity

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

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Two blog posts caught my eyes this weekend, one on our parasitic war economy and the other on the parasites readying their blueprint to bleed the masses dry. A related article to the first story lays out Obama’s pre-election connections to one of the primary recipients of tax dollars feeding the Military Industrial Complex – General Dynamics, as mentioned also by John Hively here.

In regards to the second blog post on the elite’s blueprint for squeezing the life out of the rest of us, austerity is a failed option because it attempts to preserve the paradigm of perpetual economic growth in a world of depleted resources, and it’s designed to preserve the social hierarchy of the capitalist system. Dr. Dan Bednarz at Health After Oil talks about this in his latest essay:

Socioeconomically, reaching the limits to growth means the impossibility of repaying accumulated debt and that massive unemployment will worsen under current institutional conditions. Politically we are witnessing governments not only caught up in a contraction of tax and revenue bases, but utterly failing and concomitantly repressing their citizens so as to maintain –and deepen- class inequalities and support for too big to fail private entities. This is the antithesis of resilience…

Until recently energy was cheap and seemed limitless, as did other natural resources; climate change risks remain “political,” not corporeal and existential. The overexploitation of natural resources and population growth should be apparent and frightening, but they are not; and wastes and pollution continue to be –from a grossly misguided economic growth point of view- “externalized” or “discounted” for future generations to gag on….

And the hypocritical remarks by the IMF chief Christine Lagarde:

Her hypocrisy–she claims to have great concern and sympathy for poor African schoolchildren, whose plight she compares with the problems of comparatively well-off Greeks–is frankly nauseating in light of the IMF’s contribution to African suffering and misery. The agency’s so-called structural adjustment programs, akin to austerity for Europeans, have forced African nations to slash spending on healthcare, food, and education, and to boost exports of raw materials and privatization of industries by multinational corporations, resulting in dramatically increased national debts. Not for nothing do critics of the IMF and its partner in exploitation in the name of assistance, the World Bank, speak of Africa’s new “overlords.”

But one suspects that there is more to the Lagarde affair than mere hypocrisy. The IMF managing director’s Africa reference can be seen as a telling slip of the tongue that calls attention to her true aim–the strategic objective of the global elites whose interests she serves–which is the permanent pauperization of the middle classes of the industrialized world. The objective isn’t to raise Africa up to the level of Europe–not even close to that. Rather, the elites seek to lift Africa only marginally while bringing the West down–meaning, the workers who have become too prosperous and too politically powerful in the eyes of the powers that be–closer to the level of the impoverished inhabitants of the resource-rich continent that was ravaged by imperialism and colonialism. A global leveling off is the real goal. Grinding Greece down is the beginning of what is intended to be a grand restructuring for purposes of creating a new world order in which a few privileged population segments will labor in well-paying, favored industries, including high technology and finance, with decent benefits and opportunities for advancement and upward mobility, while the great masses of workers will be condemned to toil like drones, or serfs, in deadening, dead-end jobs that will barely pay subsistence wages and little or no benefits of any kind.

Hence, the seemingly irrational, international obsession with promoting austerity during times of depression and recession. For the IMF and its backers, mass unemployment isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a strategy to bemanaged. Degrees of joblessness that have not been seen since the Great Depression are meant to become the new normal; meaningful social safety nets and social services, things of the past.

Already, the argument can be made that “we are all Greeks.” Absent a reversal of the trend, unless the IMF’s iron heel is broken before it can complete its crushing mission, we will soon all be Africans … and Asians … and Latin Americans … anything but the middle class Americans and Europeans we once were … as social services are dismantled and workers rights are shredded in the name of “reform.”

Now on to the two blog posts I mentioned at the beginning:

America’s murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror

“More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the “war on terror” was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war – the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands – is now being relentlessly escalated.”

The drone wars are all about raising corporate profits, for General Dynamics and other master’s of war. They have President Obama on a leash. He is their good little boy in the white house, ordering the murder of innocent people for profits. Sure, there might be a terrorist that he gets now and then, but the terrorists aren’t his targets; Wall Street analysts tell corporate CEO’s what their profit targets will be every quarter, and every drone strike is intended to push up those profits to reach Wall Street expectations. The more drone strikes, the more drones need to be built, the more profits are obtained, and all at tax payer expense.

That means the drone wars are all about redistributing income from working people to the rich via higher corporate earnings, rising dividends and soaring share prices. The drone wars also mean the president, like President Bush before him, is the terrorist.

America’s murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror

VIDEO: Scott Walker’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is

“The New Model For The Country”

Coming soon to your state: The anti-union, education-cutting, free-market-leaning, divide-and-conquer playbook of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

According to a leading conservative activist, the Walker agenda in Wisconsin is the new conservative game plan for all states in the union. That was the key message delivered at a rally Friday evening in Madison by Tim Phillips, national president of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative nonprofit started with money from the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. “The Wisconsin approach to changing and making state government better is the new model for the country,” he said. “You are the model for the country.”

Here a video of Phillips’ remarks:


Since taking office in January 2011, Walker has slashed collective bargaining rights for public-employee unions, cut funding to public schools by $800 million, signed a controversial voter ID bill that critics say discriminates against students and minorities, and approved a divisive redistricting bill that benefitted his fellow GOP lawmakers. Walker managed to eliminate a $3.6 billion deficit, but did so, his critics say, at the expense of workers’ rights, teachers and students, and the public sector as a whole. In a January 2011 conversation with billionaire businesswoman Diane Hendricks, a top donor of his, Walker admitted that his plan was to “divide and conquer” the unions in Wisconsin. Walker’s agenda has turned Wisconsin into the most polarized state in America.

This agenda, AFP’s Tim Phillips insisted, is the new model for state governments. “Today every other governor in the country and every state legislator in the country is watching Wisconsin,” he said. “Because the Wisconsin approach to changing and making state government better is the new model for the country. You are the model for the country. For fiscal prosperity and economic freedom and getting the state moving again. You’re the model!”…

Capitalism’s Self-Preserving Tactics: Crushing Dissent Covertly & Overtly

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex

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You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.

Michael Parenti’s son, Christian, gives the methods by which the capitalist power structure controls rising social movements:

Parenti starts by noting a paradox within the capitalist system. “Capitalism needs poverty,”(2) states Parenti unequivocally, arguing that without enough poor people around workers start demanding better conditions and higher wages. However, at the same time, capitalism is threatened by too much poverty. Poverty, he argues, tends to breed dissatisfaction, which makes revolt more likely. The question is “How do you have poverty and manage the threat of poverty?”(3) The answer, for Parenti, is by expanding social control mechanisms through the criminal justice system. The buildup of prisons and policing in the last two decades is not a result, as some might have it, of corporations expanding into the criminal justice system for profits.(4) Rather, the growth comes from an increasing need by the capitalist class (in collusion with the state) for greater social control, a growth necessary to keep the poor from revolting. Prisons, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs” become the means by which the state is able to subdue the working class and keep poverty at a level that maximizes profits while minimizing dissent. Here we see a clear example of “hard-line” social control.

Parenti also describes a second, softer tactic of social control, mainly co-optation. He briefly describes the way that workers’ movements in the 1960s were co-opted by turning their leaders into administrators of low income housing and social services. This co-optation happened at a time when the Unites States was economically strong enough to absorb the poor in order to legitimize the system. However, the economic crisis in the 1970s put an end to this tactic and brought with it the harder modes of social control. Parenti concludes that, “In a class society, rule comes down to two things, as Machiavelli said. The prince has two choices. He can either treat men [sic] well or crush them. . . . Sometimes economic conditions are plush enough that people can be treated well, but more often then not, in a capitalist society, the ruling class, through the state, must crush and intimidate people to reproduce their system. And that is what the criminal justice system is all about.”(5)

 

And tying together the previous post about Drones and the earlier post about the State’s oppressive security and surveillance apparatus, we have this essay which contains a perfect example of how the Corporate State crushes dissent:

“…I see other things coming even sooner, caused by the same ruling elite’s insatiable greed and lust for power, and by the same political system’s actions in support of their goals.

First there is the accelerating march towards a police state, which began in earnest during the first year of the Bush/Cheney administration with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the passage of the cynically named USA PATRIOT Act, and the launching of the so-called War on Terror, but which has been carried forward to a place I could never have imagined by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. Today, police in America ride around with fully automatic M-16s in their squadcars, routinely taser people, including children, the elderly and the disabled, for minor offenses, and when confronted with a peaceful and permitted political demonstration, respond in full military SWAT gear, complete with guns, pepper spray, clubs, tear gas, and undercover agents who deliberately try to incite violence.

Just yesterday, long-time Latino activist Carlos Montes, 64, was arrested in Los Angeles during a joint LAPD/FBI SWAT-team midnight raid on his house. The charge: possessing illegal weapons. But Montes possessed only licensed guns in his home. The catch was, the FBI, which was clearly after Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, for political reasons, conveniently told local police that he was not allowed to register firearms because of a (get this!) 1969 felony conviction for allegedly throwing a coke can at a cop (Montes says he never threw such a can). Note that the police knew all about that conviction when Montes first registered his guns. He has not been in trouble with the law since then. Clearly he could have simply been informed that his gun registrations were invalid, and the guns had to be turned in. Why Montes, who has remained politically active and a critic of the government, was really arrested in this Gestapo-like manner became clear when an FBI agent hopped in the car with him right after he was picked up, and said, “I am from the FBI and I want to talk to you about the Freedom Road Socialist Organisation.” Montes is now facing a possible 22 years in jail for possessing legally registered guns that the LAPD has known for years that he had in his home, and that nobody ever cared about before. (I had to learn about this from the British newspaper the Guardian. The corporate media in America have covered up this outrageous political bust.)

America today is crawling with secret police–local, state and federal. They’re all connected too, through 72 so-called Fusion Centers that receive federal funds, but remain insulated from any kind of public oversight. Our phones and our internet communications are monitored automatically by National Security Agency super-computers that look for key words like “airport, exercise, flu, blizzard, bridge, or fundamentalism,” any of which prompt closer attention to what we are saying or writing.

Meanwhile, the president has claimed the right to detain–in secret, without charge–any American he deems to be a threat, and to hold such people indefinitely, without any recourse to lawyer or trial. He is even claiming the right to execute such captives. So much for the Fourth Amendment, as well as the First, Second, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth!

While I don’t think we live in a police state yet (having lived in China for two years, and visited there as a journalist over four other years, I know what a real one looks and feels like), but all the elements for one have been put in place and await only the throwing of a switch.

In the vision I clearly have, I feel strongly that someone, whether Obama or Romney, or whoever follows him, will throw that switch. When power is available to political leaders, they inevitably avail themselves of it. It’s just a question of time.

But there is another vision I have too. It has to do with America’s increasing international lawlessness and bellicosity.  As the nation turns increasingly to technology for its aggressive purposes, through the use of armed robotic drones, and through internet attacks on purported “enemies,” it not only opens the door to others to do the same to us; it virtually assures that we will be attacked ourselves in like manner to what we are doing.

It was one thing to be the world’s superpower when being a superpower meant having the biggest ICBMs and the most nuclear warheads — weapons that required an enormous military budget and a massive industrial base. Drone technology and internet “weapons” are something else altogether. As Israel has demonstrated with its Stuxnet virus, a very small nation can easily construct a weapon of tremendous destructive power.  Iran demonstrated its own capability in that area by using computer savvy to take control of a sophisticated US surveillance drone flying over its airspace, actually stealing it electronically, landing it, and now, apparently, back-engineering it. And remotely-piloted drones are not particularly complex technologically. Basic ones can be purchased off the shelf in any hobby shop.

How long will it be before foreign predator drones begin flying over US airspace, taking out targets without leaving any clue as to who was the attacker?  How long before other countries begin destroying American power systems, industrial sites or military command centers using internet-based computer viruses?

This is a game that many people can play, and I predict that it will not be long before we Americans will rue the day this country began playing it….”

Automating Totalitarianism in the Empire

01 Friday Jun 2012

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“MQ-1 Predator drones kill civilians.” This great wall of screen printed street posters is up around the corner from my house.”

Humans love to automate their life. That’s why we have such things as cruise control in our vehicles, robotic assembly lines in factories and ATM machines at banks, to name a few examples. Then you have more insidious automating like algo trading or high frequency trading in the stock market, NSA/CIA/FBI data mining and collection, and Targeted Drone assassination. With our so-called Drone War, the assumption of innocence has been thrown out the window in favor of a George Zimmerman vigilante style assumption of guilt. Glenn Greenwald adds detail to this State Terrorism mindset here. This sort of power that Obama has assumed circumvents any form of trial by jury and issues of constitutionality and moral consciousness. It is also designed, whether intentionally or not, to strike fear into the world and inhibit/control people’s behavior. It’s a high-tech, automated form of totalitarianism which does not waste time on frivolities such as freedom of speech, criminal investigation, and the judicial process of ascertaining guilt or innocence. GLOBAL GUERRILLAS has a post on this:

The US President’s Hit List or “Death by PowerPoint”

Last Friday, I wrote a post on how:

  1. US national security agencies increasingly use computerized analysis of collected data to designate a person as an enemy combatant.
  2. The US currently uses non-judicial Presidential “hit lists” to simplify the killing of people (including US citizens) designated as enemy combatants.
  3. The US is rapidly increasing its use of drones to kill enemy combatants nearly anywhere in the world 24x7x365.

The scary part is that the combination of these trends is the path of least resistance to an automated totalitarianism.

For those of you out of the loop on what is going on, it probably seemed to be a bit of a stretch.  Particularly, the idea that the President could put American citizens on a military hit list without going through a judicial process.

If you were skeptical on the existence of a hit list, here’s an article from today’s (almost on cue) New York Times.

Some choice bits from the article.  It shows there are still humans in the loop, although the process used to nominate people (including Americans) to kill is largely ad hoc.

Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

Obama … insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.

Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people”

a disputed method for counting civilian casualties… counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials…

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

It [the hit list nomination process] is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

Remember also that local police forces will be the recipients of the Drone technology America is using to obliterate those smarmy, suspicious-looking terrorists on the other side of the globe. Back in February, Congress passed Bill, HR 658 which will fund 30,000 DRONE UNMANNED AIRCRAFT for use inside America’s boundaries at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security. And the Drone lobbyists are out in full force on the Washington Beltway:

 

“The more our government, eased of any former legal moorings, abuses its position to maintain the edge of secrecy, the more it demands transparency of citizens. From naked body scans at airports, to urine samples, from the huge base being built to store our PERSONAL correspondences, to the “right” of government to listen in. I mean all this is STILL being sold to the Fox-viewing public under the banner of freedom!

……

We’ve crossed the rubicon where literature becomes reality, and the progeny of 1984, Kafka’s “The Trial,” and the Star Wars trilogy merge together into a dystopian display that no doubt is sending many to either anti-depressants, booze, or (undiagnosed symptoms of) Stockholm Syndrome. As the troops fight “them” over there, so they don’t have to fight “them” over here… and all for our FREEDOMS! The heists underway impact our liberties, pocketbooks, minds, and bodies!”

———

“Whenever “security forces” become overmighty they also become paranoid. Look at the Soviets; look at Hitler’s Germany. There were enemies everywhere, not least within.

More than this, however, is the chaotic nature of how the power forces within an autocracy evolve. In both Hitler’s Germany and Lenin’s Russia, sheer chaos played a major part – things get hot and sizzle off in unexpected directions.

In America the same forces are at work, but they are evolving in relation to a different set of political givens and a radically different technological environment. With current technology, Hitler or Stalin would have ruled the world in no time. There will be no coup, revolution, or Reichstag moment in America. It will be the world’s first auto-autocracy – a voluntary (or at least non-resistant) slide into a police state, in which everyone denies it is a police state. Naomi Wolf has all the details.”

Review of an Important Documentary

31 Thursday May 2012

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The following is a review of the documentary “The War You Don’t See” which I highly recommend seeing if you can find a copy. I originally wrote this for Media Roots, but never finished it. I have reworked it with edit suggestions by Abbey Martin. “The War You Don’t See” is not available in America. It was originally scheduled to debut at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico but was mysteriously cancelled at the last minute.

Review of John Pilger’s

“The War You Don’t See”

John Pilger’s powerful documentary, “The War You Don’t See,” explores what the media’s role has been during today’s rapacious wars, like those of Iraq and Afghanistan. What Pilger reveals is both frightening and sad: the so-called “Fourth Estate” of the media, once thought of as a bulwark against corruption in government and big business, is now no more than a cheerleader and mouthpiece for what has become the Corporate State.

Interviewing with western news reporters, Pilger questions the efficacy of today’s media in living up to its duty of critically analyzing the government narrative while providing unbiased information to the public. In response, he is met with exasperated replies like that of David Manion, editor in Chief of ITV news, who says, “I don’t think you are suggesting that we [the media] should completely dismiss the words of arguably the second most powerful man in the western world [Dick Cheney].”

Manion completely abdicates his responsibility of fact-finding when he states, “…we allowed the viewers to make up their [own] minds as to whether this[Cheney] was a man telling the truth or not.” With responses such as these, it becomes apparent that the Fourth Estate has been rendered a neutered servant to government/corporate power and agendas. 

Major media outlets have simply become unthinking stenographers of the ‘official word’, not daring to ask substantive or probing questions about government/social policy. Television, print, and radio have been reduced to hollow conduits through which runs the government/corporate PR machinery, continuously pumping out lies and spin in order to generate legitimacy for its criminal acts. Bradley Manning exposed the inner workings of this deception with his access to U.S. state department cables from embassies and consulates around the world:

The non-PR-versions of world events and crises …like everything from the buildup to the Iraq War during Powell, to the actual content of “aid packages”: for instance, PR that the US is sending aid to Pakistan includes funding for water/food/clothing… that much is true, it includes that, but the other 85% of it is for F-16 fighters and munitions to aid in the Afghanistan effort, so the US can call in Pakistanis to do aerial bombing instead of Americans potentially killing civilians and creating a PR crisis.

Edward Bernays, who coined the term ‘public relations’ and pioneered modern propaganda as a form of psychological warfare, declared once that “the intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” The ability of the U.S. to wield ‘soft power’ by way of effective propaganda techniques is ever-evolving, and the ability of the Corporate State to frame the public debate and spread the Big Lie through its control of the nation’s digital media stream has consequently dumbed down the public discourse on important subjects.

In speaking about the advancement of nonstop digital news feeds, British reporter Rageh Omar explains that “twenty-four hour news is the easiest to manipulate, because it’s a giant echo-chamber.”  Constant 24/7 repetition of the Big Lie all across the nation’s digital media stream ensures the successful brainwashing of the masses.

Author Chris Hedges experienced firsthand the mind-numbing shock of our corporatized culture when he moved back to America after having spent twenty years outside of it:

I remember when I was twenty years outside the United States, I moved back to New York City, and I was overwhelmed by the electronic hallucinations that bombarded me in my public and private space. And so, I retreated into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I could contemplate objects or paintings that didn’t move. You need to spend significant amounts of time with print material to grasp complex thoughts, and that requires silence. It requires an absence of noise. It requires an absence of moving images. And the less we do that, the more — the shallower or the more manipulated we become.

And those pulling the levers of the mass media machine are the über-wealthy and power elite who have one foot in government and the other in the corporate world. In their quest for profit and control, the reality and facts of the world are politically malleable tools.

Investigative journalist Mark Curtis explains that the relationships western governments cultivate with oppressive foreign regimes are accompanied by a sophisticated PR operation touting foreign policy objectives of “promoting democracy, human rights, and economic development.” However, these fake altruistic claims hide an insidious agenda. Actual government planning files clearly state the intended policy is based on “controlling oil resources, creating an international economy that works in the interests of corporations, and maintaining their power status.” If one looks at the current influx of multinational oil firms into Iraq, the intentions of military intervention are made obvious.

When investigative journalists report the truth, such as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charles J. Hanley who personally went to Iraq in 2003 and found no WMD after visiting every site named by Bush officials, they are simply blackballed and shut out of the mainstream media.

Of particular concern is the symbiotic relationship between the military industrial complex, driven by the profit-seeking objectives of corporations, and the major news conglomerates which, if not directly owned by military weapons manufacturers, receive advertising dollars from them. This intertwined relationship has been called the Military-Industrial-Media Complex. For instance, GE  happens to be one of the largest defense contractors in the world and owns NBC. Another example is Lockheed Martin, which spends large sums of money advertising on CNN.

In his book War made Easy, Normon Solomon explained that “a military-industrial-media complex … now extends to much of corporate media. … Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links — financial and social— with the military industry and Washington’s foreign policy establishment.”

Pilger adeptly illustrates this perverse alliance with a string of TV clips in which news commentators are seen gushing and fawning over the extreme efficiency and performance of various industrial-killing weaponry. This groveling self-worship within the military-media complex is especially disturbing when recalling the images shown earlier in the film of children’s limp bodies being pulled out of rubble from Afghan villages obliterated by hi-tech armaments. With the ongoing censorship of such massacres and the sanitizing of western news reporting, Americans have become desensitized and normalized to war. The fact that over a million Iraqis have been snuffed out is simply not reported in the MSM (mainstream media), nor the fact that Iraq’s infrastructure remains crumbling and destroyed from the invasion.

Professor Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, explains that “pentagon officials have contracts with news organizations in terms of how to manipulate the news” as well as “pentagon officials involved in press releases to the media in which intelligence is used to manipulate public opinion (a violation of the charter of any intelligence organization).” Goodman claims that 80-90% of what you hear and read is ‘officially inspired’, meaning influenced by the ‘official’ narrative of the government. With 90% of the media in the hands of six corporations, can there be any doubt that the majority of news emanating from the self-serving interests of the corporatocracy’s military-media complex is all-pervasive. The dawning of the twentieth century has seen propaganda from the Corporate State taking on a truly global initiative. There also exists a revolving door between top military brass and defense contractors, making conflicts of interest inevitable and systemic. The degree to which utter moral decay and corruption has overtaken the American Empire is emphasized in an interview Pilger conducts with Julian Assange, whose character assassination by the U.S. government is currently playing out in the news:

Assange: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military and intelligence insider documents… what I see is a vast, sprawling estate — what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex or military industrial complex. And that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled.

This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interests by thousands and thousand of players all working together and against each other to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia… and keeping that going…

We often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through off-shore tax havens. So I can see some really quite remarkable similarities. Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an off-shore haven, which doesn’t follow the rule of law. Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia are used to wash money out of the U.S. tax base and back in.

Pilger: Arms Companies

Assange: Arms Companies… yep.

Pilger: What you’re saying is money and money-making is at the center of modern war, and it’s almost self-perpetuating.

Assange: Yes, and it’s becoming worse.

The insanity behind America’s over-extended and bloated military war machine is highlighted when Pilger’s asks why the U.S. is in such a permanent state of war, when there is, in reality, no other country strong enough to stand up to it. The answer given by a government official to justify America’s never-ending militarism is “asymmetrical threats which transcend all geographic boundaries.” In other words, we wage war with an ever-shifting, nebulous enemy whom the Corporate State continually redefines. In reality, we create our own enemies to suit the interests of the elite who hold power. As the saying goes, state-sponsored war is simply terrorism with a bigger budget. The ‘War on Terror’ begets more of the same; it’s a self-perpetuating process. To quote Chalmer’s Johnson, “‘Blowback’ does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end).”

Carne Ross was the only official who expresses a higher form of moral consciousness in Pilger’s film when he states that he feels “actual shame running through [his] body” for what he did when working for the British government. He says, “…we should all be accountable to each other. That’s the only way to have a civilized society, with some kind of transparency and accountability with each other… with people holding others accountable for what they do, and that applies to journalists as much as it applies to anybody.”

In a world where resources are dwindling and the environment is showing clear signs of collapse, such a nihilistic war-mongering economy can only pull civilization down with it into chaos and barbarism. The remaining hope for mankind to survive the future and avoid the catastrophes of war and terrorism is for his ethical sense to evolve beyond what his scientific and technological capabilities have wrought. The war you don’t see is the true destructive and evil face of war whitewashed by a propaganda machine operating 24/7 to control and steer public sentiment in favor of underlying corporate interests. As Abraham Lincoln said, “He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.” Pilger’s documentary is one of the most important to have come out in the last decade and is essential viewing for those who really want to better understand the machinations of the corporate-controlled political economy dominating our society.

Here is an entertaining video done by Diran Lyons using the art of political video remixing. Donnie Darko happens to be one of my all-time favorite films.

We Fight to support the Profiteers of War

30 Wednesday May 2012

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I’ll be off for several days. But before I go, I’ll post what Ted Rall says is Obama’s funniest quote:

“We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/28/remarks-president-commemoration-ceremony-50th-anniversary-vietnam-war

Preserving the Status Quo via the State’s Security & Surveillance Apparatus

27 Sunday May 2012

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The power elite and the Corporate State will use whatever tools at their disposal to protect the status quo and their privileged positions within it. One common and insidious method deployed is the security and surveillance apparatus. Covert methods are used to employ operatives who will infiltrate a threatening opposition group or social movement in order to either help discredit it or to generate a climate of fear so as to stifle and discourage such activities, effectively neutralizing its momentum. Such appears to be the case in Cleveland on May Day and in Chicago during the NATO summit this month:

Gelsomino said “Mo” and “Gloves”[two police informants] began befriending activists in the Chicago area in early May and were present when Church, Chase or Betterly were arrested. She said many activists in Chicago for the NATO protests knew “Mo” and “Gloves” and are now worried they could also be arrested.

Critics say filing terrorism-related charges against protesters is reminiscent of previous police actions ahead of major political events, when authorities moved quickly to prevent suspected plots but sometimes quietly dropped the charges later.

McCarthy on Saturday flatly dismissed the idea the arrests of the initial three suspects were anything more than an effort to stop “an imminent threat.”

Kris Hermes, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, which has represented many of the activists, said the charges against Senakiewicz and Neiweem are also an “effort to frighten people and to diminish the size of the demonstrations.”

“Even if charges are dropped or reduced later, they will have succeeded in spreading fear and intimidation,” Hermes said.

Truth-Out has an excellent article discussing these two cases in more detail:

” … Another lawyer, who has been handling high-profile political cases like the Cleveland 5 for nearly 40 years, mentioned that in addition to the use of undercover agents and informants, the FBI employs “agent provocateurs” to infiltrate and discredit political movements, changing the name of programs to make it appear as if it has reformed its underhanded ways.

In the case of the five Chicago activists who have been swept up on terrorism charges, defense attorneys charge that two police informants nicknamed “Mo” and “Gloves” were the masterminds. In the post-9/11 era the FBI has up to 60,000 informants and spies around the United States, according to an expose by Mother Jones. The FBI cut its teeth as a repressive police force during the Red Scare after World War 1, raiding homes and deporting thousands of legal foreign-born radicals in the labor, anarchist and socialist movements. After World War II, the FBI destroyed thousands of lives and decimated the left during the McCarthy Era. The FBI famously spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., during the 1960s and at one point thousands of agents were devoted to disrupting and sabotaging the anti-Vietnam War, student and black liberation movements.

During the 1980s the FBI spied on Central American solidarity activists. Since Sept. 11 the FBI has snared hundreds of Muslim Americans in cases involving informants who supplied the ideas, motivation and means for a terrorist plot. In recent years the FBI has termed “animal rights and environmental extremists,” as well as anarchists as some of the main domestic terrorist threats. It has used infiltrators, most infamously one code-named Anna, to entrap environmental activists. In 2008, the FBI sent a snitch by the name of Brandon Darby on a fishing expedition, and he managed to cajole and push two Austin, Texas youth into agreeing to make Molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. These were all political cases as are the two against the Cleveland 5 and the Chicago group.

The fact that the FBI sprang cases during the biggest Occupy events this year – May Day and NATO – indicates it has the Occupy movement in its sights. They are hardly the only ones. Reams of federal government documents secured by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal widespread government surveillance and information gathering on the movement ranging from the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon. The public interest legal organization asserts that the documents regarding Occupy Wall Street “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

For now the Cleveland 5 are languishing in jail. Connor Stevens and Doug Wright have been on suicide watch according to those who visited them. Brandon Baxter wrote in a letter dated May 19, “So Skelly was just dragged out of his cell a bit ago, He wrote ‘They all want me to DIE’ all over his walls, They said they’ll bring him back, but he may be a suicide watch for awhile.”

Their trial has been set for September 17, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, after the defense objected to Sept. 11, which was originally scheduled as the trial start date….”

Evan Rowe, an acquaintance of one of the accused, gives another astute observation for why these elaborate entrapment schemes have been utilized:

In Rowe’s opinion, the arrests were a “public relations exercise” by law enforcement agencies that need to invent sophisticated terrorist plots to justify their out-sized budgets, he said.

This keen observation is further explained here:

The FBI affidavit — analyzed here by RT — confirms, again, what many have warned about regarding the growing surveillance and security agencies in the United States: To keep themselves employed and justify their budgets, people in agencies like the FBI are orchestrating plots to catch “terrorists” who, otherwise, seem to be quite unable to do anything on their own. Last fall, Mother Jones reported on FBI efforts against Muslim extremists and concluded that many of those were instances of entrapment as well.

In activist circles, there are a series of notorious cases of entrapment by federal authorities. In 2006, for instance, environmental activist Eric McDavid, encouraged by an informant known as “Anna,” was convicted on conspiracy charges. Another more notorious case is that of Brandon Darby — a well-known anarchist and activist-turned-informant — and his entrapment of David McKay and Bradley Cowder. The award winning film, Better This World, tells the story of how McKay and Cowder were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“In most cases,” said Stepanian, “this is not one coordinated crackdown with a puppet-master. It’s a bottom-up [phenomenon] where special investigators are creating things for themselves to do. They go to potential targets to justify their position and create work for themselves.”

Perhaps even more troubling than the manipulation of vulnerable individuals — whether they be political activists or members of mosques — is the way in which law enforcement meanwhile manipulates public discourse about terrorism, Islam or, in this case, a growing social movement.

According to Schulte, the operation in Cleveland appears to have been part of a pre-planned narrative meant to paint Occupiers as a group with terrorist thugs in their midst, discouraging others from joining the movement. The FBI had a media statement prepared for immediate release on May Day after the arrests, and it hosted an unusually high-profile press conference the following day. There have been more than 300 pleas involving FBI informants in six years and such kind of overt media blitz from the feds is rare. Rolling Stone reporter Rick Perlstein observes, comparing two different anti-terrorism operations at the end of April, “that the State is singling out ideological enemies.” He reports that authorities are much less likely, for instance, to use tactics of entrapment against violent white supremacist groups.

Harkening back in history during the McCarthy Era and the Red Scare, The Harvard Crimson, the nation’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper, recently reprinted an article from its archives in 1949 which illustrates the same kind of tactics being used today and their effect on the populace:

Yale University is caught in a mystifying web of “cold war” security. So is Harvard. So is M.I.T. So is the country. What makes Yale different is that Yale is scared–scared right out of its civil liberties. The older faculty men, secure in tenure appointments, are just worried. Certain faculties, notably those of the law and medical schools, are not even worried. But the younger faculty members and the graduate students, especially in the physics department are scared stiff. “We’re afraid to open our mouths on any idea left of Wilsonian liberalism,” one physics instructor says. Other young instructors have admitted that this attitude is wide-spread in the science departments. (Little information is available in other fields in the university; it is well known, however, that although many instructors have Progressive Party sympathies, very few men did any active work for Wallace in the recent election.)

Why is this true at Yale? There are two reasons. The first is the appointment policy followed by the Prudential Committee, the standing committee of the Yale Corporation, in the one case in which the facts are known: no card-carrying or de facto Communists will henceforward be admitted to the Yale faculty. The young graduate students and faculty men put it a different way: “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale (quoted from President Charles Seymour), because there will be no witches.” What worries the young men is how far the Prudential Committee intends to go with this policy….

The second reason is the FBI–not just the eight or so regular New Haven agents, but the many more undercover agents, the liaison men on the faculty, the FBI informants, official, semi-official, and just plain snoopers. Provost Furniss himself says that the known agents are only a minority in the New Haven FBI system. No one agrees on this system’s area of investigation. In the physics department alone, some feel that every faculty member and student is under surveillance…

Setting Newt Gingrich Straight on Oil Shale and Shale Oil

25 Friday May 2012

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Ed Hanox sets Newt Gingrich straight on the viability of oil shale/shale oil playing any part in making America “energy independent”.

” Newt Gingrich has rebounded from his embarrassing presidential campaign to take to the op-ed pages to slam President Barack Obama’s energy policy.

But Newt seems to be confusing oil shale with shale oil (and its close relative shale gas). The latter are conventional hydrocarbons (crude oil and natural gas) trapped within impermeable shale rock; the former is something quite different. Oil shale actually contains no “oil” at all, but rather a precursor hydrocarbon known as kerogen. Given enough time and pressure and kerogen will turn into hydrocarbons like crude oil. Exploiting oil shale means finishing the job Mother Nature started by pulverizing the shale rock, heating the crushed rock under pressure to release the kerogen and then processing it into usable shale oil (not to be confused with the shale oil mentioned earlier). It is a complex, expensive and energy-intensive process. In fact, the Energy Return on Investment (or EROI, an industry measure of production efficiency) for oil shale is typically about 2:1, meaning one unit of energy is used to produce two units of usable shale oil; by comparison the EROI for conventional crude oil averages 20:1, with some oil fields having a much higher EROI than that.

This is the main reason why oil shale deposits have often only been exploited when no other energy alternatives exist. The nation with the biggest reliance on oil shale today is likely tiny Estonia, where much of that country’s power comes from oil shale. But the oil shale power industry accounts for 91% of the water usage in Estonia, and is responsible for almost all of the country’s air pollution. And Estonia is using raw shale oil in their power plants. To use shale oil to produce gasoline, it needs to be processed further before being ready to use as a substitute for conventional crude oil in petroleum refining, all of which adds to the complexity and cost in using oil shale.

While the U.S. oil shale deposits may be three times larger than Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves, much of America’s oil shale is located in Utah, Wyoming and western Colorado; a fairly arid part of the nation. As mentioned earlier, the production of oil shale is a water-intensive process; between one and three barrels of water are needed for the production of just one barrel of oil shale. To exploit domestic oil shale at Gingrichian levels would mean either setting up a massive pipeline infrastructure to move water from wetter areas of the country to the oil shale, or taking that water from cities and farmers across Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. These factors are likely the reasons why the National Oil Shale Association itself (the trade group set up to promote oil shale) discusses oil shale not as a way to get cheap and plentiful gasoline, but rather as a domestic “bridge fuel” for America to use in a decades-long project to move the country off a fossil fuel-based economy.

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With political stooges putting out misinformation to the gullible public, is it any wonder the average Joe has no idea what the fuck is going on. He is getting bombarded with propaganda and misinformation in all directions. Even military psy-op techniques are being used on his pea brain.