The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 11, 2024 2:05 pm

US Army Dependent on China for Supplies
July 11, 12:33

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US Army is made in China

The report, which is sad for the Pentagon ( https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65e6 ... Matter.pdf ), was published by Govini, an Arlington, Virginia-based company that in 2019 received a five-year, $400 million contract from the Pentagon to provide data, analysis, and information on Defense Department spending, supply chains, and acquisitions.

The report also says that dependence on the Chinese supply chain is present on every major weapons platform, including U.S. aircraft carriers.

It is separately noted that the existing dependence on China cannot be resolved even in a decade. Because a “supply chain” on this scale is an entire economy, since it is a network of many firms that buy and sell from each other.

https://t.me/infantmilitario/130888 - zinc

Spent 400 million dollars to establish the fact of dependence on China.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9259199.html

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 13, 2024 2:04 pm

Is Revival of Draft the Only Way to Revive Mass Antiwar Protests Capable of Ending America’s Forever Wars?
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - July 11, 2024 0

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[Source: reuther.wayne.edu]

About ten years ago, I attended a lecture by noted anti-war author Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and former Army colonel whose son died in Iraq.

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Andrew Bacevich [Source: atlanticcouncil.org]

Bacevich provided critical commentary on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and then advocated for restoring the draft which, he said, was the only way to revitalize the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.

According to Bacevich, if the draft were restored, the students and parents at his and other elite universities would be pounding on the doors of university administrators and government officials demanding an end to the country’s forever wars.

The Lincoln administration first instituted the draft during the Civil War when it provoked large-scale riots that resulted in attacks on Black New Yorkers and hundreds of deaths.

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Wood engraving depicting 1863 New York City draft riots. [Source: fineartamerica.com]

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Young men registering for conscription in New York City on June 5, 1917. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

After a 50-year lull, the draft was re-instituted during World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War and then abolished by the Nixon administration in 1973 in an attempt to defuse protests against the Vietnam War and GI revolt led primarily by draftees.

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Soldiers in revolt in Vietnam. [Source: vietnamfulldisclosure.org]

Over the last 50 years, the U.S. government has continued to wage permanent wars with an all-volunteer force reliant on air power, robotic machines and other advanced technologies so that the draft does not have to be reinstituted.

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[Source: tamupress.com]

The U.S. further relies on the use of proxy forces, third-country nationals, mercenaries, Special Forces and the CIA, which have been crucial in sustaining the U.S. empire in an era when the public has not been expected to make the same sacrifices as generations past.

James C. Kearney and William H. Clamurro’s book Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience: The Story of Two Conscientious Objector Combat Medics during the Vietnam War (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2023) argues that alarm at the emergence of a new breed of political conscientious objector during the Vietnam War contributed significantly to the termination of the draft by President Nixon in 1973.

Prior to the Vietnam War, most people who requested conscientious objector status did so on religious grounds. Many were Mennonites, Quakers, Amish or Seventh Day Adventists who faced severe persecution.

The Hofer brothers were sent to Alcatraz after becoming conscientious objectors during World War I. Members of the Hutterite religious sect who believed that God did not place humans on earth to kill each other, they were hung from the ceiling and subjected to other forms of torture, dying after their transfer to Fort Leavenworth military stockade in Kansas.[1]

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Plaque that was unveiled at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City to commemorate the deaths of the Hofer brothers after they became conscientious objectors. [Source: historynewsnetwork.org]

The U.S. military was most afraid that the new breed of political conscientious objector in Vietnam would undermine morale through their interaction with regular combat troops.

Kearney and Clamurro went to Vietnam as non-combat medics under a unique I-A-O classification, which was a compromise that would prevent them from having to desert the army or burn their draft cards and flee to Canada or Sweden as a friend of theirs from basic training did.

In a talk at a conference on the Vietnam War in Dallas hosted by Texas Tech University in April, both Kearney and Clamurro said that they had each come to oppose the Vietnam War during their college studies, though still felt a duty to serve their country in some capacity.

Kearney had become politicized as a student at the University of Texas where he studied liberal arts, had attended meetings of the anti-war campus group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and read books like J. William Fulbright’s The Arrogance of Power and Edwin O. Reischauer’s Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia, that debunked the official narrative about the war.

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[Source: pinterest.com]

Clamurro obtained a Master’s degree in literature at Amherst College, where he was mentored by famed poet Archibald MacLeish and came to embrace Marxism. In Vietnam, his nickname was “Groucho Marx” because he mixed left-wing political views with a sense of humor.

Kearney and Clamurro stressed that the decisions of young people drafted during the Vietnam War were very difficult and that there were often family pressures. Kearney, for example, grew up on a ranch in a small conservative Texas town and his decision to seek conscientious objector status caused a breech with his parents that took years to resolve. Clamurro’s family were more left leaning but also patriotic and his brothers served in the U.S. military.

Kearney and Clamurro said that what they did was not necessarily heroic, as they supported the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, though they did not carry any weapons or fire any shots and their focus was on healing the wounded.

Today, the two lead productive lives, but are still periodically haunted by what they experienced in Vietnam.

In Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience, they write of Army friends who got killed after having a premonition that their time was short, of a daily “crapshoot with death,” and of the horrendous devices adopted to kill Vietnamese and destroy the environment, including the Rome plow, a monster bulldozer manufactured in Rome, Georgia, that cleared through jungle foliage.

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Rome plows clearing the jungle in Vietnam. [Source: webdoc.sub.gwdg.de]

Kearney and Clamurro wrote additionally about racial strife in the U.S. Army, rampant drug use in the rear, and fraggings, or attempts by “grunts” to kill their senior commanding officers.

The Kent State killings in 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a campus protest and killed four students, was in their view “another symptom and an inevitable consequence of the madness that simply was the U.S. Army in Vietnam and the basic delusion of our government’s view of the world.”[2]

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Famous image from massacre at Kent State. [Source: cnn.com]

That delusion included a false belief in the domino theory and the willingness to expend massive firepower on behalf of a corrupt ally who could not compete politically with the National Liberation Front (NLF)-North Vietnamese side in the war.

Kearney and Clamurro wrote that “Cu Chi provides an apt symbol of American ignorance and folly in the Vietnam misadventure, given that, even as we were invading Cambodia in 1970 to find and destroy the VC (NVA) command center, this very same command center was hidden under our feet (the U.S. Army deeply unaware), deep in the famous Cu Chi tunnels—now a favorite tourist stop for American veterans and others visiting Vietnam.”[3]

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Cu Chi Tunnels. [Source: amusingplanet.com]

Kearney is lucky to still be alive. In the last week of his tour of duty, he was shot in a “hot hoist” operation where a medevac crew hovers over wounded GIs even when the enemy is still firing at them and tries to rescue and treat them.

When Kearney was medevaced to an aid station, he was treated by Clamurro who remains among his best friends.

Both went on to successful careers—Clamurro in academia and as a poet, and Kearney running his family’s ranch and in academia—and Clamurro presided over Kearney’s daughter’s wedding.

A half century after the war ended, the two have decided to tell their story to remind people about political conscientious objectors in the Vietnam War and of the folly of that war—like so many others.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... ever-wars/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 15, 2024 2:53 pm

The CIA and FBI Were Never “Heroes”
By Kenny Cordasco - July 15, 2024 0

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[Source: theintercept.com]

Confronted with an incoherent assertion, an exasperated Bertrand Russell once sighed, “Statements of this kind, I must confess, leave me gasping, and I hardly know where to begin.”[1] I found myself repeatedly having the same thought while making my way through a delusional new book about the intelligence community.

Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains is a schizophrenic attempt to merge reactionary Cold War anti-communism with contemporary right-wing scaremongering over diversity in order to explain what has “gone wrong” with the FBI and CIA. The author, J. Michael Waller, appears to be a 21st century reincarnation of Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper, with a worldview indistinguishable from the ravings of a madman.

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[Source: Regnery.com]

While difficult to summarize owing to its kaleidoscopic nature, Big Intel’s central premise goes something like this: Shortly after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks initiated an “active measures” campaign to subvert American political, cultural and educational institutions from within. As part of their plot, they created the Frankfurt School, whose adherents launched a campaign of “cultural Marxism” that penetrated American institutions and devoured them from the inside over the next hundred years. This scheme was so successful that it outlived the Soviet Union, continuing on autopilot after the Cold War and engulfing the formerly “heroic” CIA and FBI, converting them into bastions of the totalitarian ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Despite the sheer insanity of all this, Big Intel is more than a mere freakish curiosity. It is a reminder that the ghosts of frothing-at-the-mouth, John Birch-style, McCarthyite anti-communism continue to influence American politics. This is crucial to appreciate, since the United States has decisively embarked on a reckless new Cold War against Russia and China, drastically increasing the possibility of nuclear holocaust. If we are ever to see the return of a vigorous anti-imperialist movement capable of reining in the national security state, socially conscious people will need to pay close attention to the thinking of its members. J. Michael Waller—who has long been nestled within the most reactionary corners of the intelligence community—has written a book that reveals how especially unhinged security state insiders understand the world. We would be remiss not to take a look.

Who Is J. Michael Waller?
Before saying anything further about his extravagant theorizing, it is worth discussing who J. Michael Waller actually is. While hardly a household name, he has long been a dedicated servant of the national security state. As early as the 1980s, he developed an “interest in fighting Communism and supporting President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to push Soviet-backed revolutionaries out of Central America.” Back then he was “national secretary of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), Reagan’s favorite youth organization,” as well as “a coordinator at the College Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill to promote the president’s takedown of the Soviet bloc.”[2]

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J. Michael Waller [Source: centerforsecuritypolicy.org]

Waller claims that he never applied to the CIA, but Big Intel’s cover refers to him as a “former operative for the CIA,” and in the text he claims to have “served as an asset for CIA Director Bill Casey in Central America,” albeit as a “total amateur.”[3]

His own website proudly boasts that he “received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (contras).” According to Big Intel, he first attempted “to sneak into Nicaragua on [his] own with the anti-Sandinista forces of former Sandinista guerrilla leader Eden Pastora.”[4] He claims to have been personally recruited by then-CIA Director William Casey in a Catholic Church during mass shortly thereafter.[5]

The Contras were known to have adopted a “premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants,” with “[h]undreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes…committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the…C.I.A. superiors were well aware.” Recently, Waller boasted to the One America News (OAN) Network about his involvement with the notorious terrorists—whom he characterized as “these really wonderful people in this peasant army.”

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Waller (right) tells OAN about his exploits with the Contras, whom he claims were actually wonderful people. [Source: Rumble.com]

Waller’s exact role in Nicaragua is not entirely clear. But clues can be gleaned from his website, where he refers to himself as “a scholar-practitioner in strategic communication and unconventional conflict” and a “[s]pecialist in propaganda, political warfare, psychological strategy, subversion, [and] strategic communication.” He also boasts of his “[h]ands-on work with insurgencies and counterinsurgency efforts” as well as “involvement at all levels with planning and execution of political and psychological warfare campaigns.” Presumably this refers to his time with the Contras; another site that appears to be Waller’s boasts that he received “contracts with the U.S. government in Honduras” to train “commanders and sub-commanders of the Nicaraguan Resistance Army in political warfare and political communication.”

Waller’s academic career has also been defined by his national security state ties. In Big Intel he claims to have “spent two years studying how to recognize and combat Soviet disinformation” via a research methodology he characterizes as “most irregular.”[6] He never elaborates on the nature of this methodology, but judging by the bizarre claims made in Big Intel, “most irregular” is an understatement.

Waller also claims to have “worked on U.S. contracts to design and implement political warfare attacks on the Soviet and Russian intelligence services,” to have been “on the scene at the Kremlin in the hours before the Soviet Union was abolished, and at the Russian parliament building during the 1993 coup attempt.”

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Waller speaking at the 2019 founding of the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger: China. [Source: presentdangerchina.org]

Much of his post-Cold War commentary has consisted of warning that the “Russian threat” to the United States did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union; in Big Intel he describes his “unpopular and sometimes ridiculed view…that the former KGB had positioned itself to take over the Russian economy and state.”

He sees himself as vindicated because “a Chekist named Vladimir Putin [took] control of Russia’s government,” thus “confirming a warning in [his] academic research.”[7] At the NATO-sponsored Riga Conference in 2018, Waller explained that “the Russians have been subverting all of us for a hundred years,” and characterized the Russian Federation as “a hostile regime.”

One of Waller’s (many) complaints in Big Intel is that the “CIA’s strategic intelligence analysis has been poor for generations.” He cites as an example the agency “help[ing] start a senseless war in Iraq by assessing that Saddam Hussein was building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.”[8] He conveniently omits that he himself was a major proponent of the Iraq War at the time. In a series of articles for the now-defunct Insight on the News in 2003-2004, Waller cheered the U.S. attack on Iraq as “audacious,” “spectacularly successful,” and “one of the most successful campaigns in military history.”

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In a series of contemporary articles for a since-shuttered conservative publication, Waller engaged in impressively uninformed Iraq War apologetics. [Source: jmichaelwaller.com]

This seasoned “expert” promoted absurd claims during the war, including that “evidence is mounting of a connection between the former Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda.” He compared George W. Bush to “a modern Abraham Lincoln or an Old Testament prophet.” He praised the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive war for “envision[ing] regime change not only in states ruled by terrorists and tyrants, but wherever freedom is repressed.”

He condemned critics who argued that the war was unnecessary, based on lies, or motivated by oil, and complained that “backstabbers” were comparing Iraq and Afghanistan with Vietnam—which was obviously an appropriate comparison—and whined that these naysayers were labeling the conflicts “quagmires”—which they obviously were.

During this period, Waller continued to work with the intelligence agencies. Such collaborations were not always harmonious—he complains in Big Intel that “jihadist sympathizers” convinced the FBI to shut down a “jihadist awareness training program” he started in 2005, on the grounds that it was “racist and bigoted.”[9]

Readers can judge for themselves whether the FBI harbored an abiding love for jihadism four years after 9/11, or whether something else might have been the problem. Nevertheless, in 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller awarded Waller a citation for “exceptional service in the public interest.” A few years later he was appointed to the ominously named “Psychological Operations Capabilities-Based Assessment team for the U.S. Special Operations Command,” according to the Italian Institute for Strategic Studies (where he is also a member).

More recently he set up something called “Georgetown Research,” a “private intelligence company” whose bare-bones website provides little information other than that it is “a competitive intelligence company” for “confidential clients.”

He is also a “Senior Analyst for Strategy” with the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a neo-conservative think tank that reliably churns out comically hawkish commentary—a description that also applies to Waller’s writing (Waller-authored gems include “U.S. Should Arm Venezuelans to Take Their Country Back,” “America Needs an In-Kind Deterrent to Russia’s Political Warfare,” “Time to up the ante on Russian subversion in America,” and “Wokeness: A grave risk to America’s Military”).[10]

With a career trajectory like this, one begins to understand how the loony narrative of Big Intel could have been conceived. It is to that narrative that we now turn.

Cultural Marxism—Old Wine, New Bottles
According to Waller, “cultural Marxism”[11] originated as a Bolshevik plot to spread Frankfurt School thinking, which he argues abandons traditional Marxism’s class approach in favor of a relentless focus on gender, race and other “cultural issues.” He goes so far as to blame this ideology for somehow bringing down Weimar Germany: “Moscow’s plan a century ago was to use the Frankfurt School to destroy Weimar Germany from within after World War I, and then collapse the rest of Europe by poisoning its culture and destroying its history.”[12] It goes without saying that historians of the period will be surprised at this interpretation.

The rise of the Nazis forced Frankfurt School adherents to flee to the U.S. Even though they relocated to American universities, the Soviet Communists continued to pull the strings, Waller alleges. Guided by Moscow, Frankfurt School adherents “and other Soviet agents and fellow travelers” brought “their Central European ideological baggage with them to subvert and ruin” American institutions. Thanks to them, “cultural Marxism” supposedly took over the intelligence agencies, which “embraced it, wrapped it in lovely packaging called diversity, equity, and inclusion, and placed it at the core of their missions.”[13]

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The main philosophers of the Frankfurt School. [Source: findingtruthsblog.com]

“Cultural Marxism, critical theory, and the other excreta of the Comintern’s Frankfurt School have rotted American society from within,”[14] Waller raves, and now the “great institutions [FBI and CIA] designed to protect us against the threat of Soviet Communism” have “absorbed and re-weaponized the most subversive Soviet plot ever launched.”[15]

Although Waller adds his own bizarre twists, the idea of “cultural Marxism” is not new. Historian Samuel Moyn has explained that the idea developed over a century “through global sewers of hatred.” Both he and Ari Paul of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) note its connection to the old anti-Semitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism”—the idea that Soviet Communism was a Jewish conspiracy. Paul thus accurately characterizes “cultural Marxism” as “a most paranoid fantasy” coming “straight from Nazi ideology.” He summarizes it as “the belief that a failure by communists to topple capitalism through worker revolt has led to a ‘Plan B’ to destroy Western society from the inside. By tearing down the gender binary, de-centering Christianity values [sic], championing the weak over the privileged and creating a multicultural society, revolutionaries have unanchored traditional Western order.”

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Waller subscribes to the long-discredited idea of “Cultural Marxism,” which has deep roots in Nazi ideology. [Source: FAIR.org]

This is almost word-for-word what Waller describes: He repeatedly claims that “cultural Marxists” conspired to abandon class warfare in favor of pushing a coercive racial and gender ideology, and that this was the design of a conscious Soviet plot to destroy America. They “move[d] from overthrowing the economic system to undermining the culture,” abandoning “the rich-versus-poor, bourgeoisie-versus-proletariat model for another engine of total wreckage of society, community, church, and family.”[16]

Waller’s contention that the Frankfurt School was a Bolshevik (he drops the “Judeo”) scheme to destroy American society is of course without evidence. Credible researchers differ in their conclusions about the relationship between the school and the Soviet Union, but none supports Waller’s fantastical notions. According to a scholarly study by Martin Jay, the Frankfurt School was sympathetic toward Stalin’s regime, and was initially silent about its crimes. But “after the Moscow purge trials” almost all of them “completely abandoned their hope for the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, the “Critical Theory” Frankfurt intellectuals developed had always contained “implicit criticisms of the Soviet ideological justification for its actions.”[17]

Other interpretations are even more damning. Philosopher Gabriel Rockhill, director of the Critical Theory Workshop at the Sorbonne, argues that it was actually the CIA that used the Frankfurt School—with the aim of undermining the left. Rockhill builds off the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, whose brilliant study The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters shows how the Agency constantly tried to co-opt left-wing culture in order to “steer” it away from supporting the “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet Union to create an anti-communist left that would tacitly support American hegemony.

Rockhill suggests that the Frankfurt School was a key part of this project: “In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism,” he writes, “what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century?”

Detailing their numerous connections to CIA-funded publications and organizations, Rockhill provides compelling evidence that the Frankfurt School, far from acting to subvert Western civilization, was working overtime to prop it up. “The Institute was doing the kind of ideological work that the U.S. state and capitalist ruling class wanted to—and did—support.”

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Gabriel Rockhill [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Their statements and writings make this clear. For example, Theodor Adorno explained that “Our philosophy [e.g., the Frankfurt School] stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union.” Max Horkheimer stated in 1956 that “Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned,” and that “the preservation of these gains” must be ensured. Horkheimer later went on to very publicly support the U.S. war in Vietnam.

These are hardly the actions of people acting on orders from Moscow. “Ultimately,” Rockhill concludes, most Frankfurt School adherents were “global spokesmen for an anti-communist politics of capitalist accommodation.” Notably, he concurs with Waller that the Frankfurt School “increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity.” But Rockhill sees this as a means of undermining the left: “The Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era.”


Conversely, Waller sees this shift as a means of undermining civilization itself. He seems to believe that mere criticism of Western institutions—family, gender norms, religion, etc.—is an inherently destabilizing act that inevitably leads to total destruction. More level-headed observers might argue that it is the responsibility of free-thinking citizens in a democracy to interrogate their society, in order to identify and hopefully rectify its flaws. Either way, Waller’s crude charges about the Frankfurt School acting as a Soviet puppet simply cannot be substantiated—and his lurid claims that large numbers of people accepting its ideology are enough to upend civilization are even less compelling.[18]

However, the broader idea—that contemporary discussions around gender and race are the result of an attempt to evade the issue of class—might strike a chord with some readers, and thus warrants comment. Indeed, neo-liberalism often does emphasize race and gender in order to mask its rejection of class politics. But outside movements like the Frankfurt School, the left has generally been critical of such practices—far from abandoning class, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and other groups emphasized it. And countless contemporary figures (Barbara Fields and Adolph Reed, among many others) have insisted that the vapid neo-liberal rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism is nothing more than an attempt by capital to ignore wealth inequality.

A subset of this phenomenon is the national security state’s embrace of such multicultural rhetoric. Agencies like the CIA and the Pentagon adopt this vocabulary in order to put a progressive gloss on the decidedly not-very-progressive project of keeping the world safe for American capital by way of military and economic hegemony. “Woke” CIA ads are merely attempts to sell “torture, brutal coups, and global death-dealing” to “a millennial audience seemingly invested in notions of racial justice and feminism,” as The Intercept put it.

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Still image from the infamous “Humans of the CIA” ad. [Source: youtube.com]

Given that intelligence agencies continue to spy on and disrupt movements composed of what the FBI derides as “Black Identity Extremists,” as well as accuse Black socialists of working for Russia, it is pretty obvious that its embrace of the language of diversity is merely “lipstick on a pig.” Waller is one of a number of uber-reactionaries who never “got the memo” on this. His inability to understand the simple concept of pinkwashing, combined with his generally paranoid worldview, have thus triggered him into conjuring up a nonsensical zombie Soviet plot, which he astoundingly sees as a more plausible explanation.

The Perils of Not Doing the Assigned Reading
In her classic study The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick observed that people write “about Communists with an oppressive distance between themselves and their subject, a distance that often masquerades as objectivity but in fact conveys only an emotional and intellectual atmosphere of ‘otherness’—as though something not quite recognizable, something vaguely nonhuman was being described.” [19] Waller’s approach in Big Intel is an extreme example of this tendency.

Waller never explains why Communists, leftists, or “fellow travelers” would want to destroy Western civilization. He depicts them as automata pre-programmed to obliterate societies for no discernable reasons. This may be because, like many on the right, he is clearly unfamiliar with the ideologies that he condemns. This is most apparent when he discusses Marxism, which he calls “the civilization-destroying theories of Karl Marx.”[20] He claims that “Marx’s goal was not to improve but to destroy: family, human relationships, economics, patriotism, loyalty, morals, religion, Western civilization. Destruction of the entire human existence.”[21] “The goal of Marx then, as with his disciples now,” he goes on, “demanded the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization.”[22] Needless to say, there are no citations to Capital or anything else written by Marx, except for a few letters.

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Left to right: Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and John Dewey, three of the many prominent thinkers whose ideas Waller badly misconstrued. [Source: Britannica.com / Jacobin.com / Wikipedia.org]

Waller’s views on other influential left thinkers are similarly rabid. Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci “mastered the art of strategic psychological warfare” and “went beyond taking control of government or the means of production to destroying Western civilization itself.”[23] Education philosopher John Dewey is derided as “a willing Comintern fellow traveler,”[24] while sociologist C. Wright Mills is chastised for being “anti-Christian.”[25] Here, too, their actual works are cited sparingly, if at all. This ignorance of anything actually written by Marx (or “his disciples”) situates Waller squarely within a wearisome tradition on the reactionary right of defining “Marxism” as “anything that scares them.” And the further one gets into Big Intel, the more it becomes clear that Waller is scared of quite a lot.

McCarthyism, Redux
One of the most surprising things about Big Intel is its regurgitation of 1950s-style McCarthyism—Waller is such a hardline anti-communist that he appears to have come straight from a HUAC hearing. His understanding of the Cold War is that the Soviet menace was inherently expansionist and had to be stopped at all costs. “Stalin was planning to re-order the post-Axis world under the red banner,”[26] requiring the CIA to “become a covert political player against Communist expansion worldwide.”[27] Cold War historians like Frank Kofsky and former security state insiders like Daniel Ellsberg have long shown the erroneous nature of such views. Kofsky conclusively demonstrated that fears of Soviet military aggression had more to do with justifying military Keynesianism at home than describing reality.[28] And Ellsberg (no Stalinist) confirmed that “the presumption that [Communist] regimes, like Nazism, had an insatiable appetite for expansion, which they were determined to satisfy by military aggression where necessary and feasible,” was “flat wrong,” and “dangerously so.”[29]

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Pentagon Papers whistleblower and security state insider Daniel Ellsberg, one of many authorities who demonstrated the falsity of the conventional narrative that the Cold War revolved around a militaristic international communist conspiracy. [Source: HAC.bard.edu]

But Waller apparently never got this memo either. In a subsection titled “Saving America from Communist Imperialism,”[30] he argues that any Third World expression of leftism or nationalism was inevitably the result of Soviet influence, and indicated an impending Soviet military takeover. “When left-wing Mohammad Mosaddegh won election as president of Iran with Stalin’s blessing,” he writes, “Eisenhower deftly deployed the CIA to remove the Soviet proxy and restore the Iranian monarchy for twenty-five years of stability.” Shortly thereafter, Eisenhower “had the can-do men of the CIA mount a creative operation in 1954 to prevent the Soviets from securing a foothold in Guatemala.”[31] (Emphases added.)

Even a cursory knowledge of Cold War history shows all this to be farcical. Mosaddegh was a nationalist, motivated by the imperialism of the British, who had been exploiting Iran’s oil wealth and keeping its workers impoverished for decades. Far from a “Soviet proxy,” he was known to dislike Communism, and cracked down on the small Iranian Communist Tudeh Party (which in turn viewed him as an American stooge). When Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil, the CIA and MI6 overthrew him in a coup, then set up a police state run by the Shah which, according to Amnesty International, accrued one of the worst human rights records in the world—or what Waller calls “twenty-five years of stability.”

Similarly, there was never any threat of “the Soviets securing a foothold in Guatemala.” Far from being a Soviet creation, Guatemalan Communism, numerically small but politically influential, was entirely homegrown. It was motivated by miserable living conditions created by an unequal system of land ownership maintained by Guatemalan elites and America’s United Fruit Company—the largest landholder in the country. These Guatemalan elites and United Fruit teamed up with the CIA to overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz, which ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and led to genocidal results that reverberate to this day.


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Former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (left) and former Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz (right), both left-leaning nationalists overthrown by the CIA in order to preserve American politico-economic interests in their respective regions. [Source: trumanlibrary.gov/swissinfo.ch]

It is particularly galling that Waller’s grasp of history is so comically poor, because the dust jacket of Big Intel alleges that he did “groundbreaking scholarship after the Soviet Empire’s breakup.” This will surely come as a surprise to scholars of Russia, among whom Waller is a non-entity. Nonetheless, any scholar knows the importance of familiarizing oneself with the standard literature on a subject before writing about it. He clearly did not do this, or he would not have made such lunatic claims.[32]

His refusal to do the bare minimum level of basic research allows Waller to continually trot out cartoonishly hawkish interpretations of every international situation he discusses. For example, he claims that “[t]he Sandinistas turned Nicaragua into a staging area to export Soviet-sponsored subversion and violence across Central America.”[33] Similarly, Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada interrupted “Soviet plans to take over the Caribbean and Central America.” Waller claims that documents proving such claims were released (though he does not cite them), and that they “proved the ongoing covert Soviet invasion of the Americas.”[34] (Emphases added.) Once again, such interpretations fly in the face of the historical record.[35]

My Country, Always Right
Whereas “Communist imperialism” was everywhere, to Waller American imperialism was a fiction. Discussing the USSR’s role in the world, he sneers that they “opposed American ‘imperialism,’ whatever that was, especially the military and CIA that repressed those struggling for Third World ‘liberation.’”[36] (Emphasis added.) In Waller’s mind, to even suggest that American imperialism or Third World exploitation were real is laughable, since only the Soviets exploited other nations. Thus, a subsection titled “Third World Killers Become Cool” refers not to U.S. support for countless literal Third World killers,[37] but rather to the New Left’s admiration for Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.[38]

To Waller, anyone politically to the left of Genghis Khan was a Soviet agent, or at the very least a useful idiot. His framework leaves no room for nuance: “All loyal Americans were anti-Marxist,”[39] with the alarming implication that “any Marxist or anarchist [was] by definition, a legitimate target” of counterintelligence activity, albeit “only if the law allows.”[40] (Emphases added.)

Accordingly, Waller sees First Amendment protections as suspect. He condemns the ACLU for adhering to “an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment that disregarded the Founding Fathers’ profound concerns about foreign influence and subversion.”[41] (Emphasis added.) When faced with (alleged) foreign subversion, the First Amendment is little more than a liability, Waller seems to imply. “Free societies had trouble reconciling protection of free speech with protection from foreign enemy manipulation,” he warns. But he does not consider the possibility that the state might exaggerate or invent out of whole cloth tales of “foreign enemy manipulation” in order to restrict civil liberties at home.[42]

Deep State Heroes
The heroes of Waller’s narrative are “honorable” national security state personnel—with “honorable” meaning “untainted by leftist sentiments”—as suggested by Big Intel’s subtitle, which claims that the FBI and CIA were Cold War Heroes. He praises the CIA for rigging the 1948 Italian elections,[43] wistfully refers to “Allen Dulles and his inner circle of great men,”[44] and calls Dulles and Richard Helms “legendary heroes” of U.S. intelligence.[45]

But Waller’s main protagonist is FBI godfather J. Egar Hoover, who he sees as one of the only men in Washington who “got it.”[46] Hoover supposedly understood the threat that “cultural Marxism” and critical theory posed to American life—although Hoover tellingly never used either term. Though Hoover is said to have grasped the insidious nature of the threat right from the beginning, Waller laments that at times he was not as forceful in stamping it out as he might have been. Thus, the infamous Palmer Raids “did not go far enough,”[47] since they were aimed at dangerous radicals espousing harmful “Central European ideologies.”

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CIA Directors Allen Dulles [Source: wikipedia.org]

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J. Edgar Hoover [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Waller contrasts the steadfast Hoover with the suspect William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. Because “the OSS needed people with direct knowledge of everything about enemy territory,” they recruited “immigrant scholars who had lived under Hitler’s rule and in Nazi-occupied areas.”

Many of these, Waller alleges, were “principally loyal to the Kremlin” and aimed “to overthrow the United States Constitution.” Donovan, he laments, “seemed blind to the fact that Communists and foreign assets recruited into the OSS would not have American interests first in mind.”[48] Whereas Hoover consistently “saw the threats clearly,” Donovan “seemed not to see domestic threats from the Soviet side at all,” which supposedly led to the intelligence community adopting a “no enemies on the left mentality.”[49]

Granted, Waller is not entirely critical of Donovan. He credits him with making “a brilliant strategic decision that jump-started American foreign counterintelligence against the Kremlin,” referring to Donovan’s putting former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence network on the U.S. payroll. As if anticipating that readers might object, he defensively notes that “Gehlen and his men had never harmed the United States.” Of course, given that Gehlen was “a top German intelligence officer on the Eastern Front against the Soviets,” it is safe to say that they harmed a lot of other people—but since they weren’t Americans, no matter. “Thanks to Donovan’s quick action,” Waller gushes, “the Gehlen Organization became critical to American efforts to contain the Soviets during the Cold War.”[50]

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“Wild Bill” Donovan, whom Waller ridiculously accuses of being “soft on communism.” [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

As noted by David Talbot, the CIA ensured that “the Gehlen Organization” became “West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.” Gehlen’s subordinates included Dr. Franz Six, “an intellectual architect of the Final Solution as well as one of its most enthusiastic enforcers.”

During his tenure in West Germany, Gehlen plotted “to reinstitute fascism” in the event that the German left won elections, with the CIA itself “supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy.”[51] Waller apparently sees this as “brilliant” intelligence work. One cannot help but notice the contradiction of a book whose central gripe is supposed foreign influence over U.S. intelligence simultaneously praising the CIA for making a network of literal Nazis “critical” to that intelligence.

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Reinhard Gehlen [Source: ww2db.com]

Successfully incorporating a Nazi cell into the espionage apparatus aside, Waller blames Donovan for allowing a “soft-on-Communist mentality” to “permeate the American intelligence and counterintelligence communities.”[52] This supposedly ingrained sympathy for Soviet Communism made intelligence institutions vulnerable to the Bolshevik “cultural Marxist” plot.

It is ridiculous to assert that the American intelligence community was “soft on Communism” during the Cold War, which was defined by a manic anti-communism. But Waller is not entirely wrong about Soviet penetration of war-time American intelligence operations. If he had stopped there, this part of his narrative would at least be somewhat plausible.

As the pre-eminent historian of the crimes of McCarthyism (and dedicated leftist) Ellen Schrecker acknowledges, “during the Second World War, [Soviet] espionage agents penetrated the U.S. government and its top-secret atomic-bomb project,” in part “because most of the dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans involved with that operation were in or near the Communist Party.” Since the NSA’s 1995 release of its VENONA decrypts, scholars have confirmed that “Moscow’s espionage operation was more massive than anyone had suspected.”

Such breaches were only possible due to the anomalous nature of the New Deal period, wherein a number of progressive individuals—notably Henry Wallace—less hostile toward the USSR, attained positions in government. The Second World War led to a further thaw in hostilities between Washington and Moscow as they became uneasy allies against the Nazis.[53] Unsurprisingly, Soviet intelligence took advantage of this situation.

Importantly, Schrecker notes that those with “a narrow perspective on American communism” never “try to understand why so many otherwise law-abiding and well-educated individuals were willing to send secrets to Moscow.” (Emphasis added.) “Were they dupes, traitors, or something considerably more complicated?” She emphasizes that Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, a major study of the issue by conservative author John Earl Haynes that Waller himself often cites, “suggests [that] at the height of the worldwide struggle against fascism, these men and women did not think that they were betraying their own country.”

In any event, “by the end of 1945, the unique political conditions that had favored the Soviet espionage operation had changed and the KGB was never again to achieve such a success.” Hardline anti-communism became the order of the day—people like Wallace were exiled from the halls of power, and McCarthyism purged the American establishment of left-wing and even pro-New Deal personnel.

Obama Derangement Syndrome
An especially notable feature of Big Intel is that it brings together decades’ worth of right-wing bogeymen under a single rubric. The “radical theorists and Soviet agents” who founded the Frankfurt School were not just “the fathers of cultural Marxism and critical theory,” but also “the progenitors of political correctness and twenty-first century wokeness.”[54]

Their ideology is blamed for “intimidation of independent thought, the relentless attacks on religion and the American founding, the extreme politicization of academia and law, and thus government, and politicization in the FBI and CIA.”[55] The Bolshevik plot is also blamed for cancel culture, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and DEI.

Countless prominent individuals are singled out—and in a very peculiar way. There is a long tradition of reactionaries being unable to distinguish between milquetoast liberals and revolutionary Marxists (or anyone in between), and Waller is a perfect example. He reflexively sees every vaguely liberal person as an agent of International Communism.

Thus, liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr exemplified “American Protestant collusion with the Kremlin”[56] because “Marxist theory heavily influenced [his] intellectual development in the 1930s.” That Niebuhr was known to have been an anti-communist Cold Warrior, dismissed by Noam Chomsky as the “prophet of the establishment,” is irrelevant. Similarly, Barbara Lee (D-CA) remains to this day a “Communist Operative.”[57] John Conyers (D-MI) was a Communist “acolyte,” “if not a card-carrying member.”[58] Jim McGovern (D-MA) “worked with the Sandinistas and FMLN or the Cuban regime” as a congressional staffer, and “still supports the same old causes” as a sitting congressman.[59] Surprisingly, Waller overlooks that Vice President Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Marxist economist—surely an indication that the Bolsheviks are running the White House from beyond the grave.

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Jim McGovern—in Waller’s eyes, a communist operative. [Source: mcgovern.house.gov]

But no one rankles Waller more than Barack Obama. The sections of Big Intel that deal with his presidency read like transcripts of a Fox News segment from 2011—hell, even Saul Alinsky gets a shoutout. Like the Tea Party conservatives of that era, Waller mistakes warmongering, neo-liberal shill Obama for an anti-imperialist revolutionary intent on overturning the American system via a “cultural revolution.” He warns that Obama did not receive adequate schooling in “patriotism and American history”[60] as a child, that he read Marxists in college, and that he had expressed admiration for Comrade Niebuhr. Waller raves that “Obama entered the presidency with the worldview, training, organization, and talent networks in place to fundamentally transform America,” and that he oversaw “the conversion of the CIA, FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community into instruments of his agenda,”[61] or “Obama’s Great Cultural Revolution.”[62] Incredibly, Waller even claims the Obama administration’s plan revolved around “rigorous critical theory and anti-imperialism.”[63] (Emphases added.)

One wonders how Waller squares such delusions with Obama’s actual policies, which were the furthest thing from “anti-imperialist.”[64] He appears to believe that Obama’s cultural agenda interfered with his oversight of the military, as when he claims that the “White House seemed more obsessed with taking over the levers of power through its cultural Marxist revolution than it did with terminating bin Laden.” Since bin Laden was rather famously “terminated,” this is yet another extremely silly thing for him to have written.[65]

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Representatives Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Communist “operatives,” “acolytes,” or “party members,” in Waller’s telling. [Source: Wikipedia.org / politico.com]

Undaunted, Waller indicts the Obama administration for spearheading a takeover of the intelligence community by the woke. Discussing Executive Order (EO) 13583 (“Establishing a Coordinated Government-Wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce”), Waller comes close to accurately perceiving the true nature of such policies: “On its face, EO 13583 looked like a virtue-signaling sop to the various identity groups that funded or mobilized voters for Obama’s presidency.” But Waller insists that EO 13583 was really “an ideological palace coup” and “a majoritarian decree to transform the culture of the entire federal bureaucracy through implementation of critical theory.”[66]

Obama’s intelligence officials are the subjects of particular vitriol. Waller lambasts CIA Director

John Brennan for promoting diversity, complaining that “[n]owhere in his four-hundred-page memoir did Brennan ever claim that the goal was to make intelligence more efficient or its deliverables more productive.” (Two sentences later, Waller asserts the exact opposite—that “Brennan began a constant refrain that the cultural revolution in the CIA would make America’s intelligence machinery stronger.”[67]) (Emphasis added.)

Obama’s selection of James Comey to lead the FBI might have “had the appearance of keeping a level, nonpartisan approach,” since Comey was “a lifelong Republican” who had investigated the Clintons in the past. But this too was merely a ruse—Comey was “a Niebuhr acolyte” hell-bent on “replac[ing] the FBI’s fidelity, bravery, and integrity with diversity, equity, and inclusion.”[68]

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, too, “looked like a Republican but acted like a Marxist.” Perhaps best known to CAM readers for lying to Congress about the NSA spying on the entirety of the American population (something Waller notably does not criticize him for), Clapper is derided as “a counterintelligence weakling” with “leftist, soft-on-Russia views.” Waller even alleges that he attempted to “obtain Department of Defense passes for the Russian GRU military intelligence rezident and his deputy officers so they could roam the Pentagon freely and unescorted,” a claim too absurd to be taken seriously. (Emphases added.) Worst of all, from Waller’s perspective, Clapper “quietly sponsored the intelligence community’s first annual ‘Pride Summit.’”[69]

As a result of all this, Waller claims, “an aggressive, extreme, psychologically manipulative diversity program” was “waged against personnel” by the intelligence agencies. “After years of work, the horizontally networked identity groups had not only burrowed into the heart of the American intelligence community; they had fused with its vertical bureaucratic command structure to mobilize as secret agents of change across Uncle Sam’s intelligence and counterintelligence defenses.”[70] The horrifying results included nightmares like FBI employees having to view PowerPoint presentations on gender.

One such controversial presentation, which does indeed appear to have been rather over-the-top, prompts Waller to start making comparisons to the Cheka and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[71] Given the absence, in this case, of a mountain of corpses, the analogy comes off just a little bit silly. Equating “having to sit through an irritating PowerPoint” with “Cheka murders” and “the Chinese Cultural Revolution”—in which he erroneously claims more than one million people died—obliterates any remaining right Waller had to be taken seriously. What normal people understand to be the typical frustrations of cubicle culture, Waller interprets as a totalitarian conspiracy—albeit one that is apparently easy to defeat, since this particular PowerPoint was so widely despised that it was quietly withdrawn.[72]

The Spook Who Cried Wolf
Waller spends most of Big Intel warning that a Soviet/Russian disinformation campaign has been steadily degrading American institutions for more than 100 years. A glance at the rest of his career shows that he has been making similar claims for decades, right up to the present.

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Waller (far right, literally and politically) participates in a 1994 panel discussion on the threat of Russian intelligence services organized by the free market, anticommunist Heritage Foundation. [Source: CSPAN.org]

At the aforementioned 2018 Riga Conference, for instance, Waller insisted that “Russia’s going to exploit all our vulnerabilities, including elections, as it has,” then suggested the United States “exploit those vulnerabilities of the Kremlin regime, of the gangster state, and even of the Russian Federation itself.” He offered several creative ideas for how to do so, such as carrying out “cyberattacks to steal [Russian government] bank account money [to] fund opposition movements.” Ultimately, he argued, the U.S./NATO should “prepare for a sudden collapse of the Russian Federation regime, and take advantage of it, the way we failed to do in 1991.”

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Waller advocated for the US/NATO to engage in cyberattacks (among other forms of “non-military deterrence”) against Russia at the 2018 Riga Conference. [Source: YouTube]

Such ideas would make even Victoria Nuland blush. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that Waller does not buy into the Russiagate narrative.

“Suspicions and piecemeal evidence were there all along to show that the ‘Russia collusion narrative’ against Trump was a lie,” he writes, but “[f]or four years, the narrative that Trump and those around him ran America as Russian traitors was pounded into the political psyche.”[73] By 2020 “some of the biggest names in the American intelligence community had convinced themselves and half the country, with no corroborating evidence, that Trump was a Putin tool. A derangement syndrome had swept some of the most respected, or at least prestigious, names in U.S. intelligence.”[74]

As Alan MacLeod, Matt Taibbi, Jeff Gerth, Glenn Greenwald, and countless other critics have carefully documented, there were always, from the very beginning, a million reasons to know that Russiagate was pure nonsense. In a way, then, it is nice to see Waller come up with something sensible after putting forward so many absurdities. Indeed, the portions of Big Intel that deal with Russiagate could have been written by the likes of Taibbi or Greenwald.

But there is a boy-who-cried-wolf aspect to it, since the rest of Waller’s book promotes the same logic as Russiagate. Waller accuses every politician, every intellectual, every activist, and every ideological trend he dislikes, from the Russian Revolution to the War on Terror, of originating with a Soviet influence campaign. Now, with Russiagate, such claims have been directed against a figure (Trump) that he does like. Has this led him to re-think his approach? Not at all. Instead of finally realizing that reflexively accusing everyone you disagree with of working for a foreign power is unjustified and harmful, Waller interprets Russiagate as the Frankfurt School plot proceeding to its latest phase.

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Waller is correct to criticize intelligence officials’ claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” but his insistence that this is yet more evidence of a never-ending Soviet scheme is absurd. [Source: foxnews.com]

Waller—again, correctly—notes that Comey, Clapper and Brennan among others spread lies about the Hunter Biden laptop story being Russian disinformation. But he attributes this not to the typical machinations of a deep state which he himself has long served, but to these men being “a triumvirate of direct descendants of the Frankfurt School.”[75] Thus, even on the rare occasions when Waller inadvertently gestures toward something vaguely resembling the truth, he remains a one-trick pony; an old dog uninterested in learning new tricks, or even aware that there are any to learn.

Why Does This Matter
Some readers may wonder, given its clearly unhinged contents, whether it is even worth examining Big Intel at all. Why waste time focusing on such obviously fraudulent material? There are two reasons.

First, as noted at the outset, it is important to appreciate the way the security state thinks. Waller might be a particularly disturbed figure, but his general perspective—that America is rife with harmful foreign plots that need to be combatted, and that the left is comprised of all foreign agents or assets—is not so different from the worldview of the intelligence community writ large.

The second reason requires a bit more explanation.

Ever since Donald Trump blasted George W. Bush for lying about non-existent Iraqi WMDs in 2016, there has been a renewed willingness on the part of self-styled “right-wing populists” to engage in a (limited) critique of the permanent warfare state. Not long ago, only a fringe minority of Republicans, like Ron Paul, would risk doing this, but now it is relatively common to see people on the right criticizing “forever wars,” “the deep state,” etc.


In a 2016 primary debate, Donald Trump blasted Jeb Bush for his brother’s lies about WMDs during the Iraq War, a shocking statement for a Republican at the time, but which ended up ushering in an era of “right-wing populism” that has been willing to criticize some—though only some—aspects of U.S. militarism. [Source: youtube.com]
Unfortunately, this shift coincided with the weakening of the anti-imperialist left, with many progressives falling for nonsense about Russiagate and coming to believe that the CIA, FBI and NSA were guardians of American democracy (prompting socialist publications to issue reminders that “the CIA is not your friend”).

The result has been an information ecosystem characterized by segments of the left abandoning critiques of empire, with elements of the right filling the gap. This has led to some shallow analyses of militarism that lack a coherent grasp of political economy, and that are less concerned with the “triple threat” of militarism, racism and materialism about which Martin Luther King, Jr., warned. Waller’s book is a particularly egregious example of this trend, with its ultimate “critique” of the security state being that it is too “woke”—but not too murderous.

Tucker Carlson, another figure fond of making such criticisms, prominently endorsed Big Intel; his blurb sits atop the front cover. Lately, Carlson has been reinventing himself as a critic of the “deep state” and vaguely defined “establishment elites.” To be fair, he has indeed taken a number of positions that set him apart from other pundits, such as supporting Julian Assange and giving a platform to Palestinian Christians. But more often, his ideas subtly reinforce the overall dominance of the military-industrial complex, as when he condemns the U.S. for funding a proxy war against Russia—which is good—but on the grounds that Mexico or migrants are the real threat—which is bad—or that China is—which is very bad.

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Tucker Carlson does the deep state’s work for it by routinely demonizing China—even as he claims to be an anti-deep state figure. [Source: jacobin.com]

As Alan MacLeod unearthed in a major investigation for MintPress News, Carlson has incredibly suspicious connections to the CIA. In addition to being the son of a Reagan-appointed CIA propagandist, Carlson traveled to Nicaragua to support the Contras (this may be where he met Waller), then tried to join the CIA, then wrote for the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, penning articles defending the Agency against its critics, notably Gary Webb.

In a recent interview, Carlson clarified that, when it comes to the CIA meddling in other countries, “I don’t really have a problem with that as much.” Even more recently he interviewed Waller himself, and appeared to completely endorse Big Intel’s contents, offering not a word of pushback.

In a climate where “limited hangouts” like Carlson are held up as principled opponents of empire, “critiques” of the intelligence services like Big Intel may well be seen as compelling by less politically savvy observers. This makes it important to carefully scrutinize them, and to offer an alternative by providing principled analyses of the national security state.

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Tucker Carlson with J. Michael Waller. [Source: tuckercarlson.com]

After all, many of Waller’s targets (Obama, Clapper, Brennan) are indeed genuine villains. It is just that he sees them as villains for entirely ridiculous reasons. This is not a minor disagreement.

Obama was not bad because he encouraged diversity—he was bad because he was a mass murderer. In the same way, Waller blasts Mike Pompeo not because he was a fanatic who wanted to kidnap and kill Julian Assange and start a war with Iran, but because he failed to stem the DEI tide. Similarly, Waller’s problem with Gina Haspel is not her history of torturing people but that she, too, supposedly promoted DEI.[76]

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As he is with Obama’s intelligence leaders, Waller is critical of Trump officials Mike Pompeo (left) and Gina Haspel (center)—not for their criminal actions, but for their supposed lack of willingness to counter the spread of DEI. [Source: politico.com]

Sophisticated observers will see through this sort of thing, and understand that any worldview that considers the CIA and FBI “heroic,” so long as they avoid woke language and stick to overthrowing Third World governments and consorting with Nazis, is fundamentally bankrupt. When a pro-Contra, Iraq War-supporting “intelligence expert” comes along and claims that the deep state was just fine until it started waving rainbow flags, the appropriate response for informed students of foreign policy is to laugh off such nonsense. We have more important things on which to focus.

(Notes at link.)

('Red' added because you can't say it enough.)

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... er-heroes/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 21, 2024 5:54 pm

U.S. elections: A democracy that does not allow opposition

Eduardo Vasco

July 20, 2024

The political system of the United States does not allow opposition, even though the majority of citizens want one.

The U.S. regime considers itself the most democratic in the world. This is what the presidents of the United States have always said from the rooftops, and what their monopolistic communication system has always propagated throughout the world. This has already become common sense, proving one of the most famous Nazi maxims: a lie repeated a thousand times ends up becoming the truth (in the consciousness of the general public).

But how can a system be considered democratic if there are only two parties, which do not differ in any way on the main national and international issues, and which, as many have pointed out for some time, are nothing more than two sides of the same coin?

For the presidential elections in November this year, the script is the same as always: Democratic Party vs. Republican Party. Even though the majority of voters do not agree with the candidacies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as a Reuters/Ipsos survey on January 25 pointed out: “in general, an absolute majority of Americans (52%) are not satisfied with the system of two parties and wants a third choice.”

This feeling is not new today. In 2008, when the presidential elections pitted Barack Obama (D) against John McCain (R), 47% of voters surveyed by Gallup wanted an alternative to Democrats and Republicans. In October 2023, the same institute pointed out that 63% of Americans thought that the two parties do such a “bad job” of popular representation that a third major party is needed.

A third highly prestigious institute in the USA, the Pew Research Center, showed, on April 24, that 49% of voters would replace both Biden and Trump as candidates in these elections, if they had the “ability” to decide who would be the candidate for each party.

Even with such dissatisfaction, which highlights the American people’s opposition to the two-party regime, this opposition does not materialize in a political party with a chance of victory.

Only on eight occasions in U.S. history (the first in 1848 and the last in 1992) has a third candidate won more than 10% of the popular vote. And only in two of them did he manage to be ahead of one of the two main candidates, but never ahead of two, that is, he never managed to get elected. These two third-way exceptions who came in second were John Breckinridge for the Lecompton Democrats in 1860 and Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive Party in 1912.

For more than a hundred years, Americans have not been given any option other than the Democratic Party candidate or the Republican Party candidate, even though, as polls show, voters demand this third option. But the pulsating U.S. democracy does not respond to the will of its citizens in its most important moment, the presidential election!

In fact, parties and candidates that try to compete with the two-party regime are systematically prevented by the electoral apparatus. Few are able to qualify to appear on electoral ballots, the criteria for which vary by state. Voting intention polls do not mention names other than those of the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate – very few mention a third or fourth candidate. The press does not report on the activities of the other candidates, nor does it interview them. To participate in the debates promoted by the Presidential Debate Commission, the candidate must have at least 15% of the voting intentions in the polls (how, if his name is even mentioned?) and appear on a sufficient number of ballots to have a chance of winning in the Electoral College.

The entire apparatus of the U.S. regime (electoral justice, institutions, press, search engines) works as if there were only two candidates: the Democrat and the Republican. And, in fact, this is the reality. The other four or five who perform the feat of overcoming difficulties to appear on the ballot do not effectively compete.

This same apparatus, headed by the U.S. government, usually demands that other countries – especially those that do not accept American interference – hold elections where all candidates have equal opportunities to win. Of course, these demands are just a ruse to force regime change in the countries to be dominated. The American regime itself does not offer any chance for the opposition to win the elections – and does not even accept international observers, just “escorts”.

But not only that. The hole is much lower. The poor souls who, after much suffering, manage to run against the bipartisan machine and have no chance of winning it are actually not even a consenting opposition. They are simply not opposition.

An exponent of this thesis is Robert Kennedy Jr. He gave up his candidacy for the Democratic Party to run as an independent. But, despite having left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party did not leave RFK Jr. Its proposals are not very different from those of the two hegemonic parties – in fact, throughout history, there has always been a bloc of Democrats and Republicans with proposals distinct from the party leadership, with a social and more isolationist inclination. The son of former senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy is not even an outsider: the most conclusive proof of this is his faithful support for the genocide promoted by the USA/Israel in Gaza. Just like Democrats and Republicans, RFK Jr. is in the pocket of the bourgeoisie that controls the American regime.

It is because he is a facade opposition that Kennedy has the best rate of voting intentions among third-way candidates since the 1996 elections. The rare polls that mention his name present him with a rate of between 10% and 15% of intentions of vote. But the reason for this performance is less an agreement on the part of voters with his program than a rejection of bipartisanship (particularly the Biden vs. Trump dispute) or sympathy for his traditional family. A survey published last year by CNN showed that 39% of those who intend to vote for RFK Jr. don’t even have an opinion about him, that is, they barely know him. They only chose him because he doesn’t belong to the Democratic or Republican party.

In addition to RFK Jr., five other candidates will appear on the ballot in less than half of the states. Therefore, they will not have the slightest chance of tickling bipartisanship. The remaining five parties that attempted to compete did not even gain access to registration on the ballot in a single state. In practice, they are all completely unknown to the American electorate. And even if voters knew them, they would realize that their programs and ideology are poorly formulated copies of those of the Democratic and Republican parties.

All attempts to create a party truly distinct from the Siamese brothers were sabotaged and suppressed by the American dictatorial system. These were the cases of the Progressive Party, which lasted only two years (1912-1914), the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party (the latter two brutally persecuted and repressed by the State).

In effect, the political system of the United States does not allow opposition, even though the majority of citizens want one. Donald Trump, whose political platform and social strength is a threat to this bipartisanship, had to capture the Republican Party – with many internal difficulties – and, against the entire system, managed to run for office. But not even he, a tycoon who represents a powerful sector of the American bourgeoisie and who has no ideological differences with the imperialist system, is welcome in the electoral system. Those who control the system will do anything to prevent his victory. This is the most perfect true democracy man has ever created! God save America!

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... pposition/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 26, 2024 2:30 pm

The Country of the Rust Belt and the Broken Road: The Thirtieth Newsletter (2024)

From the 1941 ‘American century’ to Trump’s ‘American carnage’, the US has shifted from a post-WW2 boom to decline, facing political divides, economic crisis, poverty, and social decay.
25 JULY 2024

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José Clemente Orozco (Mexico), The Epic of American Civilisation, 1932–1934.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In his inaugural presidential address on 20 January 2017, Donald Trump used a powerful phrase to describe the situation in the United States: ‘American carnage’. In 1941, seventy-six years before this speech, Henry Luce wrote an article in Life magazine about the ‘American century’ and the promise of US leadership to be ‘the dynamic centre of ever-widening spheres of enterprise’. During the period between these two proclamations, the United States went through an immense expansion known as the ‘Golden Age’ and then a remarkable decline.

That theme of decline has returned in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. ‘We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation’, Trump declared at the Republican National Convention on 19 July in his speech to accept his party’s presidential nomination. Trump’s words echoed his inaugural address from 2017, in which he said, ‘We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon’.

In seven decades, the United States’s self-image has fallen from the grandiose heights of an ‘American century’ to the bloodied present of ‘American carnage’. The ‘carnage’ that Trump identifies is not only in the economic domain; it defines the political arena. A failed assassination attempt against Trump comes alongside an open rebellion in the Democratic Party that ended with incumbent US President Joe Biden withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. By all accounts, Trump will be favoured to defeat any Democratic candidate at the polls in November, since he leads in a handful of key ‘swing states’ (which house a fifth of the US population).

At the Republican convention, Trump tried to talk about unity, but this is a false language. The more US politicians talk about ‘bringing the country together’ or bipartisanship, the wider the divides tend to be between liberals and conservatives. What divides them is not policy as such, since the two parties both belong to the extreme centre that pledges to impose austerity on the masses while securing financial security for the dominant classes, but an attitude and orientation. A few domestic policies (important as they are, such as abortion rights) play a key role in allowing this difference of mood to emerge.

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Robert Gwathmey (USA), Sunny South, 1944.

Reports and rumours filter out of US government documents that give a glimpse of the ongoing devastation of social life. Younger people find themselves at the mercy of precarious employment. Home foreclosures and evictions for those in the lower ends of the income bracket continue as sheriffs and debt-recovery paramilitaries scour the landscape for so-called delinquents. Personal debt has skyrocketed as ordinary people with inadequate means of earning a living turn to credit cards and the shady world of personal loan agencies to keep from starving. The Third Great Depression has made low-wage service workers with no benefits, most of whom are women, even more vulnerable. In earlier instances of economic depression, these women, with those jobs, stretched their invisible hearts across their families; now, even this love-fuelled glue is no longer available.

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Hector Hyppolite (Haiti), Marinéte pie chè che (MARinÉ I), 1944–1946.

On 18 July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its staff report on the United States, which showed that poverty rates in the country ‘increased by 4.6 percentage points in 2022 and the child poverty rate more than doubled’. This increase in child poverty is ‘directly attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era assistance’, the IMF wrote. No longer will any government in the United States, with its tanking economy and increasing military spending, provide access to basic conditions for survival for millions of families. One paragraph in the report struck me as particularly significant:

The increased pressure on lower income households is becoming more visible in an upswing in delinquencies on revolving credit. Furthermore, worsening housing affordability has aggravated access to shelter, particularly for the young and lower income households. This is evident in the number of people experiencing homelessness, which has risen to the highest level since data began to be compiled in 2007.

Swathes of the US landscape are now given over to desolation: abandoned factories make room for chimney swallows while old farmhouses become methamphetamine labs. There is sorrow in the broken rural dreams, the gap between the distress of farmers in Iowa not so far from the distress of peasants in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Those who had previously been employed in mass industrial production or in agriculture are no longer necessary to the cycles of capital accumulation in the United States. They have been rendered disposable.

By the time that China developed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to enhance infrastructure around the world in 2013, the United States had slipped into its own rust belt and broken road reality.

It is impossible for the US political class that is committed to this politics of austerity to control, let alone reverse, this downward spiral. Austerity policies cannibalise social life, razing everything that makes it possible for humans to live in the modern world. For decades, the parties of liberalism and conservatism have muted their historical traditions and become shadows of each other. Just as the water in a toilet rushes in a spiral and gets dragged into the sewer, the parties of the ruling class have dashed toward the extreme centre to champion austerity and to allow an obscene upward distribution of wealth in the name of spurring entrepreneurism and growth.

Whether in Europe or in North America, today the extreme centre is increasingly losing its legitimacy amongst populations in the Global North stunted by malaise. Ugly proposals allegedly seeking to spur growth that would have sounded acceptable three decades ago – such as tax cuts and increased military spending – now have a hollowness to them. The political class has no effective answers for stagnant growth and decayed infrastructure. In the United States, Trump has hit upon a politically expedient way of talking about the country’s problems, but his own solutions – such as the idea that militarising borders and escalating trade wars will be able to magically create the investment needed to ‘make America great again’ – are in fact just as hollow as those of his rivals. Despite enacting a set of laws to encourage productive investment (such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors [CHIPS] and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), the US government has failed to address enormous gap in necessary fixed capital formation. Apart from debt, there are few other sources for investment in the country’s infrastructure. Even the US Federal Reserve Bank doubts the possibility that the US can easily delink its economy from that of booming China.

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Moisés Becerra (Honduras), Luchemos (Let’s Struggle), 1971.

It is tempting to throw around words like ‘fascism’ to describe political tendencies such as those led by Trump and an assorted group of right-wing leaders in Europe. But the use of this term is not precise, since it ignores the fact that Trump and others make up a far right of a special kind, one that is reasonably comfortable with democratic institutions. This far right pierces neoliberal rhetoric by appealing to the anguish caused by the decline of their countries and by using patriotic language that arouses great feelings of nationalism amongst people who have felt ‘left out’ for at least a generation. Yet, rather than blame the project of neoliberalism for that national decline, the leaders of this far right of a special kind blame it on working-class immigrants and on new cultural forms that have emerged in their countries (particularly increasing social acceptance for gender and racial equality and sexual freedom). Since this far right has no new project to offer to the people to reverse this decline, it forges ahead with neoliberal policies with as much gusto as the extreme centre.

Meanwhile, unable to make a break with the extreme centre, the exhausted forces of liberalism can only shout that they are a better alternative than the far right. This is a broken choice that has reduced political life to different sides of the extreme centre. A genuine break is needed from the carnage. Neither the far right of a special kind nor liberalism can provide that break.

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Angelina Quic Ixtamer (Guatemala), Mayan Market, 2014.

In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter argued that, over its history, capitalism has generated a series of business downturns when failed enterprises close. In the ashes of these crashes, Schumpeter said, a phoenix is born through ‘creative destruction’. However, even if ‘creative destruction’ eventually produces new lines of enterprise and therefore employment, the carnage it causes results in the possibility of a political turn to socialism. Though the march to socialism has not yet taken place in the United States, larger and larger numbers of young people are more and more attracted to this possibility.

In 1968, the night before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘only when it is dark enough can you see the stars’. It now seems dark enough. Perhaps not in this election or the next one, or even the one after that, but soon the choices will narrow, the extreme centre – already illegitimate – will vanish, and new projects will germinate that will enhance the lives of the people instead of using the social wealth of the Global North to terrorise the world and enrich the few. We can see those stars. Hands are striving to reach them.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -politics/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 27, 2024 2:39 pm

One third of the world under US sanctions: Report

Four consecutive US governments have incrementally expanded their reliance on using the US dollar as a weapon of war, forcing nations across the world to create alternative financial systems and pursue de-dollarization

News Desk

JUL 26, 2024

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(Photo Credit: CNN)

The US government currently imposes sanctions on a third of all nations on earth in a situation that disproportionately affects low-income countries – 60 percent of which are under US sanctions of some kind – according to an analysis of the White House’s long-standing policy of economic warfare by the Washington Post.

This trend spiked during the last four US governments and reached a fever pitch under President Biden, who imposed over 6,000 sanctions in just two years.

“It is the only thing between diplomacy and war and, as such, has become the most important foreign policy tool in the US arsenal,” Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official, told the US news outlet. “And yet, nobody in government is sure this whole strategy is even working.”

Washington’s over-reliance on using the US dollar as a weapon of war took a marked turn following the 11 September attacks in New York City. Up until then, economic sanctions had primarily targeted “rogue states” like Cuba and Libya to block them from taking part in the global financial system and instigating regime change.

However, from 2001 onward, sanctions were more freely used by successive US presidents to isolate nations worldwide, in particular, shifting their strategy to West Asia and further east. “As the Treasury Department became a key player in the global war on terrorism, US policymakers began to understand the power of the nation’s financial hegemony,” the Washington Post details.

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The spike in US economic sanctions globally came hand in hand with the growth of a parallel multi-billion-dollar lobbying and influence industry in which foreign governments and transnational corporations “spend exorbitant sums to influence the system.”

“Congress got in on the act, flooding the State Department and the White House with requests for sanctions that, in some cases, appeared intended to cut off foreign competition to home-state industries,” the report details, adding that, at a holiday party in 2011 Adam Szubin, then director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), sang a song titled “Every Little Thing We Do Is Sanctions.”

“Smart sanctions were meant to be a buffet of choices where you fit the particular imposed sanction to the offense and vulnerability of the country,” George Lopez, a sanctions scholar at the University of Notre Dame, told the Washington Post. “Instead, policymakers walked into the buffet and said, ‘I’m going to pile everything onto my plate.’”

This approach by a revolving door of White House officials ignores the devastating effect of economic coercion policies on civilian populations, as countless studies have shown that sanctions cause immense suffering and possibly deaths in the hundreds of thousands.

“The inconvenient truth is that these sanctions indirectly affect the health of people and generally result in devastating consequences … Soon after imposing economic sanctions on a country, many essential life-saving drugs become unavailable. Even production of some drugs being manufactured in a country is decreased, or even stopped, because of a shortage in basic ingredients or spare machine parts,” Iranian researcher Farrokh Habibzadeh wrote in a letter published by The Lancet in 2018.

“Lack of spare parts affects not only medical devices but also other necessary infrastructures such as electric generators; frequent power cuts cause serious problems (loss of vaccines, drugs, ventilators, monitors, etc). Hundreds of thousands of people die in silence from diseases. This quiet mass murder in a part of the world that is submerged in turmoil is not even noticed or is perhaps overlooked,” Habibzadeh adds.

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“The mentality, almost a weird reflex, in Washington has just become: If something bad happens, anywhere in the world, the US is going to sanction some people. And that doesn’t make sense,” Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser in the Obama government, told the Washington Post. “We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral damage of war,” Rhodes added.

According to the report, staffers from the US Treasury Department drafted an internal proposal in 2021 for the newly elected Biden government to restructure the sanctions system in what could have been “the most substantial revamp of sanctions policy in decades.”

However, the White House refused to implement most of the changes and instead has doubled down on upholding thousands of sanctions against hundreds of nations and continued imposing even more.

“By the time Treasury publicly released its '2021 Sanctions Review in October that year, the 40-page draft had dwindled to eight pages and contained the earlier document’s most toothless recommendations,” people familiar with the internal proposal are quoted as saying.

Similar discussions on revamping Washington’s economic coercion policies collapsed in 2022 following the start of the Russia–Ukraine war.

“Until recently, western policymakers have maintained a dogmatic belief in the efficacy of sanctions despite the fact that they had clearly failed to achieve their intended policy outcomes in most countries … But, like St Augustine, who counseled against trying to understand the workings of the heavens, policymakers committed to sanctions policy felt it was ‘not necessary to probe into the nature of things,’” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, wrote for Responsible Statecraft earlier this year.

The continued reliance on sanctions by the US has pushed many nations across the world to consider de-dollarizing bilateral trade. It has also boosted interest in alternative economic blocs such as BRICS, Mercosur, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 21, 2024 1:20 pm

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Politicians In Dystopialand Warn Other Candidate Will Cause Dystopia

From the heart of this tyrannical nightmare, politicians warn that if you don’t vote for them you will find yourself in a nation that has been transformed into a tyrannical nightmare.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 20, 2024

One bizarre thing about modern US presidential races is watching politicians in one of the most dystopian civilizations ever to exist warning people that the other candidate wants to lead them into a dark dystopia, which depending on the party they label “communism” or “fascism”.

Yesterday I saw an amazingly idiotic tweet by Chuck Schumer responding to an equally idiotic tweet by Donald Trump. Trump had tweeted an AI image of Kamala Harris addressing the DNC convention in Chicago with a crowd full of red flags beneath a giant hammer and sickle, the suggestion of course being that Harris is a communist and the Democrats are a communist political party.

“The guy who loves Putin is projecting again,” Schumer said in response to Trump’s tweet.


I mean, where do you even start with this? Russian president Vladimir Putin is not a communist, Russia is not a communist country, and the Soviet Union ended more than three decades ago — all facts that the average fifth grader could have told the majority leader of the US senate.

Perhaps more significantly, Kamala Harris is about as far from a communist as anyone could possibly be, and the Democratic Party is devoutly capitalist. Ideologically Harris is much, much closer to Donald Trump than she is to communism, and from a communist point of view there isn’t a great deal of difference between Harris and Trump. They’re both imperialist lackeys of neoliberal capitalism, are both devoted to the US empire’s goal of stomping out communism around the world by any means necessary, and are both pledged to continue the exploitation, oppression, ecocide and warmongering of the status quo capitalist order if elected.

But this is all these freaks do every four years. Trump, who spent his entire presidential term ramping up cold war aggressions against Moscow, is accused of wanting to turn America into a fascistic autocracy ruled by Vladimir Putin. The Democrats, who play just as crucial a role in preserving the capitalist status quo as Republicans, are accused of trying to institute communism. All while campaigning to lead a nation that is arguably more dystopian than anything they claim the other candidate wants to create.

The US is the most tyrannical regime on the entire planet. No other power structure on earth has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other government is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars around the world, and working to destroy any population on earth who disobeys its dictates via invasions, proxy conflicts, bombing campaigns, starvation sanctions, staged coups and covert ops.

This is all held in place using the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed. Americans are the most propagandized population on earth, successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, laboring, spending, acting and voting exactly how the powerful want them to in a mind-controlled dystopia — all while believing themselves to be free. This propaganda machine extends its reach throughout the world, with most of its firepower focused on its close allies who are effectively member states in a globe-spanning empire.


The only reason the US empire isn’t seen for the horrifying blood-soaked dystopia it is is because of that very propaganda machine, which normalizes and glorifies this freakish status quo through both its “news” media and its mainstream culture manufacturing centers in New York and Los Angeles.

From the heart of this tyrannical nightmare, politicians warn that if you don’t vote for them you will find yourself in a nation that has been transformed into a tyrannical nightmare.

But what else are they going to do? Campaign on their actual policies and point out their actual differences from the other candidate? They don’t have any real differences. They’re both auditioning for the job of temporary mid-level management of the US empire, and you don’t get to have that job if you are in any way opposed to the interests of that empire.

Either of them will preside over the continuation of imperialist extraction, warmongering, militarism and genocide. Either of them will preside over the continuation of capitalist exploitation and ecocide. Either of them will preside over the continued expansion of authoritarian measures like surveillance, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism.

But they can’t just come out and say that. They wouldn’t be this close to getting the job if they were the types to say that. Saying that would wake people up to the reality of how profoundly unfree they really are, opening up the possibility for the birth of a real revolutionary movement.

So they babble about the other candidate wanting to usher you into some frightening future dystopia, hoping you won’t notice that dystopia is already here.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... -dystopia/

*****

Matt Taibbi: American Stasi: Tulsi Gabbard Confirms “Quiet Skies” Nightmare
August 20, 2024
By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 8/7/24

Tuesday night, while self-styled Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard described being tracked by teams of government agents in a surveillance regime more reminiscent of East Germany than a free country. Whistleblowing Air Marshals told Uncover DC Gabbard was singled out as a terror threat under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program, and the former presidential candidate says she noticed.

“The whistleblowers’ account matches my experience,” says Gabbard. “Everything lines up to the day.”

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

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Examples of “Quad-S” boarding passes. Tulsi Gabbard’s air tickets, as well as those of her husband Abraham, were similarly marked
Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics.’ And he said, oh.”

The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled.” Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening,” along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”

She called a colleague, who told her: these things happen, don’t worry. “So I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just being paranoid,’” Gabbard says. Then she saw this past Sunday’s report in Uncover DC, a site edited by the well-known Twitter writer Tracy Beanz. Uncover interviewed Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), an advocacy association for Federal Air Marshals. Disclosing Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list, the former Marshal LaBosco told a disturbing story:

According to LaBosco… Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.

Uncover DC said Gabbard was initially placed on the list on July 23rd, and that trios of Air Marshals first began following her on flights on July 25th. As Racket would learn, surveillance was conducted on at least eight flights, with different three-Marshal teams for each flight, part of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) “Quiet Skies” regimen that can literally surround people with human watchers. There are “potentially 15 or more TSA uniformed and plain clothes” at a gate for such assignments, LaBosco told Racket. The story about Gabbard was surfaced by two TSA whistleblowers, including one detailed to follow her. When Gabbard read this, she felt a shock of recognition.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, okay. So everything I was experiencing was exactly what I feared was going on,’” she says.

Though clearly outraged, Gabbard stresses the important part of her story isn’t any inconvenience or insult she’s gone through.

“This is not a woe-is-me situation,” she explains. Instead, “it’s bringing to the forefront… how brazen the political retaliation and abuse of power continues to be under the Biden-Harris administration.”

The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii’s 2nd district is far from the first American to be placed under physical surveillance as a “domestic terrorist” threat in post-9/11 America. Especially since January 6th, 2021, when the Quiet Skies program expanded to accommodate a broad effort to track people who were at the Capitol, Americans following Americans on airplanes is no longer uncommon, though the public largely has no idea of the scale of this activity.

However, Gabbard is by far the highest-profile figure to be caught up in this surveillance web. As a war veteran with no connection to J6 or any other known offense, her appearance on a terror watch list is striking, and symbolic of the way politicians and intelligence officials have turned the machinery of the War on Terror inward in the last decade. This aspect of the story galls Gabbard the most.

“I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” Gabbard says. “I was like a lot of Americans. We enlisted to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people and go after the terrorists who attacked us. And so now to have confirmation — I guarantee there are other men and women in uniform or veterans now being targeted.

“I can’t think of a word that adequately captures how I feel. The closest I can think of is the deepest sense of betrayal.” She pauses. “It cuts to the core.”

Gabbard pointed to this summer’s release of documents from the ill-fated “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” an advisory panel led by former CIA chief John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Litigation filed on behalf of former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell led to the disbanding of the group, and the production of documents identifying Trump supporters, people “in the military,” or “religious” as “indicators for extremism or terrorism.” Gabbard says this is an indication that the intelligence community is targeting people of “many stripes,” but “especially so those who still wear the uniform or who have worn the uniform.”

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“IN THE MILITARY”: The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group identified soldiers as a heightened risk for domestic terrorism

Neither Gabbard nor, apparently, the whistleblowing Marshals know why the former congresswoman would be on a terror watch list. Gabbard has been a persistent, pointed critic of politicians in the current administration. The day before her reported placement on the TSA list, Gabbard appeared on the Ingraham Angle and criticized the “proxy war” in Ukraine, saying the administration was selling the public “crap” excuses for expanding its military commitment, with intent to turn Ukraine into “another Afghanistan.” A debate clash in the 2020 primary was also a factor in ending Harris’ run that year, featuring the viral line: “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked.”

Gabbard’s account squares with LaBosco’s description of how Quiet Skies works. Surveillance, LaBosco says, is “every flight, every leg. If she has three legs that day, it’ll be nine Air Marshals. So if she does three flights in a day, she’ll have a set of Air Marshals on every one of her flights.” As for canine teams, “They maneuver over to the gate area. You will have plainclothes TSA officers, you will have uniformed TSA officers and the canine teams will be running in the gate area. They’ll have them floating around to try to pick up a scent of something.” LaBosco says these dogs are only trained for explosives, not narcotics.

What now? Gabbard, who has spoken to at least one of the whistleblowers, is reviewing possible courses of action, contacting former congressional colleagues about a possible Hill investigation. In a seemingly related matter, Empower Oversight — the firm that represented FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Marcus Allen as well as IRS special agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in the Hunter Biden case — sent a letter Monday night to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari demanding an immediate investigation in the Gabbard case. The firm represented an Air Marshal in another ugly Quiet Skies case two years earlier (see below), and though Cuffari’s IG office promised in January 2023 to investigate, there’s no evidence it ever did, making the Gabbard story more troubling.

Worse, Empower today says it’s learned that the TSA has already initiated an investigation to identify the two TSA whistleblowers who leaked “sensitive security information” in Gabbard’s case. The firm sent another letter to the IG this morning asking for help in stopping retaliation before it begins. “A retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step for the agency to take,” the firm wrote, adding that the TSA “should be investigating the abuses on which [Marshals] are blowing the whistle.” The TSA has not commented for this article.

“Quiet Skies” is a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program for tracking “travelers who may present an elevated risk,” as well as “unknown or partially known terrorists.” It’s a signature initiative for a new vision of the federal enforcement state that, as covered in this space before, moved after 9/11 from an emphasis on making cases and building prosecutions to endless intelligence-gathering as well as “disruption” and “prevention.” In a key moment, the FBI in 2008 put out a new “baseline collection plan,” which urged agents to come with plans to “disrupt” potential “acts of violence” or other “criminal behavior.” Agents began getting credit for an internal metric called “disruptions,” which allowed them to rise without records of prosecutions or even arrests.

Because most investigations under this new system will never lead to court, agents do not have to worry about meeting probable cause standards or justifying surveillance. The behaviors may be technically permitted, even if some would consider them unconstitutional.

“It all comes under the heading of the Department of Pre-Crime,” adds Empower attorney Jason Foster, longtime Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So it’s ‘We don’t have to prove anything. We’re not going to court. We’re just following people.’”

In the wake of 9/11 programs like the TSA’s “No Fly List” and the multi-agency Terrorist Screening Center regularly made the news as the focus of controversies, with criticism often coming from Democrats. In an incident that sounds similar but in fact underscores the expansion of the scope of such programs, the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was prevented from boarding planes on five occasions in 2004, apparently because a suspected terrorist was using “Anthony Kennedy” as an alias. These programs symbolized the Bush-era reflex for wide-scale screening of mostly Muslim suspects, and came to be frowned upon as racist and anachronistic. When a judge in 2019 finally declared the Terrorist Screening Database unconstitutional, voices across the spectrum cheered, “It’s about time.”

Despite the perception that terrorist watchlists are a thing of the past, they’ve actually expanded, with Clear Skies representing an aggressive new generation of watchlisting, which no longer just targets Muslims but ranges of alleged domestic offenders. Though it’s theoretically possible Gabbard’s case will prove a mistaken-identity caper à la Kennedy’s incident (“I can’t imagine what, but they might have an excuse,” a Republican House aide counseled), LaBosco insists whistleblowers waited to make sure it wasn’t an “anomaly” before coming forward. “We thought, ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’” she says. “But then, second flight, third flight… no, this is no mistake.”

Quiet Skies eats up an astonishing amount of resources: an Inspector General’s report about the program in 2019 “identified $394 million in funds that could be put to better use,” meaning nearly half the Air Marshals’ budget was being wasted. LaBosco says this is no surprise. “Think about the overtime, the vouchers, the overnight travel, the per diems. Think of all the wasted resources that we so desperately need right now… We’re not going to find a terrorist following Tulsi Gabbard. We’re not even looking for the bad guys anymore.”

Air Marshals have complained more than once about being asked to spy on Americans. The existence of the program was first exposed on July 28, 2018, when Boston Globe writer Jana Winter published an exposé: “Welcome to the Quiet Skies.” The Globe report said 30 or more people were followed every day by Air Marshals, some of whom told the paper they worried the program “may be unconstitutional.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ ... blejsapi=0

The Globe story led to a July 30th letter Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey to TSA Administrator David Pekoske, asking about reports that the TSA was “monitoring seemingly innocuous behavior such as whether a person slept on the plane, used the bathroom, or obtained a rental car.” The letter was followed by a remarkable (if mostly unattended) hearing in which Markey questioned Pekoske in September 2018.

When Markey asked if it were true that “innocent” Americans not suspected of crimes were followed under Quiet Skies, Pekoske deflected, then said finally, “I wouldn’t use the term ‘innocent.’” The hearing also disclosed that “thousands” of Americans were in the program. Pekoske later conceded Quiet Skies hadn’t led to a single arrest, nor had it foiled any plots, a fact that is apparently still true:

Three years later in July 2021, in a story out of a Philip K. Dick novel, a Senior Federal Air Marshal with 27 years of experience discovered that his wife had been labeled a “domestic terrorist.” She was reportedly targeted for “Special Mission Coverage” for having attended the January 6th speech by Donald Trump at the Capitol, which she did not enter. When the Marshal told his supervisor, he was advised to “let it play out” as “it was not our investigation.”

Eventually, the Marshal turned to aforementioned whistleblower firm Empower Oversight, which helped him file a protected disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. The OSC on July 8, 2021 wrote back, declining to refer the matter for investigation to the Inspector General’s office. Empower then wrote directly to the Inspector General’s office, which to date has “provided no public accounting of what it has done.” The Marshal did manage to work with the FBI to have his wife’s name removed from the terror watchlist, though this did not slow the program.

Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts,” especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat… TSA is out of control against the American people.”

Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset.” After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.

“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 26, 2024 2:08 pm

Responsible Statecraft: Meet the army of lobbyists behind $2 trillion nuclear weapons boost
August 25, 2024 natyliesb
By Hekmat Aboukhater and William Hartung, Responsible Statecraft, 8/8/24

The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.

This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.

That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.

Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”

This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.

Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.

The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.

Who decides? The role of the ICBM lobby
A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.

Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.

In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.

Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.

Lobbying dollars and the revolving door
The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.

During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.

While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Playing the jobs card
The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.

As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a minuscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.

Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.

A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.

There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.

Unwarranted influence in the nuclear age
Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:

“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”

The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”

Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.

Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.

This article was originally published at Tom Dispatch and was republished with permission by Responsible Statecraft.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 27, 2024 1:41 pm

Who really controls US foreign policy?
Brian Berletic

Aug 23, 2024 , 4:42 pm .

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US Congress headquarters in Washington DC (Photo: Archive)

From the ongoing US involvement in Ukraine, to its enduring military presence in West Asia, to rising tensions between Washington and Beijing in the Asia-Pacific region, regardless of who controls the US Congress and who sits in the White House, these conflicts continue, often with a Democratic president paving the way for his Republican successor, and vice versa.

Why, regardless of who Americans vote for in office, does the country's foreign policy, and even its domestic policy, seem to move full speed ahead?

Contrary to popular belief, American foreign and domestic policy is not determined by Congress, or even the White House, but by a powerful combination of unelected corporate-financial interests that fund a vast network of political institutions known as think tanks .

These think tanks create a consensus among the various corporate-financial interests that finance their activities, in addition to being part of their administrative councils, boards of directors or serving as advisors to these institutions.

This consensus is reflected in the various policy documents that think tanks publish each year, which are then drafted into bills by teams of lawyers and legislative specialists. Lobbyists propose the bills to Congress and the White House, which vote on them or approve them, often without even reading their content.

Since the center of power in that country lies with these interests and not with Congress or the White House, efforts to influence, challenge or change American policy must focus on interests based primarily on Wall Street and not on politicians in Washington DC.

What are think tanks ?
Far from being a “conspiracy theory,” the central role that corporate-funded think tanks play in driving U.S. foreign and domestic policy was explained by none other than the government-sponsored media outlet, Voice of America, in a 2018 article titled “What’s Behind the Think Tanks That Influence American Policy?”

The article noted:

"Of the more than 1,800 think tanks in the United States, nearly 400 are based in Washington. Previous administrations have relied on the research and ideas generated by these organizations to formulate their policies. These institutions have been criticized in the past for their excessive influence in the formulation of the nation's policies."

The article also admitted that many of those in American media and politics got their start in the halls of these corporate-funded institutions.

The article said:

"In addition to influencing public policy, these institutions are often a training ground for those who wish to carve out a niche for themselves in the media or the corridors of power."

The same article admitted that " think tanks are also a revolving door for talent," noting that,

"In the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all came from Washington think tanks."

Only at the end of the article is there any mention of the business and financial interests that subsidise these study centres.

The article stated:

"But policies and ideas are often developed through the prism of political bias, so knowing who is paying for those ideas is important."

"I think the most important thing is for the public to know that when think tanks publish a report, it's important for those who read it to try to understand whether it was influenced by the sponsor or not," says Georgetown University's Rom. "And good think tanks are open and transparent about the kind of research they do so that those who read that research can judge its independence."


Few Americans know, much less understand, the central role these organizations play in their country's policymaking. Fewer still are aware of the monumental conflict of interest that exists between the corporations and financial institutions that fund them, the policies they propose, and the bills and policies that are ultimately passed and implemented in Washington.

Because of this lack of understanding, many citizens believe that the future of politics in Washington is defined through elections. In reality, its future is determined by unelected business and financial interests that promote the proposals they want, regardless of who controls Congress or who currently occupies the White House.

How invoices are (really) made
CBS News, in a 2017 article titled "Who Really Writes the Bills in Congress?", would admit that "lawyers" knowledgeable about the bills' issues are often the ones writing them.

The same article admits that bills may originate "directly from a member, who may receive input from constituents, lobbyists or staff on a particular issue."

As Voice of America admitted in its article, these "lobbyists" and "lawyers," and even "members" of Congress, come from think tanks funded by financial corporations.

So while many mistakenly believe that their elected members of Congress "represent" them and their interests, it is clear that unelected interests monopolize policymaking, enjoy unwarranted influence over those who pass new proposals, and Americans only learn about them through the media, often long after there is any practical possibility of protesting or reversing them.

As Voice of America also admitted, many of the media outlets informing the American people about the new policies began their careers in the halls of these political think tanks backed by the same unelected corporate-financial interests proposing these policies in the first place.

USA Today, in a 2019 investigative report titled “You elected them to write new laws. Instead, they let corporations do it,” explains it more explicitly:

"Every year, state legislators across the United States introduce thousands of bills designed and written by corporations, industry groups, and think tanks. Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called 'model' bills are copied in state Capitol Hill after state Capitol, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who wrote them."

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The Atlantic Council is headquartered in Washington, DC (Photo: Atlantic Council)

The investigative report also pointed out how manipulative the titles of bills often are, designed to deliberately mislead the public:

"The Asbestos Transparency Act did not help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations that wanted to make it harder for victims to recover money. The HOPE Act, introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it harder to access food stamps."

The report lamented that "the bills promise to protect the public" but "actually bolster corporate bottom lines."

This should come as no surprise, given that these projects come from think tanks funded by these same companies.

Congress passes bills it doesn't even read
US News, in an op-ed titled "A Not-So-Dirty Little Secret," would attempt to excuse Congress from having to read the bills it signs.

He admitted:

"The not-so-dirty little secret of Congress—and, I suspect, of most legislative bodies—is that members often vote on laws without sitting down to read them verbatim."
The article notes that instead, "legislative specialists working in Congress and, in some cases, denizens of think tanks outside it," interpret the bills and explain them to lawmakers, who then vote on them.

According to the White House website , “anyone can write” a bill to submit to Congress. In theory, such documents should represent the interests of the people in a Western democracy. Lawmakers who vote for them should do so in the interest of the citizens who elected them to office in the first place.

In reality, many legislative projects are written by corporate-funded interests themselves or by legislators and their staffs, who are under pressure from these factors. These are plans that Congress confesses it does not understand, and instead relies on specialists working for those same interests to explain them to it.

What emerges is politics driven by unelected interests, simply whitewashed through elected representatives, creating the illusion of a public mandate. As politicians can be voted in and out of office, when the public is dissatisfied with politics, the empty hope of new elections and the prospect of “change” prevents them from addressing the underlying factors that prevent transformation from actually happening.

Who finances these think tanks ?
Think tanks often list on their websites who sponsors their work or who sits on their board of directors, management board or advisory team. Regardless of the information made public, the same circle of business and financial interests is represented.

For example, the American Enterprise Institute does not readily disclose its list of donors, but it does publish a list of trustees , which includes representatives from the private equity firm Carlyle Group, insurance companies such as State Farm, big tech companies such as Dell, and big finance companies such as UBS.

RAND Corporation, infamous for its 2019 paper “Extending Russia,” which outlines a series of military and economic measures aimed at drawing the Russian Federation into a protracted war with its neighbors, including Ukraine, lists IBM, Mitre Corporation, and PhRMA Foundation—which itself is made up of several pharmaceutical giants—among its major clients.

The Brookings Institution, responsible for crafting war policy around the world, including its 2009 paper “Which Way to Persia?” focused on Iran, lists its corporate and institutional sponsors, which include not just the U.S. government but multiple foreign governments, as well as corporate-financial interests not only Big Tech like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, Big Finance like Blackrock, Mastercard, and UBS, arms manufacturers like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, Big Oil like BP and Chevron, as well as consumer goods and services like PepsiCo, Amazon, and Walmart.

How to control unelected and unjustified power
As Voice of America noted, there are more than 1,800 think tanks in the United States alone , many of which share the same handful of Fortune 500 funders, directors, trustees and advisors .

While the American people can vote for and against the many members of Congress who pass the bills presented to them, what can they do about the unelected interests who present these documents to Congress in the first place?

Often referred to as “voting with your wallet,” they can create lists of the big business and financial interests that exert unwarranted influence over their government, and redirect their monthly income away from them, and instead to local or foreign alternatives.

These special interests did not appear "overnight" but were built up over years, sometimes decades, accumulating the money, time, attention and energy of millions of Americans at home and hundreds of millions of people outside of it.

By raising awareness of the unjustified power and abuse wielded by these interests and by diverting money, time, attention and energy away from them and towards a greater variety of alternatives at home and abroad, a better balance of power can be created.

In many ways, the rise of multipolarism is a good example. The West had for generations held a monopoly on many goods, services and industries, giving it global hegemony.

With the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, and newly industrialized nations creating alternatives to what were once Western monopolies, people around the world are now dividing their money, time, attention, and energy among these many options, creating a better balance of power. As this process plays out around the world, Americans can begin a similar process at home.

If a greater balance of power can be created in the United States, by redistributing the wealth and power it generates among a greater number of corporations and interests across the country, then there will be a much greater chance that those in Washington will represent this greater balance of power rather than the concentrated wealth and power that currently exists on Wall Street.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 02, 2024 2:53 pm

SCOTT RITTER: On a Highway to Hell
September 1, 2024

Nuclear weapons offer an illusion of security. By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift from deterrence to employment, there will be a scenario where the U.S. will use nuclear weapons. And then it’s lights out.

Image
A front view of four nuclear free-fall B61s on a bomb rack at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, 1986. (DoD, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Successive U.S. administrations have eschewed arms control in favor of maintaining American strategic advantage over real and/or imagined adversaries.

This is accomplished by embracing nuclear weapons employment strategies that deviate from simple deterrence into war-fighting at every level of conflict, including scenarios that don’t involve a nuclear threat.

At a time when the U.S. advocates policies exacerbating already high levels of tension with nuclear-armed adversaries Russia and China, the Biden administration has signed off on a new nuclear employment plan that increases, rather that decreases, the probability of nuclear conflict.

Left unchecked, this policy can have only one possible outcome — total nuclear annihilation of humanity and the world we live in.


By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

An interesting thing happened on the road to Armageddon.

In January 2017, then-Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned about the dangers inherent in expanding funding for, and by extension increasing the importance of, nuclear weapons.

“If future budgets reverse the choices we’ve made, and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup,” said Biden — referring to Obama administration policies that included secured the New START Treaty limiting the size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals — “it hearkens back to the Cold War and will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States or our allies.”

Later, in 2019, Biden, now a candidate for president, commented on the decision made by President Donald Trump to deploy two missile systems — a cruise missile still under development, and the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile deployed onboard the U.S. Navy’s Ohio-class submarines —armed with a new low-yield nuclear warhead.

“The United States does not need new nuclear weapons,” Biden declared in a written answer to questions posed by the Council for a Livable World. “Our current arsenal of weapons…is sufficient to meet our deterrence and alliance requirements.”

In an article published in the March/April 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, candidate Biden vowed to “renew our commitment to arms control for a new era,” including a pledge to “pursue an extension of the New START treaty, an anchor of strategic stability between the United States and Russia, and use that as a foundation for new arms control arrangements.”

Biden went on to declare that “that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with the U.S. military and U.S. allies.”

Biden prevailed over Trump in the 2020 Presidential election, and on Jan. 21, 2021, was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States.

And then…nothing.

Copying Trump’s Pre-Emptive Strike

Image
Aerial view of Pentagon at night. (Joe Lauria)

In March 2022, after much speculation about whether or not Biden would follow through with his pledge to implement a “sole purpose” nuclear policy, the Biden administration published the 2022 edition of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a Congressionally-mandated document which describes United States nuclear strategy, policy, posture, and forces in support of the National Security Strategy (NSS) and National Defense Strategy (NDS).

It was a near carbon-copy of the February 2018 NPR published by the Trump administration, including language which enshrined as doctrine the U.S. ability to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively, even in scenarios that did not involve a nuclear threat.

In December 2022, during a reunion of personnel involved in the negotiation and implementation of the landmark 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, a senior Biden administration arms control official was asked by a veteran arms controller why Biden had backed away from his pledge regarding the “sole purpose” doctrine.

“The inter-agency wasn’t ready for it,” this official replied.

The “inter-agency” the official was referring to is the amalgam of departments and agencies, staffed by unelected career civil servants and military professionals who serve as the executioners of policy regarding America’s nuclear enterprise.

It was a surprising, and extremely disappointing, admission on the part of an official whose oath of office bound him or her to the bedrock constitutional principle of executive authority and civilian control of the military.

Biden had, even before being sworn in, received push-back regarding any alterations in the nuclear doctrine of the United States.

In September 2020, Admiral Charle Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, warned that, “We are on a trajectory, for the first time in our nation’s history, to face two peer nuclear-capable competitors.” Richard was referring to the nuclear arsenals of Russia and China.

Once he became president, Biden was immediately confronted with two major challenges for which he was ill-equipped to handle — the Russian-Ukraine crisis, and China’s assertion of its national interests over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Both involved the potential of military escalation leading up to direct force-on-force conflict between the U.S. military and their Russian and Chinese counterparts, both of which included the possibility of nuclear war.

The Russian initiation of its “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine, in February 2022, brought with it the inherent risk of escalation with NATO, leading to Russian threats about the potential for nuclear weapons use if NATO decided to directly intervene in Ukraine.

And a November 2022 Pentagon report forecast that China would increase its nuclear arsenal from around 400 weapons to more than 1,500 by 2035.

The New START treaty limits the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 each for the U.S. and Russia. The treaty was negotiated on the principle of bilateral reciprocity.



With the U.S. facing a potential Chinese nuclear arsenal of 1,500 weapons, and the existing Russian arsenal of around the same, it was clear that, left unchecked, the U.S. was going to find itself in a disadvantageous position when it came to its strategic nuclear forces.

While the NPR provides a general policy statement regarding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, there are two more documents — the President’s Nuclear Employment Guidance and the Secretary of Defense’s Nuclear Weapons Employment Planning and Posture Guidance — that direct planning for actual employment of nuclear weapons consistent with national policy.

The last Nuclear Employment Guidance document, published in 2019, was responsive to the 2018 NPR. This guidance fully incorporated the new low-yield W-76-2 nuclear warhead into the nuclear employment plans of the United States. It did the same for the new generation of B-61 gravity bombs that constitute NATO’s nuclear deterrence force.

The employment plans, which were based upon the concept of “escalate to de-escalate” (i.e. by using a small nuclear weapon, the U.S. and NATO would deter Russia from escalating out of fear of bringing on a general nuclear exchange.)

In short, America’s nuclear war plans were front loaded for the localized employment of nuclear weapons against both a Russian and Chinese threat.

This U.S. nuclear war plan was premised on the ability to deter Russian nuclear escalation and deter or defeat China’s nuclear force using the number of nuclear warheads permitted under the caps implemented by the New START treaty.

Facing a Stronger Nuclear China

However, the Biden administration is now confronted with the possibility and or probability of a much larger, capable Chinese strategic nuclear force capable of surviving a limited U.S. first-strike and delivering a nation-killing nuclear payload to U.S. soil in retaliation.

To adjust to this new reality, the U.S. would need to allocate nuclear warheads currently targeted against Russia onto China. This would require that the U.S. not only develop revised target lists for both Russia and China, but also rethink targeting strategies in general, looking to maximum physical destruction over political impact.

More dangerously, the U.S. would have to look at employment strategies that maximized the element of surprise to ensure all targets were hit by their designated weapons. This would require a change in the readiness posture and operational deployment areas of U.S. nuclear forces.

With increased readiness comes the need for vigilance against any preemption efforts by a potential nuclear adversary, meaning that U.S. nuclear forces will be placed on a higher alert status.

In short, the risk of nuclear war, inadvertent or otherwise, has become exponentially greater.

In March the Biden administration reportedly issued a new Nuclear Employment Guidance document reflecting this reality.

Nowhere in this guidance is there consideration for using arms control as a means of managing the nuclear equation, either by extending the New START treaty, or working with China to prevent a Chinese nuclear breakout.

Instead, the U.S. appears to be concerned about the erosion of nuclear deterrence that will be brought about by diverting weapons dedicated to non-Chinese contingencies. When seen in this light, the answer to the problem is more, not fewer, nuclear weapons.

This is why the U.S. is going to let the New START treaty lapse in February 2026 — once the treaty goes away, so, too, does the cap on the number of deployed warheads, and the U.S. nuclear establishment will be able to build up the U.S. operational nuclear arsenal so that there are enough weapons for every designated target.

The world is becoming a very dangerous place.

Nuclear weapons offer the illusion of security.

By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons.

And then we all die.

We are, literally, on a Highway to Hell.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/01/s ... y-to-hell/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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