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Thank you for caring about Justice and Peace.
You know who's making a mint off ISIS?
KA-CHING: The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War
For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe.
For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.
by Kate Brannen
08.02.15
The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.
SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
The company, which goes by “SOSi,” says on its website that the contracts it’s been awarded for work in Iraq in 2015 have a total value of more than $400 million. They include a $40 million contract to provide everything from meals to perimeter security to emergency fire and medical services at Iraq’s Besmaya Compound, one of the sites where U.S. troops are training Iraqi soldiers. The Army awarded SOSi a separate $100 million contract in late June for similar services at Camp Taji. The Pentagon expects that contract to last through June 2018.
A year after U.S. airstrikes began targeting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, there are 3,500 U.S. troops deployed there, training and advising Iraqi troops. But a number that is not discussed is the growing number of contractors required to support these operations. According to the U.S. military, there are 6,300 contractors working in Iraq today, supporting U.S. operations. Separately, the State Department is seeking janitorial services, drivers, linguists, and security contractors to work at its Iraqi facilities.
While these numbers pale in comparison to the more than 163,000 working in Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War, they are steadily growing. And with the fight against ISIS expected to take several years, it also represents a growing opportunity for defense, security, and logistics contractors, especially as work in Afghanistan begins to dry up.
“It allows us to maintain the façade of no boots on the ground while at the same time growing our footprint,” said Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University whose recent work has focused on regulating private military contractors.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/02/the-company-getting-rich-off-of-the-isis-war.html
We've been at war with Iraq for so long, two generations have grown up never knowing the answer, seeing how it's never on the tee vee or discussed in Texas school book history.
The truth from William Safire, Tom Lantos (D-California) and Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas):
THE ADMINISTRATION'S IRAQ GATE SCANDAL
BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Congressional Record
Extension of Remarks - May 19, 1992
Washington
Americans now know that the war in the Persian Gulf was brought about by a colossal foreign-policy blunder: George Bush's decision, after the Iran-Iraq war ended, to entrust regional security to Saddam Hussein.
What is not yet widely understood is how that benighted policy led to the Bush Administration's fraudulent use of public funds, its sustained deception of Congress and its obstruction of justice.
As the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, was urging Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to buy the friendship of the Iraqi dictator in August 1989, the F.B.I. uncovered a huge scam at the Atlanta branch of the Lavoro Bank to finance the buildup of Iraq's war machine by diverting U.S.-guaranteed grain loans.
Instead of pressing the investigation or curbing the appeasement, the President turned a blind eye to lawbreaking and directed another billion dollars to Iraq. Our State and Agriculture Department's complicity in Iraq's duplicity transformed what could have been dealt with as `Saddam's Lavoro scandal' into George Bush's Iraqgate.
The first element of corruption is the wrongful application of U.S. credit guarantees. Neither the Commodity Credit Corporation nor the Export-Import Bank runs a foreign-aid program; their purpose is to stimulate U.S. exports. High-risk loan guarantees to achieve foreign-policy goals unlawful endanger that purpose.
Yet we now know that George Bush personally leaned on Ex-Im to subvert its charter--not to promote our exports but to promote relations with the dictator. And we have evidence that James Baker overrode worries in Agriculture and O.M.B. that the law was being perverted: Mr. Baker's closest aid, Robert Kimmett, wrote triumphantly, `your call to . . . Yeutter . . . paid off.' Former Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter is now under White House protection.
Second element of corruption is the misleading of Congress. When the charge was made two years ago in this space that State was improperly intervening in this case, Mr. Baker's top Middle East aide denied it to Senate Foreign Relations; meanwhile, Yeutter aides deceived Senator Leahy's Agriculture Committee about the real foreign-policy purpose of the C.C.C. guarantees. To carry out Mr. Bush's infamous National Security Directive 26, lawful oversight was systematically blinded.
Third area of Iraqgate corruption is the obstruction of justice. Atlanta's assistant U.S. Attorney Gail McKenzie, long blamed here for foot-dragging, would not withhold from a grand jury what she has already told friends: that indictment of Lavoro officials was held up for nearly a year by the Bush Criminal Division. The long delay in prosecution enabled James Baker to shake credits for Saddam out of malfeasant Agriculture appointees.
When House Banking Chairman Henry Gonzalez gathered documents marked `secret' showing this pattern of corruption, he put them in the Congressional Record. Two months later, as the media awakened, Mr. Bush gave the familiar `gate' order; stonewall.
`Public disclosure of classified information harms the national security,' Attorney General William Barr instructed the House Banking Committee last week. `. . . in light of your recent disclosures, the executive branch will not provide any more classified information'--unless the wrongdoing is kept secret.
`Your threat to withhold documents,' responded Chairman Gonzalez, `has all the earmarks of a classic effort to obstruct a proper and legitimate investigation . . . none of the documents compromise, in any fashion whatsoever, the national security or intelligence sources and methods.'
Mr. Barr, in personal jeopardy, has flung down the gauntlet. Chairman Gonzalez tells me he plans to present his obstruction case this week to House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, probably flanked by Representatives Charles Schumer and Barney Frank, members of both committees.
`I will recommend that Judiciary consider requiring the appointment of an independent counsel,' says Mr. Gonzalez, who has been given reason to believe that Judiciary--capable of triggering the Ethics in Government Act--will be persuaded to act.
Policy blunders are not crimes. But perverting the purpose of appropriated funds is a crime; lying to Congress compounds that crime; and obstructing justice to cover up the original crime is a criminal conspiracy.
SOURCE: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920519l.htm
William Safire was almost alone in the Corporate Owned Media of 1992 tying George Herbert Walker Bush to the illegal arming of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact, very few liberal and almost zero conservative voices have dared oppose the Bush bandwagon, let alone the War Party. The story, read by the late Representative Tom Lantos (D-California), into the Congressional Record (public domain), Amazing stuff. Still...not much else worth remembering, besides how few Democrats stood with Gonzalez.
More, from back in the day: Know Your BFEE: Poppy’s CIA Made Saddam Into the Butcher of Baghdad.
James Risen wrote about a death threat made by Blackwater's main man in Iraq upon an official from the State Department sent to investigate contractor corruption. Upon hearing that news, and before I could think of what that really meant or anything else, I thought of Col. Theodore S. Westhusing, United States Army.
Col. Westhusing was in charge of training the new Iraqi army and overseeing civilian contractors. He is remembered as a good man, a brilliant man who followed the Cadet Code: "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” As an instructor at West Point, the PhD colonel served as the Army's chief ethicist. So, as an honest officer in Iraq, he came to suspect something was very wrong with the conduct of some of the private military contractors in the employ of USIS. Unfortunately, before he revealed those suspicions, and just a few weeks before he was scheduled to return home to his loving wife and family, he became a suicide.
The subject was discussed on DU. One thread from 2007:
Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...
Another from 2012, when Petraeus ran into some conduct unbecoming problems at CIA:
Is David Petraeus Dirty? Ted Westhusing Said So, and Then He Shot Himself.
Which brings me back to hearing the report of Blackwater's top manager in Iraq. Imagine the gall of the son of a bitch! To threaten the life of a U.S. citizen sent on official government business -- the People's business -- to see how our money was being spent, or in the case of the Iraq War, stolen. It seems some groups, such as the private military contractors, join their employers in Washington in thinking that they really are above the law. They certainly behave that way.
Could there be any connection between Blackwater and USIS, the once-public then privatized public employee background check organization now turned military contractor in Iraq? Of course, there are. Both are BFEE-connected for-profit outfits that are making enormous fortunes from the Iraq War.
Blackwater was owned and operated largely by one Erik Prince, darling of America's hard right and Michigan's right to inherit wealth beyond imagination class. His sister is a GOP kingmaker, including his brother in law, the once unsuccessful GOP candidate for Michigan governor. Petraeus and CIA were so enamored of the talents and abilities of Mr. Prince, CIA outsourced drone targeting to his firm.
At the time of Col. Westhusing's death, USIS was owned and operated largely by Carlyle Group, a private investment bank known for finding, buying, and flipping defense-related companies at a nice profit. They literally and figuratively are good friends and actual employers of George W Bush, his father, George H.W. Bush, Sec. of State James Baker, Sec. of Defense Frank Carlucci, Prime Minister John Major of the UK and other government insiders and players connected to the grand ol' oily chess board.
In short, both USIS and Blackwater are controlled by the "money trumps peace" crowd, the cronies and family of George W Bush. What Bartcop termed the BFEE for Bush Family Evil Empire, or what I call the War Party for short, follow the philosophy that the United States can be defended at a handsome profit and, if you apply enough media spin, quite patriotically.
As for Col. Westhusing: He, according to one officer under his command, at first very much believed in his mission. Why? Because the same BFEE liars who lied America into war also lied the good men and women at West Point and at the Pentagon into war. Until he got to Iraq and saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, he never thought "money would trump peace."
An Army psychologist concluded that Westhusing struggled with the idea that “monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war.” This, she said, was a flaw. -- Westhusing's Flaw
Of course, the only "flaw" was in being a highly ethical person, one who would NOT "go along to get along." In short, Col. Westhusing was a man of integrity. He was the kind who stand in the way of the warmongers and war profiteers. Until the politicians who lied him and America into war are brought to justice, we just won't know how much he became their victim.
Col. Westhusing was in charge of training the new Iraqi army and overseeing civilian contractors. He is remembered as a good man, a brilliant man who followed the Cadet Code: "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” As an instructor at West Point, the PhD colonel served as the Army's chief ethicist. So, as an honest officer in Iraq, he came to suspect something was very wrong with the conduct of some of the private military contractors in the employ of USIS. Unfortunately, before he revealed those suspicions, and just a few weeks before he was scheduled to return home to his loving wife and family, he became a suicide.
The subject was discussed on DU. One thread from 2007:
Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...
Another from 2012, when Petraeus ran into some conduct unbecoming problems at CIA:
Is David Petraeus Dirty? Ted Westhusing Said So, and Then He Shot Himself.
Which brings me back to hearing the report of Blackwater's top manager in Iraq. Imagine the gall of the son of a bitch! To threaten the life of a U.S. citizen sent on official government business -- the People's business -- to see how our money was being spent, or in the case of the Iraq War, stolen. It seems some groups, such as the private military contractors, join their employers in Washington in thinking that they really are above the law. They certainly behave that way.
Could there be any connection between Blackwater and USIS, the once-public then privatized public employee background check organization now turned military contractor in Iraq? Of course, there are. Both are BFEE-connected for-profit outfits that are making enormous fortunes from the Iraq War.
Blackwater was owned and operated largely by one Erik Prince, darling of America's hard right and Michigan's right to inherit wealth beyond imagination class. His sister is a GOP kingmaker, including his brother in law, the once unsuccessful GOP candidate for Michigan governor. Petraeus and CIA were so enamored of the talents and abilities of Mr. Prince, CIA outsourced drone targeting to his firm.
At the time of Col. Westhusing's death, USIS was owned and operated largely by Carlyle Group, a private investment bank known for finding, buying, and flipping defense-related companies at a nice profit. They literally and figuratively are good friends and actual employers of George W Bush, his father, George H.W. Bush, Sec. of State James Baker, Sec. of Defense Frank Carlucci, Prime Minister John Major of the UK and other government insiders and players connected to the grand ol' oily chess board.
In short, both USIS and Blackwater are controlled by the "money trumps peace" crowd, the cronies and family of George W Bush. What Bartcop termed the BFEE for Bush Family Evil Empire, or what I call the War Party for short, follow the philosophy that the United States can be defended at a handsome profit and, if you apply enough media spin, quite patriotically.
As for Col. Westhusing: He, according to one officer under his command, at first very much believed in his mission. Why? Because the same BFEE liars who lied America into war also lied the good men and women at West Point and at the Pentagon into war. Until he got to Iraq and saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, he never thought "money would trump peace."
An Army psychologist concluded that Westhusing struggled with the idea that “monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war.” This, she said, was a flaw. -- Westhusing's Flaw
Of course, the only "flaw" was in being a highly ethical person, one who would NOT "go along to get along." In short, Col. Westhusing was a man of integrity. He was the kind who stand in the way of the warmongers and war profiteers. Until the politicians who lied him and America into war are brought to justice, we just won't know how much he became their victim.
Iraqi POW and son.
George W. Bush didn't just lie about the Iraq War. What he did was much worse.
Paul Waldman
The Week, May 5, 2015
EXCERPT...
For the moment I want to focus on the part about the lies. I've found over the years that conservatives who supported the war get particularly angry at the assertion that Bush lied us into war. No, they'll insist, it wasn't his fault: There was mistaken intelligence, he took that intelligence in good faith, and presented what he believed to be true at the time. It's the George Costanza defense: It's not a lie if you believe it.
Here's the problem, though. It might be possible, with some incredibly narrow definition of the word "lie," to say that Bush told only a few outright lies on Iraq. Most of what he said in order to sell the public on the war could be said to have some basis in something somebody thought or something somebody alleged (Bush was slightly more careful than Dick Cheney, who lied without hesitation or remorse). But if we reduce the question of Bush's guilt and responsibility to how many lies we can count, we miss the bigger picture.
What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of weeds. In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935 were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That's what was truly diabolical about their campaign.
And it was a campaign. In the summer of 2002, the administration established something called the White House Iraq Group, through which Karl Rove and other communication strategists like Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin coordinated with policy officials to sell the public on the threat from Iraq in order to justify war. "The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," White House press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."
CONTINUED...
http://theweek.com/articles/555921/george-w-bush-didnt-just-lie-about-iraq-war-what-did-much-worse
I am sad to think of people I know who died in an illegal, immoral, unnecessary and disastrous war based on lies. Then there are the million or so others whose deaths and injuries demand justice. Thank you for standing up, Enthusiast. It's almost weird, using words instead of taking up arms to stop war.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité and ideas like justice, commonwealth and democracy may be missing from humanity's thoughts in the very near future if we don't wake the heck up now.
Like the fellah who just wants a bath and a shave in "High Plains Drifter."
Surveillance and Scandal
Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
CONTINUED...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/
Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
CONTINUED...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/
Why does this matter, when my house is about to get foreclosed because my job got offshored? It's tied in, when Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made. For We the People are the ones who ALWAYS get "the haircut."
Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."
CIA moonlights in corporate world
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
SNIP...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh
Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.
Banks is where the money is.
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
The Knights of the Revolving Door
When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013
Paris.
A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.
For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.
For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC
Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.
Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.
Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.
One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/
Sorry to repost ad nauseum, but thanks to Terror Inc, the subject needs mention and there's no time to reinvent the wheel. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude in what are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history. The fact the greedheads would rather make a World War instead of building a better world for all shows who Terror most benefits.
After seeing what war was doing for the Carlyle Group's bottom line, the guy saw a great way to make big bucks -- AND -- get credit for defending the country with his new Trireme Partners.
Old news to some, but one of the most important articles, IMFO, that The New Yorker ever published:
Lunch with the Chairman
by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.
The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.
Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact
A bit on the new TRIREME business...
At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World
By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01
It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.
Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.
And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.
Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.
CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html
Which country? That's another question.
No one apologized to them for that.
We destroyed Iraq. We got the Soviets to destroy Afghanistan before we picked up the slack. And most the rest of Africa and the Middle East, from the Atlantic across the Indian Ocean.
That is the story. For oil. Then, again, they are -- heh, were -- living on top of our oil.
Big lines of corruption.
Brothers in Arms: Bandar Bush Took a Billion in Bribes to Push UK Weapons Deal
Written by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Thursday, 07 June 2007
So says the Guardian, which has had a sneak peek at the evidence compiled by Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in its lengthy investigation of vast corruption in a decades-long arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the Anglo-American arms merchant, BAE, Tony Blair's favorite war profiteer. The SFO's probe was preemptorily quashed by Blair's ever quiescent attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, last December. Now the Guardian has learned that BAE paid a quarterly bribe to Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud-- long-time ambassador to the United States, and so intimate with America's ruling family that the president nicknamed him "Bandar Bush." BAE was plying Prince Bush with $30 million every quarter -- for ten years. Nice work if you can get it.
The background to this sordid business can be found in a piece I did last year: Last Bad Deal Gone Down: War Profits Trump the Rule of Law. A brief excerpt below sets the scene:
Slush funds, oil sheikhs, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney – it's a scandal that has it all: corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it – even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war.
But here's how the deal went down. On Dec. 14, the UK Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global backroom – Swiss bank accounts – when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, "would not be in the national interest."
It certainly wasn't in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant which has become one of the top 10 U.S. military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror – including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first "Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to "disappear" approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history – the UK-Saudi warplane program known as "al-Yamanah" (Arabic for "the dove". Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE's coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.
Bandar Bush was instrumental in setting up the deal in the first place, the Guardian notes, wheeling and dealing with Maggie Thatcher from his Washington redoubt. The prince -- one of the leading figures in perhaps the most repressive and extremist Islamic state on earth -- has continued to be influential with the White House even after stepping down as ambassador in 2005. (He's now head of the repressive state's security organs.) He's also played a key role in L'il Bush's political career -- making a deal to cut oil prices before the 2004 vote and publicly endorsing his "brother" in the election. One cannot but speculate on how much of the dirty BAE money was used to grease the overt and covert ops of the Bush political machine. According to the Guardian, Bandar's BAE bribes were drawn from BAE's slush fund and deposited in Bandar's account in Washington's Riggs Bank -- the notorious money-laundering outfit used for decades by American and foreign elites to wash their filthy lucre. L'il Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush, was a top executive at Riggs Bank when it was hit with a record $25 million fine in 2004 for skirting money-laundering laws, as David Sirota -- and then the Washington Post -- report.
CONTINUED w/links...
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/060707Floyd.shtml
Guys know how to turn a buck.
Thank you for knowing the story, Rosa Luxemburg!
Since publication, the professor has been relieved of his class.
West Point professor calls on US military to target legal critics of war on terror
US military academy official William Bradford argues that attacks on scholars’ home offices and media outlets – along with Islamic holy sites – are legitimate
by Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, August 29, 2015
An assistant professor in the law department of the US Military Academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.
In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.
Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism, Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist.
“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” Bradford wrote.
CONTINUED...
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/29/west-point-professor-target-legal-critics-war-on-terror
The Catch-22 System is the best system They got.
Condi Rice and Victoria Nuland looking for meaning, if not sustainable profits.
They pushed for war on Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, and now Ukraine.
Neocons and Liberals Together, Again
The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government's national security...
Tom Barry, last updated: February 02, 2005
The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government's national security strategy with a new public letter stating that the "U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume." Rather than reining in the imperial scope of U.S. national security strategy as set forth by the first Bush administration, PNAC and the letter's signatories call for increasing the size of America's global fighting machine.
SNIP...
Liberal Hawks Fly with the Neocons
The recent PNAC letter to Congress was not the first time that PNAC or its associated front groups, such as the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, have included hawkish Democrats.
Two PNAC letters in March 2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. PNAC and the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy. With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit strategy in Iraq. In their March 19th letter, PNAC stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq for the long haul: "Everyone-those who have joined the coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors-must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long as it takes."
Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC's first letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton's top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by PNAC on March 28 called for broader international support for reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, and brought together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another Brookings' foreign policy scholar, Michael O'Hanlon.
CONTINUED...
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/Neocons_and_Liberals_Together_Again
That's from Rightweb. They're full of facts, for those who take the time to read and learn. One name to pay attention to is Victoria Nuland, our woman in Ukraine, who is married to PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan's brother is Frederick Kagan
Frederick Kagan's spouse is Kimberly Kagan
Brilliant people, big ideas, etc. The thing is, that's a lot of PNAC. And the PNAC approach to international relations means more wars without end for profits without cease, among other things detrimental to peace, justice and democracy.
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.
The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:
[font color="green"]“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”[/font color]
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election the next cycle.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”[/font color]
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election the next cycle.
And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:
In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
From GWU's National Security Archives:
"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.
Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era
Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).
SNIP...
Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]
SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from NSA?
“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.
Lost to History NOT, thanks to people who care. Thank you for grokking, Boomerproud.
The BFEE Formula: War + Oil + Bankstering = $ Big Time
what the FUCK were they thinking
The Five in ''5-4'' have seen their side especially profit over the past 32 years. By design. And by design they've kept it going -- it as in kleptocracy. Did someone say "Offshore?" It's where a lot of the money "lost" in the great Bankster Bailout must have gone.
Check Out Who's Hiding $32 Trillion in Offshore Tax Haven Accounts
EXCERPT...
Some $32 trillion has been hidden in small island banking hubs which host a bevy of trust funds, shell corporations and other tax havens, the Tax Justice Network estimates.
SNIP...
The information is still being sifted through, even as it's being released to the public, but here's some of what's been found so far:
■ American Denise Rich, ex-wife of pardoned tax cheat Marc Rich, has been uncovered as the settlor and beneficiary of two large trusts based in the tiny Cook Islands. The ICIJ found that Denise Rich gave up her American citizenship in 2012. Her citizenship was convenient enough when President Clinton had the authority to pardon her ex-husband.
■ French President Francois Hollande, ardent socialist and tireless champion of the 75% marginal tax rate, appears in these documents, mostly by association. His campaign co-treasurer, Jean-Jacques Augier, has been forced to reveal the name of his Chinese business partner in a Caymans-based distribution company. Augier says he used his offshore company to make a large investment in China.
■ Australian actor Paul Hogan, of "Crocodile Dundee" fame, has lost about $35.3 million from an account that he used to offshore his "bonza" film royalties. His once-trusted tax adviser Philip Egglishaw ran off with Hogan's sizeable hidden offshore stash.
■ French banking scion Elie de Rothschild, of the famous banking family, has been named in the leaks. He was instrumental in setting up some 20 trusts and 10 holding companies in the Cook Islands, all extremely opaque in nature. His heirs have, not surprisingly, refused comment.
■ Brigitte Bardot's third ex-husband, Gunter Sachs, a millionaire industrialist, has been revealed as the owner of a huge, obscure wealth-masking machine: trust upon shell company upon holding company, almost ad infinitum, mostly based in the Cook Islands. The ICIJ has constructed an interactive map of Sachs' extensive offshore holdings and business networks. The network is fairly representative of the steps that many on this list have taken to hide their wealth away. You can marvel at its imponderable complexity here.
And these names are barely the tip of the iceberg. The shockwaves have already begun to spread through the corridors of wealth and power all over the world.
How Much is $32 Trillion?
It bears repeating: $32 trillion has been stashed away, off the books, by corporations and wealthy individuals.
CONTINUED...
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article40250.html
Offshore loot also represents money made from trafficking in drugs, guns and people. So...what can we do about it?
On My Mind
Tax Offshore Wealth Sitting In First World Banks
James S. Henry
07.01.10, 09:00 AM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated July 19, 2010
Let's tax offshore private wealth.
How can we get the world's wealthiest scoundrels--arms dealers, dictators, drug barons, tax evaders--to help us pay for the soaring costs of deficits, disaster relief, climate change and development? Simple: Levy a modest withholding tax on untaxed private offshore loot.
Many aboveground economies around the world are struggling, but the economic underground is booming. By my estimate, there is $15 trillion to $20 trillion in private wealth sitting offshore in bank accounts, brokerage accounts and hedge fund portfolios, completely untaxed.
SNIP...
This wealth is concentrated. Nearly half of it is owned by 91,000 people--[font color="green"]0.001% of the world's population[/font color]. Ninety-five percent is owned by the planet's wealthiest 10 million people.
SNIP...
Is it feasible? Yes. The majority of offshore wealth is managed by 50 banks. As of September 2009 these banks accounted for $10.8 trillion of offshore assets--72% of the industry's total. The busiest 10 of them manage 40%.
CONTINUED....
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0719/opinions-taxation-tax-havens-banking-on-my-mind.html
Not only would that money balance the budget, erase the debt and fix the nation and world's problems from hunger and homeless to energy and education; it would free humanity to do better things than make war all the time. Then again, that might take away from the Power Elite's power and We the People can't have that, no matter how many of us vote for it.
PS: I think it was you, Skittles, who brought up C. Wright Mills way back when. Thanks!
Don Quixote is Still Alive in Argentina
by CESAR CHELALA
CounterPunch, Nov. 16, 2015
Tucuman, Argentina -- It may come as a surprise to many, but “Don Quixote” is still alive, and in a most unlikely place. He lives in Tucumán, my hometown in northern Argentina.
His name is Carlos Duguech. He does not dress in body armor but rather, despite usually scorching temperatures, in suit and tie. He carries bundles of papers, some of them legal sheaves enabling him to persecute and enrage his enemies.
Fortunately, his enemies are also civil, decent and honorable. He is of medium height with a narrow face, short beard, an aquiline nose and penetrating green-blue eyes. They are serious, determined eyes.
Although he is not a lawyer himself, his legal knowledge is encyclopedic and probably greater than that of any lawyer, something he uses to full advantage when persecuting miscreants. He is a writer and poet but — to his friends’ dismay — he will sideline any activity to pursue his obsessions.
What characterizes him most are not his physical traits; it is his devotion to fight for unjust causes. There is a wonderful phrase in Spanish that defines him: “Defensor de pobres, menores y ausentes” (Advocate for the poor, the children and the absent.)
SNIP...
After many defeats, this was clearly a major achievement for my friend. I could only ask him, “Why do you continue fighting all these mostly lost causes which are so costly, take so much of your energy, and don’t give you any financial gain?”
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/16/don-quixote-is-still-alive-in-argentina/
PS: Democracy and Justice depend on Truth. If we don't tell it, we get sick -- and nobody else will ever know.