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Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon

Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.

Bus burning on a road from Kharkiv to Kiev as Russia invades Ukraine on Feb. 24. (Yan Boechat/VOA)

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investors in US Weapon-Makers Only Clear Winners of Afghan War

Investors in US Weapon-Makers Only Clear Winners of Afghan War

Share prices of military manufacturers vastly outperformed the stock market overall during the Afghanistan War.

May 25, 2002: Two U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopters land at Bagram Airfield in Parwan, Afghanistan, after completing a mission. (U.S. National Archives)

As the hawks who have been lying about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for two decades continue to peddle fantasies in the midst of a Taliban takeover and American evacuation of Kabul, progressive critics on Tuesday reminded the world who has benefited from the “endless war.”

“Entrenching U.S. forces in Afghanistan was the military-industrial complex’s business plan for 20+ years,” declared the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Public Citizen.

[Related: A People’s Guide to the War IndustryPart 1 and  Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4 and Part 5.]

“Hawks and defense contractors co-opted the needs of the Afghan people in order to line their own pockets,” the group added. “Never has it been more important to end war profiteering.”

In a Tuesday morning tweet, Public Citizen highlighted returns on defense stocks over the past 20 years — as calculated in a “jaw-dropping” analysis by The Intercept — and asserted that “the military-industrial complex got exactly what it wanted out of this war.”

The Intercept‘s Jon Schwarz examined returns on stocks of the five biggest defense contractors: Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.

Schwarz found that a $10,000 investment in stock evenly split across those five companies on the day in 2001 that then-President Georg W. Bush signed the authorization preceding the U.S. invasion would be worth $97,295 this week, not adjusted for inflation, taxes, or fees.

According to The Intercept:

“This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Fraud: the Link Between Capitalism and Profiteering by Deception

The Age of Fraud: the Link Between Capitalism and Profiteering by Deception

Photo Source Daniel Lobo | CC BY 2.0

Fraud is an issue that haunts many contemporary societies around the globe, including in East Africa. I have been researching the topic of economic trickery for over a decade in Uganda, and published a number of articles, books and opinion pieces about the matter.

As many of you might know, Uganda experiences intensive fraud levels in numerous economic sectors, from agricultural seeds and produce trade to land and the fuel business. Basically, all vital sectors of the economy are affected by fraud in one way or another.

As an analyst, I have for a while now regarded Uganda to be at the high end of the fraud problem in the region, at least in certain trades such as seeds. However, a few days ago I spent some time in Kenya and was taken somewhat by surprise by how dominant the theme of fraud – i.e. profiteering by deception – was in the Kenyan press. On the day I gave a talk at the Aga Khan University, the front and inside pages of one of the dailies was full of news about the latest scandals and the evening news started with and was dominated by the same theme: fraud and corruption.

It quickly became evident to me that this fraud-heavy news day was probably not a one-off, or an outlier. In a way I was prepared for this scenario and realisation: I have read over the past few years about some of the major fraud cases in Kenya (Goldenberg et al.), and was aware that the current government has declared to fight corruption vigorously.  But more broadly, I have watched fraud news become more or less a staple, not only in the country of my research focus, namely, Uganda, but also in my country of residence, the UK, and my home country, Germany.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Massive Deficit Spending Greenlights Waste, Fraud, Profiteering and Dysfunction

Massive Deficit Spending Greenlights Waste, Fraud, Profiteering and Dysfunction

America’s problem isn’t a lack of deficit spending/consumption. America’s problems are profoundly structural.

The nice thing about free to me money from any source is the recipients don’t have to change anything. Free money is the ultimate free-pass from consequence and adaptation: instead of having to make difficult trade-offs or suffer the consequences of profligacy, the recipients of free money are saved: they can continue on their merry way, ignoring the monumental dysfunction of their lifestyle.

This explains the appeal of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which holds that deficit spending is the “solution” to all our problems because governments can’t go broke–they can always emit whatever currency they need via printing or borrowing.

The problem with government deficit spending is it’s free money to the recipients: there are no feedback mechanisms to enforce any consequences for spending that’s wasteful, fraudulent or inefficient/ineffective.

Deficit spending simply enables the wasteful, corrupt, rewarding-insiders profiteering state-cartel kleptocracy to continue gorging on public spending.So what desperately needed efficiencies and improvements are imposed on the higher education cartel by handing the cartel another trillion dollars of public spending? None.

What desperately needed efficiencies and improvements are imposed on the healthcare cartel by handing the cartel trillions of dollars in publicly funded “Medicare for all”? None.

What desperately needed efficiencies and improvements are imposed on the national defense cartel by handing the cartel additional trillions of public spending? None.

What kind of sense does it make to encourage wasteful consumption on a finite planet with limited resources? The entire rationale of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that the productive capacity of the economy isn’t being maxed out because we’re not consuming enough.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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