A 48-page reprint of Smedley Butler's 1935 booklet War Is A Racket. Foreword by Cindy Sheehan. Each copy is autographed by Cindy and includes a free download link of the audio recording in a digital MP3 file format. Order here: WWW.WARISARACKET.NET
369,256 People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR 13,314 Police or Sheriff's Patrol Officers for One Year OR 16,317 Firefighters for One Year OR 148,755 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR 223,882 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR 656,044 Children Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR 141,455 Head Start Slots for Children for One Year OR 440,995 Households with Renewable Electricity - Solar Photovoltaic for One Year OR 16,140 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR 1,175,986 Households with Renewable Electricity-Wind Power for One Year
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 06/12/2010 - 1:08am
This story made me stop and take notice.
According to Mike Ludwig at truthout, Texas and Arizona lawmakers are getting serious campaign contributions from the "drone-makers".
Funny thing, now those same lawmakers want the FAA to approve drone flights over the entire Texas border despite the fact that that border is considered safe.
But that is so not the point, is it?
Let's make it more unsafe, then, just to keep the campaign money pouring in and to keep the killing machine makers fat and happy.
Those in the American corporate media and political elite are in love with the sleek, smooth, efficient, mechanical birds of prey. As jawbone of corrente brought up recently, God knows how many of our Earth's living birds are struggling and dying thanks to the BP catastrophe. The grim irony is that Obama-drones, those high-tech Frankenstein-birds of execution, are replacing them thanks to the war- and death-mongering Congress and administration, a humanity-hating corporate media, along with their collectively-joined-at-the-hip, psychopathic, "corporate person", profits-forever-over-people pals. And when I say in this case, "profits over people" -- I mean "OVER THEIR DEAD BODIES."
So some drone operator sipping his vanilla latte in a comfy chair in Nevada, with one hand on his joy stick, can less messily -- from his end, that is -- kill a Mexican kid with a rock.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 05/29/2010 - 1:12am
According to James A. Lucas, the War in Afghanistan has cost the U.S. taxpayer $260 billion. Lucas translates this into White House rhetoric as being "money for the rebuilding of Afghanistan."
Then he challenges:
Ann Jones, a former humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, not long ago blew the whistle on this scam. The author of Kabul in Winter, she reported that between 2002 and 2008 the U.S. pledged $10.4 billion for development but delivered only $5 billion of that amount, 47 percent of which was paid to American experts, who often were unqualified, instead of going to unemployed Afghans who were supposed to benefit from this aid.
Two more of Ms. Jones' revelations:
1) Public teachers and administrators often leave Afghan institutions to work for private contractors for more money. The Afghan institutions are therefore weakened not strengthened. U.S. money often goes to private contractors for their "literacy programs," etc.
2) 70% of aid is tied to purchasing American products in preference to products originating in Afghanistan. Afghans must buy American agricultural products, thus putting them out of business and driving them to the poppy trade or adding them to the 40% of the population now unemployed.
Lucas provides further glaring reports and abuses of U.S. funding through corruption and/or incompetence over the years in Afghanistan:
Submitted by libbyliberal on Thu, 05/27/2010 - 10:45am
Bill Quigley, law professor at Loyola University, has done the numbers crunching for us. All we have to do now is open our eyes and comprehend them, intellectually -- and morally might be a refreshing dimension, also.
No doubt, the USA is number one in war. This coming year the US will spend 708 billion dollars on war and another $125 billion for Veterans Affairs - over $830 billion. In a distant second place is China which spent about $84 billion on its military in 2008.
The US also leads the world in the sale of lethal weapons to others, selling about one of every three weapons worldwide. The USA's major clients? South Korea, Israel and United Arab Emirates.
Our country has 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for more than 40% of the military spending for the whole world.
Prof. Quigley factors in the, as always, apparently irrelevant or minimal human cost to America’s administrative, recent and present, and legislative leaders:
Our nation does not respect our soldiers by engaging in permanent war. War is grinding up our children. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost over 5000 US lives and tens of thousands more lives of people in those countries. Over 20% of those in our military who served in these two wars, 320,000 people, have war-related traumatic brain injuries. Suicide rates are up by 26 percent among 18 to 29 year old male veterans in the latest Veterans Administration study. Mental health hospitalizations are now the leading cause of hospital admissions for the military, higher than injuries. On any given night, over 100,000 veterans are homeless and living on our nation's streets.
Prof. Quigley also factors in the systematic erosion … hell … bald-faced annihilation of our Bill of Rights in the name of permanent war.
A year after President Obama pledged to end the practice of funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with "emergency" spending bills, the Senate is taking up a $60 billion request that would do exactly that.
The spending bill, which includes $33 billion for the two wars in addition to disaster relief funds and aid for Haiti, is running headlong into concern from war-weary Democrats and deficit-conscious Republicans.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the bill a "heavy lift" in her chamber. But the Senate, which is taking up the request first, could be the scene of a spending stand-off between Democrats and Republicans.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., plans to offer an amendment requiring Congress to offset the cost of the package with spending cuts elsewhere. He slammed the administration for continuing to use the "emergency" supplemental to fund the wars -- by designating the spending bill as "emergency," Congress avoids having to find a way to pay for it.
[...]
Of course the duplicitous Coburn said absolutely nothing about curbing spending when Bush was President. And his cuts are most certainly going to be in social programs
There’s a crisis on our hands in California. The cost of the war in Afghanistan is making basic goals, such as stable housing, decent work and education, nearly impossible to maintain.
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Sat, 03/13/2010 - 4:40pm
Remember in the last post I said that Michael Chertoff was going to get his own post in this series? Well, he's going to get at least two, and this is the first one. It's very serendipitous for him that he just happens to represent a company, ironically called Rapiscan (as in raping of civil rights) that is positioned to make a huge profit from the rhetoric generated by Chertoff in the wake the strange story of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Below are a few paragraphs from Antifascist Calling that summarize his involvement, followed by the full article. And my guess is that these expensive machines will go the way of the discontinued Puffers
On New Year's eve, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff penned a Washington Post op-ed that argued "whole-body imagers" should be deployed world-wide.
[...]
Currently TSA has fielded 40 machines at 19 airports with more on the way. Indeed, the agency handed out a $25 million contract last October to Rapiscan Security Systems for 30 more peep-show devices with funds generously provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
What Chertoff failed to disclose however, is that since leaving the secret state's employ his security consulting firm, The Chertoff Group, "includes a client that manufactures the machines" according to The Washington Post.
Over the last few weeks there have been a series of posts at different websites that have documented the latest variations of the conjunction of the military and anti-terror industrial complex with our government. I'm going to call it the Fear Industrial Complex because to be boxed in into the Military Industrial Complex would be inaccurate and wouldn't even come close to defining the collusion of 1) the military wing, with 2) the security wing, with 3) the Congressional wing, with 4) the Presidential wing and lastly 5) the media wing of the complex . There are so many links that if I tried to put them all in one post it would take several hours to put together and would shortshrift them all and be a disservice to the thought-provoking information.
With that, here's the first post by Frida Berrigan, with an intro by Tom Engelhardt in the link. I'm posting the entire thing because things like this have a way of disappearing
On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 7:05pm
This is such a good blog, I posted the entire thing. But please click on the header to read the original. What we are being sold about Afghanistan is a reprise of The Simla Manifesto
Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Butler depicting William Brydon who was the sole British survivor after Britain's catastrophic retreat from Kabul.
A leading advisor to the U.S. military, the Rand Corporation, released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida". The report confirms what experts have been saying for years: the war on terror is actually weakening national security.
"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism."
On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.
