The billions of dollars in weapons America is sending to Ukraine are ending up in Mexico. Nice. https://t.co/bvj899XaBM
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 1, 2023
Military industrialized complex
Russia just proved that its hypersonic missiles can pierce NATO’s defenses with ease, thus representing a military game-changer and possibly even soon a diplomatic one too if the West realizes that it’s better to agree to a ceasefire after the end of Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive than escalate their proxy war on Russia to a conventional one in pursuit of that targeted Great Power’s “Balkanization”.
The fake news that circulated earlier this month alleging that Kiev’s Patriots shot down one of Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles has become even more ridiculous in the days after since they’re now claiming that another six were supposedly downed during a recent strike. The Mainstream Media’s (MSM) laundering of these lies isn’t just due to them taking everything their Ukrainian proxies say at face value, but even includes their own military experts actively contributing to this disinformation campaign.
The US’ Patriots lack the technical capabilities to track and intercept hypersonic projectiles, but that isn’t anything for them to be embarrassed about since there doesn’t presently exist any air defense system in the world that could do this. The West’s problem is therefore one of perceptions, however, since the MSM hyped up their deployment to Ukraine to the point where the public expected that former Soviet Republic to become invulnerable to any Russian strikes.
The Kremlin was aware of the West’s soft power interests in transferring this equipment there, hence why it cleverly decided to include several hypersonic missiles in its latest spree of strikes against military targets, knowing that there was no way that they’d be intercepted and thus discrediting their opponents. Not only that, but they even managed to destroy five launchers and a multifunctional radar on 16 May according to the Russian Ministry of Defense’s report that was shared the day after.
Footage of that night’s strikes subsequently appeared on social media, after which those who shared such were detained by the Ukrainian secret police on the pretext that this could have helped Russia’s military-intelligence services. In reality, Kiev was left flustered after that same footage showed how many millions of dollars’ worth of air defense missiles were wasted in trying to shoot down the Kinzhals. The US also confirmed that the Patriots were indeed damaged but denied that any of them were destroyed.
Nevertheless, the public was able to see for themselves just how desperate Kiev was to intercept those hypersonic projectiles, and many interpreted America’s confirmation that the Patriots were damaged as a limited hangout to deflect from their suspicions that they were actually destroyed. 16 May will therefore be seen in hindsight as a pivotal turning point in popular perceptions since Russia’s claim that its Kinzhals smashed the Patriots is believed by a growing number of people after watching that footage.
Continue:
Dear generous, gullible, enslaved EU taxpayer: In the last week, over 2 billion dollars of weapons and ammunition were destroyed in Ukraine. Ammunition depot in Khmelnitsky. +500 Million dollars Patriot system : 1.1 billion dollars 30 Patriot missiles launched in 2 minutes. . 150 million dollars. and…more.
Dear EU voter, keep supporting your politicians that are working for who funds them. The Pharma, the military-industrial complex, Wall Street… they are laughing at you while they are getting richer and you are getting poorer with curent hyperinflation. Salava Ukraine flag bearer / EU-NATO clown supporter.
In the meantime, keep being lobotomised by porn, Netflix, football, drugs, beer, junk food. And keep believing you have freedom and that you are in control of your life. You are either guilty because you know all this and stay silent or a victim because of your ignorance, making you a useful idiot.
The full U.S. military budget is much more than the $514 billion spent by the rest of the world’s 144 nations combined. That’s a difference of $363 billion, which would be enough to fund solar power for nearly every household in the U.S. for 10 years.
May 09, 2023
World military spending has reached a new record high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That’s up 3.7% since the previous year, including the steepest increase among European nations since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago.
The United States remains the world’s largest military spender by far, with its $877 billion representing 39% of global military spending. That’s three times as much as the second largest spender, China, which spent $292 billion in 2022. And it’s about ten times as much as the next largest spender, Russia, which spent about $86 billion in the same year.
U.S. spending is more than the next ten countries combined, more than last year when it was larger than the next nine. Many of these next ten countries are geopolitically aligned with the U.S. — including Ukraine, which had the highest single-year increase in military spending SIPRI has ever recorded, rising 640% to $44 billion since Russia invaded.
U.S. military aid to Ukraine amounted to $19.9 billion in 2022, but this was only 2.3% of total U.S. military spending. Military spending by NATO members, including the U.S., totalled $1.232 trillion in 2022, up 0.9% since 2021. Many analysts have predicted a long-term war of attrition, with no victory in sight for either side – it remains unclear how continuously increasing militarization can end this war.
Meanwhile, basic needs continue to go unmet for hundreds of millions of people around the world. The climate crisis continues to wreak havoc, and the U.S. has barely begun to address its historical responsibility in contributing to global fossil fuel emissions. The nations of the world are dangerously unprepared to secure our collective planetary future.
The full U.S. military budget is much more than the $514 billion spent by the rest of the world’s 144 nations combined. That’s a difference of $363 billion, which would be enough to fund solar power for nearly every household in the U.S. for 10 years.
$363 billion would be enough to fund 43 million public housing units – more than the 38 million people displaced as refugees in the post-9/11 wars waged by the U.S. over the past two decades.
Just 10% of the U.S. military budget would go a long way toward meeting any number of societal needs.
It’s worth noting that it’s not inevitable for countries to keep perpetually increasing their military budgets – a number of large nations, like Nigeria and Turkey, have significantly decreased military spending in the past year.
Over-investment in the military is a major cause of the crises we face today. But it’s possible to reinvest in real solutions and begin to repair the harm caused by many decades of war.
Kennedy called for an end to the “corrupt merger of corporate and state power,” also known as an embedded administrative state within the Federal government which controls implementation of almost every Federal program at will as they use their influence to create outcomes on behalf of their corporate entities. Kennedy identified the “corporate kleptocracy as a‘cushy socialism for the rich’ and a ‘brutal merciless capitalism for the poor.’
“It keeps us in a state of war, it bails out banks. Last month the Federal government told 30 million Americans they were cutting their food stamp checks by 90%. It took fifteen million people off Medicare, the same month it gave $300 million to the Silicon Valley Bank and tapped up the cost of the Ukraine war to $113 billion. The entire budget of EPA is $12 billion, and the CDC budget is $11 billion. The way we do this is printing money; we printed ten centuries of money in the last fourteen years.”
Global Research, May 03, 2023
Region: USA
Theme: Militarization and WMD
***
It is not surprising that Deep State President Joe Biden, who is the oldest living American President ever, has the audacity to announce that he will be a candidate in the 2024 Presidential campaign even though 70% of Americans believe he should not make a second run.
That percentage includes 51% of Democrats as 67% of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. With Kamala Harris as his vice president, 37% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance and even the pathetic Sen. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Biden’s re-election.
In a pre-packaged three minute video rather than a real live recitation, Biden’s claim to ‘let’s finish the job’ as he continues to spread a fabricated reality with false assertions while encouraging divisiveness in today’s political landscape with an attack on former President Trump and MAGA supporters.
There was no mention of his fiasco presiding over an unnecessary $113 Billion proxy war in Ukraine that began with the 2014 coup, Seventh Fleet invasion of China’s territorial waters in the South China Sea and most recently, challenges to North Korea’s ‘aggression’ with deployment of a nuclear-armed submarine as well as a series of severe economic sanctions against recalcitrant nations (which have boomeranged against the US economy) and the Nord Stream pipeline bombing which is categorized as an ‘act of war.’
Since Biden is little more than a frontman for a highly motivated team of political operatives led by former President Barack Obama or the diabolic WEF Klaus Schwab or some equally malevolent dark political entity, the country has been seized by the totalitarian clique as his administration targets the First Amendment as if free speech is tyrannical permitting government to criminalize political dissent. At the same time, the Biden Administration has allowed an invasion of titanic proportions at the southern border as UN-funded NGO’s threaten US sovereignty with an expected infiltration of up to one million illegal immigrants awaiting the potential lifting of Title 42 on May 11th.
All Biden policies display an utter contempt for the rule of law as the result of a deliberate strategy to collapse the US and its Constitution from within as the US rules-based order has replaced international law, dictating its imperialist foreign policy based on an interventionism-at-will strategy with a bankrupt Country able to only print Monopoly paper money of no real value.
While the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has a forbidding reputation for engineering favorable election result for their choice of candidate; legitimacy, ethics and public opinion notwithstanding, they have “with no plan to sponsor primary debates.” With Biden as its favored candidate, partisan politics has morphed into spiritual warfare, as a diabolic contest of wicked proportions contrary to the country’s divinely inspired beginnings and yet the Dems remain the odds-on-favorite to win via ballot harvesting and other election day trickery.
It is, however, a fitting response to the discredited Democrats and its handlers that an exceptional Presidential primary challenger has emerged who is genetically opposed to the malicious agenda espoused by Biden and its authoritarian elite. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of the prestigious political Kennedy clan, is the most superior and influential Democrat who could have entered the campaign; not because of his last name but rather because he is a gifted orator, an incisive thinker with a penetrating analytical mind and fortunate enough to be imbued with integrity and a strength of character.
Having viewed RFK’s speech at Hillsdale College on “Anthony Fauci and the Public Health Establishment,” at Dartmouth University on “College Covid 19 Mandates” and his interview as one of Tucker’s last guests, the American public would be wise to pay attention and listen closely to the most knowledgeable and talented extemporaneous Presidential candidate on the American political scene since….1963.
Author of The Real Anthony Fauci as well as a history of voluminous lawsuits all predicated on science have established Kennedy’s bona fides as a professional advocate on Covid 19 and the methodical study of the material world known as ‘science.’ He is more knowledgeable than any other candidate with regard to all the implications of the pandemic and its mandated minutiae of masks, distance, shutdowns, vaccinations, and impacts on American culture and the health of its children.
Kennedy’s accomplishments are extensive and remarkable as Founder, Chair and General Counsel of the Children’s Health Defense, Founder of the Waterkeepers Alliance, legal counsel at Morgan and Morgan personal injury law firm with a BA from Harvard, a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, an LLM from Pace University School of Law and studied at the London School of Economics. He is the recipient of numerous awards with a forthcoming book entitled “The Wuhan Coverup: How US officials Conspired with Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of Covid 19”.
RFK’s appearance at Hillsdale, the only college in the country that did not shutdown during the Covid Pandemic, occurred in early March just prior to his formal announcement as a candidate. An appreciative and receptive audience, Kennedy’s provided a wide-ranging extraordinary presentation on a variety of formidable topics beginning with his efforts on behalf of the Hudson River Riverkeepers to clean up industrial pollution.
He especially focused on collusion between regulatory ‘captured’ state-federal agencies and powerful corporations like big Pharma, detailing the impacts of mercury and DPT vaccines on children and his experiences with Dr. Fauci. Kennedy outlined Covid related attacks on the Constitution including government imposed ‘arbitrary and capricious’ censorship to limit conversation about the truth of Covid including violations of freedom of assembly, enforced social distance w/no due process, compulsory closing of churches with no supporting science and reiterated that ‘the Constitution is the heart and soul of this country.”
Adding that President Reagan’s agreement to provide full vaccine immunity as a liability shield (due to “unavoidable adverse side effects”) allowed that vaccines are the only medical product never required to conduct pre-licensing safety studies as Big Pharma has paid $35 billion in criminal penalties in last ten years. In addition, Kennedy cited a 1989 explosion in chronic health issues for children related to mandated vaccines.
As a lifelong student of the CIA, Kennedy identified the role of his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, former US Ambassador to the UK, who served on the Hoover Commission and voted to disband the CIA; thus beginning a sixty year Kennedy family fight with the CIA which led RFK to write “American Values: Lessons Learned from my Family.” He identified the CIA in developing bioweapons at Ft. Detrick including the anthrax attack during Patriot Act consideration in 2001. On JFK’s assassination, RFK shared that evil doer Allen Dulles who had been fired from the CIA, was quoted “I’m glad the little shit is dead. He thought he was a God.”
Kennedy’s Hillsdale appearance was followed by formal announcement of his candidacy in Boston which added current foreign policy and economic crisis to his agenda questioning whether pushing Russia and China together is in US national interest and what is objective of the war. Suggesting the US is in Ukraine ‘for the right reasons” although he questioned a nuclear exchange with a country that has more nukes and US prolonging the war is not a good idea. Like the majority of Congress including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Kennedy would benefit from an in depth briefing by Scott Ritter and/or Colonel Doug MacGregor for a total understanding of the CIA initiated 2014 coup, Russia’s Special Military Operation and NATOs presence threatening Russian sovereignty.
RFK told the audience that after the Soviet Union collapse in 1990, the US never activated its peace dividend which was expected to decrease defense spending from $6 billion to $2 billion as the US made more foreign enemies around the world while increasing its military budget to $8.8 billion. Citing the economy as a source of American strength, ‘not bullets and weapons’ and that while the US spent $8 Trillion in Iraq, China built bridges, ports and infrastructure as it is displacing the US as a trading partner. “While China is earning good will, the US spends $800 Billion on the military.” Having lost Saudi Arabia as “our number one ally in the Shia Crescent”, which has been a key foreign policy objective in the Mideast, RFK suggested that “US foreign policy has collapsed and is no longer a coherent strategy.”
With de-dollarization, lowered oil production, Iraq now a proxy state of Iran, the entire US strategy in the Middle East has disintegrated. RFK suggested we need to do something FAST and committed to “close 800 US overseas bases and bring American troops home immediately in order to make the US an exemplary democracy again” as the Democratic party has lost its identity.
“The worse thing Trump did was the lockdown. In fairness, the bureaucrats rolled him on it; he did not want to do it. But that it not a good enough excuse. He was President of the United States. In May 2020, six hundred doctors sent a letter to Trump asking him to not do the lockdowns.” He said “bureaucrats were coming after him; he had the right instincts. He knew he shouldn’t close down the country but he didn’t; he got rolled by his bureaucracy. At this time in history, you need a President who can stand up to his bureaucracy.”
Kennedy pointed to Trump’s appointment of Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a well-known physician with ties to the pharmaceutical industry as an FDA Commissioner in March, 2017 to eliminate some of the agency’s “regulatory burdens”. Two years later, on June 27, 2019, Gottlieb was elected to Pfizer’s Board of Directors to serve on its Regulatory and Compliance Committee. According to US Federal Election Commission documents (page 163), Pfizer, Inc. donated $1 million to Trump’s Presidential Inauguration Committee on December 22, 2016 and received four tickets to the Leadership Luncheon with Cabinet appointees and House and Senate Leadership.
Only a political neophyte might not recognize the ‘coincidence’ that within days after RFK’s appearance as a Presidential candidate on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker was unceremoniously removed from his Fox program.
Kennedy called for an end to the “corrupt merger of corporate and state power,” also known as an embedded administrative state within the Federal government which controls implementation of almost every Federal program at will as they use their influence to create outcomes on behalf of their corporate entities. Kennedy identified the “corporate kleptocracy as a‘cushy socialism for the rich’ and a ‘brutal merciless capitalism for the poor.’
He continued
“It keeps us in a state of war, it bails out banks. Last month the Federal government told 30 million Americans they were cutting their food stamp checks by 90%. It took fifteen million people off Medicare, the same month it gave $300 million to the Silicon Valley Bank and tapped up the cost of the Ukraine war to $113 billion. The entire budget of EPA is $12 billion, and the CDC budget is $11 billion. The way we do this is printing money; we printed ten centuries of money in the last fourteen years.” We have raised food prices for basic foods like chicken, dairy, milk by 76% in the last two years and now we’re cutting food stamps and bailing out banks in the same month. We need to get rid of this corporate control of our government.”
RFK’s appearance at Dartmouth was nothing short of a brilliant analysis as, given that the topic was part of a larger conference, he focused exclusively on health issues as related to government-industry collusion, the perversion of the science by government regulators, the explosion of chronic childhood diseases and that ‘vaccine effects are impervious to the facts or reality.”
RFK provided shocking and disturbing numbers as he is adamant that the lockdown was not a success but an economic catastrophe that cost the US $16 Trillion according to a Harvard Study with a massive GDP drop for the next ten years. With 4.2% of the world population, the US had 16% of covid deaths shifting $4 Trillion from the American middle class to billionaires as 41% black businesses shut down permanently. Toddlers lost 22 IQ points during the lockdown and many in need of remedial attention. The CDC revised its milestones that a toddler no longer walk at one year but now walk at 1.5 years.
Most impressive has been the quality of Kennedy’s scholarship, the level of his ability to identify essential data to his audience with no slipping and sliding around the unpleasant facts; never hesitating to be straight, true and factual in the belief that all citizens needed to have access to the same information he is familiar with.
In conclusion, RFK:
“Any power that government takes will never be returned voluntarily, every power government will abuse to the max possible and no one ever complied their way out of totalitarianism = the only way is to resist.”
*
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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Renee Parsons, Global Research, 2023
The war industry, a state within a state, disembowels the nation, stumbles from one military fiasco to the next, strips us of civil liberties and pushes us toward suicidal wars with Russia and China.
The intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic, reason or fact. No nation is immune.
The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/enemy-from-within-chris-hedges/5817885
By Chris Hedges
Global Research, May 02, 2023
ScheerPost 30 April 2023
Region: USA
Theme: Intelligence, Militarization and WMD
***
America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single-sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic, reason or fact. No nation is immune. The gravest mistake made by European socialists on the eve of the First World War was the belief that the working classes of France, Germany, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and Great Britain would not be divided into antagonistic tribes because of disputes between imperialist governments. They would not, the socialists assured themselves, sign on for the suicidal slaughter of millions of working men in the trenches. Instead, nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.
Six Reasons Why China and Russia Are Catching Up with the U.S. Military
A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry. The essence of the military is masked with subterfuges — using the military to carry out humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in the Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention” or a way to protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as carrying out a vital civic function by teaching leadership, responsibility, ethics and skills to young recruits. The true face of the military — industrial slaughter — is hidden.
The mantra of the militarized state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.
It was not in our national interest to wage war for two decades across the Middle East. It is not in our national interest to go to war with Russia or China. But militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbied to be integrated into Western economic and military alliances. An alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO — which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany — and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this made us more secure. Washington’s decision to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic affairs by backing a coup in 2014 triggered a civil war and Russia’s subsequent invasion.
But for those who profit from war, antagonizing Russia, like antagonizing China, is a good business model. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin saw their stock prices increase by 40 percent and 37 percent respectively as a result of the Ukraine conflict.
A war with China, now an industrial giant, would disrupt the global supply chain with devastating effects on the U.S. and global economy. Apple produces 90 percent of its products in China. U.S. trade with China was $690.6 billion last year. In 2004, U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s. China’s output is now nearly double that of the United States. China produces the largest number of ships, steel and smartphones in the world. It dominates the global production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics. It is the world’s largest rare earth mineral exporter, its greatest reserve holder and is responsible for 80 percent of its refining worldwide. Rare earth minerals are essential to the manufacture of computer chips, smartphones, television screens, medical equipment, fluorescent light bulbs, cars, wind turbines, smart bombs, fighter jets and satellite communications.
War with China would result in massive shortages of a variety of goods and resources, some vital to the war industry, paralyzing U.S. businesses. Inflation and unemployment would rocket upwards. Rationing would be implemented. The global stock exchanges, at least in the short term, would be shut down. It would trigger a global depression. If the U.S. Navy was able to block oil shipments to China and disrupt its sea lanes, the conflict could potentially become nuclear.
In “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” the military alliance sees the future as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China. It calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict. In October 2022, Air Force General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, presented his “Mobility Manifesto” to a packed military conference. During this unhinged fearmongering diatribe, Minihan argued that if the U.S. does not dramatically escalate its preparations for a war with China, America’s children will find themselves “subservient to a rules based order that benefits only one country [China].”
According to the New York Times, the Marine Corps is training units for beach assaults, where the Pentagon believes the first battles with China may occur, across “the first island chain” that includes, “Okinawa and Taiwan down to Malaysia as well as the South China Sea and disputed islands in the Spratlys and the Paracels.”.
Militarists drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.
Those such as Julian Assange, who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and suicidal folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.
*
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Featured image: You Are What They Eat – by Mr. Fish
The original source of this article is ScheerPost
Copyright © Chris Hedges, ScheerPost, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jnr was condemning the US military-industrial complex as the alarm went off
https://www.rt.com/news/575091-robert-kennedy-speech-alarm/
April 20, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a campaign event in Boston, Massachusetts, April 19, 2023 © AP / Josh Reynolds
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first presidential campaign speech was interrupted on Wednesday when a fire alarm was triggered. Immediately before the alarm, Kennedy had spoken out against the CIA and the US military-industrial complex.
Kennedy, a Democrat, officially launched his 2024 campaign in Boston, Massachusetts, on Wednesday. Announcing that he would challenge President Joe Biden on a platform of “clean government, civil liberties, peace, and economic revitalization,” Kennedy also took aim at the past two decades of US military interventions, arguing that as the US was “spending $8 trillion bombing bridges, ports, roads and hospitals,” China was “spending $8 trillion building bridges, roads, ports and hospitals.”
Just as Kennedy was arguing that China’s approach had seen it replace the US as the preferred trading partner for much of the third world, a fire alarm rang out, halting his speech.
“Nice try,” Kennedy quipped, telling his supporters that “there is no emergency.” It is unclear who set off the alarm.
“This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” he told the crowd, adding that he has “a lot to talk about.”
JFK’s nephew announces 2024 US presidential bid
Kennedy’s uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, promised before his assassination to “take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind,” a remark that Kennedy quoted before the alarm was triggered. Kennedy said that JFK had correctly concluded that “the function of the intelligence agencies had become to provide the military industrial complex with a constant pipeline of war.”
“You need a president at this time in history who can stand up to his bureaucracy,” Kennedy said, citing his father’s opposition to military strikes on Cuba when he served as JFK’s confidant during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such a move could have brought the US into open war with the Soviet Union.
Kennedy was nine when his uncle was assassinated in Texas. Five years later, his father Robert – JFK’s attorney general and later a US senator – was fatally shot during the 1968 presidential primaries. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, is now 78 and still in prison. Kennedy has met with Sirhan Sirhan and believes that a second gunman was responsible for his father’s death.
Michael Snyder
Feb 5, 2023
It took a balloon for millions of Americans to finally realize that we really are on the brink of war with China. When a four-star general recently warned that we would be fighting a war with China in 2025, that didn’t create too much of a stir. And when U.S. Representative Michael McCaul stated that odds of a war between the United States and China over Taiwan are “very high”, that barely made a blip in the news cycle. But the giant “spy balloon” that just floated across our country really got people fired up. Despite the fact that China has been relentlessly spying on us in countless other ways for years, many of our leaders are suddenly acting as if some huge change just happened. They are issuing all sorts of very angry statements and they are demanding action from the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the Chinese are pissed that we just shot down their “civilian airship” and they are warning that they have “the right to respond further”.
What this means is that we are now closer to war with China than we have been in decades.
And that is the real significance of this entire saga.
Long before it was fashionable to do so, I repeatedly warned my readers that war with China was coming. Back then, a number of my critics thought I had gone off the deep end. They argued that China was our friend and that we would never go to war with one of our most important trading partners.
But now suddenly vast hordes of Americans are waking up and realizing that the warmongers in Washington really do have us on the verge of an unthinkable conflict with the Chinese.
If you are one of those people, I have a message for you.
Welcome to the party.
What took you so long?
Needless to say, most Americans don’t want to have a war with China.
But we are going to have one anyway.
This whole episode with the mysterious Chinese balloon has brought tensions that have been simmering for months to a boiling point. On Saturday afternoon, the U.S. military finally shot it down “off the South Carolina coast”…
A U.S. warplane shot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast Saturday afternoon, sending its surveillance gear into relatively shallow water where recovery efforts began immediately, Pentagon officials announced.
The balloon was downed after it passed into U.S. territorial waters, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.The balloon, which carried a large payload of spy gear according to U.S. officials, had soared over several strategic sites, including nuclear missile silos, and became the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing.
If this really was a “spy balloon”, why didn’t we shoot it down before it had a chance to collect so much information?
According to Joe Biden, he was concerned “about debris killing people on the ground”.
Seriously?
There was plenty of wide open space where it could have been shot down safely.
Now that it has been shot down over the ocean, it is going to be more difficult to retrieve the remains.
In any event, the Chinese continue to insist that this was not a “spy balloon” at all…
China claims that its balloon was a “civilian airship” and not the spy device the US claimed it to be, and said that the US’s decision to destroy its property “seriously violates international convention,” according to a statement obtained by The New York Times.
“In these circumstances, for the United States to insist on using armed force is clearly an excessive reaction that seriously violates international convention,” the statement said. “China will resolutely defend the legitimate rights and interests of the enterprise involved, and retains the right to respond further.”
Maybe the Chinese are correct.
Maybe this really wasn’t a spy balloon.
But then why did it fly over so many of our key military installations?
Gateway Pundit has made a list of all the military bases that this spy balloon flew near…
** Malstrom Air Force Base – Montana – home of 341st Military Wing
** Ellsworth Air Force Base – South Dakota – home of 28th bomb wing
** Joe Foss Field ANG – South Dakota – home of 114th fighter wing
** Sioux City ANG – Iowa – national gard base
** Offutt Air Force Base -Nebraska – headquarters US strategic command
** Camp Ashland – Nebraska –
** Lincoln ANG – Nebraska
** Whiteman Air Force Base – Missouri – home of B52 bombers
** Fort Leonard Wood – Missouri – Army training installation
** St. Louis Army Human Resources – St. Louis, MO
** Scott Air Force Base – Illinois – home of the Air Mobility Command
** Fort Campbell – Tennessee – home fo Screaming eagles, the 101st Airborne
** Nashville ANG – Tennessee
** Smyrna ANG – Tennessee
** Houston Barracks – Tennessee
** McGhee Tyson ANG – Tennessee
** Pope Air Force Base – North Carolina – Air mobility command
** Fort Bragg – North Carolina – one of the largest military installations in the world
** MCAS New River – North Carolina
** Camp Lejeune – North Carolina – military training facility
** US Coast Guard Station Fort Macon
And apparently now there are two more Chinese “spy balloons” that have been identified…
A third Chinese spy balloon could be lingering near US interests, but officials won’t say where it is.
An anonymous source told the Washington Post a third balloon is likely operating near the US after the first balloon was discovered hovering over Montana on Thursday and another was found above Latin America on Friday.
Of course it is quite true that the Chinese do not exactly need giant balloons to spy on us.
The Chinese can see pretty much whatever they want using their spy satellites, and their stealth drones are highly sophisticated.
As U.S. Senator Marco Rubio has pointed out, the Chinese have already been spying on us in many different ways…
On Friday’s “Mike Gallagher Show,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) stated that the Chinese spy balloon over the United States is “not the first time” and “We’ve seen these before.” He also stated that China can get the information it gets from the balloon from satellites, Huawei equipment that is installed in the United States, and “a million” different ways and China does so and the balloon is “just one more method that they use to collect intelligence on us.”
And most Americans don’t realize that the Chinese literally have an army of spies on the ground here in the United States.
If you don’t want to believe me, perhaps you will believe what Donald Trump just said…
Former President Donald Trump warned on Friday that China has “many thousands of spies working in the United States” in various industries amid a revelation that a Chinese spy balloon is flying over the continental United States.
“It’s rarely even mentioned that China has many thousands of spies working in the United States in business, finance, academia, technology, media and likely, even government, very sadly,” Trump declared.
A current member of Congress even slept with a known Chinese spy, but he has not been removed from Congress.
So with everything else that has already been going on, it amazes me that everyone is suddenly so upset about a giant balloon.
Whether or not this was actually a “spy balloon” or not, the truth is that the Chinese are going to continue to spy on us in countless different ways.
And whether or not the Chinese sent this “spy balloon” toward us on purpose or not, the truth is that they are going to continue to prepare for the coming war.
According to author Gordon Chang, the Chinese are currently “engaged in the fastest military buildup since the Second World War”…
“We know what the Chinese are doing,” Chang explained. “They’re engaged in the fastest military buildup since the Second World War. They’re trying to sanctions proof their regime and most ominously they’re preparing China’s civilians for war.”
Chang pointed to a recent move from Chinese President Xi Jinping shortly after he was appointed to his precedent breaking third term as General Secretary at the National Congress in October, when he appointed what is being referred to as the “war cabinet.”
And we also know that the Chinese have been busy making economic moves that would make sense if they believe that a war with the U.S. is approaching…
While we focus on the obvious, it’s important to also understand that from a monetary and financial perspective, it looks like China is preparing for war.
Notably, China is continuing to stockpile gold while selling U.S. Treasuries, an obvious step that a country readying either for war or to challenge the U.S. dollar on a global stage (or both) would be taking.
As Zero Hedge noted last month, China has now bought 100 tons of gold in days.
Once again, I want to make it very clear that I don’t want to see a war between the United States and China.
Because such a war would be absolutely horrific.
Unfortunately, anti-China sentiment is reaching a fever pitch in Washington, and anti-American sentiment is reaching a fever pitch in Beijing.
We really are on the brink of the unthinkable, and once the missiles start flying there will be no going back.
They could have stopped the war at the beginning but they did not in order to make obscene profits out of it. Dollars for human lives. Pure evil.
Speechless. War is the virus.
CIA, USAID, State Department undermined socialist Lula, and helped put authoritarian Bolsonaro in control of South America’s largest nation.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/usual-suspects-attempted-coup-against-lula-brazil/5804148
By Kurt Nimmo
Global Research, January 10, 2023
There is an important element omitted from the emerging narrative on Brazil and the attack on the elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
First, though, let’s take a look at the current situation in Brazil. According to the establishment “newspaper of record,” The New York Times,
Thousands of supporters of Brazil’s ousted former president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Sunday to protest what they falsely believe was a stolen election, the violent culmination of years of conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies.
Jair Bolsonaro is characterized as the “Trump of the Tropics,” possibly an unfair comparison as Bolsonaro’s politics were far more radical and destructive than anything Trump could get past Congress or, for that matter, his own inner circle.
If we assume the election was fair, then it can be said the people of Brazil re-elected Lula, and the attack on Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential offices represent a coup attempt. Maybe Bolsonaro supporters organized the sacking on their own, and maybe they had help.
First and foremost, the USG is adamantly opposed to Lula holding office.
In 2021, the CIA was involved in removing Lula from Brazil’s political landscape. Brasilwire reported on June 3, 2021,
In a White House ‘Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on the Fight Against Corruption’, a Biden administration official admitted that the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus were involved in assisting the “War on Corruption” which jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and elected Jair Bolsonaro.
Reading through an official White House transcript, we learn the State Department and USAID were involved in, as Antony Blinken put it, “anti-corruption work in all of our bilateral context, as well as in multilateral fora,” in other words, in plain speak, making sure political enemies, designated as corrupt, are removed from the political landscape.
Former President Lula Declared Winner in Brazil
USAID, as former director John Gilligan admitted, functions as “a graduate school for CIA agents,” and at any given time “many AID offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people… It was pretty obvious what they were up to… The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
Jair Bolsonaro is on excellent terms with the CIA. He is, after all, the first Brazilian leader to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “He was accompanied by his Justice Minister Sergio Moro who had jailed main opponent Lula da Silva before the 2018 election, on now annulled charges,” Brasilwire reported. “In contrast, Bolsonaro has never visited ABIN, Brazil’s moribund equivalent of the CIA.”
Moreover, the Atlantic Council supported collaboration with Brazilian prosecutors in the attempt to get rid of Lula, according to a Brasilwire report. The Atlantic Council is an influential think tank “staffed with military, CIA, and their attendant politicians; and CEOs from strategic industries, like oil and media. It has strong connections to NATO, and is a central part of the modern military-industrial congressional complex,” according to WikiSpooks.
All of this is either ignored or underplayed by the corporate propaganda media. For instance, it would be rare indeed for USG involvement in Operation Lava Jato, the ostensible “anti-corruption” project in Brazil, to be mentioned, let alone investigated by the likes of The New York Times or The Washington Post, both hardly strangers to CIA misinformation campaigns.
A petition filed with the Federal Supreme Court (STF) by the defence of ex-president Lula presents such new evidence that ex-judge Sergio Moro colluded with foreign authorities in conducting the process which led to the arrest of the Workers Party leader, and his subsequent barring from a run for the presidency in 2018.
So, now we have “right-wing protesters” storming government offices, violently agitating for the overthrow of Lula. Considering the above, it is fair to say the USG and USAID (now doing much of the CIA’s dirty work) are involved behind the scenes in the storming of government offices.
I don’t know this for a fact. It is speculation based on history.
More to the point, the 1964 coup in Brazil was organized by JFK and the CIA. For all the lionization of Kennedy, it should be remembered he was an ardent anti-communist. Kennedy believed Brazilian President Goulart was too chummy with anti-colonial and anti-American activists in Latin America, many of them undoubtedly communists, such as Che Guevara, killed in Bolivia with CIA assistance in 1967.
In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine declared South and Latin America, indeed the entire western hemisphere, as USG property not to be claimed or occupied by other nations and empires. It later became the exclusive domain of US agricultural corporations and that domain was protected by USG Marines, as Major General Smedley Butler described in his short book, “War is a Racket.”
Considering the history of the USG, in collision with US corporations, and the “racket,” as Butler described it, we can assume this latest outbreak of violence in Brazil is designed to once again get rid of a politician not following neoliberal orders.
Lula’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) was formerly described as a straight-up socialist party but is now viewed as middle-of-road social democratic by many observers. In 1998, Lula cut all mention of socialist proposals from his political rhetoric. Despite his professed distance from socialism and the ideology of the Workers Party, it was decided by the financial elite in New York and London that Lula had to go.
This is Bolsonaro’s last hurrah, even if he said previously that he accepted the result of the election, and even though he may not be involved in the current effort to shock and awe the Lula government. Like so many other autocrats and psychopathic leaders and dictators before him, Bolsonaro and his supporters are being manipulated by the USAID, CIA, and the Biden State Department.
I seriously doubt this latest act of violence was cooked up entirely by outraged Bolsonaro supporters.
*
This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Kurt Nimmo, Global Research, 2023
The CIA abandoned Afghanistan in a humiliating retreat – even ditching the heroin ratline – just to relocate to Ukraine and continue playing the same old broken records. The CIA is behind the ongoing sabotage of Russian infrastructure – in tandem with MI6 and others. Sooner or later there will be blowback.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-bye-bye-1991-2022
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, JAN 08, 2023
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
The hard work starts now. Welcome to the New Great Game on crack…
2023 starts with collective NATO in Absolutely Freak Out Mode as Russian Defense Minister Shoigu announces that Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov is now on tour – complete with a set of Mr. Zircon’s hypersonic business cards.
The business tour will encompass the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and of course include the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire’s former Mare Nostrum. Mr. Zircon on the prowl has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine: it’s a sign of what happens next when it comes to frying much bigger fishes than a bunch of Kiev psychos.
The end of 2022 did seal the frying of the Big Ukraine Negotiation Fish. It has now been served on a hot plate – and fully digested. Moscow has made it painfully clear there’s no reason whatsoever to trust the “non-agreement capable” declining superpower.
So even taxi drivers in Dacca are now betting on when the much-vaunted “winter offensive” starts, and how far will it go. General Armageddon’s path ahead is clear: all-out demilitarization and de-electrification on steroids, complete with grinding up masses of Ukrainians at the lowest possible cost to the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass until Kiev psychos beg for mercy. Or not.
Another big fried fish on a hot plate at the end of 2022 was the 2014 Minsk Agreement. The cook was no other than former chancellor Merkel (“an attempt to buy time for Ukraine”). Implied is the not exactly smokin’ gun: the strategy of the Straussian/neo-con and neoliberal-con combo in charge of U.S. foreign policy, from the beginning, was to unleash a Forever War, by proxy, against Russia.
Merkel may have been up to something telling the Russians, in their face, that she lied like crypto-Soprano Mike Pompeo, then she lied again and again, for years. That’s not embarrassing for Moscow, but for Berlin: yet another graphic demonstration of total vassalage to the Empire.
The response by the contemporary embodiment of Mercury, Russian Foreign Ministry’s Maria Zakharova, was equally intriguing: Merkel’s confession could be used as a specific reason – and evidence – for a tribunal judging Western politicians responsible for provoking the Russia-Ukraine proxy war.
No one will obviously confirm it on the record. But all this could be part of an evolving, secret Russia-Germany deal in the making, leading to Germany restoring at least some of its sovereignty.
Time to fry NATO fish
Meanwhile, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, visibly relishing his totally unplugged incarnation, expanded on the Fried Negotiation Fish saga. “Last warning to all nations”, as he framed it: “there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world [because] it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything… From now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power… There is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason.”
Medvedev, significantly, recited more or less the same script, in person, to Xi Jinping in Beijing, days before the zoom to end all zooms – between Xi and Putin – that worked as a sort of informal closure of 2022, with the Russia-China strategic partnership perfectly in synch.
On the war front, General Armageddon’s new – offensive – groove is bound to lead in the next few months to an undisputable fact on the ground: a partition between a dysfunctional black hole or rump Ukraine on the west, and Novorossiya in the east.
Even the IMF is now reluctant to throw extra funds into the black hole. Kiev’s 2023 budget has an – unrealistic – $36 billion deficit. Half of the budget is military-related. The real deficit in 2022 was running at about $5 billion a month – and will inevitably balloon.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, a professor at the Kiev School of Economics, came up with a howler: the IMF is worried about Ukraine’s “debt sustainability”. He added, “if even the IMF is worried, imagine what private investors are thinking”. There will be no “investment” in rump Ukraine. Multinational vultures will grab land for nothing and whatever puny productive assets may remain.
Arguably the biggest fish to be fried in 2023 is the myth of NATO. Every serious military analyst, few Americans included, knows that the Russian Army and the military-industrial complex represent a superior system than what existed at the end of the U.S.SR, and far superior to that of the U.S. and the rest of NATO today.
The Mackinder-style final blow to a possible alliance between Germany (EU), Russia and China – which is what is really behind the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine – is not proceeding according to the Straussian wet dream.
Saddam Hussein, the former imperial vassal, was regime-changed because he wanted to bypass the petrodollar. Now we have the inevitable rise of the petroyuan – “in three to five years”, as Xi Jinping announced in Riyadh: you just can’t prevent it with Shock’n Awe on Beijing.
In 2008, Russia embarked on a massive rebuilding of missile forces and a 14-year plan to modernize land-based armed forces. Mr. Zircon presenting his hypersonic business card across the Mare Nostrum is just a small part of the Big Picture.
The myth of U.S. power
The CIA abandoned Afghanistan in a humiliating retreat – even ditching the heroin ratline – just to relocate to Ukraine and continue playing the same old broken records. The CIA is behind the ongoing sabotage of Russian infrastructure – in tandem with MI6 and others. Sooner or later there will be blowback.
Few people – including CIA operatives – may know that New York City, for instance, may be destroyed with a single move: blowing up the George Washington bridge. The city can’t be supplied with food and most of its requirements without the bridge. The New York City electrical grid can be destroyed by knocking out the central controls; putting it back together could take a year.
Even trespassed by infinite layers of fog of war, the current situation in Ukraine is still a skirmish. The real war has not even started yet. It might – soon.
Apart from Ukraine and Poland there is no NATO force worth mentioning. Germany has a risible two-day supply of ammunition. Turkey will not send a single soldier to fight Russians in Ukraine.
Out of 80,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe, only 10% are weaponized. Recently 20,000 were added, not a big deal. If the Americans activated their troops in Europe – something rather ridiculous in itself – they would not have any place to land supplies or reinforcements. All airports and seaports would be destroyed by Russian hypersonic missiles in a matter of minutes – in continental Europe as well as the UK.
In addition, all fuel centers such as Rotterdam for oil and natural gas would be destroyed, as well as all military installations, including top American bases in Europe: Grafenwoehr, Hohenfels, Ramstein, Baumholder, Vilseck, Spangdahlem, and Wiesbaden in Germany (for the Army and Air Force); Aviano Air Base in Italy; Lajes Air Base in Portugal’s Azores islands; Naval Station Rota in Spain; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey; and Royal Air Force stations Lakenheath and Mildenhall in the UK.
All fighter jets and bombers would be destroyed – after they land or while landed: there would be no place to land except on the autobahn, where they would be sitting ducks.
Patriot missiles are worthless – as the whole Global South saw in Saudi Arabia when they tried to knock out Houthi missiles coming from Yemen. Israel’s Iron Dome can’t even knock out all primitive missiles coming from Gaza.
U.S. military power is the supreme myth of the fish-to-be-fried variety. Essentially, they hide behind proxies – as the Ukraine Armed Forces. U.S. forces are worthless except in turkey shoots as in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, against a disabled opponent in the middle of the desert with no air cover. And never forget how NATO was completely humiliated by the Taliban.
The final breaking point
2022 ended an era: the final breaking point of the “rules-based international order” established after the fall of the U.S.S.R.
The Empire entered Desperation Row, throwing everything and the kitchen sink – proxy war on Ukraine, AUKUS, Taiwan hysteria – to dismantle the set-up they created way back in 1991.
Globalization’s rollback is being implemented by the Empire itself. That ranges from stealing the EU energy market from Russia so the hapless vassals buy ultra-expensive U.S. energy to smashing the entire semiconductor supply chain, forcibly rebuilding it around itself to “isolate” China.
The NATO vs. Russia war in Ukraine is just a cog in the wheel of the New Great Game. For the Global South, what really matters is how Eurasia – and beyond – are coordinating their integration process, from BRI to the BRICS+ expansion, from the SCO to the INSTC, from Opec+ to the Greater Eurasia Partnership.
We’re back to what the world looked like in 1914, or before 1939, only in a limited sense. There’s a plethora of nations struggling to expand their influence, but all of them are betting on multipolarity, or “peaceful modernization”, as Xi Jinping coined it, and not Forever Wars: China, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia and others.
So bye-bye 1991-2022. The hard work starts now. Welcome to the New Great Game on crack.
“It’s been bought by corporations and the military-industrial complex.”
Tales from the Conspiratum 
