Exocet
04/02/2009
Un grief phosphorescent pour tous les frustrés,frustrés de tant d’événements sanglants ,censurés et donc inutilisables,sinon comme inconscient politique pour les générations futures.
scaron
04/02/2009
Puisque maintenant les banques ne peuvent se soutenir que grâce à l’État, comme que le CIM l’a toujours fait, y aura-t-il alors une “guerre” entre les banques et l’industrie militaire pour s’approprier des resources financières (décroissantes et à crédit) des É-U ?
Dedef
05/02/2009
Chalmers Johnson, Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon
2009-02-02
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175029
Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered “that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008.” Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded “an army of Washington lobbyists,” plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.
And it isn’t only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies—“drastically,” according to reporter August Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping 54% in 2008.
If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here to view an ad for that company’s potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you’ll discover is not just that it will “protect” 300 million people—that’s you, if you live in the USA—but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad’s threatening message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times, it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that’s effective lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below, that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.
We don’t usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation, a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional representatives; nor do we usually consider the “defense” budget as a giant make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble recently suggested, but it’s never too late.
Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy, including most recently Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us. (Check out, as well, a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon’s economic death spiral by clicking here). Tom
The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon
How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars
By Chalmers Johnson
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment—and that’s to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
etc…
Despite Gates’s praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd’s “Fighter Mafia.”
As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):
“The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. ‘Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement’ within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service .
“The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072.”
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people’s countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical—and difficult—decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
2009 Chalmers Johnson
Dedef
05/02/2009
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KB04Aa02.html
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Crisis looms at the Pentagon By Chalmers Johnson
Feb 4, 2009
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the United States automotive industry
etc…
Francis Lambert
10/02/2009
Bomb Plants Could Shift to Control of Pentagon By MATTHEW L. WALD, February 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/washington/07nuke.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=nuclear%20pentagone&st=cse
The Obama administration is considering whether to shift the management of nuclear weapons production to the Pentagon from the Energy Department, a step that would end more than 60 years of civilian control over nuclear bomb manufacture. (...)
Oversight of the costly cleanup of heavily polluted weapons plants would stay with the Energy Department. (...)
Changing the status quo would doubtless raise concerns among some, and Congress might not go along. (...) civilian control is good public policy and a good model for other countries to follow.
Besides, she said, giving the program to the Pentagon would mean turning it over to an organization whose reputation for management is not stellar. (...)
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said that if transferred, the weapons laboratories would be even less transparent than they are now with regard to environmental and security problems.
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