The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

What about internally, then?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became enemies of each other, but neither of them had ever really been a friend of the American public: both of them were instead liars who would, and did, do everything they could to grab control (on the aristocracy’s behalf, who financed their respective campaigns) over what is supposed to be our Government, in a democracy. That’s just a sad fact about reality, which both of America’s political Parties deny (because they both need those voters, not merely those mega-donations; they need the public to believe that the Party cares about them).

Most of the American public have been successfully deceived by the ‘news’media, and by the ‘history’-books (likewise published by agents for the aristocracy), to believe that the U.S. Government serves the public-interest, and not the interest of the centi-millionaires and especially billionaires, who finance political campaigns. But it’s no truer than it’s true that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend: both enemies of each other can be your enemies, too. The difference here is that the enmity between the aristocracy and the public is basically intrinsic, whereas the enmities between (Republican versus Democratic, or any other divisions between) aristocrats, are basically personal — these are matters of business, instead of matters of state. They are, in a sense, different business-plans — competing business-plans. But they are all assisting the aristocracy, to control the public, so as to advance the interests of the aristocracy. They’re all competing for the aristocracy’s support, and deceiving for the public’s support. Two blatant recent examples displaying this were America’s invasion in 2003 that destroyed Iraq, and America’s invasion in 2011 that destroyed Libya. Did either of those invasions advance the interests of the American public? But the owners of Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’ contractors blossomed after 9/11. In fact: U.S. arms-exports are at record highs.

The now-proven reality in America is that the U.S. Government really does represent those billionaires and centi-millionaires, and not the public. It’s a now-proven reality, that the U.S. isn’t a democracy but a dictatorship — albeit, a two-Party one, with a real competition between billionaire and centi-millionaire Republicans on the one hand, versus billionaire and centi-millionaire Democrats on the other. But all billionaires and centi-millionaires are takers (that’s how they came to be super-rich, even the ones who didn’t inherit it from their parents), who (notwithstanding any ‘charity’ they may establish to avoid taxes while extending their control) receive from the public far more than they give to the public; and, so, there is actually an intrinsic class-war — not at all like Karl Marx famously said, between the bourgeoisie (including small-business owners) versus the proletariat (including some centi-millionaires and billionaires who became super-wealthy from being movie-stars or athletic stars and who don’t necessarily actually control any business at all, and so they’re “proletariats”), but instead between the aristocracy versus the public: the ancient and permanent class-conflict. It’s the entire aristocracy-of-wealth (which is maybe half of the nation’s wealth) that’s arrayed against the public (the poorer 99+% of the people). (In fact, Marx — the promoter of the view that the bourgeoisie are the public’s enemies — had aristocratic sponsors, and he would have remained obscure and died poor, if he had instead blamed the aristocracy, not “the bourgeoisie” — which is mainly the middle class — as being the exploiting-class. Marx, too, was an agent of aristocracy. He succeeded and became famous because he had aristocratic sponsors. Otherwise, his name would have simply been forgotten.)

Anyway, the American public are now alone. No Government represents our interests. It’s now been proven that America’s Government doesn’t represent us; and it’s not even the business of any other Government in the world to represent us; so, no foreign government does, either. No Government represents us.

In order to understand any aristocracy, one must understand what gives rise to almost all wars, because almost all wars throughout history have been between contending aristocracies — between the aristocracies of different nations. Each aristocracy needs to be able to fool its national public, to believe that they’re fighting against the foreign public, when, in fact, they’re fighting against the foreign aristocracy, and they’re fighting for the home-nation’s aristocracy — they are, almost always, fighting for one aristocracy, against another aristocracy. Any public who would know that this is the reality, would just as soon commit a democratic revolution, against the local aristocracy, as go to war for the local one, against the foreign ones. This is the reason why, in every dictatorship, the local centi-millionaires and billionaires buy up all of the ‘news’media that inform, or (on essential matters) misinform, their audiences about international relations, and about who did what to whom and why. They hire only ‘reporters’ who comply with whatever deceptions the owners feel to be necessary, in order to be able to attract sponsorships from other aristocrats’ corporations and ‘charities’. But, the aristocrats themselves are actually all in this together, because their mutually shared enemy is the public. Without deceiving the public about essential matters, no national news-medium would be able to attract the sponsorships it needs in order to grow, or even to survive.

The public thinks it’s fighting an international war, when, in fact, they’re fighting for the local aristocracy (and its allied aristocracies), against foreign aristocracies (and their allied aristocracies). This has been true since the dawn of human civilization. Only the weapons are bigger now, and the alliances (in the World Wars) are now global. (But, of course, if there is another World War, then all of human civilization will immediately end, and not long thereafter, all human and most other forms of life will also end.)

An excellent example of the real class-war, and of its international nature, is James Bamford’s 3 April 2012 masterful and pioneering article in Wired, “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA”. He documented that even very high-up people in America’s NSA were kept out of the loop when joint U.S.-and-Israeli intelligence-agencies and private corporations were creating the present 1984-ish, “Big Brother” reality, in (at least) those countries (but, actually, the Sauds, and probably a few others, were also on the inside — the aristocracies not merely of those two countries, U.S. and Israel, are in the alliance).

The “Deep State” isn’t merely one nation’s aristocracy and its agents; it is basically a form of actually international gang-warfare. That’s what got us into invading and destroying Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, Ukraine (by coup 2014), and so many other nations. It wasn’t done in order to serve the American public’s interests. That’s just the standard lie — and it keeps going on, and on. Maybe until we invade Russia.

$21 Trillion of Unauthorized Spending by US Govt Discovered by Economics Professor

Posted on December 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: Covert Geopolitics

he US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was announced.

Two departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as $21 trillion on things they can’t account for between 1998 and 2015. At least that’s what Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.

They came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of Defense (DoD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as repots of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) over summer.

The research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush administration, saying the Inspector General found $6.5 trillion worth of military spending that the DoD couldn’t account for. She was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought she must be mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous experience with public finances, he thought the figure was too big even for an organization as large as the US military.

“Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don’t have adequate transactions… so an auditor would just recede. Usually it’s just a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that you just can’t account for,” he explained in an interview with USAWatchdog.com earlier this month.

After discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated with a pair of graduate students to comb through thousands of reports of the OIG dating back to 1998, when new rules of public accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to 2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The research was only for the DoD and the HUD.

“This is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the Army,” Skidmore said.

The professor would not suggest whether the missing trillions went to some legitimate undisclosed projects, wasted or misappropriated, but believes his find indicates that there is something profoundly wrong with the budgeting process in the US federal government. Such lack of transparency goes against the due process of authorizing federal spending through the US Congress, he said.

Skidmore also co-authored a column on Forbes, explaining his research.

The same week the interview took place the DoD announced that it will conduct its first-ever audit. “It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer dollar,” Comptroller David Norquist told reporters as he explained that the OIG has hired independent auditors to dig through the military finances.

“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” Skidmore commented.

Interestingly, in early December the authors of the research discovered that the links to key document they used, including the 2016 report, had been disabled. Days later the documents were reposted under different addresses, they say.

https://www.rt.com/usa/413411-trillions-dollars-missing-research/

This is probably where the Deep State government called CIA and State Department took their extra fund to topple uncooperative governments around the world. The bulk, of course, may have gone to the military industrial complex.

The United States has double the military budget of the combined military spending of Russia, China and G7 countries. Said military spending remains unauditable due to “widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations” according to a GAO report in 2010.

So, how can a government spread its wings beyond its own borders, and demand democratic ideals elsewhere when it is not practicing the same values at home?

How To Create NPR’s Propaganda – As Seen In a Hit Piece Against Me

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Lee Camp

Source: Naked Capitalism

I never thought I’d be the target of an NPR attack piece. Through my twenties I even looked to NPR as an outlet full of good, progressive, thoughtful reporting – You know, the soothing voices occasionally interrupted by music no one really listens to but that sounds good between soft-spoken ivy league journalists over the age of 50. Everything about NPR subtly reinforced the idea, “Everything is fine. You’re probably a middle to upper class white person or you hope to be one day, and that’s just great. Everything is fine.” They might not SAY that, but they say that. And for a long time, I was cool with that message.

Then I woke up. About the time NPR was avoiding Occupy Wall Street – or when they did cover it, acting like those of us who supported it were brainless hippies without a point or at least none that would fit easily into the lives of suburbanites with two kids, one cat, and a robust retirement account. In hindsight I should’ve woken up sooner. I should’ve seen the truth about the time most NPR shows were pushing for war in Iraq, buying into the WMD lie. Or maybe I should’ve realized the truth when Kevin Klose took over as President of NPR in 1998. Klose came straight from a nice seat as director of the US Information Agency, described as “a United States agency devoted to ‘public diplomacy’ (AKA propaganda).” So when you have one of the top government propagandists as your president, one can assume your reporting is slightly biased.

Anyway, that leads me to today. A couple days after NPR’s Weekend Edition hosted by Scott Simon did a rather awesome attack piece on me and my TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp which airs on RT America. I’d like to walk you through how to write such beautiful propaganda, as I did following the NY Times smear job against me, which sounded shockingly similar (more on that later).

STEP ONE: Create a subconscious association to old Cold War Russian propaganda

Scott Simon opens his show with “Russian programming is no longer breathless proclamations about tractor production or accolades to the Kremlin. Look at a show like Redacted Tonight.” This opening sentence essentially tells the listener that everything they’re about to hear is modern Russian propaganda. Sure, he doesn’t use the word “propaganda” yet, but when you say something was ONCE accolades to the Kremlin and is now Redacted Tonight, you are priming your audience, giving them a subconscious opinion of the target before they even know what it is. This would be like saying “American programming is no longer ads where a little girl with a daisy is killed by a nuclear blast. Now it’s the Daily Show.” If you had never heard of the Daily Show, you would assume it must be a modern version of a girl obliterated by a nuclear bomb.

STEP TWO: Lie by omission

Scott Simon knows the truth, but he’s keeping it from his audience. My show is not Russian propaganda. Simon knows I’m an American in America covering American news for Americans. He does slip in that I’m American in the opening sentences, but not until the end does he reveal to his audience that I have never been told to say anything or not to say anything on RT America. And after he says that, he immediately plays a clip of me joking that my show is written by heavily bearded Russian trolls. He seems to play it as if it reveals the truth, rather than being a joke. Furthermore, assuming Simon did even an ounce of research, he knows that I’ve been doing the same type of material in my stand-up comedy act for decades – long before I was every on RT. Saying my show is Russian propaganda would be to say that all the shows on RT America are Russian propaganda including ones hosted by Larry King, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, Governor Jesse Ventura, Mike Papantonio, and former hosts Thom Hartmann and Abby Martin.

I’ve addressed why I do this show on RT America, and you can watch that here. But for NPR’s listeners who have never heard of me, Simon wants to essentially warn them that they are about to hear nefarious neo-propaganda put forward by dastardly Russians.

STEP THREE: Subtly let your listeners know the target is not one of us

In his second sentence Simon says, “The show is hosted and written by an American comic in black jeans with a hipster beard and long, bobbed hair, Lee Camp.” To begin with, I don’t know what a hipster beard is, but I doubt I have one. I guess Scott Simon thinks any beard is a “hipster beard.” I suppose this means Wolf Blitzer has a hipster beard too. I also don’t know what “long bobbed hair” is other than a way of saying, “He’s a fuckin’ long hair!” This description is all basically Simon’s way of letting his elitist older core audience know, “This guy is NOT one of us. He probably doesn’t even OWN a salmon-colored button-down shirt.”

STEP FOUR: Imply that curse words = enemy of the state

Simon next plays a few sentences from my show, bleeping out the word “fuck.” Then he interrupts and says, “A lot of profanity. In fact ONE profanity over and over…” So Simon’s first sentence about me was to insult my clothing and look. His first sentence about my show was to express near horror at the fact I use the word “fuck”. First of all, I take great exception to the idea I only use ONE profanity. My profanity is varied AND prolific. Name another show where you’ve recently heard Congress described as a “Steaming bucket of mangy dicks.” But again this is designed so Simon can let the nice NPR listeners know, “He’s not one of us. He uses dirty language.” Isn’t it amazing that it’s been a half century since the 1960’s and yet the insults against the “counter culture” are all the same – “He’s a long-hair hipster with a dirty mouth!” As George Carlin said, dirty words can “impact your mind, curve your spine and lose the war for the Allies!” Clearly Scott Simon didn’t get the memo that fearing dirty words is not something most of America is doing anymore. Americans are far more worried about where their next paycheck will come from or how to get healthcare for their sick child. If you look at the situation our country is in and don’t say “FUCK” to yourself, then you aren’t paying attention.

STEP FIVE: Bring in an “Expert” who clarifies how awful the target is

Next, Julia Ioffe is brought on to explain how horrible Redacted Tonight truly is and why your children should be asked to leave the room and cover their ears until the terrifying thought bombs are extinguished. NPR identifies Ioffe as simply someone who writes critically about Russia for the Atlantic and other platforms. What Simon doesn’t want his listeners to know is that Ioffe is a hardcore neocon neo-McCarthyist who spends her days spouting fake news about Russia, such as this lovely piece of fact-free reporting entitled “How Russia Hacked America.” In the credits of that piece she thanks two private intelligence firms for helping her out – Fidelis Cybersecurity and Farsight Security. Fidelis used to be owned by General Dynamics, one of the biggest weapons contractors riding the Russia hysteria to billions of dollars in profits. Julia Ioffe is not even close to an unbiased critic of my show. She’s quite the opposite – a useful idiot for the weapons industry which collects bundles of cash from the deaths of millions.

And those Russian hacking claims? I covered the reality of those claims on my show with former 27-year veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

It’s very telling that while Ioffe and Scott Simon breathlessly attack dissenting voices, they choose NOT to cover how our 2016 election was ACTUALLY rigged as reported on by the nonpartisan Project Censored here, here, and here. I have also covered all of these stories extensively on my show.

Ioffe is not only a pure xenophobe, seemingly trying to angle our country towards nuclear war, but she also is – apparently – an expert on comedy! Her opening lines – “[Redacted Tonight] is very shrill. Lee Camp is very shrill. It looks like the kind of rantings I would engage in when I was an angry 15 year-old.” Apparently when Julia Ioffe was a mere teen, she was angrily spouting about how unfettered vulture capitalism destroyed Puerto Rico even before the hurricane did, or the unlimited war powers that both Democrats and Republicans voted to give Donald Trump, or perhaps the secret family making billions from our opioid crisis. I guess little Julia was once very well informed. But now, as an adult, she has changed her ways – becoming a good shill for the corporate state, toeing the pro-war propaganda line without a second thought.

STEP SIX: Shrug off or ignore any positive attributes

At one point Scott Simon talks about attending a taping of the show where the audience “laughed and cheered when prompted – but sincerely.” In the audio version the words “but sincerely” drip with disgust. This is about as close as Simon can come to admitting Redacted Tonight has very large, active, and excited fanbase of people who see through the ridiculous mainstream media and want something more, something deeper.

Another positive attribute of my show, in my opinion, is the fact that we’re left of the corporate-owned Democrats. Simon mentions that I mock both Republicans and Democrats but that’s where he leaves it. If he watched more than ten minutes, he knows that I don’t simply attack everything for the sake of mockery. I go after our ruling elite who are bought and sold by massive corporations, soulless people who seem fine with a level of inequality that surpasses even ancient Rome just before its collapse. This is the most important thing any viewer should know about my show, but NPR intentionally leaves it out. The reasoning is obvious – because it would attract a lot of viewers. And when you’re busy making new Cold War propaganda, you don’t want such stumbling blocks in your path.

STEP SEVEN: Bring in another “expert” to simply lie

Scott Simon next asks executive producer of Second City, Kelly Leonard, if Redacted Tonight is funny. Leonard response: “It is funny, but there’s a problem. ” Leonard says the real trouble is that I avoid certain subjects – such as hacking of the election. But in fact, I HAVE talked about hacking the election here, here, here, here, here, here – You get the point. I’ve talked about it FAR more than any other comedy news show Leonard can list. The problem is I don’t talk about it from the false narrative Leonard and Simon WANT me to – the narrative that calls it “hacking the election” even though no one is even accusing Russia of actually hacking voting machines, which is essentially impossible from a foreign country. (Instead voting machine rigging happens right here at home.) The accusations only have to do with hacking emails at the DNC (that showed *REAL* corruption) – and even those accusations have been debunked by experts.

So even if Leonard disagrees with my more truth-based views on the hacking, he still provably lied when he said I don’t talk about election hacking. Either he lied or he’s so woefully unfamiliar with my show that he’s hardly seen any of it. Which is worse? Scott Simon then lets this grand lie go unchecked, or Simon doesn’t know that I’ve covered the hacking extensively. Again, which is worse?

STEP EIGHT: Simply call your target evil

Leonard next says, “I think comedy is a superpower. And a very smart person once said, if it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower. And in this case, that’s kind of what I feel is going on.” Yep, my show is clearly being used for evil. A show which tirelessly fights for a more egalitarian and just society – You could hardly find an episode where I’m not covering those issues and giving solutions for how to get there – Such a TV show is using comedy for evil. …Hence the sinister beard and long hair.

STEP NINE: Refuse to have the target on for a live interview

The number one question I’ve gotten about NPR’s attack piece was about this sentence by Simon, “We asked Lee Camp for an interview but couldn’t agree to his ground rules.” Simon is being intentionally vague here. Saying that we couldn’t agree to ground rules makes the listener think I said, “I’ll do an interview but no questions about Russia, and you have to be dressed as a chicken during the entirety of it!” In fact, what Simon doesn’t reveal to his listeners is that I simply said, “I would love to do a live on-air interview.” That is all I said, and I said it repeatedly over email. NPR cannot have me on for a live on-air interview because that would not allow them to cut out all the things they don’t want viewers to know. It would not allow them to redact certain parts and take things out of context. I was told by the producer of Weekend Edition that they rarely do live interviews – which means they do indeed have the capability. I, myself, have an interview show that is never filmed live because it simply doesn’t air live. So I am not opposed to pre-taped interviews played in their entirety, but NPR is not looking for that. If Simon valued honesty, he should’ve stated, “Lee Camp agreed to a live interview, but we were not willing to do that.”

STEP TEN: Bring back the New Cold Warrior faux expert

Julia Ioffe comes back to call me and my team “co-conspirators” and “useful idiots.” (Which is it? Are we conspiring or are we idiots??) She says we are not creating the show “…for the rights and the lives of the little man or the little person. It’s for Putin’s power.” And although I find it hilarious to respond to a moral attack coming from someone spouting talking points on behalf of weapons contractors, I’ll do it anyway. Ioffe is perfectly wrong in her assertion. I’ve been doing politically minded stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years. Long before I ever created Redacted Tonight, I was speaking about the same issues – endless war, gut-wrenching inequality, environmental destruction – all the topics I continue to cover on my show. When I decided to work with RT America, it came down to one simple thought – I don’t believe we have a lot of time to waste. Our world is collapsing around us – for example the earth has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years. We have to talk about all these issues, which are redacted from our corporate media. We have to provide information to people in new and interesting ways, and I’ve been trying to do that for two decades. Julia Ioffe on the other hand wants to create war, death, and continued destruction while tearing down anyone who dissents.

STEP ELEVEN: One last parting lie – “No one’s watching anyway.”

Scott Simon closes by saying fewer than 30,000 people are likely watching RT America. He says, “That’s not far from the average attendance at a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game.” But one can assume Simon knows he’s lying. Even without factoring in television views, the average episode of Redacted Tonight gets over 30,000 views on YouTube alone, which does not count Facebook and other platforms. Clips from each episode add hundreds of thousands of more views on YouTube. I have recent web exclusive videos that have over 150,000 views each on YouTube. Assuming Simon can do a simple search, he knows he’s misleading his listeners as to how many people watch my show. If he can’t do a YouTube search, it might be time for him to throw in the ol’ crusty “journalism” towel.

If I really wanted to get down in the mud with Simon, I might mention that he has nearly 1.25 Million Twitter followers and yet his tweets – almost without exception – receive between zero and ten retweets. This either means Simon isn’t saying much of value or his 1.25 million followers aren’t listening to him to begin with.

It’s also a bit comical Simon picks Milwaukee as the city to use in his parting jab. Milwaukee also happens to be the home of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which helps fund NPR and therefore receives glowing segments like this in what seems to be a pay-to-play scenario. Even when corporations are not influencing NPR’s coverage, they are still benefiting from what NPR proudly calls “the halo effect” simply by being an underwriter. Basically NPR brags that they scrub clean the image some of the worst corporations in the world, making them angelic – corporations like ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.

Furthermore Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting did a study (“Some Things Considered Mostly By White Men”) that included Weekend Edition and other NPR shows and found that most of the commentary is by white men and in recent years there is less and less political coverage. The lack of political coverage is actually by design. NPR’s job is to cast reality in a pro-corporate pro-war light via two avenues, one is by straight up propaganda, such as hit pieces against dissenting voices – anything outside the corporate unfettered-capitalist paradigm. (I covered this in a recent web exclusive video.) Another avenue is to simply fill the airwaves with useless information that makes us feel smart and comfortable but contributes nothing to informing the population about what is REALLY happening. This is why Scott Simon produces pieces like this one about waiting in line. (It has 9 retweets as of this writing.) If you listen to the piece, he actually could have gone deeper and made the segment meaningful. He could have talked about how our system seeks profit over all else, even over the innately fair process of waiting in line. He could’ve discussed how those ideals then become codified in our cultural mindset, creating an immense level of misery and inequality. …But instead he left it as a weak version of Andy Rooney (which is impressive because I thought Andy Rooney was a weak version of Andy Rooney).

When he does cover politics, Simon has proven to be war hungry. Right now he seems to be Cold War hungry – which could lead to nuclear war. In the past he supported the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In case it was never mentioned on NPR, the Iraq War killed over one million people according to Reuters. Even in 2003 he reassured his listeners that not finding weapons of mass destruction (the entire premise for the war) didn’t really matter that much anyway because the greatest threat to Iraqis was the regime that the U.S. had taken down. (One assumes he doesn’t mean the greatest threat to the million who were killed during our obliteration of their country.) Simon helped manufacture the consent for such a horrific bloodbath, and I wonder whether that sits with him at all.

Since Weekend Edition did a poor job of finding guests who could speak intelligibly on the issues at hand, I did it for them. Author Max Blumenthal said of this segment, “NPR only interviewed neo-Cold Warriors, giving figures with no expertise on Russia a platform to hold forth on Russian meddling, and offering figures with no experience in comedy a platform to criticize Redacted Tonight‘s comedic value. NPR interviewed Lee Camp’s fans but no media professionals from the left who could have offered a nuanced perspective on RT. And they deliberately obscured Camp’s principled left-wing positions by claiming that he bashes the GOP and Democrats equally, with the Dems as a stand in for the living, breathing left social movement that Camp is part of. If anyone is looking for slanted propaganda under the guise of news, look no further than this piece by the semi-official radio outlet of the US government.”

And Scott Dikkers, co-founder and longtime head of The Onion publicly stated to Scott Simon, “I was disappointed you thought it necessary to tar [Lee Camp] as little more than a Putin Stooge. He happens to be a talented and hard-working comedian on the populist/left end of the spectrum.”

This is the second major attack piece on me and my comedy show in recent months, one on NPR and one on the cover of the NY Times Arts section. These smear jobs are similar in nature, and I’m far from the only one experiencing such attacks. Many dissenting voices have been attacked, suppressed, and maligned, and it’s up to those of us who value truth and open debate to stand up and demand better. The good news is that corporate media [which does include NPR] and the profit-over-people they uphold are right now fighting for their lives, and the only way of maintaining their power is by drumming out those of us calling attention to the reality.

The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

By Alfred McCoy

Source: The Unz Review

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper readers across America were captivated by a brand-new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It offered the country its first images of space-age death rays, atomic explosions, and inter-planetary travel.

“I was twenty years old,” World War I veteran Anthony “Buck” Rogers told readers in the very first strip, “surveying the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh… when suddenly… gas knocked me out. But I didn’t die. The peculiar gas… preserved me in suspended animation. Finally, another shifting of strata admitted fresh air and I revived.”

Staggering out of that mine, he finds himself in the 25th century surrounded by flying warriors shooting ray guns at each other. A Mongol spaceship overhead promptly spots him on its “television view plate” and fires its “disintegrator ray” at him. He’s saved from certain death by a flying woman warrior named Wilma who explains to him how this all came to be.

“Many years ago,” she says, “the Mongol Reds from the Gobi Desert conquered Asia from their great airships held aloft by gravity Repellor Rays. They destroyed Europe, then turned toward peace-loving America.” As their disintegrator beams boiled the oceans, annihilated the U.S. Navy, and demolished Washington, D.C. in just three hours, “government ceased to exist, and mobs, reduced to savagery, fought their way out of the cities to scatter and hide in the country. It was the death of a nation.” While the Mongols rebuilt 15 cities as centers of “super scientific magnificence” under their evil emperor, Americans led “hunted lives in the forests” until their “undying flame of freedom” led them to recapture “lost science” and “once more strike for freedom.”

After a year of such cartoons filled with the worst of early-twentieth-century Asian stereotypes, just as Wilma is clinging to the airship of the Mongol Viceroy as it speeds across the Pacific , a mysterious metallic orb appears high in the sky and fires death rays, sending the Mongol ship “hissing into the sea.” With her anti-gravity “inertron” belt, the intrepid Wilma dives safely into the waves only to have a giant metal arm shoot out from the mysterious orb and pull her on board to reveal — “Horrors! What strange beings!” — Martians!

With that strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century moved from Earth-bound combat against racialized Asians into space wars against monsters from other planets that, over the next 70 years, would take the strip into comic books, radio broadcasts, feature films, television serials, video games, and the country’s collective conscious. It would offer defining visions of space warfare for generations of Americans.

Back in the 21st Century

Now imagine us back in the 21st century. It’s 2030 and an American “triple canopy” of pervasive surveillance systems and armed drones already fills the heavens from the lower stratosphere to the exo-atmosphere. It can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out enemy satellite communications at a moment’s notice, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. It’s a wonder of the modern age. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated military information system ever created and an insurance policy for global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.

That is, in fact, the future as the Pentagon imagines it and it’s actually under development, even though most Americans know little or nothing about it. They are still operating in another age, as was Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates when he complained that “our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917.”

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed… the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.” Obama then offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Indeed, working in secrecy, the Obama administration was presiding over a revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the future full-scale weaponization of space. From stratosphere to exosphere, the Pentagon is now producing an armada of fantastical new aerospace weapons worthy of Buck Rogers.

In 2009, building on advances in digital surveillance under the Bush administration, Obama launched the U.S. Cyber Command. Its headquarters were set up inside the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwar center staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees was established at Lackland Air Base in Texas. Two years later, the Pentagon moved beyond conventional combat on air, land, or sea to declare cyberspace both an offensive and defensive “operational domain.” In August, despite his wide-ranging attempt to purge the government of anything connected to Barack Obama’s “legacy,” President Trump implemented his predecessor’s long-delayed plan to separate that cyber command from the NSA in a bid to “strengthen our cyberspace operations.”

And what is all this technology being prepared for? In study after study, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and related think tanks have been unanimous in identifying the main threat to future U.S. global hegemony as a rival power with an expanding economy, a strengthening military, and global ambitions: China, the home of those denizens of the Gobi Desert who would, in that old Buck Rogers fable, destroy Washington four centuries from now. Given that America’s economic preeminence is fading fast, breakthroughs in “information warfare” might indeed prove Washington’s best bet for extending its global hegemony further into this century — but don’t count on it, given the history of techno-weaponry in past wars.

Techno-Triumph in Vietnam

Ever since the Pentagon with its 17 miles of corridors was completed in 1943, that massive bureaucratic maze has presided over a creative fusion of science and industry that President Dwight Eisenhower would dub “the military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” he told the American people. “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” sustained by a “technological revolution” that is “complex and costly.” As part of his own contribution to that complex, Eisenhower had overseen the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and a “high-risk, high-gain” research unit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, that later added the word “Defense” to its name and became DARPA.

For 70 years, this close alliance between the Pentagon and major defense contractors has produced an unbroken succession of “wonder weapons” that at least theoretically gave it a critical edge in all major military domains. Even when defeated or fought to a draw, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research matrix has demonstrated a recurring resilience that could turn disaster into further technological advance.

The Vietnam War, for example, was a thoroughgoing tactical failure, yet it would also prove a technological triumph for the military-industrial complex. Although most Americans remember only the Army’s soul-destroying ground combat in the villages of South Vietnam, the Air Force fought the biggest air war in military history there and, while it too failed dismally and destructively, it turned out to be a crucial testing ground for a revolution in robotic weaponry.

To stop truck convoys that the North Vietnamese were sending through southern Laos into South Vietnam, the Pentagon’s techno-wizards combined a network of sensors, computers, and aircraft in a coordinated electronic bombing campaign that, from 1968 to 1973, dropped more than a million tons of munitions — equal to the total tonnage for the whole Korean War — in that limited area. At a cost of $800 million a year, Operation Igloo White laced that narrow mountain corridor with 20,000 acoustic, seismic, and thermal sensors that sent signals to four EC-121 communications aircraft circling ceaselessly overhead.

At a U.S. air base just across the Mekong River in Thailand, Task Force Alpha deployed two powerful IBM 360/65 mainframe computers, equipped with history’s first visual display monitors, to translate all those sensor signals into “an illuminated line of light” and so launch jet fighters over the Ho Chi Minh Trail where computers discharged laser-guided bombs automatically. Bristling with antennae and filled with the latest computers, its massive concrete bunker seemed, at the time, a futuristic marvel to a visiting Pentagon official who spoke rapturously about “being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

However, after more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops with tanks, trucks, and artillery somehow moved through that sensor field undetected for a massive offensive in 1972, the Air Force had to admit that its $6 billion “electronic battlefield” was an unqualified failure. Yet that same bombing campaign would prove to be the first crude step toward a future electronic battlefield for unmanned robotic warfare.

In the pressure cooker of history’s largest air war, the Air Force also transformed an old weapon, the “Firebee” target drone, into a new technology that would rise to significance three decades later. By 1972, the Air Force could send an “SC/TV” drone, equipped with a camera in its nose, up to 2,400 miles across communist China or North Vietnam while controlling it via a low-resolution television image. The Air Force also made aviation history by test firing the first missile from one of those drones.

The air war in Vietnam was also an impetus for the development of the Pentagon’s global telecommunications satellite system, another important first. After the Initial Defense Satellite Communications System launched seven orbital satellites in 1966, ground terminals in Vietnam started transmitting high-resolution aerial surveillance photos to Washington — something NASA called a “revolutionary development.” Those images proved so useful that the Pentagon quickly launched an additional 21 satellites and soon had the first system that could communicate from anywhere on the globe. Today, according to an Air Force website, the third phase of that system provides secure command, control, and communications for “the Army’s ground mobile forces, the Air Force’s airborne terminals, Navy ships at sea, the White House Communications Agency, the State Department, and special users” like the CIA and NSA.

At great cost, the Vietnam War marked a watershed in Washington’s global information architecture. Turning defeat into innovation, the Air Force had developed the key components — satellite communications, remote sensing, computer-triggered bombing, and unmanned aircraft — that would merge 40 years later into a new system of robotic warfare.

The War on Terror

Facing another set of defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the twenty-first-century Pentagon again accelerated the development of new military technologies. After six years of failing counterinsurgency campaigns in both countries, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to help pacify sprawling urban areas. And when President Obama later conducted his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, that country became a frontier for testing and perfecting drone warfare.

Launched as an experimental aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was deployed in the Balkans that very year for photo-reconnaissance. In 2000, it was adapted for real-time surveillance under the CIA’s Operation Afghan Eyes. It would be armed with the tank-killing Hellfire missile for the agency’s first lethal strike in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in October 2001. Seven years later, the Air Force introduced the larger MQ-9 “Reaper” drone with a flying range of 1,150 miles when fully loaded with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing it to strike targets almost anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia. To fulfill its expanding mission as Washington’s global assassin, the Air Force plans to have 346 Reapers in service by 2021, including 80 for the CIA.

Between 2004 and 2010, total flying time for all unmanned aerial vehicles rose sharply from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. By 2011, there were already 7,000 drones in a growing U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft. So central had they become to its military power that the Pentagon was planning to spend $40 billion to expand their numbers by 35% over the following decade. To service all this growth, the Air Force was training 350 drone pilots, more than all its bomber and fighter pilots combined.

Miniature or monstrous, hand-held or runway-launched, drones were becoming so commonplace and so critical for so many military missions that they emerged from the war on terror as one of America’s wonder weapons for preserving its global power. Yet the striking innovations in drone warfare are, in the long run, likely to be overshadowed by stunning aerospace advances in the stratosphere and exosphere.

The Pentagon’s Triple Canopy

As in Vietnam, despite bitter reverses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s recent wars have been catalysts for the fusion of aerospace, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence into a new military regime of robotic warfare.

To effect this technological transformation, starting in 2009 the Pentagon planned to spend $55 billion annually to develop robotics for a data-dense interface of space, cyberspace, and terrestrial battle space. Through an annual allocation for new technologies reaching $18 billion in 2016, the Pentagon had, according to the New York Times, “put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power,” exemplified by future drones that will be capable of identifying and eliminating enemy targets without recourse to human overseers. By 2025, the United States will likely deploy advanced aerospace and cyberwarfare to envelop the planet in a robotic matrix theoretically capable of blinding entire armies or atomizing an individual insurgent.

During 15 years of nearly limitless military budgets for the war on terror, DARPA has spent billions of dollars trying to develop new weapons systems worthy of Buck Rogers that usually die on the drawing board or end in spectacular crashes. Through this astronomically costly process of trial and error, Pentagon planners seem to have come to the slow realization that established systems, particularly drones and satellites, could in combination create an effective aerospace architecture.

Within a decade, the Pentagon apparently hopes to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via a triple-canopy aerospace shield that would reach from sky to space and be secured by an armada of drones with lethal missiles and Argus-eyed sensors, monitored through an electronic matrix and controlled by robotic systems. It’s even possible to take you on a tour of the super-secret realm where future space wars will be fought, if the Pentagon’s dreams become reality, by exploring both DARPA websites and those of its various defense contractors.

Drones in the Lower Stratosphere

At the bottom tier of this emerging aerospace shield in the lower stratosphere (about 30,000 to 60,000 feet high), the Pentagon is working with defense contractors to develop high-altitude drones that will replace manned aircraft. To supersede the manned U-2 surveillance aircraft, for instance, the Pentagon has been preparing a projected armada of 99 Global Hawk drones at a mind-boggling cost of $223 million each, seven times the price of the current Reaper model. Its extended 116-foot wingspan (bigger than that of a Boeing 737) is geared to operating at 60,000 feet. Each Global Hawk is equipped with high-resolution cameras, advanced electronic sensors, and efficient engines for a continuous 32-hour flight, which means that it can potentially survey up to 40,000 square miles of the planet’s surface daily. With its enormous bandwidth needed to bounce a torrent of audio-visual data between satellites and ground stations, however, the Global Hawk, like other long-distance drones in America’s armada, may prove vulnerable to a hostile hack attack in some future conflict.

The sophistication, and limitations, of this developing aerospace technology were exposed in December 2011 when an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel drone suddenly landed in Iran, whose officials then released photos of its dart-shaped, 65-foot wingspan meant for flights up to 50,000 feet. Under a highly classified “black” contract, Lockheed Martin had built 20 of these espionage drones at a cost of about $200 million with radar-evading stealth and advanced optics that were meant to provide “surveillance support to forward-deployed combat forces.”

So what was this super-secret drone doing in hostile Iran? By simply jamming its GPS navigation system, whose signals are notoriously susceptible to hacking, Iranian engineers took control of the drone and landed it at a local base of theirs with the same elevation as its home field in neighboring Afghanistan. Although Washington first denied the capture, the event sent shock waves down the Pentagon’s endless corridors.

In the aftermath of this debacle, the Defense Department worked with one of its top contractors, Northrop Grumman, to accelerate development of its super-stealth RQ-180 drone with an enormous 130-foot wingspan, an extended range of 1,200 miles, and 24 hours of flying time. Its record cost, $300 million a plane, could be thought of as inaugurating a new era of lavishly expensive war-fighting drones.

Simultaneously, the Navy’s dart-shaped X-47B surveillance and strike drone has proven capable both of in-flight refueling and of carrying up to 4,000 pounds of bombs or missiles. Three years after it passed its most crucial test by a joy-stick landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush in July 2013, the Navy announced that this experimental drone would enter service sometime after 2020 as the “MQ-25 Stingray” aircraft.

Dominating the Upper Stratosphere

To dominate the higher altitudes of the upper stratosphere (about 70,000 to 160,000 feet), the Pentagon has pushed its contractors to the technological edge, spending billions of dollars on experimentation with fanciful, futuristic aircraft.

For more than 20 years, DARPA pursued the dream of a globe-girding armada of solar-powered drones that could fly ceaselessly at 90,000 feet and would serve as the equivalent of low-flying satellites, that is, as platforms for surveillance intercepts or signals transmission. With an arching 250-foot wingspan covered with ultra-light solar panels, the “Helios” drone achieved a world-record altitude of 98,000 feet in 2001 before breaking up in a spectacular crash two years later. Nonetheless, DARPA launched the ambitious “Vulture” project in 2008 to build solar-powered aircraft with hugewingspans of 300 to 500 feet capable of ceaseless flight at 90,000 feet for five years at a time. After DARPA abandoned the project as impractical in 2012, Google and Facebook took over the technology with the goal of building future platforms for their customers’ Internet connections.

Since 2003, both DARPA and the Air Force have struggled to shatter the barrier for suborbital speeds by developing the dart-shaped Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet, it was expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in 2010 and 2011 crashed in midflight, they did briefly reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound.

As often happens, failure produced progress. In the wake of the Falcon’s crashes, DARPA has applied its hypersonics to develop a missile capable of penetrating China’s air-defenses at an altitude of 70,000 feet and a speed of Mach 5 (about 3,300 miles per hour).

Simultaneously, Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” experimental unit is using the hypersonic technology to develop the SR-72 unmanned surveillance aircraft as a successor to its SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest manned aircraft. When operational by 2030, the SR-72 is supposed to fly at about 4,500 mph, double the speed of its manned predecessor, with an extreme stealth fuselage making it undetectable as it crosses any continent in an hour at 80,000 feet scooping up electronic intelligence.

Space Wars in the Exosphere

In the exosphere, 200 miles above Earth, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Defense Department launched the robotic X-37B spacecraft, just 29 feet long, into orbit for a seven-month mission. By removing pilots and their costly life-support systems, the Air Force’s secretive Rapid Capabilities Office had created a miniaturized, militarized space drone with thrusters to elude missile attacks and a cargo bay for possible air-to-air missiles. By the time the second X-37B prototype landed in June 2012, its flawless 15-month flight had established the viability of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft.”

In the exosphere where these space drones will someday roam, orbital satellites will be the prime targets in any future world war. The vulnerability of U.S. satellite systems became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites in orbit 500 miles above the Earth. A year later, the Pentagon accomplished the same feat, firing an SM-3 missile from a Navy cruiser to score a direct hit on a U.S. satellite 150 miles high.

Unsuccessful in developing an advanced F-6 satellite, despite spending over $200 million in an attempt to split the module into more resilient microwave-linked components, the Pentagon has opted instead to upgrade its more conventional single-module satellites, such as the Navy’s five interconnected Mobile User Objective Systems (MUOS) satellites. These were launched between 2013 and 2016 into geostationary orbits for communications with aircraft, ships, and motorized infantry.

Reflecting its role as a player in the preparation for future and futuristic wars, the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, established in 2006, operates the Space Surveillance Network. To prevent a high-altitude attack on America, this worldwide system of radar and telescopes in 29 remote locations like Ascension Island and Kwajalein Atoll makes about 400,000 observations daily, monitoring every object in the skies.

The Future of Wonder Weapons

By the mid-2020s, if the military’s dreams are realized, the Pentagon’s triple-canopy shield should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike or, with equal ease, blind an entire army by knocking out all of its ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation. It’s a system that, were it to work as imagined, just might allow the United States a diplomatic veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of international influence.

But as in Vietnam, where aerospace wonders could not prevent a searing defeat, history offers some harsh lessons when it comes to technology trumping insurgencies, no less the fusion of forces (diplomatic, economic, and military) whose sum is geopolitical power. After all, the Third Reich failed to win World War II even though it had amazingly advanced “wonder weapons,” including the devastating V-2 missile, the unstoppable Me-262 jet fighter, and the ship-killing Hs-293 guided missile.

Washington’s dogged reliance on and faith in military technology to maintain its hegemony will certainly guarantee endless combat operations with uncertain outcomes in the forever war against terrorists along the ragged edge of Asia and Africa and incessant future low-level aggression in space and cyberspace. Someday, it may even lead to armed conflict with rivals China and Russia.

Whether the Pentagon’s robotic weapon systems will offer the U.S. an extended lease on global hegemony or prove a fantasy plucked from the frames of a Buck Rogers comic book, only the future can tell. Whether, in that moment to come, America will play the role of the indomitable Buck Rogers or the Martians he eventually defeated is another question worth asking. One thing is likely, however: that future is coming far more quickly and possibly far more painfully than any of us might imagine.

The Other Side of the Post’s Katharine Graham

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Norman Solomon

Source: Consortium News

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

“I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications,” Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry — who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s — has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures.”

Among Parry’s examples: “On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.” (The 1996 memoir of former CIA Director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.)

Graham’s book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara and other luminaries of various administrations who remained her close friends until she died in 2001. To Graham, men like McNamara and Kissinger — the main war architects for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — were wonderful human beings.

In sharp contrast, Graham devoted dozens of righteous pages to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and “the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike.” It is a profound commentary on her outlook that thuggish deeds by a few of the strikers were “unforgivable” — but men like McNamara and Kissinger were lovable after they oversaw horrendous slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Graham’s autobiography portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. “Only a handful of [Newspaper Guild] members had gone out for reasons I respected,” she told readers. “One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired.”

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union) the admiration was far from mutual. As he put it, “The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing sections of the Pentagon Papers immediately after a federal court injunction in mid-June 1971 stopped the New York Times from continuing to print excerpts from the secret document. That’s the high point of the Washington Post’s record in relation to the Vietnam War. The newspaper strongly supported the war for many years.

Yet Graham’s book avoids any semblance of introspection about the Vietnam War and the human costs of the Post’s support for it. Her book recounts that she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page in August 1966: “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Vast carnage resulted from such unwillingness to be “precipitous.”

Although widely touted as a feminist parable, Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seemed to exist in her range of vision; painful realities of class and racial biases were dim, faraway specks. Overall the 625-page book gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous, whose lives are peripheral to the drama played out by the wealthy publisher’s dazzling peers. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded, history-drenched book.

Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for “The Post” will change that awful truth.

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

3 Characteristics of a True Political Awakening

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Waking Times

History is written by the winners, or so they say, but there is an agreed upon version of our story that is taught to us in school and reinforced in everyday life by the media and government propagandists. Coasting through life haphazardly believing in this standardized version of reality is a form of consciousness, a contemporary way of relating to a world where the individual is consumed by the group, and truth becomes evermore out of reach.

The typical level of political awareness in our society is fairly basic, simplified and incomplete, but it serves as a functional trap for the mind and the imagination, pigeon-holing individuals into a conformist. This psychological trap preys upon two basic human traits: conservatism and progressivism. And because these traits are biologically hardwired into the human psyche, they are exploited as a fissure to create disharmony and division amongst the public.

Many people only rise to a level of political consciousness which allows them to understand their predisposition to one or the other of these traits. Awareness often ends here, with extreme devotion to one side of the publicized political spectrum.

The truth is that human societies have always needed an even distribution of people with each of these ideological tendencies in order to achieve a balance between our need for external and internal control, protection and care. Political awakening involves rising above the prescribed psychology of division, into a position of appreciation of the qualities which unite us all.

This idea is enumerated in the following three characteristics of true political awakening.

Trust in the Statist System Collapses

To continue to trust and support a consistently abusive master is often referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. When a person experiences a true and deep political awakening, it is not longer possible to excuse any of the crushing affronts to human rights and human dignity that are intrinsic to state power.

State power is historically abusive. The manipulation of our money supply, endless wars, wasting of public resources, corruption, permitting the destruction of the natural world, terrorizing citizens with abusive police and punitive tax codes, and limiting prosperity with regulatory overkill are all standard operating procedure for the state.

In a statist world, the awakening individual is tasked with the challenge of seeing through all of this in order to free the mind and see the greater possibilities for freedom and cooperation in the human story.

So-Called Leaders Are Seen as Puppets of Division

Watching the pendulum of public opinion and discourse swing violently back and forth between the merits of two political parties is comical once you’ve recognized just how predictable and destructive it is. We are goaded into engaging in the divisiveness, encouraged by the rhetoric of the political establishment.

It is our unity they fear most. Falling into the trap of politically dogmatic ideological fortifications is more dangerous to our society than just about anything else, and the truly politically awake fly above the argumentative mentality of those who are trapped in the two-party paradigm.

The Recognition that Politics is Heavily Influenced by Powerful Forces

If politics is the arena of government, and government is clearly influenced by corporate interests, intelligence agencies and deep state operators, and supranational organizations, then it makes no sense to pretend that we have power in the political system. It makes no sense to pretend as though politicians are acting in the true interest of actual people. It makes no sense to pretend that we can save ourselves by calling on members of the state to represent us in their corrupt scene.

It is commonly known that politicians are beholden to special interests, and while they never talk openly about this influence, so many people carry on with the charade that politicians can wield power over these organization, for the benefit of the plebs. They cannot, for these forces are beyond their control. The politically awakened understand that the plots against humanity extend way beyond the political scene.

Final Thoughts

Unity is the one thing that any political elite has always feared the most. Without smashing down the perceived barriers in contemporary political consciousness we can only expect our society to become more fractured, chaotic and dangerous. Trust in that which deceives and harms us is simply not possible for the truly politically awakened.

The End of Empire

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home.

By Chris Hedges

Source: CommonDreams

The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.

The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.

This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.

The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.

“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.

A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.

Plagues

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Klaus Madersbacher

Source: AntiWar.com

One indicator of human development is the number of people who die from preventable diseases and epidemics.

For example, the plague, as “Black Death” one of the horrors of the Middle Ages, is extinct in Europe, but still occasionally occurs worldwide – in “underdeveloped” regions, of course. Insufficient hygienic conditions are the first prerequisite for the occurrence and spread of this disease. After all, at least there are effective drugs to treat it.

Smallpox was a very dangerous disease. This epidemic also claimed millions of lives, especially in areas where there was no immunity in the population. The American Indians are to be mentioned here, who were particularly numerous victims of smallpox.

Smallpox is my favorite disease, firstly because it has been eradicated – “only an eradicated epidemic is a good epidemic” – and secondly because I myself have been engaged in eradicating it, working in the Smallpox Eradication Program, the only successful project worldwide carried out by the World Health Organization in the 1970s. With our well-designed approach we quickly could bring even major outbreaks of this epidemic under control.

Cholera is a particularly serious disease. Cholera can spread practically unhindered if there is no clean drinking water and water is contaminated by contaminated waste water. Cholera, dysentery and typhus indicate a lack of clean drinking water and are life-threatening for malnourished people, primarily for children and the elderly.

Perhaps you remember the 500,000 children in Iraq who were killed by the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War – yes, those who according to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were “worth the price”?

I deliberately and intentionally write “were killed” and not “have died”, have “lost their lives” or as can be heard in the mendacious media in this country/in the West, if at all. A report by UNICEF has been slammed in the Security Council by the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In my opinion a mass murder has been carried out on a huge scale, with the greatest unscrupulousness and with the cooperation and agreement of the Western community, including the United Nations, this pathetic bureaucratic Moloch with its low life existence under the whip of the US State Department.

In Washington and London they certainly know that poor hygiene conditions promote the spread of epidemics. Well, what does this mean for the rulers and commanders of the most aggressive rogue states of our time?

They let destroy power stations, drinking water systems and sewage treatment plants by their own and by the war planes of their respective “coalitions”.

And then?

Then they impose sanctions to block and prevent the necessary materials for repairs being brought into the country. Or prevent food or medicine from being brought into the country, or whatever evil the criminal brains in these command centers will devise to damage and harass people who do not obey. Sooner or later, the desired effect will appear, which can only be described as planned mass murder. This has happened in recent years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and most recently in Yemen. Gaza can be counted as one of the places where this “policy” has also been practiced for years, interrupted only by further bombing of residential buildings and infrastructure. The fact that the Western media hardly ever report about these gigantic crimes against humanity makes these “free media” accomplices in the style of Nazi media.

The terrorist superpower, the United States of America, apparently is not mainly interested in conquering these countries – it is enough for them to have them rendered helpless and defenseless, at least not being able to stand in the way of the aggressive ambitions of those striving for world domination. It easily can be found out on any world map where they are heading to.

Many millions of people killed, crippled and displaced will have to continue to be worth the “prize” that the aspirations of the terrorist superpower and their criminal “community” will require, at least in case things are developing according to their intentions.

As already mentioned the management of preventable diseases is a benchmark for the development of mankind.

If certain states cause the death and unspeakable suffering of countless people with tremendous effort, this is directly directed against the development and the interests of humanity. The fight against such parasitic states and their criminal aspirations is justified in every respect.

The fact, that a terrorist superpower and its terrorist appendage are granted civilizing, cultural or even humanitarian competence in spite of their manifest crimes against peace and against humanity is obviously an outstanding feature – symptom – of a society whose spiritual state is situated deeply in the realm of pathology.

Obviously, we are dealing with an epidemic here, too. A plague that affects people’s brains. Just as cholera bacteria attack the organism by programming its functions to self-destruction.

Guess if there is an “immune system”, too? That can prevent mankind being led into self-destruction?

You may assume that there is one and that you too can be a potential/potent part of this immune system.

As always in such cases it starts at a small scale. The chances of a movement growing against the current madness, that ultimately will prevail, are intact. Mankind at first glance may not appear getting constantly smarter, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that this inevitably must be the case. I would be surprised if the organism of mankind will not, in the foreseeable future, discard the elements that cynically endanger and trample underfoot the fate of mankind as a whole out of selfish interests. So far we have made it anyway…

Klaus Madersbacher is editor of www.antikrieg.com, an antiwar website in German with mainly articles from antiwar.com which he translates into German.

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Category Archives: war

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Plagues