Tuesday, April 25, 2017

The “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war. Yet as Eisenhower recognized the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources, and dictate our national priorities beyond the grave. Do you want to know what the military/industrial complex is now costing us? Well, read this.







Beware the Dogs of War: Is the American Empire on the Verge of Collapse?

By John W. Whitehead

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. — James Madison

April 15/16, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Waging endless wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Syria) isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

In fact, it’s a wonder the economy hasn’t collapsed yet.

Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs. Even then, government spending would have to be slashed dramatically and taxes raised.

You do the math.

The government is $19 trillion in debt: War spending has ratcheted up the nation’s debt. The debt has now exceeded a staggering $19 trillion and is growing at an alarming rate of $35 million/hour and $2 billion every 24 hours.  Yet while defense contractors are getting richer than their wildest dreams, we’re in hock to foreign nations such as Japan and China (our two largest foreign holders at $1.13 trillion and $1.12 trillion respectively).

The Pentagon’s annual budget consumes almost 100% of individual income tax revenue. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off, especially when it comes to paying the tab for America’s attempts to police the globe. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $57 million per hour.

The government has spent $4.8 trillion on wars abroad since 9/11, with $7.9 trillion in interest: That’s a tax burden of more than $16,000 per American. Almost a quarter of that debt was incurred as a result of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Syria. For the past 16 years, these wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing money from foreign nations and the U.S. Treasury. As the Atlantic points out, we’re fighting terrorism with a credit card. According to the Watson Institute for Public Affairs at Brown University, interest payments on what we’ve already borrowed for these failed wars could total over $7.9 trillion by 2053.

The government lost more than $160 billion to waste and fraud by the military and defense contractors: With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a $640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.

Taxpayers are being forced to pay $1.4 million per hour to provide U.S. weapons to countries that can’t afford them. As Mother Jones reports, the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Finance program “opens the way for the US government to pay for weapons for other countries—only to ‘promote world peace,’ of course—using your tax dollars, which are then recycled into the hands of military-industrial-complex corporations.”

The U.S. government spends more on wars (and military occupations) abroad every year than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. In fact, the U.S. spends more on its military than the eight highest-ranking nations with big defense budgets combined. The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As investigative journalist David Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

Now President Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion. Promising “an historic increase in defense spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States,” Trump has made it clear where his priorities lie, and it’s not with the American taxpayer. As The Nation reports, “On a planet where Americans account for 4.34 percent of the population, US military spending accounts for 37 percent of the global total.”

Add in the cost of waging war in Syria (with or without congressional approval), and the burden on taxpayers soars to more than $11.5 million a day. Ironically, while presidential candidate Trump was vehemently opposed to the U.S. use of force in Syria, as well as harboring Syrian refugees within the U.S., he had no problem retaliating against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on behalf of Syrian children killed in a chemical attack. The cost of launching a 59 Tomahawk missile-strike against Syria? It’s estimated that the missiles alone cost $60 million. Mind you, this is the same man, while campaigning for president, who warned that fighting Syria would signal the start of World War III against a united Syria, Russia and Iran. Already oil prices have started to climb as investors anticipate an extended conflict.

Clearly, war has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

Yet what most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and now Syria. However, the one that remains constant is that those who run the government—including the current president—are feeding the appetite of the military industrial complex and fattening the bank accounts of its investors.

Case in point: President Trump plans to “beef up” military spending while slashing funding for the environment, civil rights protections, the arts, minority-owned businesses, public broadcasting, Amtrak, rural airports and interstates.

In other words, in order to fund this burgeoning military empire that polices the globe, the U.S. government is prepared to bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez rightly asks:
Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there's something radically wrong with our strategy. Should 55% of the federal government's discretionary spending go to the military and only 3% to transportation when the toll in American lives is far greater from failing infrastructure than from terrorism? Does California need nearly as many active military bases (31, according to militarybases.com) as it has UC and state university campuses (33)? And does the state need more active duty military personnel (168,000, according to Governing magazine) than public elementary school teachers (139,000)?

Obviously, there are much better uses for your taxpayer funds than trillions of dollars being wasted on war. The following are just a few ways those hard-earned dollars could be used:
  • $120 billion a year to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. With 32% of the nation’s major roadways in poor or mediocre condition, it’s estimated that improving the nation’s roads and bridges would require $120 billion a year through 2020, although it will take “many trillions ... to fix the country's web of roads, bridges, railways, subways and bus stations.”
  • $251 million for safety improvements and construction for Amtrak.
  • $690 million to care for America’s 70,000 aging veterans.
  • $11 billion per year to provide the world—including our own failing cities—with clean drinking water.
As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to wage its costly, meaningless, endless wars abroad, the American homeland will continue to suffer: our roads will crumble, our bridges will fail, our schools will fall into disrepair, our drinking water will become undrinkable, our communities will destabilize, and crime will rise.

Here’s the kicker, though: if the American economy collapses—and with it the last vestiges of our constitutional republic—it will be the government and its trillion-dollar war budgets that are to blame.

Of course, the government has already anticipated this breakdown.

That’s why the government has transformed America into a war zone, turned the nation into a surveillance state, and labelled “we the people” as enemy combatants.

For years now, the government has worked with the military to prepare for widespread civil unrest brought about by “economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Having spent more than half a century exporting war to foreign lands, profiting from war, and creating a national economy seemingly dependent on the spoils of war, the war hawks long ago turned their profit-driven appetites on us, bringing home the spoils of war—the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.—and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield.

This is how the police state wins and “we the people” lose.

Eventually, however, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all military empires fail.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Wake up, America. There’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Paul Craig Roberts: "The reckless and irresponsible war talk in the US government and presstitute media and among NATO and Washington’s vassals must stop immediately. Life is in the balance." "Putin has shown amazing patience with Washington’s lies and provocations, but he cannot risk Russia by trusting Washington, whom no one can trust. Not the American people, not the Russian people, not any people."










Is That Armageddon Over The Horizon?


April 12 2017

Is That Armageddon Over The Horizon?

Paul Craig Roberts

The insouciance of the Western world is extraordinary. It is not only Americans who permit themselves to be brainwashed by CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and Washington Post, but also their counterparts in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, who rely on the war propaganda machine that poses as a media. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39573526
 
The Western “leaders,” that is, the puppets on the end of the strings pulled by the powerful private interest groups and the Deep State, are just as insouciant. Trump and his counterparts in the American Empire must be unaware that they are provoking war with Russia and China, or else they are psychopaths.

A new White House Fool has replaced the old fool. The New Fool has sent his Secretary of State to Russia. For what? To deliver an ultimatum? To make more false accusations? To apologize for the lies?

Consider the audacity of Secretary of State Tillerson. He has spent the week prior to his visit to Moscow supporting incredible lies and false allegations that Assad of Syria used chemical weapons with Russia’s permission, which justified Washington’s unambigious war crime of a military attack on a country with which the US has not declared war. Less than 100 days in office, and Trump is already a war criminal along with the rest of his warmonger government.

The entire world knows this, but no one says it. Instead, Tillerson, who has been heavy with lies and threats has the confidence to go to Moscow to tell the Russians that they have to hand over Assad to the American Uni-Power.

Tillerson’s mission demonstrates the complete, total unreality of the world in which Washington lives. Try to imagine Tillerson’s arrogance. If you had been bad-mouthing and threatening strong, important people, would you feel comfortable going over to their house to have dinner with them? Does Tillerson think that now that Russia has largely freed Syria of US-supported ISIS, Russia is going to turn Syria over to Washington?

Is he going to tell Lavrov that he didn’t really mean all those nasty lies he told about Russia, but the zionist neoconservatives made him do it? That he is not really in charge, just a tool of the Anglo-Zionist Empire?

Is Tillerson going to apologize for White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s statement that Assad, Russia’s ally, is more evil than Hitler? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39573063 

Maybe Tillerson is going to ask for asylum and get on the winning side.

Stephen Cohen, one of the few remaining Americans knowledgeable about Russia, told the two CNN presstitutes and the warmonger Col. Leighton, one of the “experts” that the presstitutes roll out to pronounce the propaganda against Russia, that Russia was preparing for hot war. It seems to have gone over the heads of the CNN presstitutes and colonel. Whose payroll are they on? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46838.htm 

The Russian leaders, who, unlike the Western liars, speak the truth, have said clearly that Russia will never again fight a war on her own territory. The Russians couldn’t put it more clearly. Provoke a war, and we will destroy you on your own territory.

When you watch the president and government in Washington, the European governments, especially the idiots in London, the Canadian and Australian governments, you can only marvel at the total stupidity of “Western leadership.” They are begging for the end of the world.

And the presstitutes are at work driving toward the end of life. Huge numbers of Western peoples are being prepared for their demise, and they are protected from the realization by their insouciance.
 
Washington is so arrogant and lost in its own hubris, that Washington does not understand that the years of clear-as-crystal lies about Russia and Russian intentions and deeds have convinced Russia that Washington is preparing the populations of the United States and Washington’s captive peoples in West and East Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan for a US pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia. Published US war plans against China have convinced China of the same.

If not for war, what else is the change in US war doctrine for? George W. Bush abandoned the stabilizing role of nuclear weapons by moving them from a retaliatory function to a nuclear first strike. Then he pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty concluded by President Richard Nixon. Now we have US missile sites positioned on Russia’s borders. We tell the Russians the lie that the missiles are to prevent an Iranian nuclear ICBM strike against Europe. This lie is told, and accepted by the puppets in Europe, despite the known, incontestable fact that Iran has neither nukes nor ICBMs. But the Russians do not accept it. They know it is another Washington lie.

When Russia hears these flagrant, blatant, obvious lies, Russia understands that Washington intends a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia.

China has reached the same conclusion.

So, here is the situation. Two countries with nuclear forces expect that the insane fools who rule the West are going to attack them with nuclear weapons. What are Russia and China doing? Are they begging for mercy?

No. They are preparing to destroy the evil West, a collection of liars and war criminals, the like of which the world has never previously experienced.

It is the US, the washed-up joke of a “uni-power” that after 16 years is still unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban in Afghanistan, that needs to ask for mercy.

The reckless and irresponsible war talk in the US government and presstitute media and among NATO and Washington’s vassals must stop immediately. Life is in the balance.

Putin has shown amazing patience with Washington’s lies and provocations, but he cannot risk Russia by trusting Washington, whom no one can trust. Not the American people, not the Russian people, not any people.

By jumping on the Deep State’s propaganda wagon the liberal/progressive/left is complicit in the march toward Armageddon. 

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Welcome to theREALnews.com, the only nation-wide news service that eschews nuclear holocost that could kill us all. Yet the insane US "mainstream media" can't wait to exchange ICBCs with Russia.










Original Here:

 
Trump's Syria Attack Sanctioned by the Media

Media critic Norman Solomon says US media's uncritical coverage of Trump's Syria attack is typical and has its roots in ratings spikes and in economic ties to the military-industrial complex


https://youtu.be/fW_UTtng7-s
 
Norman Solomon wrote the nationally syndicated "Media Beat" weekly column from 1992 to 2009. He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a consortium of policy researchers and analysts. Solomon is co-founder of the national group RootsAction.org, which now has more than 700,000 active members.

Sunday, April 09, 2017

I would have put this up first, had I seen it first. So please read my header on the one below. Both of today's posts bear on the deadly reversal of Trump's view of Syria and Russia.






















Because I have a relatively small readership, I have sometimes separated my posts by as much as two weeks so that more of you will find my important ones. But this weekend is different. It has to do with the sudden cry that Syria must be bombed to ground in order to save its people. Of course, that is absurd, but thanks to the military-industrial-security complex and the lies of the despicable mainstream media, this is where the U.S. is now headed. So please read my last two posts before tackling this very important, but long, essay by Glenn Greenwald. Wake up America!











Trump In Freefall Collapse


April 9, 2017

Trump In Freefall Collapse

Glenn Greenwald explains the hypocrisy of the US political class and the removal of constitutional restraint on the power of the presidency. What he misses, perhaps, is the power of the Deep State. It required less than 100 days for Deep State propaganda to completely reverse President Trump’s announced policy of normalizing relations with Russia and removing the US from the Syrian conflict that Washington initiated. It is a far-fetched notion that the US has an accountable government. 

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/07/the-spoils-of-war-trump-lavished-with-media-and-bipartisan-praise-for-bombing-syria/

Saturday, April 08, 2017

Most Americans don't know this, but the bylaws of the United Nations (aka the UN) state that any member state that attacks another for no good reason is regarded to be a WAR CRIME. The UN has enforced this rule in the case of all its members ...except the US, which has been granted a free ticket. Today the U.S. has drones bombing 7 countries, and in the past has killed or displaced millions of innocents. For a long time, Russia has tried to get along with the U.S. driving the Islamic State out of Syria. But now they realize that the U.S. has no intentions to do so. Therefore, because Russia was invited by Syria to protect against exterior attack THEY are NOT war criminals.








































Russian Foreign Ministry announced cessation of all aviation agreements, regarding airspace security over Syria operations. 

In a statement, issued on Friday, it was declared that the US military presence in Syria is illegal and that the strikes, verified by the US government, constitute an act of aggression and breach all international conventions and laws. The statement also called on the UN Security Council to convene an emergency session to discuss the US missile strikes on Syrian territory, while also announcing a cessation of all aviation agreements (mainly related to security) in Syria with US.

The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that Washington had taken the decision to strike Syria even before the events in Khan Sheikhoun Idlib, that were later used as a pretext to the US strikes that represent an act of aggression against the sovereignty of the Syrian state, asserting that Damascus never used chemical weapons in Idleb, a fact that has repeatedly been confirmed by experts.

Earlier on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the US strikes on Syrian Army positions, whose main purpose was to divert attention from the atrocities of the terrorist group Al Nusra Front, will have a negative effect on the already strained Moscow-Washington relations. He further stated that Washington never bothered to provide a single evidence about Syrian Army using chemical weapons.

The illegal US intervention in Syria also triggered a response from Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that the respect for the Syrian people in regards to the the choice of their leader must be maintained. It also made calls to avoid any further deterioration of the situation in Syria, following the overnight US strikes on Syrian military positions.

Hua Chunying, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said "We are opposed to the use of chemical weapons by any countries, organizations or individuals, and whatever the circumstances and goals may be".