Another incisive piece by one of the current warfare state’s greatest rational observers and critic, Chris Hedges.

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

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Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war—who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution—must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy   to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed. 

Read The Full Article In Truthdig

Good article detailing why the whole military exercise in Afghanistan and Iraq are failing. It is sad to have to relay this kind of ‘negative’ news, but the fact is the entire escapade in those nations has been flawed from the get go, because the true agenda and underlying reasons for them were disingenuous, and when actual motivations don’t correspond with the rhetoric and publicly stated purposes, you get these kinds of result.

The Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it ‘liberated,’ Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They’re all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren’t so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.

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It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan. While the U.S. has occupied the country — for seven years and counting — and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted in the country. If, in the last seven years, George W. Bush did not get the lights back on in the capital, or the water flowing, or dispose of the sewage or trash, how can we assume Barack Obama will do any better with the corrupt system he’s about to inherit?

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There are other peculiar features of American development aid. Nearly half of it (47%) goes to support “technical assistance.” Translated, that means overpaid American “experts,” often totally unqualified — somebody’s good old college buddies — are paid handsomely to advise the locals on matters ranging from office procedures to pesticide use, even when the Afghans neither request nor welcome such advice. By contrast, the universally admired aid programs of Sweden and Ireland allocate only 4% and 2% respectively to such technical assistance, and when asked, they send real experts. American technical advisors, like American privateers, are paid by checks — big ones — that pass directly from the federal treasury to private accounts in American banks, thus helping to insure that about 86 cents of every dollar designated for U.S. “foreign” aid anywhere in the world never leaves the U.S.A.

Read The Full Report of this sad, sorry tale.

Sad but unfortunately accurate analysis by Paul Farrell in MarketWatch.

Americans passively zone out playing video war games. We nod at 90-second news clips of Afghan war casualties and collateral damage in Georgia. We laugh at Jon Stewart’s dark comedic news and Ben Stiller’s new war spoof “Tropic Thunder” … all the while silently, by default, we’re cheering on our leaders as they aggressively expand “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” a relentless machine that needs a steady diet of war after war, feeding on itself, consuming our values, always on the edge of self-destruction.

— Why else are Americans so eager and willing to surrender 54% of their tax dollars to a war machine, which consumes 47% of the world’s total military budgets?

— Why are there more civilian mercenaries working for no-bid private war contractors than the total number of enlisted military in Iraq (180,000 to 160,000), at an added cost to taxpayers in excess of $200 billion and climbing daily?

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We’ve lost our moral compass: The contrast between today’s leaders and the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 shocks our conscience. Today war greed trumps morals. During the Revolutionary War our leaders risked their lives and fortunes; many lost both.

Today it’s the opposite: Too often our leaders’ main goal is not public service but a ticket to building a personal fortune in the new “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” often by simply becoming a high-priced lobbyist.

Ultimately, the price of our greed may be the fulfillment of Kevin Phillips’ warning in “Wealth and Democracy:” “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”

Read The Full Article

Of course they do. That is an indespensible factor in why wars happen in the first place (at the very least speaking in the current nation-state, corporate state era). Wars would not be initiated by the ruling elites if they had not calculated profit from them.

Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it’s a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you’ve never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago.

But here’s how the deal went down. On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain’s biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global back room - Swiss bank accounts - when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, “would not be in the national interest.”

It certainly wasn’t in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant that has become one of the top 10 US military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror - including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first “Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil” in those heady “Mission Accomplished” days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to “disappear” approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history - the UK-Saudi warplane program known as “al-Yamanah” (Arabic for “The Dove”). Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE’s coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.

What is really shameful about all of this is the fact that a terror-sponsor state of oligarchic despots has our foreign policy, our entire national well-being, wrapped in the palm of its dirty little autocratic hands. These dictators are, of course, long time family friends and associates of another crime family, the Bush family. And to think that people continue to support the current American political elites as somehow being for ‘national security.’

Read The Complete Article

And then there is this new evidence of political manipulation to create a war in Iraq from the Australian side of things.

On February 27, 2002 - just five months after 15 Saudis, 2 Lebanese, and 2 Yemenis flew airplanes into US buildings - Trevor Flugge, who was then chairman of AWB, the Australian Wheat Board, a private corporation, told AWB’s board that John Dauth, who was then Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations, had revealed to Flugge the plans of the US and Australian governments for war on Iraq. Tragically for war profiteers everywhere, somebody took minutes of the meeting.

Read about those minutes Here

For more on this, I recommend Gen. Smedley Butler’s timeless tract “War Is A Racket”

There is a reason why its called the ‘military-industrial complex’. You’re looking at one of them right here (albeit one of its less-publicized manifestations).

Monsanto Teams Up with the U.S. Military to Force Genetically Engineered Soybeans on Paraguay
GM Watch Daily
July 23, 2006

The US military are establishing bases and new collaborations with the Paraguayan military.  Many ask why.

With the excuse of fighting terrorism, the presence of these forces in a US friendly territory may yet give some measure of discomfort to the neighboring governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, all of whom continue to build opposition to US hegemony in the hemisphere.

One thing is clear, however: internal military and paramilitary repression has found an immediate use in promoting the spread of GMO soy.  Herbicide resistant transgenic soy has brought to this South American region a form of agriculture that is incompatible with campesino or indigenous ways of life. Instead of changing agriculture to fit people, the landscape is being cleansed through violence to make it fit mechanized, high-input, monoculture soybean production.  National armies are now protecting GMO, export-oriented soybean plants against the diverse ecosystems of the region, but also against the citizens of those countries who insist on rejecting them.  Infusing the CIA and the US military into this formula simply adds deadly power to an already raging fire.

In reading these news, one should not forget that the international market for soybeans is being artificially inflated, not least by the new craze to exploit globalized sources of biofuels.

So it is that the Pentagon is finding a new cause in common with environmentalists.

For more on this ongoing development, check out The US Military Descends on Paraguay by Benjamin Dangl in The Nation

This brings an enhanced meaning to the term ‘making a killing.’

The litany of US mistakes and excessive force has the Pentagon commissioning at least two secret strategy studies in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This is a struggle for the soul of the Army,” said Colonel Peter Mansoor, the head of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.

Just as odorous, a mountain of corporate cash grows next to the piles of bodies. In this bizarre war where Iraqi civilians fear both suicide bombers and the United States, the biggest sacrifice that President Bush asked of American civilians was to get on a plane and show those terrorists a thing or two by going to Disney World.

Defense contractors took that request to a logical extreme. They built their own fantasy land.

There is no evidence of a contractor having a soul in the 13th annual Executive Excess CEO survey by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. The report found that 34 defense CEOs have been paid nearly $1 billion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

As soldiers have died in displaying personal patriotism, the pay gap between soldiers and defense CEOs has exploded. Before 9/11, the gap between CEOs of publicly traded companies and army privates was already a galling 190 to 1. Today, it is 308 to 1. The average army private makes $25,000 a year. The average defense CEO makes $7.7 million.

As Chalmers Johnson said, when war becomes this profitable, you are going to see a lot more of it.

Read the complete Boston Globe editorial

William Rivers Pitt takes on the heart of the problem with this essay on the power and influence of what Eisenhower termed “The Military-Industrial Complex” (actually, his original statement referred to it by it’s more appropriate moniker of “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex”).

Only the dead, said Plato, have seen the end of war. As true as this may be, it does beg the question: why? Why is there so much conflict in the world? Why are there so many wars? Ethnic and religious tensions have been casus belli since time out of mind, to be sure. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ruptured a framework that held for almost fifty years, bringing about a series of conflicts that are understandable in hindsight.

There is a simpler answer, however, one that lands right in our back yard here in America. Why so much war? Because war is a profitable enterprise. George W. Bush and his people can hold forth about the wonders of democracy and peace, and can condemn worldwide violence in solemn tones. Until the United States stops being the world’s largest arms dealer, these words from our government absolutely reek of hypocrisy.

As Chalmers Johnson stated in Eugene Jarecki’s film “Why We Fight” in reference to the dramatically increasing profits being reaped by the weapons manufacturers in the last couple years, “When war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see a lot more of it.”

Read The Full Essay

The Neo-Cons are at it again. But then, when have they ever not been. Cenk Ugyur outlines, in their own words, how America’s warmongers are openly calling for the U.S. to push for enlarging the fighting in the Mideast into full-scale war.

It is sometimes the realm of over-heated rhetoric to call people ‘warmongers’, but in this case, it is the exactly correct terminology. Of particular note is the violent insanity of the likes of Limbaugh and the white-collared brown shirts of Fox. There is a special level of hell for these so-called ‘conservatives’ and their molestation of Christ and Christianity for their bloodlust and war fever.

I guess we are supposed to just forget about that ‘wimp’ Jesus and his “blessed are the peacemakers” thing.

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” - George Orwell

Read Cenk Ugyur on The Huffington Post

Now we’re talking. Good to see some of the major media voices starting to point out the facts at hand and bring some much-needed awareness to this issue.

Little known to the American public, there are some 50,000 private contractors in Iraq, providing support for the U.S. military, among other activities. So why not go all the way, hints Ted Koppel in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, and form a real “mercenary army”?

Such a move involving what he calls “latter-day Hessians” would represent, he writes, “the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.”

Koppel points out what is in essence the only conclusion possible under the current trajectory national defense policy (or any policy, for that matter) is going these days.

“So, what about the inevitable next step — a defensive military force paid for directly by the corporations that would most benefit from its protection? If, for example, an insurrection in Nigeria threatens that nation’s ability to export oil (and it does), why not have Chevron or Exxon Mobil underwrite the dispatch of a battalion or two of mercenaries?”

The only thing I would point out here, though, is that the Cheney administration already has formed that corporate army. In fact, the real power elites in this nation have regularly used their own private police forces to enforce their own control (Pinkerton strike breaking to name just one example). The CIA running cladestine armies and covert operations to protect corporate interests around the world is certainly another.

Read the report in Editor & Publisher Here

Guess it was only a matter of time. Can we really be surprised, considering this is the regime that has sold out our defense to private contractors, our port security to foreign government owned operations, our nation’s wealth to foreign creditors, etc… The privatization scam is reaching critical mass in absurdity.

“Once cleared, they can get a higher salary outside and they are gone,” the official said. “We’re leasing back our former employees.”

The phenomenon is partly the result of Congress’s approving large funding increases for intelligence activities but not increasing the limit on the number of full-time persons that agencies can hire. “We don’t have the billets,” the official said, so the surge is taken care of by contracting out the jobs.

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who ran Iraqi military training from 2003 to 2004, describes the hiring of civilians to do jobs previously done by the military as a “shell game” created by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to keep the “force strength static on paper.” In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Eaton wrote, “This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle with those positions swiftly eliminated.”

“The Pentagon ramped up so fast, it had to turn to contract personnel to have continuity,” said another former senior intelligence official who now does contract work. He pointed out that some jobs are so complex, military personnel on three-year rotations are facing reassignment just as they master their jobs.

The trend toward contracting for intelligence analysts will hurt the ability of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to retain and keep high-quality people, said a former senior intelligence official who helped supervise the rebuilding of the CIA’s case officer and analyst corps. “It takes time to get the young up to snuff, and you need 10 to 20 years to get the value for that investment,” this former official said, asking for anonymity because of his past role in government.

Wonder if they even have to be American citizens?

Read The Full Article