Draining the Swamp

Benjamin Cassidy, installed by Trump as assistant secretary for legislative affairs, previously worked as a senior executive at Boeing’s international business sector, marketing Boeing military products abroad. Jonathan Rath Hoffman, named assistant secretary for public affairs, previously worked as a consultant to the Chertoff Group, the sprawling homeland security consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. The firm has come under fire for advising a variety of firms seeking government contracts, including for full-body scanners deemed invasive by privacy activists. Hoffman also led a state chapter of a neoconservative military-contractor advocacy organization during the 2016 presidential campaign. Neither position requires Senate confirmation.

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Before their confirmations, Jim Mattis and John Kelly, the secretaries of the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, were primarily paid by defense firms.

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Personnel from major defense companies now occupy the highest ranks of the administration including cabinet members and political appointees charged with implementing the Trump agenda. At least 15 officials with financial ties to defense contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far, with potentially more industry names on the way.

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Defense firms have eagerly watched as Trump recently unveiled a budget calling for $54 billion in additional military spending next year, as well as an additional $30 billion for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security for this fiscal year, which ends on September 31. About $15.5 billion of the $30 billion is slated to be spent on new military equipment.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has weaponized the revolving door by appointing defense contractors and their lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programs.

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In the White House, one of the newest members of the National Economic Council staff is Michael Catanzaro, formerly a registered lobbyist working for both Boeing and Halliburton.

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The Trump administration is the “military-industrial complex personified,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

  Lee Fang

Get the whole list here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Who Leaked the Podesta Emails? Who Hacked the DNC?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has suggested that the DNC leak came from a “disgruntled” Democrat upset with the DNC’s sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from the U.S. intelligence community.

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“John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number of other security services as well.”

[...]

In reference to the leak of the DNC emails, Murray noted that “Julian Assange took very close interest in the death of Seth Rich, the Democratic staff member” who had worked for the DNC on voter databases and was shot and killed on July 10 near his Washington, D.C., home.

Murray continued, “WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of his killers. So, obviously there are suspicions there about what’s happening and things are somewhat murky. I’m not saying – don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that he was the source of the [DNC] leaks. What I’m saying is that it’s probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believes that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks … whether correctly or incorrectly.”

Though acknowledging that such killings can become grist for conspiracy buffs, Murray added: “But people do die over this sort of stuff. There were billions of dollars – literally billions of dollars – behind Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and those people have lost their money.

“You have also to remember that there’s a big financial interest – particularly in the armaments industry – in a bad American relationship with Russia and the worse the relationship with Russia is the larger contracts the armaments industry can expect especially in the most high-tech high-profit side of fighter jets and missiles and that kind of thing.

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"So, there are people standing to lose billions of dollars and anybody who thinks in that situation bad things don’t happen to people is very naïve.”

  Consortium News

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Real Fake News

Black Agenda Report was one of the publications placed on the so-called "Fake News" list.

When the narrative at the heart of a system of rule falls apart, when the flow of history runs counter to the story told by those in power, then we know the entire edifice is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.

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[M]ilitary superiority is the only card U.S. imperialism has left to play in its bid for global domination. The world is outgrowing the U.S.-led, rigged economic and political system that is the last vestige of half a millennium of colonialism and white supremacy. Washington’s endless wars of aggression and regime change are desperate, scorched earth campaigns to avoid eclipse -- to stop the future from happening.

[...]

Unlike some others among the 13 leftist sites cited in the Washington Post/PropOrNot list, we at BAR will not whine that we don’t deserve to be slandered in such a manner. The function of ruling class publications is to disseminate and perfect a false narrative, so what else are we supposed to expect?

[...]

Domestically, the deteriorating living standards and rising inequality that is the inevitable [...] blowback from the global Race to the Bottom is framed as an inescapable consequence of modernity, a force much like the weather, which can be successfully managed by a technologically enlightened (and ethnically diverse) corporate leadership.

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We have entered an epoch in which everything that is said by the regime’s mouthpieces in the Democratic and Republican parties and the corporate media is, at root, a lie.

American “exceptionalism” is a lie. The U.S. has no moral or legal right to set itself above all other nations on Earth. The very act of claiming such a distinction is an abomination to modern notions of civilization. American exceptionalism is rebranded “Manifest Destiny,” which is nothing but an assertion of white supremacy over darker peoples. Barack Obama is, therefore, a racist imperial goon, in the same category as Donald Trump. There will be no break in the continuity of the lie, or the crimes, on January 20.

The U.S. is not engaged in a “War on Terror.” Along with Saudi Arabia, Washington has been the patron and puppeteer of Islamic jihadist terror for nearly 40 years, since jointly creating the previously nonexistent international jihadist network in Afghanistan.

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The United States is the biggest police state in the world, as measured by the number and proportion of its citizens that are imprisoned. It is also a fundamentally racist regime, based on the same prison numbers and the totality of its history of slavery, apartheid and genocide. Such overarching realities are in constant conflict with the official narrative and must, therefore, be delegitimized, along with those who dare to speak them.

  Bruce Dixon

Hooray for Trade

The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world's conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions.

  Stripes

But, hey. It's the basis of our economy.

Why Do They Really Need All That Data?

New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA’s Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

  Raw Story

Five Eyes. Yes, it really is a monster.

Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis – or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic “emergency” or “civil disturbance”:

“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”

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Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a “systematic effort” by the agency “to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations” linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Similarly, FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace.

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The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA’s global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.

Looking for the Proper Descriptor

Over the next week, we're going to be hearing a lot about how the sequester is going to gut our national defense so that some country with 90 percent fewer aircraft carriers than we have, and 99.9 percent fewer nuclear weapons, is going to march on up through Texas and impose sharia law on Augusta just before the Masters

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[Y]ou may not have heard that the F-35, the Flying Swiss Army Knife, aka The Lemon Of The Skies, got the entire fleet of itself grounded over the weekend by the Defense Department.[...]This thing already has cost $400 billion and it can...not...fly.

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This is the second time in two months that the entire fleet has had to be grounded. Not only that, but you and I and your Uncle Fud are all paying for most of the best pilots in the military to hang around Eglin Air Force Base, taxi these turkeys out onto the runways, and then taxi them back again because nobody dares to send them aloft.

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Its projected cost has jumped from $233 billion to an estimated $385 billion, including development.

Forty-three F-35s have been built and another 2,443 have been ordered by the Pentagon.

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They have built 43 of these. None of them can fly. So, naturally, we need almost 2500 more. The obscenity for this has not yet been coined

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Refocus - There's an Idea

President Barack Obama will unveil a revised US military strategy on Thursday designed to reflect fiscal constraints and a greater focus on the potential threat posed by a rising China, officials said.

The plan calls for confronting possible challenges from Iran and China with air and naval power while shifting away from counter-insurgency campaigns requiring large ground forces, officials and analysts said.

  Raw Story

Yeah, we haven’t been too successful with that guerilla warfare business. And if they could teach those kids they hype up not to fire missiles at anything that moves, they could also save some money.

“It sure looks clear that the administration wants to put more emphasis on the Pacific relative to the Middle East,” [Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,] said.

Previous presidents have attempted a similar change in course but “the Middle East has tended to get a lot of emphasis because things happen there that drag us in,” he said.

Oh, yeah, drag us in. We’re so reluctant.

US defense officials also said the strategy review likely will pave the way for reducing the military’s footprint in Europe, by eliminating at least one brigade, or about 3,500 troops.

I think we better call that a partial print.  Not even a whole whorl.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Mission Accomplished

Create a hornet's nest and then sell ‘em arms.

The United States is pushing ahead with a weapons deal with Iraq despite the near breakdown of the coalition government.

Reports suggest the deal is worth nearly $11bn and includes advanced fighter jets and tanks.

  alJazeera

Of course, it's not really the "United States" that's getting the benefit of the arms sales, is it?  

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.