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Military Industrial Complex

A People’s Guide To The War Industry: Portfolio Of Conflicts

June 4, 2021 Christian Sorensen, Consortium News. , , ,
Without looking at military adventurism through the lens of the corporation, analysts are bound to produce error-filled studies. For example, one analyst contended in an interview on The Real News Network, “Military force is almost never going to achieve your political aims. The Americans learned this in Vietnam. They’re learning it in Afghanistan. They’re learning it in Syria… So [President Barack] Obama supporting the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen is a sign really of incoherence on the part of the United States.” Far from incoherence, the behavior actually is quite rational. A variety of conflicts, disparate and some seemingly futile, is precisely the aim. Conflict itself — producing untold mountains of profit for war corporations and Wall Street — is the goal.

A People’s Guide To The War Industry: The New BOSS

June 3, 2021 Christian Sorensen, Consortium News. , , ,
To make more money, more and more aspects of life must be pulled into capital. This is why we see everything in civilian life being commodified, including food, housing, land and water. And this is why corporations take over many military functions. A given corporation now in charge of what was once a governmental job needs to get a layer of profit out of the task. To obtain that profit the corporation ends up over-charging, cutting jobs, polluting, and/or harming unions. Corporate America is in charge of the tasks that keep a military installation up and running. They call it “base operations support services,” or BOSS — one of the many business sectors of war. Corporations selling BOSS usually provide a combination of facility management, fire and emergency services, grounds maintenance, janitorial services, pavement clearance, pest control and waste management.

For Memorial Day, Here Is How We Stop All Wars

June 1, 2021 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
For Memorial Day week, Clearing the FOG speaks with David Swanson, the cofounder and executive director of World Beyond War, an international organization that is working to abolish all war. World Beyond War will hold its annual conference virtually from June 4 to 6. The conference, called "From Weapons Fairs to War Zones: Unraveling the War Machine," will bring activists together to share how they are stopping weapons corporation exhibitions, divesting from war, closing foreign bases and more. They will discuss what type of world they are working to create. David also speaks about his recent book, "Leaving World War II Behind," that debunks the myth of that as "the last good war."

Disrupt Land Forces Week Of Action Begins

May 30, 2021 Andy Paine, Disrupt Land Forces. , , ,
It was Thursday afternoon peak hour in South Brisbane, soundtracked as usual by trucks rumbling down the busy thoroughfares of the area. But these were not the usual trucks, and the response to them was not the customary indifference we give to our surroundings on busy city streets. Two trucks began to pull into the Brisbane Convention Centre. On the trailer of each were small military vehicles. One was an “Autonomous Combat Warrior” made by Rheinmetall. The company describes the vehicle as the “next generation of land vehicle systems warfighting capability”. Essentially it’s a giant remote controlled car with off-road wheels and guns. The trucks were headed for the Land Forces Defence Exposition, an arms industry sales event which will take place from June 1-3.

A People’s Guide To The War Industry: Bribery And Propaganda

May 29, 2021 Christian Sorensen, Consortium News. , , ,
Congress does not exercise effective oversight of the military-industrial-congressional complex. The average congressperson is clueless about the intricacies of war, espionage, and peace. The average congressperson on Armed Services or Intelligence committees is more aware, but their views are carefully circumscribed by a capitalist imperative for profit and the information that armed bureaucracies selectively divvy out. War corporations hire professional lobbying firms in order to influence federal policy. War corporations regularly spend millions on lobbying Capitol Hill. This is an effective, straightforward method for corporations to get their way. Jimmy Williams, a former lobbyist explained the system: “Years of legalized bribery had exposed me to the worst elements of our country’s political workings.

The Real Danger Of The Pentagon’s New Indo-Pacific Plan

March 30, 2021 Simone Chun, Counterpunch. , , ,
The Pentagon recently asked Congress for an astronomical $27 billion budget increase to support a massive military buildup in Asia  as part of its new Indo-Pacific plan, which calls for a substantially more aggressive military stance against China. With the US already ranking first in military spending worldwide and holding more than 290 military bases in the Asia-Pacific region alone, this aggressive buildup is being proposed at the most financially precarious moment in US history. According to the Congressional Budget Office report released this month, federal debt is projected to reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021 before surpassing its historical high of 107% in 2031 and going on to nearly double to 202% by 2051. According to Doug Bandow, “Uncle Sam is headed toward insolvency.”

What’s Behind The Biden Administration’s New $100 Billion Nuclear Missile System?

March 19, 2021 Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine. , , ,
One of the more important tasks that the Biden administration will undertake this year will be to review the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons budget and modernization strategy. According to a 2019 Congressional Budget Office report, the U.S. is committed to spending $494 billion on its nuclear forces over the next decade, or about $50 billion per year. Over the next three decades, nuclear weapons modernization plans could cost as much as $1.5-$2 trillion. This total includes investment in a $100 billion Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), a land-based nuclear missile, which is slated to replace the aging Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).

Who Are The Ultimate War Profiteers?

February 11, 2021 Christian Sorenson, Covert Action Magazine. , , ,
The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity. The war industry is composed of corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. government and allied capitalist regimes around the world.

Eisenhower’s Ghost Haunts Biden’s Foreign Policy Team

December 3, 2020 Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In his first words as President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony  Blinken said, “we have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence.” Many around the world will welcome this promise of humility from the new administration, and Americans should too. Biden's foreign policy team will also need a special kind of confidence to confront the most serious challenge they face. That will not be a threat from a hostile foreign country, but the controlling and corrupting power of the Military-Industrial Complex...

CIA Partners With Google, Amazon And IBM

November 25, 2020 Raul Diego, Mintpress News. , , ,
AWS currently holds the sole contract to provide cloud computing services to a number of intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the NSA. That contract is set to expire in 2023 and this new award – managed by the CIA – will further weaken Amazon’s once privileged position in the federal money sweepstakes, which had already taken a hard hit when Microsoft was unexpectedly chosen over Bezos’ company for the Department of Defense’s own cloud services contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program.

On War, Trump Has Largely Been An Appeaser

November 21, 2020 W. J. Astore, Bracing Views. , , ,
Yes, it’s good news that Trump is withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, though roughly 2500 troops will remain in each country when Joe Biden takes office in January. In short, Trump isn’t ending these wars; he’s merely reducing the number of boots on the ground. His Acting Defense Secretary, Chris Miller, described it as a “repositioning of forces from those two countries.” Repositioning! Perish the thought that the U.S. military might retreat or even withdraw. The answer is to “reposition” those deck chairs on the USS Titanic and its imperial wars, never mind the sinking feeling you may be experiencing.

New Report: More Than $1Billion From War Industry And Government Going To Think Tanks

October 23, 2020 Cassandra Simpson, Responsible Statecraft. , , ,
It’s well known that Pentagon contractors spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying, but the other powerful weapon contractors wield to influence U.S. national security priorities — think tanks — is often ignored. A report released today from the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, or FITI, at the Center for International Policy, where I work, reveals more than $1 billion in defense contractor and U.S. government funds flowing to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks from 2014-2019. It is part of a think tank’s role to recommend policy, and putting ideas forth into debate can be a public good.

Fortress On A Hill: Understanding The War Industry

October 1, 2020 Danny Sjursen, Fortress on a Hill. , , ,
Christian Sorenson stops by the podcast to discuss his new book “Understanding the War Industry”, a detailed look at contracting within the U.S. military industrial complex and how its giant war chest gets funneled to an endless list of contractors, without question to its necessity or what could have been purchased in its place. Everyone from libertarians to mainstream liberals to anarchists utters the words “military-industrial complex,” often as a catchall for murky forces that press the U.S. government into war. But what is this complex?

The CIA Democrats In The 2020 Elections

August 22, 2020 Patrick Martin, WSWS. , , , ,
In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats—nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one-quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives.

UFO Hype Is Probably Just The US Military Lying Again

July 26, 2020 Caitlin Johnstone. , , ,
“No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” reads a New York Times headline that is understandably attracting a great deal of attention today. True to form, the Times had to hastily issue an embarrassing correction to the article after initially reporting that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid “believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades”, when in fact Reid merely believes “crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred”.
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