Tag Archives: war

Is Sleepy Joe Biden Trying to Outdo Hitler and History?

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

History is the most interesting subject for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact it tends to repeat itself. And the fact that some are doomed by ignorance of this is an important lesson for today. Take German tanks, for instance. First, let’s rehash a little history about the steppes of Russia and Eastern Ukraine and unlearned lessons.

From the 5th of July 1943 until the 23rd of August 1943, the largest tank battle in history took place in what became known as the “Kursk Salient,” an area that stretched from the tiny town of Kirov on the Bolva River in the north, through Belgorod in Russia, Kharkiv, which Ukraine currently controls. The line reached deep into the Donbas region, the focal point of Ukraine’s Nazi hostilities since 2014.

Hitler’s Operation Zitadelle (“Citadel”) was carried out over a 700-mile-long front, where the best Germans tried to outgun and outmaneuver the advancing Soviet forces. It became the largest tank battle in history, pitting the most advanced weaponry Nazi Germany had against prepared and dug-in, superior Soviet resistance. The reader will find it interesting that the German high command chose Belgorod as one of the first key objectives.

Numerous parallels exist between the battle of Kursk and the current proxy war in Ukraine. First, I’d like to deal with tanks. In 1943, Germany manufactured what can be argued as the finest medium and heavy armor of World War II. Though not numerous at Kursk, the deadly Tiger played a big role. The all-new Panther and the giant Ferdinand tank destroyer were supposed to blast the Soviets off the battlefield.

Ironically, many of their burning hulks littered the countryside once the battle ended. The battle raged for months, with neither side gaining a clear advantage. The Soviets, not unlike their modern-day counterparts on the Russian lines, created massive defensive works to sap the German offensive until a counterattack would gain a decisive effect.

When I read the other day about almost all of the highly touted German Leopards sent to Zelensky having been destroyed, this seemed like Deja Vu as a student of history. An article in the Berliner Zeitung cited Alexander Sosnowski, who used data from pro-Ukraine media channels to determine that 41 Leopard-2s, 49 T72 tanks, 31 Bradlys, 7 German Marders, 23 howitzers, and 40 MRAP infantry fighting vehicles have already been turned to scrap by the Russians. In 1943, the great Nazi war machine faced similar despair.

But what other parallels can we draw? What is going to happen next? If you ask most experts, Europe is out of ammo, tanks, and guts. The Germans cannot even crank up and run half their remaining Leopard 2s for lack of repair, Paris is on fire, Germans are ready for any Chancellor but Scholz, Hungary seems about ready to leave the NATO alliance, the dollar may crumble toon, and even Americans grow weary of cheering a losing team.

We can understand how idiotic Joe Biden’s war on Russia will end if we recollect what happened after the Kursk failure. The Germans had been progressing in fighting through the defensive layers the Soviets had built. The northern front of the pincer bogged down, and the southern one was halted by bitter Soviet resistance. Hitler, who the legendary Heinz Guderian had warned against Operation Citadel, lost heart when decisive victory was not at hand and focused elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Soviets had gained momentum in the ground war and never relinquished it after Kursk.

As we know, once the Axis began its retreat from Kursk, the Soviets, and their allies from the West marched into the heart of Europe, taking Berlin and destroying the dream of Leibensraum, at least for the moment. Today, we find Germany’s best tanks strewn all over the battle lines in the regions reclaimed by Russia. Of course, they are not the Tigers or Panthers of legend. Four Tiger tanks held off tank brigades at Kursk. Now a lightweight drone seemed capable of knocking one out. The same seems true for NATO, a military alliance that has never shown it could beat its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone conquer Russia.

Whoever devised this genius plan to create Operation Barbarossa 2 is not even as clever as a drugged Hitler on his worst day. All that has happened is that the Russians are preparing again. Factories are shifting to creating T-14 Armata tanks instead of luxury Lada 4x4s. Far from the front, the Russians ramp up their military complex as before. For Westerners, we can only hope they do so for defensive rather than offensive operations. For certain, as the fires of discontent burning in Paris, there is nothing behind the Donetsk River to stop the Russians if they choose to widen their breathing space.

Funny, isn’t it, how history repeats itself and does so in the same places with the same idiotic mistakes being made?

House Passes $886 Billion National Defense Authorization Act

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The bill narrowly passed in a vote of 219-210 due to a partisan divide over amendments included by Republicans

By Dave DeCamp

Source: AntiWar.com

The House on Friday passed its version 2024 National Defense Authorization Act in a vote of 219-210, which largely fell along partisan lines due to amendments added by Republicans relating to social policies in the military.

The Republican amendments covered abortion, transgender surgery, and diversity initiatives. Only four Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and four Republicans voted against it. The four Republicans who opposed the NDAA are Reps. Thomas Massie (KY), Eli Crane (AZ), Andy Biggs (AZ), and Ken Buck (CO).

The Senate still needs to pass its version of the NDAA, then the two chambers will negotiate the final version that will go to President Biden’s desk. The Republican amendments packed into the House version will set up a fight between the two chambers as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other Democrats will reject them.

The 2024 NDAA is for a record $886 billion, the same amount President Biden requested. The debt ceiling deal reached between House Republicans in the White House did not limit military spending and put no caps on emergency supplemental funds, which is how the US has been spending on the war in Ukraine.

As the House was debating the NDAA, several amendments introduced by Republicans looking to rein in US support for Ukraine were voted down. One amendment sponsored by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) would have required the Biden administration to develop a strategy for the war in Ukraine. It was rejected in a vote of 129-301, with only Republicans supporting it.

One amendment introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would have cut $300 million in military aid for Ukraine that’s packed into the NDAA, but it failed in a vote of 89-341. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) put forward an amendment to cut off all military assistance for Ukraine, which failed in a vote of 70-358. Only Republicans supported the two amendments.

Greene sponsored another amendment that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, although US cluster bombs have already arrived in the country. The effort failed in a vote of 147-276. It received support from 98 Republicans and 49 Democrats.

Why Propaganda Works

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The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Consortium News

It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.

Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.

Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.

To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.

It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.

By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.

Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.

This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.

I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that Westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests.

I’m sure both of these factor into the equation exist to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.

Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system.

 Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when most humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true.

So now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.

This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.

So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries protecting those implanted worldviews.

Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.

I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why.  A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs.

Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the U.S. military to do something evil and stupid.

The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible for someone to change beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm biases.

It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.

Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.

And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it.

The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

Gee, Thanks America! U.S. Sanctions Make Russian Economy Stronger and Precipitate Multipolar World

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By SCF Editorial

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have made the stronger.

Russia’s economy is performing strongly, according to recent forecasts from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The outcome defies earlier predictions by the United States and its European allies which held that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees and force it to submissively “Cry Uncle”.

When the conflict in Ukraine escalated 16 months ago (after eight years of NATO-sponsored aggression using the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime), various Western politicians and pundits were relishing the prospect of the Russian economy collapsing from “Total War” launched against its international banking and trade.

Well, it didn’t turn out like that. Far from it. As the World Bank noted above, the Western sanctions have simply helped Russia boost alternative markets in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe. A principal earner for Russia is energy exports of oil and gas. Increased sales to Asia have maintained revenues despite the loss of European markets due to Western sanctions.

The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have actually made the latter stronger.

Michael Hudson, an American global economics analyst, points out: “The sanctions have obliged Russia to become self-sufficient in food production, manufacturing production and consumer goods.”

Hudson also notes that the U.S. geopolitical strategy is to use sanctions in order to make its supposed European allies more dependent and subservient to Washington.

Another respected commentator, Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian geoeconomics professor, likened the use of Western sanctions to the self-destructive behavior of “self-harm”. The United States and European Union, he says, have “handed over a huge market to the rest of the world”.

Diesen also observes that 85 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that do not comply with Western sanctions against Russia. This global majority is more than ever creating new forms of trade and finance that obviate Western control. A major impetus for this positive development is the necessity bequeathed by Washington’s systematic abuse of power and privilege.

The repercussions are more far-reaching and profound than the inadvertent benefits accruing to Russia’s national economy. What the Western sanctions are also doing is accelerating the development of a multipolar world and the demise of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. The upshot of those two trends is the historic dwindling of American imperial power – albeit with outbursts of militarism and warmongering along the way down.

A significant illustration of the times a-changing was seen this week at the 25th summit of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). Attending the four-day event were 17,000 delegates from some 130 nations. This year’s convocation witnessed large representations from Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The bustling event not only reflected Russia’s own economic strength but the fact that – far from being “isolated” and downtrodden – Russia is viewed by the rest of the world as an engine for growth and more prosperous multipolar relations.

Indeed, from the perspective of most nations, it looks like the United States and its Western allies are the ones who are isolated and anachronistic.

One of the attendees at SPIEF was American industrial analyst Douglas Andrew Littleton who commented: “Western sanctions against Russia have backfired.” And he added: “I’m happy that Russia has been able to bypass and skirt the sanctions in so many ways with their friends and allies.”

What’s going on here is not just merely the emergence of an alternative system, but an epochal political and perhaps moral paradigm shift. The globe wants more peaceful and mutual relations of cooperation and development. Most people on this Earth want endless warmongering, militarism and unilateral bullying by self-ordained powers to be put to an end. The planet is crying out for a world based on justice and peace.

What the world is realizing more than ever is that the unilateral use of economic sanctions by Washington is nothing but warfare and state terrorism by another, more palatable name. For decades, the U.S. has tried to use economic weapons to strangle and kill other nations. North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and many other countries come to mind where U.S. imperialism has imposed conditions of economic genocide.

The world is well aware of this fiendish legacy and has had enough of American barbarism wielded with the help of its Western lackeys in NATO and the European Union.

We should here make special mention of Syria, the Arab nation struggling to recover from 12 years of war that was inflicted upon it by Washington and its NATO partners for “regime change”. Today, Syria’s recovery is cruelly hampered by economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU. How despicable is that?

There is an unerring historical sense, however, that Washington, has finally met its nemesis. By racking up sanctions against Russia and dragooning its EU lackeys to follow suit, the United States has now unleashed a historic dynamic process of its own imperial collapse.

For decades, U.S. sanctions worked to a nefarious degree on isolated, smaller nations to indeed enforce vengeful hardship.

Not anymore. Russia’s vast natural wealth and economy are too big to contain. Militarily, too, Russia will not be pushed around. Indeed, it has pushed back in Ukraine against the West’s deceptive and pernicious proxy war.

Organically and consciously, the world economy and international relations have been transformed in recent years, especially with the rise of China and Eurasia generally.

Another key development is that the Western imperialist media monopoly has also been broken. Washington and its minions in the European political class are held in contempt as liars and charlatans, even by their own populations.

By unwisely attempting to trap the Russian bear, the West has only created a scenario of revolt by the rest of the world from the West’s exploitative control. Five centuries of European and American Western parasitism have run their course.

Russia’s economic strength is galvanizing the rest of the world to shake off the chains of Western domination and subjugation. The process of dumping the dollar is gathering momentum which self-harming sanctions are precipitating. Pillars and facades are crumbling in real time.

The theme for the SPIEF event this year was “Sovereign Development – the Basis for a Just World”.

As with many other empires in the annals of history that have collapsed, arrogance and hubris often precede the fall. The American and Western elite thought they had an eternal license to wreak havoc for their own selfish gain. Their economic plunder and weaponry are now turning on their own heads. And it’s long overdue.

The Ultimate All-American Slush Fund

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How A New Budget Loophole Could Send Pentagon Spending Soaring Even Higher

By Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung

Source: TomDispatch

On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon.

Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that’s failed to pass a single financial audit! 

Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for “national defense” next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans’ care — neither of which is frozen in the agreement — is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.

Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government’s discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government’s discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)

And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn’t be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained” by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.

As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term “overseas contingency” can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department’s “slush fund.”

So, prepare yourself for “Slush Fund II” (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year.  Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to — yes, of course! — pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. “There will be a day before too long,” he told them, “where we’ll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made a similar point in a statement on the Senate floor during the debate over that deal. “The debt ceiling deal,” he said, “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency/supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats.”

One potential (and surprising) snag in the future plans of those Pentagon budget boosters in both parties may be the position of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He has, in fact, described efforts to increase Pentagon spending beyond the level set in the recent budget deal as “part of the problem.” For the moment at least, he openly opposes producing an emergency package to increase the Pentagon budget, saying:

“The last five audits the Department of Defense [have] failed. So there’s a lot of places for reform [where] we can have a lot of savings. We’ve plussed it up. This is the most money we’ve ever spent on defense — this is the most money anyone in the world has ever spent on defense. So I don’t think the first answer is to do a supplemental.”

The Massive Overfunding of the Pentagon

The Department of Defense is, of course, already massively overfunded. That $886 billion figure is among the highest ever — hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars or during the most intensely combative years of the Cold War. It’s higher than the combined military budgets of the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are, in any case, U.S. allies. And it’s estimated to be three times what the Chinese military, the Pentagon’s “pacing threat,” receives annually. Consider it an irony that actually “keeping pace” with China would involve a massive cut in military spending, not an increase in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.

It also should go without saying that preparations to effectively defend the United States and its allies could be achieved for so much less than is currently lavished on the Pentagon.  A new approach could easily save significantly more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2024, as proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) in the People Over Pentagon Act, the preeminent budget-cut proposal in Congress. An illustrative report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in late 2021 sketched out three scenarios, all involving a less interventionist, more restrained approach to defense that would include greater reliance on allies. Each option would reduce America’s 1.3-million-strong active military force (by up to one-fifth in one scenario). Total savings from the CBO’s proposed changes would, over a decade, be $1 trillion.

And a more comprehensive approach that shifted away from the current “cover the globe” strategy of being able to fight (though, as the history of this century shows, not always win) wars virtually anywhere on Earth on short notice — without allies, if necessary — could save hundreds of billions more over the next decade. Cutting bureaucracy and making other changes in defense policy could also yield yet more savings. To cite just two examples, reducing the Pentagon’s cohort of more than half-a-million private contract employees and scaling back its nuclear weapons “modernization” program would save significantly more than $300 billion extra over a decade.

But none of this is even remotely likely without concerted public pressure to, as a start, keep members of Congress from adding tens of billions of dollars in spending on parochial military projects that channel funding into their states or districts. And it would also mean pushing back against the propaganda of Pentagon contractors who claim they need ever more money to provide adequate tools to defend the country.

Contractors Crying Wolf

While demanding ever more of our tax dollars, the giant military-industrial corporations are spending all too much of their time simply stuffing the pockets of their shareholders rather than investing in the tools needed to actually defend this country. A recent Department of Defense report found that, from 2010-2019, such companies increased by 73% over the previous decade what they paid their shareholders. Meanwhile, their investment in research, development, and capital assets declined significantly. Still, such corporations claim that, without further Pentagon funding, they can’t afford to invest enough in their businesses to meet future national security challenges, which include ramping up weapons production to provide arms for Ukraine.

In reality, however, the financial data suggests that they simply chose to reward their shareholders over everything and everyone else, even as they experienced steadily improving profit margins and cash generation. In fact, the report pointed out that those companies “generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment.” So instead of investing further in their businesses, they choose to eat their “seed corn” by prioritizing short-term gains over long-term investments and by “investing” additional profits in their shareholders. And when you eat your seed corn, you have nothing left to plant next year.

Never fear, though, since Congress seems eternally prepared to bail them out. Their businesses, in fact, continue to thrive because Congress authorizes funding for the Pentagon to repeatedly grant them massive contracts, no matter their performance or lack of internal investment. No other industry could get away with such maximalist thinking.

Military contractors outperform similarly sized companies in non-defense industries in eight out of nine key financial metrics — including higher total returns to shareholders (a category where they leave much of the rest of the S&P 500 in the dust). They financially outshine their commercial counterparts for two obvious reasons: first, the government subsidizes so many of their costs; second, the weapons industry is so concentrated that its major firms have little or no competition.

Adding insult to injury, contractors are overcharging the government for the basic weaponry they produce while they rake in cash to enrich their shareholders. In the past 15 years, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog has exposed price gouging by contractors ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known companies like TransDigm Group. In 2011, Boeing made about $13 million in excess profits by overcharging the Army for 18 spare parts used in Apache and Chinook helicopters. To put that in perspective, the Army paid $1,678.61 each for a tiny helicopter part that the Pentagon already had in stock at its own warehouse for only $7.71.

The Pentagon found Lockheed Martin and Boeing price gouging together in 2015. They overcharged the military by “hundreds of millions of dollars” for missiles. TransDigm similarly made $16 million by overcharging for spare parts between 2015 and 2017 and even more in the following two years, generating nearly $21 million in excess profits. If you can believe it, there is no legal requirement for such companies to refund the government if they’re exposed for price gouging.

Of course, there’s nothing new about such corporate price gouging, nor is it unique to the arms industry. But it’s especially egregious there, given how heavily the major military contractors depend on the government’s business. Lockheed Martin, the biggest of them, got a staggering 73% of its $66 billion in net sales from the government in 2022. Boeing, which does far more commercial business, still generated 40% of its revenue from the government that year. (Down from 51% in 2020.)

Despite their reliance on government contracts, companies like Boeing seem to be doubling down on practices that often lead to price gouging. According to Bloomberg News, between 2020 and 2021, Boeing refused to provide the Pentagon with certified cost and pricing data for nearly 11,000 spare parts on a single Air Force contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) have demanded that the Pentagon investigate since, without such information, the department will continue to be hard-pressed to ensure that it’s paying anything like a fair price, whatever its purchases.

Curbing the Special Interest Politics of “Defense”

Reining in rip-offs and corruption on the part of weapons contractors large and small could save the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars. And curbing special-interest politics on the part of the denizens of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) could help open the way towards the development of a truly defensive global military strategy rather than the current interventionist approach that has embroiled the United States in the devastating and counterproductive wars of this century.

One modest step towards reining in the power of the arms lobby would be to revamp the campaign finance system by providing federal matching funds, thereby diluting the influential nature of the tens of millions in campaign contributions the arms industry makes every election cycle. In addition, prohibiting retiring top military officers from going to work for arms-making companies — or, at least, extending the cooling off period to at least four years before they can do so, as proposed by Senator Warren — would also help reduce the undue influence exerted by the MICC.

Last but not least, steps could be taken to prevent the military services from giving Congress their annual wish lists — officially known as “unfunded priorities lists” — of items they want added to the Pentagon budget. After all, those are but another tool allowing members of Congress to add billions more than what the Pentagon has even asked for to that department’s budget.

Whether such reforms alone, if adopted, would be enough to truly roll back excess Pentagon spending remains to be seen. Without them, however, count on one thing: the department’s budget will almost certainly continue to soar, undoubtedly reaching $1 trillion or more annually within just the next few years.  Americans can’t afford to let that happen.

Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days.  I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.

I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean’s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.”  The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.

Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life.  Carl Jung called it “the shadow.”  Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies.  History is replete with examples.  My dream’s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape.  He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.  Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are.  Appropriating the ancient names without irony – such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan – unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons.  Relinquishing  their sense of god-like power doesn’t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.

They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.

Nietzsche termed the result nihilism.  Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.

The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness.  If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed.  Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when “accidents” occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.”  Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.

But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans’ surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues “greatest” invention – nuclear weapons – to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.

Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.

These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend.  They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks.  Madmen.  They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world.  Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.

But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born.  These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.

The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four.  Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We deliver innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges”), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.

While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.  Today – 2023 June – we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.

A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb.  Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas.  Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.

James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:

Question: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?”

Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare – which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] – and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.”

Robert Aldridge saw his shadow side.  He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away.  He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others.  He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia.  It is possible.

If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.

We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows.

Writing in another context that pertains to today’s high-flying nuclear madmen whose mythic Greek forbear Icarus would not listen, the poet W. H. Auden put it this way in “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We turn away at our peril.

How the Psychopaths Who Run the U.S. Government Think

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

On June 25th, the former Obama Secretary of State and current Biden climate czar John Kerry was interviewed by Darius Rochebin on the TF1 French TV network and Kerry accused Putin of aggression against Ukraine, he was pretending that the war in Ukraine hadn’t started with America’s coup in Ukraine in 2014 turning that country, which has the nearest border to The Kremlin, rabidly anti-Russian. Rochebin replied by comparing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. He asked Kerry: wasn’t that an international war-crime, an aggressive invasion against Iraq, which was based on the lie that Iraq was hiding WMD, weapons of mass destruction? Kerry answered “No.” Rochebin asked Kerry why it wasn’t comparable to Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Kerry said that there was no comparison because whereas Putin is being charged by the ICC for a war crime of aggression, Bush never was. An accurate description of the discussion was provided by Russia’s RT, and here that is:

——

https://www.rt.com/news/578750-john-kerry-iraq-aggression-lie/

26 June 2023 17:29

US envoy admits Iraq invasion was based on lie

The 2003 war was not a crime because President George W. Bush was never charged, John Kerry has insisted

[The passage is starting at 9:30 in the video:

https://www.tf1info.fr/international/video-john-kerry-sur-lci-contre-le-rechauffement-climatique-il-faut-de-l-argent-2261616.html.%5D

The US-led invasion of Iraq was completely different to the current Ukraine conflict, Washington’s special envoy for climate change John Kerry has told French TV channel LCI.

He appeared on LCI’s Sunday evening show hosted by Darius Rochebin, who had previously interviewed him for a Swiss outlet in 2017. Rochebin tweeted a video segment of the interview, in which he confronted Kerry about the West accusing Russia of aggression regarding Ukraine. The French journalist noted that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was an actual war of aggression, based on the lie that Baghdad secretly possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“No,” Kerry replied. “Because there’s never even been, you know, a process of direct accusation of President [George W.] Bush himself.”

He added that there had been “abuses” in the course of that conflict, and that he “spoke out against them.” When Rochebin asked him directly whether the Iraq War had been a crime of aggression, Kerry repeatedly denied it.

“No, No, No. Well, you didn’t know it was a lie at the time. [That’s a lie because Bush certainly did know that it was a lie, at that time.] The evidence that was produced, people didn’t know that it was a lie,” the former diplomat said, before telling Rochebin that he doesn’t intend to “re-debate the Iraq War” at this point. 

Kerry also claimed he was opposed to the war at the time and thought it was the wrong thing to do. He actually voted in the Senate to authorize the invasion, however. When Rochebin pushed him on the apparent double standard, Kerry began speaking about “climate justice.”

The Bush administration accused Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of having chemical and biological weapons, as well as being somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The ‘evidence’ for WMDs offered to the media and the UN Security Council turned out to be entirely fabricated, and no such weapons were ever found. Likewise, no connection between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda was ever established.

The 2003 invasion and the subsequent occupation of Iraq was carried out without UN approval, by what Bush called a ‘coalition of the willing’. The US, the UK, Australia and Poland provided troops for the attack, though Washington later claimed 44 more countries had offered some kind of support.

Kerry ran against Bush in 2004 but lost. He later served as secretary of state in the Barack Obama administration, and was appointed climate change ambassador by the current president, Joe Biden, in 2021.

——

Here was Rochebin’s tweeted video-clip of the discussion:

The tweeted responses to the discussion were largely regurgitations of U.S.-and-allied propaganda against Putin and against Russia. Very few tweets addressed the comparison of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Almost all of the tweeted replies were irrelevant to that issue — which had been the issue. Most of the tweets were non-responsive.

I have previously argued that the comparison is valid, and that the case that Bush is a war-criminal is far stronger than is the case that Putin is.

However, what is most remarkable here is the aristocratic Kerry’s unconcern with the substance of the matter — that Bush is at least as guilty as Putin is — and Kerry’s total and obsessive concern instead about whether Bush has been charged as having been a war-criminal. He thinks in labels, instead of realities. Bush has not been labelled “war-criminal.” It seems that all that concerns Kerry is what people think, and not what actually is.

His type of thinking is sometimes called “other-directed” as opposed to “inner-directed,” or else “conformist” instead of “autonomous” (or “independent”). It seems to lack a core, have no personality or character, because the only ‘conscience’ the person has is other people’s opinions, nothing inside the person — the person is actually a vacancy. That’s a classic psychopath: no conscience is present.

Is this a trait that is virtually universal among the people who run the U.S. Government? To judge by those twitter-responses, it appears to be a rather common trait, though perhaps not as universal as among the individuals who run the U.S. Government. In order to participate in the U.S. leadership, psychopathy seems to be the chief prerequisite. It’s the way to ignore reality.

A War Like No Other in Ukraine

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: WeMeantWell.com

Joe Biden created for the U.S. a war like no other, one where others die and the U.S. simply sits back and pays the bills on a gargantuan scale. No attempts are made at diplomacy by the Americans, and the diplomatic efforts of others like the Chinese are dismissed as evil attempts to gain influence in the area (similar for Chinese diplomatic work in the Yemen war.) Biden is coming close to achieving 1984‘s goal of perpetual warfare while only putting a handful of American lives at risk. He has learned lessons from the Cold War, and already put them into play. Can we call it the Biden Doctrine yet?

Biden’s strategy is clear enough now after well more than a year of conflict; what he has been sending to Ukraine jumped from helmets and uniforms to F-16s in only 15 months and shows no signs of stopping. The problem is U.S. weapons are never enough for victory and always “just enough” to allow the battle to go on until then next round. If the Ukrainians think they are playing the U.S. for suckers for free arms they best check who is really paying for everything, in blood.

Putin is playing this game himself in a way, careful not to introduce anything too powerful, such as strategic bombers, and upset the balance and offer Biden the chance to intervene in the war directly (one can hear old man Biden on TV now, explaining American airstrikes are needed to prevent a genocide, the go-to excuse he learned at Obama’s knee.) That’s what the current escalation holds, airpower. Ukraine will find even with the promise of the F-16 it can’t acquire aircraft and train up pilots fast enough (minimum training time is 18-24 months), and next will be begging the U.S. to serve as its air force. As it is the planes are likely to be based out of Poland and Romania, suggesting NATO will pick up the high-skilled tasks of maintaining and repairing them. Left unclear is the NATO role in required aerial refueling to keep the planes over the battlefield. F-16s aside, a spin off bonus to all these weapons gifts is that the vast majority of transfers to date have been “presidential drawdowns.” This means the U.S. sends used or older weapons to Ukraine, after which the Pentagon can use the Congressionally-authorized funds to replenish their stocks by purchasing new arms. The irony that war machines once in Iraq are now on the ground in Ukraine can’t be missed.

The U.S. strategy seems based on creating a ghastly tie of sorts, two sides lined up across a field shooting at each other until one side called it quits for the day. Same as in 1865, same as in 1914, but the new factor is today those armies face off across those fields with 21st-century HIMARS artillery, machine guns, and other tools of killing far more effective than a musket. It is unsustainable, literally chewing up men, albeit not Americans. The question meanwhile of how many more Ukrainians have to die is answered privately by Joe Biden as “potentially all of them.” Anything else requires you to cynically believe Biden thinks he can simply purchase victory,

Up until now this has all been the Cold War playbook. Fighting to the last Afghan was a strategy perfected in Soviet-held Afghanistan in the 1980s. Yet what is different is the scale — since Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States sent over $37 billion worth of military aid to support Kiev’s war effort, the single largest arms transfer in U.S. history and one with no signs of stopping. A single F-16 costs up to $350 million a copy if bought with weapons, maintenance equipment, and spare parts kits.

Yet despite the similarities to Cold War Strategy 101, some lessons have been learned over the intervening years. One of America’s fail-points throughout the Cold War and the War on Terror was the use of puppet governments largely imposed or direly supported by American money and muscle. Because these governments lacked the support of the people (see Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) they were non-starters with the lifespan of fruit flies. Ukraine is different; the puppet government is the government, beholden to the U.S. for its very survival but more or less supported directly by the people for now.

The other lesson learned has to do with nation building, or rebuilding or reconstruction, whatever the vast post-war expenditures will be called in this conflict. No more straight-up governmental efforts as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This time it will be all private enterprise. “It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” President Zelensky said, boasting that BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, and others “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”

The NYT calls Ukraine “the world’s largest construction site” and predicts projects there in the multi-billions, as high in some estimates as $750 billion. It will be, says the Times, a “gold rush: the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Russia is stepping up its offensive heading into the second year of the war, but already the staggering rebuilding task is evident. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and factories have been obliterated along with critical energy facilities and miles of roads, rail tracks and seaports. The profound human tragedy is unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity.” Earlier this year JP Morgan and Zelensky signed a memorandum of understanding stipulating Morgan would assist Ukraine in its reconstruction.

And maybe those large American companies have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the billions spent, much money was wasted on dead ends and much was siphoned off due to corruption. But success or failure, the contractors always got paid in our Wars of Terror. With that in mind, more than 300 companies from 22 countries signed up for a Rebuild Ukraine exhibition and conference in Warsaw. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a standing-room-only crowd packed Ukraine House to discuss investment opportunities.

The eventual gold rush in rebuilding makes for an interesting addendum to the Biden strategy of fighting to the last Ukrainian. The more that is destroyed the more that needs to be rebuilt, and the potential for more money to pour into U.S. companies smart enough to wait by the trough for the killing to subside. But why wait? Drones operated by Danish companies have already mapped every bombed-out structure in the Mykolaiv Oblast region, with an eye toward using the data to help decide what reconstruction contracts should be issued.

So let’s put some lipstick on this pig of a strategy and call it the Biden Doctrine. Part I is to limit direct U.S. combat involvement while fanning the flames for others. Part II is to provide massive amounts of arms to enable a fight to the last local person. Part III is to transform the home government into a puppet instead of creating an unpopular one afresh. Part IV is to turn the reconstruction process into a profit center for American companies. How long the war lasts and how many die are cynically not part of the strategy. The off ramp in Ukraine, a diplomatic outcome that resets the map to pre-invasion 2022 levels, is clear enough to Washington. The Biden administration seems content, shamefully, not to call forcefully for diplomatic efforts but instead to bleed out the Russians as if this was Afghanistan 1980, albeit in the heart of Europe.