I haven’t done any bashing truth-telling on Mitt Romney yet, so now would be a good time since it looks like King Romney is closing the gap in war chest funds. As Matt Taibbi pointed out earlier this year, “the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the timein America.” And Romney appears to be the golden boy for our financial oligarchs. According to the experts in such matters of our staged elections, Romney has the backing of the 1%:
..Romney will certainly have the advantage as Wall Street tycoons and conservative billionaires line up to contribute. One billionaire, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was reportedly ready to make “limitless” contributions, more than $100 million, to Romney to defeat the president….
“…Romney and his allies are certain to hold the financial upper hand, not least because the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 allowed for a flood of corporate cash. The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obama’s diminished stature and more formidable opponent.”
Now as I explained in my post ‘Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy‘, the job of the President is more of a PR position for who really runs the country, i.e. the corporatocracy. If you look at Obama’s record, he is indistinguishable from his predecessor in all issues that matter to the common person. For instance, contrary to Obama’s pre-election populist rhetoric, he has escalated America’s militarism such as in drone and cyber warfare, and he has widened even further the wealth gap. Having previously signed trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, Obama continues to sell out the American worker to multinational corporations as revealed in a recently leaked document of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (also known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, orTPP). Like all trade agreements before, this one is no different in the way that it was created, i.e. solely by corporate lobbyists, leaving the American public completely shut out. Compare that with what Obama said in 2008:
We can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests…
Rest assured, King Romney will continue the dismantling of America and its Third Worldization in favor of the parasitic financial sector and transnational corporations. He says this TPP tade agreement should be passed through as soon as possible:
Reinstate the president’s Trade Promotion Authority
Complete negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Pursue new trade agreements with nations committed to free enterprise and open markets
Create the Reagan Economic Zone
King Romney will also continue to support the military-industrial-complex and America’s war economy, painting himself as a pro-military, self-sacrificing patriotic citizen. But as Cenk Uygur notes, the truth is somewhere 180 degrees from what is painted for mass consumption:
Now after the 2012 political circus concludes, we will have had twelve years of rule by a president with no military service, and with another 4 more years to come. War is not for the privileged wealthy, but for the children of the impoverished 99% in America’s hinterland.
About 1 in 5 current members of Congress is a veteran, but less than 1% of their offspring are. – David Freed
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, author and Associate Professor of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, clarifies for us the ugly reality behind the wars sold to us today:
Hidden in these tragic figures[cost and lives lost] is war’s dirty secret. As historian and former U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich clearly states, “War is a source of enormous wealth and power [that delivers] profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries.”[2] These beneficiaries find it expedient and surprisingly easy to sell war and militarized priorities to a reluctant public using deception, fear, and patriotism.
The politicos no longer represent us, only themselves and the elite monied interests. So no matter who wins this election, expect more of the same from our corporate overlords.
I first heard about Peter Van Buren through a guest post by Jesselyn Radack onGlenn Greenwald’s blog discussing another case of Obama’s ever-widening war on whistleblowers:
Today, I’m not writing about the Espionage Act being used to chill journalists and whistleblowers, but something equally as troubling: the assault on whistleblowers’ First Amendment rights, illustrated by the creepy case of Peter Van Buren.
Here is Peter discussing the outright corruption of what I call our military-media-congressional complex:
And another interview he did recently with Eliot Spitzer on CurrentTV:
Van Buren has a sardonic, humorous writing style with many of his posts which makes them enjoyable to read. As Van Buren explains in the following blog entry, the vast black hole that is Iraq continues to milk American citizens dry through the privatization of war via guns-for-hire eager to project America’s increasingly militarized foreign policy. Besides having our pocketbooks raided by this outsourcing of war for profit, these paid mercenaries aren’t the best of ambassadors for spreading good will and a positive image for America, if there ever existed such a thing from our naked grab for resources by way of military invasion. But in a land of such high rhetoric and such low character, when you need someone to carry out the dirty work of our economy, extrajudicial assassins are a President’s best friend. A case in point is the infamous war profiteer Blackwater, then changed to Xe, and now metamorphosized into Academi (still operating with the testosterone-laced, self-righteous warrior-of-God mentality):
I wrote recently about the return of Blackwater to the State Department, with the mercenary guns-for-hire company changing its name once again (now called Academi in a homage to bad spelling) and buying an existing contract to put it back into the State Department’s world.
It gets creepier, as government seems to get these days.
Slam Dunk on Inman
Academi now boasts two celebrities on its Board of Directors, former attorney general John Ashcroft and retired admiral Bobby Inman. Ashcroft of course is Mr. Homeland Security, the guy who set in motion the smorgasbord of unconstitutional wiretapping, spying and detentions without trial that followed 9/11. He is also the guy who was so offended by the marble statues at the Department of Justice that he had them draped to hide classical nude details.
From a State Department-Blackwater love fest perspective, Inman is a slam-dunk. Inside Foggy Bottom, Inman is permanently associated with the up-armoring of embassies abroad through the 1985 “Inman Report,” a call to arms that resulted in the moated, blast-proof, unapproachable fortress embassies America promotes its image through today. The Report was also the catalyst for the establishment of the part of the State Department which titularly oversees the deployment of mercenaries, everyone’s favorite Bureau of Diplomatic Security, DS. Inman’s word is gospel to DS, so his appearance on the Academi Board is no accident.
Small World
Keeping the circle of life theme going, Academi’s CEO Ted Wright used to be president of mega-contractor KBR, the firm Dick Cheney worked for and the firm that made billions running the backstage logistics portion of the Iraq and Afghan crusades. One of Academi’s VPs worked for Queen Noor of Jordan, and has ties to the Bush dynasty. It is indeed a small world.
More creepiness?
Academi, on its “pro shop” web site, sells God’s Will T-shirts, pictured above. Just the thing for the budding merc crusader to wear while gunning down Muslims for profit. Jeez, and people wonder why we’re not winning.
A Devil’s Bargain
In the days since 9/11, State has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has required the organization to make a Devils’ Bargain with mercenaries like Academi. Prior to 9/11, State’s policy was generally to evacuate embassies in countries at war, reinserting diplomats when things quieted down to the point that diplomacy was again possible. This strategy worked well for some 220 years of American history.
After 9/11, State felt compelled to out-macho the military, to prove its manliness in the testosterone-fueled Bush (and now Obama) years. This meant opening and/or keeping open embassies in the midst of shooting wars, originally just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now spread alongside America’s increasingly one-tune foreign policy of belligerence to places like South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere in drone land. The US military, already stretched thin by endless war, has neither the forces nor the interest in guarding State’s pasty pseudo warriors, and so the Department of State is forced to turn to private armies, like Academi, mercenaries, to enable its macho posture abroad.
I saw groups like Blackwater in action in Iraq, often alongside our own military. The mercs were what our military would be like without the NCO corps to enforce discipline, a frat house with guns, lots of guns. While State makes wordplay out of claiming to supervise its mercs, overpaid, ‘roided ‘dudes with guns named Smitty, J-Dub, Spider and the like take little notice when requested to follow the laws of war in protecting diplomats so far out of their environments. It is a situation that isn’t just likely to go wrong, it is one that practically demands to devolve into crisis.
The solution is straightforward. State should understand and admit that it is neither equipped, trained nor needed for combat situations. State should take a step back from adventures that assure its role as negotiators, diplomats, public diplomacists and the like will be misunderstood at best, and refocus its resources away from spending billions on private armies. Until then, State is forced into bed with creepy organizations like Academi, and will suffer for it.
How are things in Iraq these days in the aftermath of our implementation of disaster capitalism? … just peachy. This video best describes the privatization of the Iraqi economy and its oil that is presently going on:
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?
I was looking for an analysis of the Wisconsin recall election results of Scott Walker, and the best, most incisive one I found is reprinted with permission below. The bold emphasis and links in the article are mine. The Big Money behind Walker controlled the narrative of the recall election by framing the problem of the economy as a choice between costly, corrupt and selfish unionized state workers versus a wasteful state government attempting to streamline itself and cut costs for the taxpayer. Absent in that polarizing message by the Corporatists was their real agenda of dismantling worker’s rights at the altar of the free market, shipping jobs oversees to exploit the cheapest of labor pools. Also absent was the Corporatist’s agenda of cutting the taxes on the wealthiest of society’s elite while dismantling and privatizing social/public services. Interestingly, the only two unions that backed Walker, the fire fighters and the police, were exempted from Walker’santi-collective bargaining law. Also of note is Obama’s absence from supporting the workers in Wisconsin. As explained in my post, Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy, this betrayal should come as no surprise. Divide and conquer is a very effective strategy to destroy the workers who have been subject to indoctrination of Neoliberal policy since Ronald Reagan. The myth of the wealthy being job creators still works, and the public doesn’t have a clue about the evils of privatization. The class war continues with the wealthy effortlessly manipulating the levers of power and mainstream media to their advantage…
Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-recall campaign sold the lie that greedy public sector workers and their unions were costing the taxpayers exorbitant amounts for high wages and lavish pensions.
The recall election in Wisconsin was won by organized Big Money. Lots will be said by many pundits about various aspects of the election, but the most important issue is how Big Money or the 1 percent were able to shape the electoral environment. Looking at that question exposes how capitalist democracy operates.
It also helps to answer the question being asked by many—why do people vote against their own interests?
In his victory speech, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said he wanted to first of all thank God for his abundant gifts. This was not only an appeal to the religious right-wing but also an attempt to give praise to the billionaires whose gifts brought him the election victory.
On Jan. 18, 2011, Walker told billionaire Diane Hendricks that his strategy was to go after collective bargaining rights for public employees first and then get a Right to Work for Less law, in a strategy which he explicitly described as divide and conquer. She gave him over $500,000 during just a three month period in 2012. Hendricks’ ABC Supply Inc., the nation’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, windows and siding paid no state income taxes in 2010.
Although pay for teachers had been capped since 1993 and public sector unions were not on the offensive, the goal of Walker and his backers in 2011 was to eliminate these unions. Unions for public employees are the last sources of significant power for organized labor as well as for the interests of unorganized workers.
Tens of millions of dollars were pumped into Walker’s campaign to win the recall election. Much of it came from the super wealthy outside of Wisconsin. This money created the slick right-wing Madison Avenue ads that inundated every household.
The rich put their money into this fight because they saw it as part of their class war against the workers. This was a referendum on slashing workers’ rights, especially public workers. It was played out in Wisconsin but finance capital saw that it would have national ramifications.
Role of the Democratic Party
The recall effort itself was the result of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of workers who gathered one million signatures to recall Walker. When they filed those petitions on Jan. 17, it was crystal clear that they wanted this election to be about basic labor rights—the right to bargain, the right to have a contract and the right to have union recognition including long established union security clauses providing for dues.
The Democratic Party took over the message and shifted it to a blander mixture with a focus on corruption. The national Democratic Party essentially ran away from the Wisconsin battle in a way that once again shows that they have no interest in supporting labor’s cause. President Obama did not come to the state to support the fight for basic rights. His absence served as another example from a long list of unfulfilled campaign promises—that he would walk on union picket lines after he became president and that he would fight to get labor laws passed with fairer terms for union elections—the Employee Free Choice Act—and more.
Role of labor
The ranks of labor were pushing for a battle in the electoral arena. Public unions put significant money and organizational resources into the fight. These unions included the teachers unions, firefighters, AFSCME (state city and county workers), SEIU and others.
However, two locals in Milwaukee—police and fire unions—endorsed Walker in the recall, while no statewide unions did. It is important to remember that Walker exempted these unions from any of the negative effects of his anti-collective bargaining law. Firefighters, of course, are workers that all of labor should support, and this local union betrayal was especially odious because an African American firefighter and union leader was a candidate for lieutenant governor. Instead of a message that public workers have rights that everyone should have, the anti-labor story is that if anyone has a wage, a right or a pension that others do not have, then we should take it away from them.
While Walker is most known for his initial attack against the public sector unions, the construction trades also joined the recall effort in a more significant way than in almost any other previous fight. The statewide Operating Engineers Local 139, with about 9,000 members, previously had endorsed Scott Walker for governor in 2010 on the promise that he would not support Right to Work legislation while delivering a larger budget for bridges and infrastructure. Walker’s flip on that overcame reservations about the Democratic candidate who, as a Mayor of Milwaukee, bargained hard against them on major contracts.
Union leaders had come together as a coalition and chosen Democratic Party politician Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk as their candidate in the recall primary. The time limits imposed by the state’s election process required quick action, but the union leaders’ lack of involvement among the hundreds of thousands of activists who had put the recall on the ballot was a signal of things to come. Falk was defeated in the recall primary by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (who had previously been defeated by Walker in 2010).
No thought was given to having a truly independent candidate with a real program addressing workers’ needs. Eventually, the labor leaders deferred to the regular Democratic Party pundits and confined the campaign to a shifting message that did not resonate with people.
Support for labor from the most oppressed communities
Organizations and leaders in the African American and Latino communities—some of the most oppressed sectors of the population—campaigned hard to get rid of Scott Walker. Early reports reveal that record numbers were mobilized to vote.
SEIU had organizers working in poor communities for some time to help mobilize action and exert power on a number of issues.
Democrat Barrett’s concession speech
When Barrett took the podium to announce that he had lost the race, he stressed that now is the time to “work together” with Walker. This is typical “good form” for a Democratic Party leader but poison for labor. Now is not the time to work with union busters; now is the time to organize even more diligently against them.
He talked about “democracy”—but not workers democracy. He called on people to stay engaged with city and state politics.
Why did some workers vote for Walker?
Without a doubt some people are wondering: What were they thinking! Why did they vote for Walker?
The Walker campaign focused on taxes and make-believe figures on job creation. Their message was that greedy public sector workers and their unions were costing the taxpayers exorbitant amounts for high wages and lavish pensions that others don’t have.
Walker constantly refers to “union bosses” and his allies frequently refer to “union thugs” or “union goons”. These terms turn reality on its head. If he were speaking the truth, he would be talking about the captains of finance who are his bosses and who are financing and directing his actions.
When Walker’s Wisconsin budget bill was passed, it increased spending in FY 2013 on prisons while imposing $792 million in aid cuts to school districts, $250 million in cuts to the university system and $71.6 million in cuts to technical colleges. In addition, nearly $500 million was cut from Medicaid programs, eliminating necessary important components of health care. At the same time, these financial bosses have gotten Walker and the legislature to approve $1.6 billion in corporate tax breaks over the next 10 years. Profits have increased—but not jobs.
That is their program, and they sell it by vilifying labor. In areas reached mostly by right-wing radio and governed by right-wing elites from the pulpit to the County Board, the Big Lie works. It is a Big Lie that has been in development since the 1940s and especially since the 1960s. As corporations move production overseas, the ruling class spins the story in a way to blame unions here for “pricing themselves out of the market.” They spin the story to divide workers in the United States from workers abroad.
In 2012 so far, General Electric has moved its medical equipment division headquarters from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Shanghai, China. The Thermo-Fisher Corporation is planning to move nearly 1,100 jobs from Wisconsin to Mexico.
In the race for maximum profits at any cost and the race to shove workers down to the lowest level of rights and pay on a world scale, they have refined the Big Lie technique and used it on a mass scale.
The truth about public services such as education, health care, child welfare and transportation is never told. These services are rights that were won through struggle—and which would never be provided by private companies that only care about profit.
The truth about public workers is never told—that their pay is modest, that most do not qualify for social security and their only pension is what the union has been able to win in a contract or through legislation.
Instead of a message that public workers have rights that everyone should have, the story is that if anyone has a wage, a right or a pension that others do not have, then we should take it away from them. And at the same time ignore the vast wealth of the CEOs. Ignore the vast profits made by the banks and the holders of state and local government bonds who get their interest payments first from every state budget while programs for the people get cut.
The principal blame for the election result in Wisconsin is not with the workers of Wisconsin but with the rich who spin this message and who control the levers of power in that state and around the country.
The road not taken: This is what democracy could have looked like
In March of last year, when Walker threw down the gauntlet and signed the “Budget Bill” killing many collective bargaining rights, labor leaders opted to move the struggle from the streets into the electoral arena.
Many experienced labor activists, including some leaders in the Madison area, know that workers have greater power in the streets because of the way money controls elections. On Feb. 22, 2011, the 97 unions of the South Central Federation of Labor of Wisconsin, representing 45,000 workers, unanimously passed a resolution calling for the preparation for a general strike.
A general strike would have electrified workers everywhere. It could have begun as a one day strike in Wisconsin cities with the greatest union strength and then expanded in terms of both days and areas covered. Millions of workers across the country who were upset with cutbacks, layoffs, privatization and more would have been inspired to take action.
Shutting down the state would have been a quicker and more definite blow to Walker and could have resulted in a defeat for Walker as compared to the defeat for labor experienced in the recall election.
General strikes are feared by the ruling class. In reference to a Philadelphia teachers strike—Jan. 8 to Feb. 28, 1973—William Usery, director of the Federal Mediation Service, said that “We came within an eyelash this year of having a test of the effectiveness of the general strike as a weapon in the United States—a weapon that has at times paralyzed the economies of France and Italy.” He went on to say that if labor had engaged in the general strike that many had called for—and if they had won—then “there would have been enormous pressures to do it again—and again—and again.”
That is the fear of the ruling class. If workers exercise their power, there could be no stopping them. No rights would be out of reach.
The Democratic Party is doing all it can to orient people to the November presidential election and away from struggle. Almost without exception labor leaders are focused on that election.
Rank-and-file members can learn a lot from this experience in Wisconsin. Labor’s hope lies not in the electoral arena but in solidarity and action on the job and in the community.”
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:
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.
Danny Schechter, journalist, author (Plunder: The Crime of Our Time), television producer and an independent filmmaker, has a new essay today describing the takeover of our political process by big money and the subsequent formation of what can only be called the ‘presidential electoral complex,’ an industry unto itself. This industry consists of armies of consultants and experts well-versed in perception management, public relations, advertising and marketing, and even psychological warfare. The facts don’t matter any more, only the public’s perception of it. And so politics is more about controlling the sentiment of the masses than anything else. Thus like the military industrial complex controlling foreign policy and America’s militarism, we can say that the Presidential Electoral Complex has also perverted the nation’s ability to hold true democratic elections which represent the will of the people. The tail is wagging the dog in both instances:
…one of Jimmy Carters’s advisers, Pat Cadell, …said in 1979 that just because you have been elected doesn’t mean you stop campaigning, He wrote in his “Initial Working Paper on Political Strategy,” “it is my thesis governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.”
Journalist Sidney Blumental, before he joined the Clinton White House, wrote The Permanent Campaign in 1980, revealing that political parties were dead and had been replaced by political consultants and other campaign professionals. (Disclosure: I helped get the book published by Beacon Press.)
In other words, politics had changed fundamentally: the old-style bosses were out and a new style media-driven system was in. Politics had also become a business with a whole retinue of advertising specialists, market researchers and pollsters.
Today, political journalist Joe Hagen labels this new army of experts for hire a “presidential electoral complex” – almost on the same scale as the military industrial complex. Their advice does not come cheap, with the tail today wagging the dog.
Any serious candidate hires his team and then has to raise millions to pay for it. When politics spawned a profession, the big money that’s transformed politics no longer went just to candidates but to the industry around them.
They also developed a stake in the fostering polarization and continuing crisis so that their counsel will be solicited more often. Increasingly political campaigns were run like military commands with centralized top-down direction, defensive and offensive strategies and tactics as well as psychological warfare. The campaign gurus are well schooled in the techniques of perception management.
This industry is bi-partisan with hired guns always shopping for the best deal irrespective of party. One-time dirty trickster Roger Stone who worked first for Richard Nixon ended up advising everyone from Al Sharpton to Donald Trump, to Libertarian Gary Johnson.
Some of these advisers step over the legal line like GOP operative Alan Raymond but few get caught. The New York Times reported In New Hampshire’s hotly contested 2002 Senate race, Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks were jammed with incoming calls on Election Day. The Republican, John Sununu, won re-election by under 20,000 votes, and Allen Raymond, a Republican Party operative, went to jail for his role in the jamming.
Raymond has now written a book about his experiences, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. In it, he paints a picture of the corruption of modern politics that should leave no doubt about the creativity and cynicism of operatives like Raymond or the need for tough new election-reform legislation.
Wikipedia had two other examples of the focus on permanent campaigns:
“A famous example that illustrates just how strongly this mind-set has come to influence politics was during the Clinton Administration when pollster Dick Morris asked voters to help decide where Bill Clinton would go on vacation.
“In the words of columnist Joe Klein, ‘The pressure to “win” the daily news cycle – to control the news – has overwhelmed the more reflective, statesmanlike aspects of the office.’ (After getting caught in a sex scandal, Morris was fired by Clinton and later resurfaced as a pundit at Fox News.)
Many of the press secretaries and campaign managers work hard to contain mistakes. The bookshelves are filled with advice about how to do that. This is from an email promoting interviews with a campaign expert turned author:
“Every word and action on the campaign trail from a televised debate to a town meeting, to an innocent question from a voter to a pointed question from the media … all of these daily events call for immediate, strategic communication.
“Any blunder should be a wake-up call: communication has power. But as with any form of power, it needs to be harnessed effectively or it can all too often backfire.
“This year’s primaries were riddled with missteps and over-reaching. As the focus shifts from primaries to the general elections, Romney will have to walk the line between connecting to the audience and pandering. On the other hand, President Obama will be less under scrutiny for potential gaffes, but more for his inattention to issues that are brewing, followed by a dramatic game-changing address.
“‘However, this can all change in a split-second, as proven by the undeniable power of word choice,’ comments Helio Fred Garcia, President of the crisis management firm Logos Consulting Group and the Executive Director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership.”
Garcia, who teaches now at NYU, discusses strategies that might be useful in a new book on the Power of Communication, or is it manipulation:
“– Leaders are judged on the fulfillment of expectations. Leaders must resist saying what merely sounds good in the moment and creating a say-do gap.
“– The only reason for communication is to change something – to influence the way audiences think and feel. Before you communicate, know what it is you want to change.
“– Facts do not speak for themselves. If we speak only facts, the audience will either not pay attention to those facts or will provide their own context to make sense of the facts, which could trigger a negative frame.
“– Communication is a continuation of business by other means. You need to engage your audience to enhance your position, thereby improving your competitive advantage.
“–Leaders must conquer the first mover advantage – a maneuver that prevents critics and adversaries from framing the situation. This has become increasingly more important in today’s world of social media.”
This same techniques are also used to sell war, as Mother Jones reported: “As long as the United States appears to be on the move against foreign adversaries, the question of whether any action is actually taken becomes of secondary interest. As Blumenthal suggested two decades ago, results and concrete proposals are less important than perception and image.”
Even as Blumenthal was partial to Hillary Clinton, who hired him for her unsuccessful primary campaign in 2008, The Economist noted that his description of a permanent campaign soon became President Obama’s prescription:
“Mr. Obama is currently deploying the formidable resources he built up during his campaign — including contact details for 10m donors, supporters and volunteers — to sell his policies. David Plouffe, the man who managed Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, has sent millions of e-mails to encourage them to support the White House’s agenda.
“One of them contains as good a definition of the permanent campaign as any: ‘In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign — talking directly to people in your communities about the president’s ideas for long-term prosperity.’ “Another, which includes a video of the president, asks supporters to put pressure on their congressman to pass Mr. Obama’s budget, by calling his or her office and reciting a little pro-Obama speech.”
The Republicans have learned these lessons too and now have more money than Democrats to invest in them. Politics is now a growing industry with money and politics more joined at the hip than ever and an interest in keeping the big money flowing into its bank account.”
Operating in concert with the Presidential Electoral Complex are the Army of Lobbyists representing the monied interests of corporations and the financial elite. Republican political operative and financial consultant Mallory Factor appeared on CurrentTV in April, saying no one party has access to the big donors and that Democrats and Republicans both rely on money. This video was available on YouTube, but has since been taken off. You can still see it here.
A couple weeks ago, Jennifer Granholm from CurrentTV aired an editorial video in which she says that “the super rich are monopolizing our democracy and effectively ruining the founding fathers’ vision of how the United States should operate, sending us back to an era that is more like a one-king rule than a real democracy.” She names Romney as the willing supplicant of the monied interests. She says the Democrats have been forced to play the same game, but I think she doesn’t go far enough: both parties are equally corrupt in my eyes. Anyone who still puts one iota of faith in our perverse, money-driven political system is just plain stupid.
Cenk Uyger did a better job of describing our systemically corrupt system back in November 2011. See also David Cohen’s excellent post: “The Idiot’s Guide To Buying A Congressman“.
Hope? Don’t make me laugh. If change was possible through our political system, they’d make it illegal.
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….
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:
“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.
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!”…
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 