Category Archives: military spending

Ferguson and the Logic of Neoliberalism

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Ferguson-RiotA Political Economy Premised on Exploitation and Social Repression

By Rob Urie

Source: Counterpunch.org

While the U.S. Department of Justice report on racist policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri provides direct evidence for skeptical Whites that institutional racism is fact, limiting the investigation to Ferguson implausibly delimits the scope of race based repression in the U.S. Additionally, from slavery to convict leasing to funding the Ferguson city budget with fines and penalties overwhelmingly extracted from poor and middle class Blacks, the economic basis of police repression is isolated in an improbable present. And in fact, the ‘tricks and traps’ used by the Ferguson police for economic extraction closely resembles corporate practices of using contract law, state institutions and monopoly power to take economic resources from those who lack the social power to resist.

A cognitive challenge for White Americans (and ‘conservative’ Blacks) is the distance between facts like police repression in Ferguson and the mythology of capitalist democracy that we live by. Use of the police for economic extraction in Ferguson, for funding the town budget through racial repression, ties state power to economic power within the particular circumstances of American racial and economic history. In a most basic sense this integration reframes state-market relations claimed to relate capitalism to democracy. More broadly, the TPP and TIPP ‘trade’ deals being pushed by President Obama are a variation on the racist shakedown in Ferguson. Their intent is to replace state power with corporate power while leaving Western states intact to provide state services for the benefit of corporations and the illusion of democratic control.

Discovery of a police ‘black site’ in Chicago, the prevalence of racist violence by the police across the U.S., the return of debtor’s prisons and ‘civil forfeiture’ laws that allow the police to take belongings without evidence of a crime illustrate the growing lawlessness of the police. When tied to illegal surveillance carried out by the NSA, DEA and FBI against citizens and non-citizens alike and the extra-judicial powers claimed by Mr. Obama a picture of widespread state lawlessness emerges. When considered in the context of no criminal prosecutions for war crimes against the (George W) Bush administration or against prominent bankers in the financial and economic debacle of the last decade a picture of widespread elite lawlessness emerges. Clearly the state, including local police departments, exists for purposes other than enforcing fealty to the law.

Based on supporting economic theories it is superficially ironic that the resurgence of neo-liberalism since the 1970s is coincident with this growing integration of state and ‘private’ power. Premised on clearly delineated state and market roles, neo-liberalism was / is in theory the economic realm unhindered by state restrictions. This state-market delineation facilitates the facade that capitalism is related to democracy— political freedom in the realm of the political and economic freedom in the realm of the economic. As fact and metaphor the role of the Ferguson police using asymmetrical social power to take economic wealth from vulnerable citizens demonstrates the implausibility of this theorized differentiation in the realm of the political. And new debtor’s prisons (link above) have police and the prison system acting as collection agents for Payday Lenders.

The TPP and TTIP trade deals being pushed by Mr. Obama are designed with analogous levers for extorting wealth. The investor resolution clauses in TTIP have a supranational judiciary ruling on ‘investor’ lawsuits against governments for hypothetical lost profits and taxpayers on the hook for adverse rulings. The relative absence of remaining trade restrictions and tariffs is well covered territory. What remains to be accomplished with these ‘agreements’ is the consolidation of economic power as the power to extract wealth. As with proposals for tradable carbon credits, the ‘product’ of the agreements combines the right to extort by putting forward projects never intended to be built with guarantees against adverse economic developments.

The police in Ferguson used a particular social lever, the residual of slavery, for gratuitous racial repression and for economic extraction. Slavery is a social institution, but it most particularly is an economic institution. It is a social mechanism for accruing the product of slave labor to the slave master. And slavery in the U.S. was ‘legal’ until it wasn’t. Convict leasing was explicit use of ‘the law’ and the judicial system to force poor Blacks to work for little or no pay. ‘The law’ was used as an instrument of economic exploitation and extraction. The push back from Whites and conservative Blacks that the murdered Mike Brown was a criminal because he likely stole a box of cigars takes this same law at face value. This view of the law depends on a similarly improbable separation of political and economic realms as neo-liberal theory.

As political theory might have it, if all of the citizens of Ferguson were intended to benefit from city resources while poor and middle class Blacks were disproportionately forced to pay for them that represents economic taking by some citizens for the benefit of others. The racial character of this taking places it in history. The history of Western colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism places it in broader internal and external context. And this history is evidence that distinct realms of the economic and the political never described existing circumstance. The practical relevance is that it places the actions of the police in Ferguson, past and pending ‘trade’ agreements and global economic relations in the space where economic and political power act in an integrated social dimension.

The effect is to reframe ‘the law’ in terms of who is committing particular acts rather than the acts being committed. The police in Ferguson can murder with impunity and shake down citizens at their discretion to fund the city budget (and their paychecks) while poor and middle class Blacks are disproportionately murdered and sent to prison for similar acts. What is legal and what isn’t is determined by who has social power, not by the acts themselves. In a racist and classist society the law is codification of class and race interests. If a black citizen of Ferguson puts a gun to someone’s head and demands their valuables they are a criminal but if the same act is committed by a cop it is within the law. Here events in Ferguson are fact and metaphor— overwhelming evidence (links above) suggests that similar social relations exist across much of the country.

This view of the law has precedence in Richard Nixon’s contention that “when the President does it that means that it is not illegal.” Earlier precedence can be found in Nazi law and in the laws of fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s. This isn’t to call anyone who isn’t a self-proclaimed Nazi a Nazi. The precedence lies in the view that the law is the will of a leadership class, be it the Nazi leadership in Germany or city government in Ferguson. One problem with this theory is that it makes the law capricious and ultimately impossible to follow. Race based law enforcement criminalizes race, not nominally proscribed acts. Stories of the Chicago police department’s black site (link above) have political protesters and poor Blacks accused of no crimes taken there. If people can be arrested without evidence that a crime was committed then what is the difference in outcomes between committing and not committing crimes?

A relation of neo-liberalism to fascism can be made through replacement of civil governance with corporate governance that subordinates the rights and privileges of civil society to corporate interests. The investor-state dispute mechanisms (link above) being broadened and formally codified in the TTIP trade deal will be used to demand compensation for environmental regulations that keep drinking water safe and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the metaphorical equivalent of threatening to end the planet if we don’t pay up. Civil forfeiture has the police taking valuables they might want at the point of a gun if necessary. The Ferguson police shake down poor Blacks using the law as a weapon. At the same time a ruling elite has immunity from prosecution for well documented crimes.

Much of what is written here was well understood in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It hardly seems an accident that this collective memory was lost to narrow ideological dogma. Across the country property taxes are being cut with partial differences made up through regressive fees and penalties. This fits the neo-liberal preference for property over labor incomes. And neo-liberal theory has no place for history because all acts within it take place in a temporally isolated present. This dissociates racist policing in Ferguson, Chicago, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia from the roles of the legislature, judiciary, police and prisons in reconstituting the economic exploitation of slavery under the guise of free choice in capitalist democracy. Race is the particular case in America; class is the broader expression of economic power.

The tension between the DOJ report (link above) on racist policing in Ferguson and the Obama administration’s broad support for neo-liberal policies will likely produce a tight circle drawn around events in Ferguson. Already supporters of police repression are raising the argument that the words “hands up, don’t shoot” never transpired. What bearing does precise wording have on a Black child being murdered by the police? And why wouldn’t Black youth have a right to be hostile to police who, as the DOJ reports concludes, are running a racist shakedown operation to force poor and middle class Blacks to fund city government? How would White readers react to being harassed, intimidated, disproportionately jailed and forced to pay for the privilege? Ultimately the problem is larger than Ferguson and social accountability should address political economy premised in exploitation and social repression.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is written and awaiting publication.

 

The ISIS Truth We Hide From

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Isis fighters, pictured on a militant website verified by AP.

By Bob Hennelly

Source: WhoWhatWhy

Identifying Terrorist Enemy No. 1—the Islamic State militants—is easy now, after a spate of horrific videos of beheadings and burnings.

But what’s hard for Western governments and the mainstream media is figuring out the popularity of this terror group among young western Muslims. Why do these people choose to leave the relative comforts of home and take up arms with IS militants? It’s as if these young people are from another planet.

Even after President Obama’s three-day White House Summit on Violent Extremism, few establishment “experts” and commentators seem ready to consider one possible answer: that it is the extreme militarism of the U.S. and its allies that helped spawn IS, and al Qaeda before that.

On the PBS NewsHour segment covering the White house confab, panelists were asked “why people are drawn to the kind of extremism we are seeing today?” The assembled pundits identified “local grievances” like “access to education and job opportunities” and faulted recruiting for “extreme ideology through books and social media.”

Yet there was no mention of U.S. drone strikes, prisoner rendition, torture, and the thousands of dead and wounded Muslim civilians. All of those factors have been exploited by ISIS and other violent groups to make their case that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam.

After several decades of self-proclaimed “nation building” and “exporting democracy” in the Middle East and its environs, the results are all too clear. There are shattered nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed states in Yemen, Libya and Syria, and more than a dozen African nations that the U.S. State Department concedes are under constant threat of attack by well-armed and organized terrorists.

Is it possible that what the U.S. has actually been doing in these hot spots is “terrorism building” and “exporting chaos”? Is this the awful truth the United States cannot bring itself to admit?

Massaging History

It would seem so, since instead of changing course, the U.S. is in the process of doubling down on its mistakes. How else to explain that the new GOP presidential hopeful, Jeb Bush, nonchalantly told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that “mistakes were made” in Iraq. He then proceeded to lay out his own plan for becoming the new global sheriff in town.

Here’s a jaw-dropping statement from that speech:

There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction was not—turns out not to be accurate.

Watching his brother’s back, Jeb wove out of thin air a phony consensus that “everybody” signed on for the rationale for the Iraq war. That’s despite a vote in Congress in which 23 U.S. Senators and 133 House members opposed it.

You see, if “everybody” was wrong, then nobody was right. It should come as no surprise that Jeb’s team of policy wise men includes many Bush II veterans, among them the unrepentant Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

His Own Man, With an Old Plan

As much as Jeb Bush insists he is his own man, the audience in Chicago could hear echoes of his brother George’s cowboy-like approach. When Jeb was asked about how he would handle IS, he said he would develop a “global strategy” that would “tighten the noose” so he and the posse could “take them out.”

During Bush’s remarks, he took aim at the Obama administration for being too quick to disengage from the world and Iraq. He blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum that set the stage for the rise of IS and Iranian influence.

Yet an examination of President Obama’s new National Security Strategy, his proposed military budget and his request for his own War Powers re-authorization all indicate an administration that is prosecuting a global war on terror with unfettered latitude as to where and whom it targets.

Could it be that this “global war on terror,” whether it be the Bush 1.0 or Obama 2.0 version, may actually be what is proliferating the very thing it was aimed to eradicate?

One policy expert who dares to look deeper is Graham Fuller, a career CIA agent and analyst who was vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Fuller says it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set the stage for IS. By creating an endemically corrupt central government in Baghdad, notes Fuller, the American occupation provided a focal point to unite disparate opposition groups. As for the high-profile effort to train a new Iraqi army, that “security” force collapsed the moment its U.S. handlers left. (In an odd twist to an already bizarre security meta-narrative, Fuller’s former son-in-law is the uncle of accused Boston Marathon Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.)

***

In linking Washington’s Middle Eastern policies to the rise of terrorist groups in the region, MIT professor Noam Chomsky takes it even further back. He says the roots start with the U.S. support of Iraq in its brutal war with Iran in the 1980s, and include the draconian economic sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In Chomsky’s view, these sanctions punished Iraqi civilians while reinforcing Saddam’s dictatorial control.

In his 2006 book Devil’s Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, longtime Nation correspondent Robert Dreyfuss documents how the U.S., as early as the 1950s, backed the Muslim Brotherhood in exchange for help fighting communism.

Peace’s Deadliest Year

One way to justify failed policies is to pretend that they have worked as advertised. Nowhere was this disconnect between rhetoric and reality more on display than in President Obama’s updating this month of his National Security Strategy.

In presenting this new security game-plan, the president exhibited excessive confidence in declaring that the United States was heading “home” and “moving beyond” ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his mini-version of Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ statement, he asserted that “the threat of catastrophic attacks” against the U.S. had “diminished.”

But even as the president describes a winding-down of combat operations, anything but peace is taking hold in those places.

The sectarian violence has resulted in record numbers of civilian deaths and injuries. The UN reported last month that more than 12,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan, the UN Assistance Mission counted close to 3,200 civilians killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year since America’s longest war started.

Providing a sharp contrast to the president’s own assertion that peace is almost at hand, he has sent troops back into Iraq. And just a few days ago, his new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said the U.S. might end up sticking around in Afghanistan after all.

What the Administration and a cheerleading media refuse to acknowledge is that the two U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at ending terrorist threats in the region, have done the exact opposite. They not only caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties but hardened the resolve of yet another generation to seek revenge against their perceived Western oppressors.

Bottom Line

While details of how the president plans to use his refreshed war powers are still vague, the price tag is not.

In the name of defending the country and fighting terrorism, the president’s proposed 2016 budget calls for adding $38 billion in regular defense spending and another $58 billion for so-called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” These expanded outlays would come on top of the more than half a trillion dollars the U.S. is already spending on the military.

Even under the sequester restrictions, says one specialist, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

“If you can’t protect the nation with $500 billion dollars,” then something is amiss, according to Veronique deRugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She notes that even under the sequester restrictions, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

The failures are especially pronounced, says deRugy, when one takes into account that in the years since 9/11, Washington’s extra expenditures, labeled “emergency” war funding, have topped Pentagon budgets by tens of billions annually.

And so under presidents from both parties, who were supposedly ‘conservative’  and ‘liberal’,  the “emergency” continues to spread.

The Difference Between the Death Star and the Pentagon

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StarWarsPentagon

By Carey Wedler

Source: The Anti-Media

The Imperial Death Star from Star Wars and the Pentagon have much in common. It is not difficult to observe the similarities between the two behemoth structures and what they represent-especially in recent years.

For one, both used to be part of representative republics and both represent the military wings of the empires in power. In 2007, Alternet reported that the U.S. had 737 bases, 38 of which were “major,” and that

“…perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.”

The desire of the military’s operatives to exert control over regions all over the world parallels the desire of the Emperor and Vader to rule the galaxy.

Another similarity is the desire of both the Death Star’s leaders and those at the Pentagon to weed out dissent. One of the main objectives of the dark side’s adherents is to find the rebels and eliminate them.

Though the Pentagon hasn’t quite started assassinating political dissidents (or entire planets, though Hiroshima and Nagasaki are an earthly comparison to Alderaan), it has made its views crystal clear: protesters are a form of terrorist and anyone deemed associated with terrorism may be denied his or her rights.

Still another commonality between the two ministries of war and destruction is the level of decadence afforded to the galactic and American agencies. The Death Star was a moon-sized, laser-clad behemoth for the Dark Side. The Pentagon employs 23,000 people in a floor space three times the size of the Empire state building and spawns doomsday technology. In both societies, the resources devoted to violence far outweigh those dedicated to promoting peace or the well-being of humanity (or alienhood).

It is easy to compare the Death Star and the Pentagon as manifestations of evil that seek power and rule by force. But there exists at least one stark difference:

In the Washington Post this week, it was revealed that the Pentagon is looking for someone to fill its “Yoda” position.

The job ad for “Director of the Office of Net Assessment” currently reads:

“The Director’s primary function is to develop assessments that compare the standings, trends and future prospects of U.S. military capability and military potential with that of other countries.”

The job was founded and held by longtime analyst Andrew W. Marshall, who recently retired. Because of his wisdom and knowledge throughout the years, he came to be known as “Yoda.”

And therein lies the difference between the rulers of the Death Star and the rulers of the Pentagon: at least Darth Vader, the emperor and their cohorts knew they were evil.

Vader repeatedly spoke of the powers of the Dark Side, of the great benefit of crossing over into evil. In the Empire Strikes Back, he tempted Luke to join the dark side to rule the galaxy with him:

“Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny, join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.”

He iterated the slavery of being on the dark side in Return of the Jedi:

“You don’t know the power of the dark side. I must obey my master.”

Considering the empire practices what is called the “dark side” of the force, its members knew exactly what they signed up for.

But to a clearly significant portion of employees at the Pentagon, the irony is lost. It has gone over their heads that working for the world’s biggest, arguably most vicious military, is not working on the side of morality, peace, or freedom.

By calling a man who works for the Pentagon “Yoda”-a virtuous practitioner of the force- it is clear that many who work for the Pentagon believe they are working for a “force” of good. It’s scary. It’s scarier that the Pentagon likely has employees who know of its evil and yet continue to work there.

May all Pentagon employees recognize its evil, quit their jobs at the American Death Star, and work to promote the true meaning of the “force” (the same goes for soldiers of governments around the world). As the real Yoda said:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

This is exactly how violent governments keep their people and foot soldiers under control and realizing this is the first step to achieving freedom and peace.

 

 

 

Multi Billion Dollar Bonanza: Companies which Make Money By Keeping Americans “Terrified of Terror Attacks”

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images

A massive industry profits off the government-induced fear of terrorism.

By Alex Kane

Source: Alternet

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded America’s television sets in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.

But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, is that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making money by scaring Americans.

Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America’s national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.

What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off government-induced fear of terrorism, even though Americans are more likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.

Here are five private companies cashing in on keeping you afraid.

1. The Chertoff Group

On August 11, former NSA head Michael Hayden, the man at the center of the Bush administration’s 2005 surveillance scandal, was defending his former agency on CBS News in the wake of the latest NSA spying scandal. Commenting on President Obama’s half-hearted promises to reform some NSA practices, Hayden told host Bob Schieffer that “the President is trying to take some steps to make the American people more comfortable about what it is we’re doing. That’s going to be hard because, frankly, Bob, some steps to make Americans more comfortable will actually make Americans less safe.”

Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff had a similar message when he appeared on ABC News August 4. Speaking about the purported threat from an Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that led to the closure of 19 U.S. embassies, Chertoff said that “the collection of this warning information [about Al Qaeda] came from the kinds of programs we’ve been discussing about, the ability to capture communications overseas.”

CBS and ABC did not see fit to inform viewers that both Hayden and Chertoff are employees of the Chertoff Group, a private firm created in 2009 that companies hire to consult on best practices for security and combatting terrorism. Some of the companies the firm advises go on to win government contracts. Chertoff is the founder and chairman of the group, while Hayden serves as a principal. So they profit off a war on terror they say is crucial to keeping Americans safe.

Though it’s unclear how much in total exactly the firm makes, there are some known numbers. After the failed attempt in 2010 to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day with a bomb hidden in underwear, Chertoff pushed for better airport security procedures. One of the suggestions Chertoff made was for the Transportation Security Agency to use full-body scanners like the ones Rapiscan, one of the Chertoff Group’s clients, made. And sure enough, after the Christmas Day plot, the TSA ordered 300 Rapiscan machines. The Huffington Post reported that Rapiscan made $118 million from the government between 2009-2010.

2. Booz Allen Hamilton

This private intelligence contractor has become a household name in the wake of the NSA scandal. Edward Snowden, the man responsible for leaking secret documents that exposed the breadth of NSA surveillance, was working for Booz Allen when he downloaded the documents he handed off to media outlets. As the New York Times reported in June, the company parlays its technology expertise for intelligence uses into massive government contracts. Thousands of employees of the company provide services to the NSA, like analyzing the massive amounts of data the government agency collects every day. The company is also the shining symbol of the government-private security complex’s revolving door: its vice president is the former director of national intelligence, while the current director of national intelligence is a former employee of Booz Allen.

Despite the Snowden security breach, Booz Allen continues to work with the government. And they’re making a lot of money from the U.S. In the last fiscal year, the company made $1.3 billion from working in U.S. intelligence. In total, Booz Allen Hamiltion made over $5 billion last fiscal year. And the cash keeps coming: in January, the company announced that it had won a contract with the Defense Department to provide intelligence services. The amount of money it could make from the deal is up to $5.6 billion.

And like Hayden and Chertoff, Booz Allen’s vice president Mike McConnell has publicly hyped up the threat of terrorism to blast Snowden’s leaks. McConnell told a government contracting conference in July 2013 that Snowden’s leaks have done “irrevocable damage” to the U.S.’s ability to stop terrorism. “It’s going to inhibit our ability to understand nuclear activity in North Korea, what’s going on in Syria, what might be happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan,” said McConnell.

3. Science Applications International Corporation

Sometimes referred to as “NSA West” because so many former NSA employees go on to work for the formerly California-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), this firm makes a ton of cash off government contracts. And they do so by hawking their expertise in combatting the terrorist threat.

Browse through SAIC’s website and you’re constantly greeted with the words “terrorist threat” and information on how the SAIC can help the government and others battle it. SAIC developed a “Terrorism Protection Manual” for Florida law enforcement that was developed to fight “today’s national terrorist threat and implement recommended security best practices.” They boast of their “experience meeting the terrorism incident response training needs of a wide variety of customers, from training for a national Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) scenario, applicable at agency response levels, to lesser levels of incidents affecting a city, a military installation or a special facility.”

Back when John P. Jumper, the current CEO of SAIC, was an Air Force general, he said the threat of terrorism is “greater than Nazism, greater than communism. This threat that we have of terrorist zealots is the most dangerous because these are people who care nothing about life. They care nothing about our lives, for sure, and they care nothing about their own lives.” And Larry Prior, a U.S. intelligence veteran who used to run the company’s Intelligence and Security Group, said in an internal newsletter that “the future of the nation rests on their backs,” referring to employees in his group.

SAIC is an immensely lucrative and large company. It boasts 42,000 employees—20,000 of whom hold U.S. government security clearances. It is the NSA’s largest contractor, according to CorpWatch, and is deeply involved in the NSA’s collection of intelligence. Last year it reported a net income of $525 million.

4. Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies 

U.S. intelligence agencies aren’t the only sectors of government where the private sector has cashed in on the fear of terrorism. The post-9/11 world has seen the blossoming of a cottage industry of self-styled “experts” on Islam from private companies that market their supposedly ironclad analysis of the threat from Islamists to other federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. These companies have profited from law enforcement taking part in the “war on terror.”

Through Homeland Security grant programs like the State Homeland Security Program and the Urban Areas Security Initiative, the federal government has doled out over billions of dollars to these private companies to provide Islamophobic training. One of these companies is called the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Based in Virginia, the center “posits radical Islam as a new global ideological menace on the order of the old communist threat from the Soviet Union,” as Political Research Associates (PRA) noted in a 2011 report on private firms doing counter-terror training. Staff members include former FBI, CIA and Defense Department personnel.

Their claim to fame is providing education and training to members of the U.S. national security community—including law enforcement agencies, according to their website. They say they have trained over 67,000 people over the past decade.

It’s unclear exactly how much this firm makes per year. But according to the PRA report, a five-day course for government employees on the “Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine” costs $39,280. The firm also lists the costs of individual courses on their website. For a 30-person class titled “Dying to Kill Us: Understanding the Mindset of Suicide Operations,” the cost is $7,856. For a three-day course for 30 people on “Informant Development for Law Enforcement to FighTerrorism,” the cost is $23,568.

The training pushes anti-Muslim ideology. On the section of their website where they list feedback from participants of the courses, one wrote: “An eye-opener. Especially how many Muslim Brotherhood front organizations there are and that the government doesn’t get it.”

5. Security Solutions International

Security Solutions International is yet another private firm hawking anti-Muslim training to law enforcement. This Miami-based company founded in 2004 uses its Israeli security connections to boost its standing in the market. They use Israeli security trainers in their courses and their president, Henry Morgenstern, is a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who says he “developed excellent high level contacts with the Security Establishment [in Israel], making SSI the premiere training company for counter-terror related subjects.”

The company has trained over 700 law enforcement agencies since 2004. Officials from law enforcement agencies like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the Department of Homeland Security have participated in the conferences they put on for profit. While SSI claims that they don’t cast aspersions on the whole of Islam, an examination of their trainings, conferences and the speakers they use indicate otherwise.

At a 2009 conference sponsored by Police magazine, an SSI instructor who is the company’s “expert” on Islam used a video that showed a terrorist beheading a hostage. After the course was met with criticism, the company’s CEO said “their religion got linked to terrorism a long time ago.”

The conferences they hold are usually well-attended, and this year SSI is putting on a conference in Orlando, Florida for three days. The cost for each attendee is $400. The keynote speaker this year is Steve Emerson, a well-known member of what’s been termed the “Islamophobia industry.” SSI also makes money off its Counter Terrorist magazine. A yearly subscription is $35, and the company says it has 15,000 subscribers.

Editor’s note: Dishonorable mentions that should be added to the list include corporate news media, all crony contractors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, etc., Neocon Pro-war Activists, and the SITE Intelligence Group.

Podcast Roundup

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9/7: On Expanding Minds, hosts Maja D’Aoust and Erik Davis have a conversation with Andy Sharp of English Heretic about death, Horror films, Hiroshima, psychogeography, and his latest release, The Underworld Service.

 
http://s50.podbean.com/pb/fd840a4721e38d3f25dd4ec01834d2c6/541340f7/data2/blogs18/276613/uploads/ExpandingMind_090714.mp3

9/8: R.U. Sirius joins hosts Chris Dancy and Klint Finley to discuss technology transhumanism, and the current social/political climate among other topics.

https://soundcloud.com/itsmweekly/pending-mindful-cyborgs-episode-37
 
9/9: Peter Null interviews Professor Andrew Kolin, a professor of political science at Hilbert College in Hamburg and Kevin Carson, researcher at the Center for a Stateless Society, on militarization of police, centralization of power, war and the military-industrial complex.


http://s53.podbean.com/pb/e788a26888199ef114360f06cc89f48c/541347f9/data1/blogs18/371244/uploads/ProgressiveCommentaryHour_090914.mp3

9/10: On the C-Realm, KMO and June Pulliam discuss and dissect the archetypes and cultural meaning of zombie apocalypse narratives.


http://c-realmpodcast.podOmatic.com/enclosure/2014-09-10T12_48_22-07_00.mp3

9/11: Christopher Knowles joins Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio to examine how Gnosticism connects to alternative cultures, politics and humanity’s existential crisis.


http://content.screencast.com/users/AeonByte/folders/AEON%20BYTE/media/7984ec1d-8363-4162-a034-0dabc54aef33/1.%20Gnosticism%20and%20Politics%20with%20Chris%20Knowles.mp3

9/12: On New World Next Week, James Corbett and James Evan Pilato report on 9/11 terror hysteria, Obama’s private CFR event with Sandy Berger (9/11 document thief) and the cryptocurrency/anti-surveillance potential of a new off-the-grid communications technology.

 
http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2014-09-11%20James%20Evan%20Pilato.mp3

“Shock and Awe” Comes to America

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Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_44

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The United States has employed «shock and awe» techniques – described by Pentagon policy documents as the use of «spectacular displays of force» to intimidate an opponent – against the civilian population of the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Ferguson, just a stone’s throw from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. The police use of shock and awe tactics followed street protests after the police shooting death of an 18-year old black teen, Michael Brown. According to a private autopsy, Brown, an African-American, was shot six times, including twice in the head, by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The St. Louis County coroner concluded that the number of shots that hit Brown could have been as high as eight.

Ferguson and St. Louis County police immediately dispatched military vehicles and equipment to quell the initially non-violent protests in Ferguson that erupted after the shooting. Two reporters covering the protests, one from The Washington Post and the other from the Huffington Post, were arrested by the police. An Al Jazeera television crew was subjected to a tear gas attack by police who then proceeded to shut off the news crew’s lights and disable their cameras.

After the local Ferguson and St. Louis County police were criticized for their «shock and awe» tactics, which also saw innocent protesters and members of the clergy shot at point blank range with rubber bullets and tear gassed, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who was slow to respond to the racially-inflamed incident, ordered Ferguson and St. Louis County police to stand down. Nixon replaced the local police with Missouri state police troopers who did not initially use military-clad law enforcement or vehicles.

However, after it was revealed that Brown was shot multiple times, rioters were reported to have looted local businesses. Nixon ordered the Missouri National Guard on to the streets and imposed a strict night time curfew. Police on the scene also issued a «keep moving» order to Ferguson citizens, an attempt to prevent any public protest organization efforts by pedestrians.

There were also numerous reports of neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, and other far-right extremists arriving in Ferguson, with police «wink and a nod» foreknowledge in some cases, to stoke violence and engage in «false flag» attacks on people and property. In many respects, Ferguson discovered what occurs when government authorities, officially or unofficially, team up with right-wing racists and xenophobes to menace an entire civilian population. The authorities in Kiev have made similar deals with neo-Nazis, who have links to American white supremacist groups, to attack civilians in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Police allegedly reported that Molotov cocktails were thrown at police by unknown parties after violence increased. The violence was stirred after Ferguson police released a videotape from a convenience store that allegedly showed Brown in a physical altercation with the store’s clerk after Brown was said to have stolen a pack of miniature cigars. The store owner later said that the videotaped individual in what the police released to the media was not Brown and the Ferguson Police Chief later admitted that Officer Wilson did not stop Brown based on any suspicion that it was he who had stolen the cigars.

Eyewitnesses said that police reports that Molotov cocktails were thrown at police vehicles were false. And as further proof that police were permitting agitators to stir up violence, there were a number of social media reports that among those stoking violence in Ferguson was a white man sporting a swastika tattoo.

Governor Nixon later stated that the release of the store’s video by police needlessly incited an already tense situation in Ferguson.

American police using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protesters is not limited to Ferguson and neither are police arrests of journalists covering protests. Neither was Ferguson the first time police arrested or threatened to arrest national television and radio reporters, as St. Louis area police threatened to do with a reporter for MS-NBC after another night of street violence in Ferguson.

In 2008, national reporters were arrested by police who used unjustified force at a protest at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The scenes from Ferguson were also reminiscent of strong-armed police tactics sued against Occupy Wall Street protesters around the country, as well as anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle; Washington, DC; Pittsburgh, and other cities.

The presence of police-sanctioned provocateurs who engaged in violent acts in order to provoke a «shock and awe» response from military-armed police is endemic to protests around the United States, especially after 9/11, the date viewed by many Americans as the watershed date between pre- and post-Constitutional America.

Someone in the St. Louis County Coroner’s Office also leaked information on Brown’s blood test, saying that it showed past use of marijuana. The leak appeared timed to hurt a number of referenda around the United States on the legalization of marijuana. Many police departments are campaigning against the referenda and it would appear that the St. Louis authorities leaked the information as some sort of proof, albeit bogus, that marijuana legalization will lead to an increase in «violence.»

Many media commentators also drew comparisons between the scenes of the heavy paramilitary presence on the streets of Ferguson to scenes of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and on the West Bank. There are valid reasons for the comparisons.

In 2011, St. Louis County Police Chief Timothy Fitch received training from Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Israeli National Police officials during a trip to Israel sponsored by the right-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL). That same year, Oakland, California police who received similar training from former members of the IDF, shot Iraqi war U.S. Army veteran Scott Olsen in the head. Olsen suffered a severe brain injury from the assault.

Companies associated with Israel’s military-law enforcement infrastructure, including those specializing in Israeli Krav Maga martial arts techniques and other Israel crowd control tactics, have not only trained state and metropolitan police forces in the United States, but also state National Guard units. Police departments receiving such training include the St. Louis County Police, as well as the police departments of New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Louisville, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Albuquerque, Tulsa, and Atlantic City.

American police departments have a seemingly unlimited supply of military gear, weapons, and vehicles at their disposal. Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, the Defense Department has made available, often free-of-charge, surplus military equipment to police departments from St. Louis County and Ferguson to Lewiston, Maine and Ohio State University.

Among the excess military equipment distributed to local, metropolitan, county, and state police by the Defense Logistics Agency are highly-mobile multi-wheeled vehicles (Humvees), militarized water craft, mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles, long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons, assault rifles, night scopes, flash bang grenades, and helicopters.

In addition to receiving population control training from Israelis, American police departments have also been trained by the constantly name-changing firm once known as Blackwater. Formerly known as Xe Security and Academi, the CIA-linked private military company, now merged with Triple Canopy under the Constellis Holdings, Inc., trained a number of U.S. police departments at its military base-like facility in Moyock, North Carolina. One of the police patches on the firm’s training alumni board in Moyock is that of the St. Louis County Police.

In addition to the St. Louis County Police, other U.S. law enforcement agencies trained by Blackwater include the Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Department; Atlanta Police; Chillicothe, Ohio Police; Charleston, South Carolina Police; Metropolitan Washington, DC Police; Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police (Dulles and Reagan National Airports); Prince George’s County, Maryland Police; the FBI SWAT Team; New York Police Department; Fairfax County, Virginia Police; Tampa Police; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); DeKalb County, Georgia Police; Arlington County, Virginia Police; Baltimore Police; U.S. Coast Guard; University of Texas Police; Norfolk, Virginia Police; Chicago Police Department; Oregon State Police; Los Angeles Police Department; Harvey Cedars, New Jersey Police; City of Fairfax, Virginia Police; Alexandria, Virginia Police Special Operations; Illinois State Police; and Dallas Police.

Based on the actions of the St. Louis County police and their cache of Pentagon weapons, as well as their Israeli and Blackwater training, the next dead U.S. citizen – African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, or otherwise – could be found lying in a pool of his or her own blood, drawn by a militarized police officer, from the Jersey shore to the streets of Los Angeles.

Local Police and Much Else Will Be Militarized As Long As Federal Government Is

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Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man

By David Swanson

Source: OpEdNews.com

“Groups on the ground in St. Louis are calling for nationwide solidarity actions in support of Justice for Mike Brown and the end of police and extrajudicial killings everywhere.”

As they should. And we should all join in.

But “nationwide” and “everywhere” are odd terms to equate when discussing police militarization. Are we against extrajudicial killings (otherwise known as murder) by U.S. government employees and U.S. weapons in Pakistan? Yemen? Iraq? Gaza? And literally everywhere they occur? The militarization of local police in the United States is related to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, which has now reached the point that bombing and “doing nothing” are generally conceived as the only two choices available. Local police are being militarized as a result of these factors:

  • A culture glorifying militarization and justifying it as global policing.
  • A federal government that directs roughly $1 trillion every year into the U.S. military, depriving virtually everything else of needed resources.
  • A federal government that still manages to find resources to offer free military weapons to local police in the U.S. and elsewhere.
  • Weapons profiteers that eat up local subsidies as well as federal contracts while funding election campaigns, threatening job elimination in Congressional districts, and pushing for the unloading of weapons by the U.S. military on local police as one means of creating the demand for more.
  • The use of permanent wartime fears to justify the removal of citizens’ rights, gradually allowing local police to begin viewing the people they were supposed to protect as low-level threats, potential terrorists, and enemies of law and order in particular when they exercise their former rights to speech and assembly. Police “excesses” like war “excesses” are not apologized for, as one does not apologize to an enemy.
  • The further funding of abusive policing through asset forfeitures and SWAT raids.
  • The further conflation of military and police through the militarization of borders, especially the Mexican border, the combined efforts of federal and local forces in fusion centers, the military’s engagement in “exercises” in the U.S., and the growth of the drone industry with the military, among others, flying drones in U.S. skies and piloting drones abroad from U.S. land.
  • The growth of the profit-driven prison industry and mass incarceration, which dehumanize people in the minds of participants just as boot camp and the nightly news do to war targets.
  • Economically driven disproportionate participation in, and therefore identification with, the military by the very communities most suffering from its destruction of resources, rights, and lives.

But policing is not the only thing militarized by what President Eisenhower called the “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual” of the military industrial complex. Our morality is militarized, our entertainment is militarized, our natural world is militarized, and our education system is militarized. “Unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex” is not easily opposed while maintaining the military industrial complex. When Congress Members lend their support to a new war in Iraq while proposing that the U.S. Post Office and a dozen other decent things not be defunded, they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. The United States cannot live like other wealthy nations while dumping $1 trillion a year into a killing machine.

The way out of this cycle of madness in which we spend more just on recruiting someone into the military or on locking them up behind bars than we spend on educating them is to confront in a unified and coherent manner what Martin Luther King Jr. called the evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to the local police. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to weapons testing sites. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to the people of Honduras causing them to flee to a land that then welcomes them with an attitude of militarism. Not any of these partial steps alone, but the whole package of interlocking evils of attitude and mindset.

There is a no-fly-zone over Ferguson, Missouri, because people in the U.S. government view the people of the United States increasingly as they view the people of other countries: as best controlled from the air. Notes the War Resisters League,

“Vigils and protests in Ferguson — a community facing persistent racist profiling and police brutality — have been attacked by tear gas, rubber bullets, police in fully-armored SWAT gear, and tank-like personnel carriers. This underscores not only the dangers of being young, Black, and male in the US, but also the fear of mobilization and rebellion from within racialized communities facing the violence of austerity and criminalization.

“The parallels between the Israeli Defense Forces in Palestine, the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro, the Indian police in Kashmir, the array of oppressive armed forces in Iraq, and the LAPD in Skid Row could not be any clearer. . . .

“This is not happening by accident. What is growing the capacity of local police agencies to exercise this force are police militarization programs explicitly designed to do so. As St. Louis writer Jamala Rogers wrote in an article on the militarization of St. Louis Police this past April, ‘It became clear that SWAT was designed as a response to the social unrest of the 1960s, particularly the anti-war and black liberation movements.’ Federal programs such as DoD 1033 and 1122, and the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), in which St. Louis Police are active participants, provide weapons and training to police departments across the country, directly from the Pentagon. Commenting on the ominous growth of the phenomenon, Rogers continues: ‘and now, Police Chief [of St. Louis Police] Sam Dotson wants to add drones to his arsenal.’

“The events in Ferguson over these last few days demonstrate that the violence of policing and militarism are inextricably bound. To realize justice and freedom as a condition for peace, we must work together to end police militarization and violence.”

The War Resisters League is organizing against Urban Shield, an expo of military weapons for police and training event planned for Oakland, Calif., this September 4-8. The Week of Education and Action will take place in Oakland from August 30-September 5. Read all about it here.

David Swanson is a member of the National Committee of the War Resisters League and wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.uson

Is Open-Ended Chaos the Desired US-Israeli Aim in the Middle East?

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98412608_second day of war in Iraq

By Thomas S. Harrington

Source: Counterpunch

During the last week we have seen Sunni militias take control of ever-greater swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq. In the mainstream media, the analysis of this emerging reality has been predictably idiotic, basically centering on whether:

a) Obama is to blame for this for having removed US troops in compliance with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated and signed by Bush.

b) Obama is “man enough” to putatively resolve the problem by going back into the country and killing more people and destroying whatever remains of the country’s infrastructure.

This cynically manufactured discussion has generated a number of intelligent rejoinders on the margins of the mainstream media system. These essays, written by people such as Juan Cole, Robert Parry, Robert Fisk and Gary Leupp, do a fine job of explaining the US decisions that led to the present crisis, while simultaneously reminding us how everything occurring  today was readily foreseeable as far back as 2002.

What none of them do, however, is consider whether the chaos now enveloping the region might, in fact, be the desired aim of policy planners in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Rather, each of these analysts presumes that the events unfolding in Syria and Iraq are undesired outcomes engendered by short-sighted decision-making at the highest levels of the US government over the last 12 years.

Looking at the Bush and Obama foreign policy teams—no doubt the most shallow and intellectually lazy members of that guild to occupy White House in the years since World War II—it is easy to see how they might arrive at this conclusion.

But perhaps an even more compelling reason for adopting this analytical posture is that it allows these men of clear progressive tendencies to maintain one of the more hallowed, if oft-unstated, beliefs of the Anglo-Saxon world view.

What is that?

It is the idea that our engagements with the world outside our borders—unlike those of, say, the Russians and the Chinese—are motivated by a strongly felt, albeit often corrupted, desire to better the lives of those whose countries we invade.

While this belief seems logical, if not downright self-evident within our own cultural system, it is frankly laughable to many, if not most, of the billions who have grown up outside of our moralizing echo chamber.

What do they know that most of us do not know, or perhaps more accurately, do not care to admit?

First, that we are an empire, and that all empires are, without exception, brutally and programmatically self-seeking.

Second, that one of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet.

Third, that the most efficient way of sparking such open-ended internecine conflict is to brutally smash the target country’s social matrix and physical infrastructure.

Fourth, that ongoing unrest has the additional perk of justifying the maintenance and expansion of the military machine that feeds the financial and political fortunes of the metropolitan elite.

In short, what of the most of the world understands (and what even the most “prestigious” Anglo-Saxon analysts cannot seem to admit) is that divide and rule is about as close as it gets to a universal recourse the imperial game and that it is, therefore, as important to bear it in mind today as it was in the times of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Spanish Conquistadors and the British Raj.

To those—and I suspect there are still many out there—for whom all this seems too neat or too conspiratorial, I would suggest a careful side-by side reading of:

a) the “Clean Break” manifesto generated by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) in 1996

and

b) the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” paper generated by The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, a US group with deep personal and institutional links to the aforementioned Israeli think tank, and with the ascension of  George Bush Junior to the White House, to the most exclusive  sanctums of the US foreign policy apparatus.

To read the cold-blooded imperial reasoning in both of these documents—which speak, in the first case, quite openly of the need to destabilize the region so as to reshape Israel’s “strategic environment” and, in the second of the need to dramatically increase the number of US “forward bases” in the region—as I did twelve years ago, and to recognize its unmistakable relationship to the underlying aims of the wars then being started by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, was a deeply disturbing experience.

To do so now, after the US’s systematic destruction of Iraq and Libya—two notably oil-rich countries whose delicate ethnic and religious balances were well known to anyone in or out of government with more than passing interest in history—, and after the its carefully calibrated efforts to generate and maintain murderous and civilization-destroying stalemates in Syria and Egypt (something that is easily substantiated despite our media’s deafening silence on the subject), is downright blood-curdling.

And yet, it seems that for even very well-informed analysts, it is beyond the pale to raise the possibility that foreign policy elites in the US and Israel, like all virtually all the ambitious hegemons before them on the world stage, might have quite coldly and consciously fomented open-ended chaos in order to achieve their overlapping strategic objectives in this part of the world.

Thomas S. Harrington is a professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and the author of the recently released  Livin’ la Vida Barroca: American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies.