Once Again, Trump's "Space Force" Is A Colossal Boondoggle That Rivals Reagan's "Star Wars" Idiocy

The recent news that Donnie Dotard  approved funding – embedded within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) -- for  the U.S. Space Force, ought to have every American's attention and outrage.   After all, in this age of outrageous military expenditures do we really need to be spending money on space wars. Trump, who first mentioned the Space Force idea in March 2018, and the U.S. Congress thinks so!

Among the lies put forward accompanying this phony event is that "Space force" marks  the first new U.S. military service in more than 70 years.  Trouble is,  it's not a "military service" but simply an unimaginative reinvention of the 'wheel'. To be specific,  a broken 'wheel' once known as the 'Strategic Defense Initiative' or SDI, other wise known as "Star Wars".   But now gussied up with PR and renamed "Space force".


According to The New York Times, Trump’s advisor and son-in-law-in-chief, Jared Kushner, “helped broker a deal to create the Space Force, a chief priority of the president’s, in exchange for the paid parental leave, a measure championed by his wife, Ivanka Trump, also a senior advisor to the president.”   

Which is more recycled bollocks that plays as a legit claim because most Americans can't keep up with the details of what's happening from one news cycle to the next.  Thanks to Trump and his incessant tweet storms and diatribes, crimes - as well as starting wars (like with Iran - and later likely North Korea) he won't be able to finish.

The truth?

The original idea for this boondoggle  was hatched some years ago by my feckless Colorado congress critter, Doug Lamborn  

 Lamborn is easily the most craven, mendacious, useless POS to ever grab power in our state.   Some  may recall that back in 2014 this walking turd wanted to slice Medicaid and food stamps for poor kids in order to feather the nest of the Pentagon and for expansion of already extensive military bases etc. near Colorado Springs.  Most recently, the miscreant mutt was almost eliminated from the GOP primary because of flouting Colorado law. To wit, a candidate may get his name on a primary ballot if he manages to get at least 1,000 signatures from likely voters- but these must be residents.

Problem was that 'Lame brain' used a lot of out- of -state dupes to garner signatures.  A legal case was brought, lawsuit filed, and the Colorado Supreme Court agreed, kicking him off the ballot. However, the slimy little douche took his case to federal court (which we know is stacked with Trumpie appointees) and argued that the residency rule for signature gatherers in Colorado was unconstitutional and "violated" his free speech. The federal judge (Philip Brimmer) agreed and tossed the case out so we're saddled with this shit head again.

Flash forward: the whole Space Force idea was originally Lamborn's, hatched in order to grab more money in campaign contributions-  from defense contractors  promised gigs here in Colorado Springs.  Lamborn as well as the defense contractors  saw only huge dollar signs,  with $$$$ pouring in at taxpayer's expense.

Cue the startup music and we beheld that  the knuckle dragger GOP House (prior to the 2018 midterms) had approved the creation of a "Space Corps" inside the Air Force. (Not separate from it!)  There  followed Trump's alleged novel brain fart on June, 18, 2018  at a meeting of the National Space Council  (WSJ, 'Trump Calls For A Space Force', 6/19/18, p. A3) 

But anyone with more than air between the ears could see it was merely a regurgitation of Lamborn's - though he also called it a "Space Corps".  At the time reported  (Denver Post, May 14, 2018) Lamborn had insisted :

"I don't care what we call it, or what it looks like as long as we make space the priority in the Department of Defense that it deserves to be".

According to the Times' piece:

"The aim of Space Force is to maintain U.S. superiority in space, particularly weighed against threats by China and Russia. The Space Force is part of a $1.4 trillion government-spending package. (Congress approved $40 million for Space Force operations and maintenance in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations.)  It will not be its own military department, like the Navy, Army and Air Force, as the secretary of the Air Force will administer it. The Space Force will have its own representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the law that created it."


Now let's cut to reality as opposed to fantasy:  What's really behind this bull crap? Well, the old term - which I still prefer - is "pork barrel spending". In other words, Lamborn's and Reagan's reincarnated boondoggle was merely revived under a new(?) title and different PR.  But like most current defense projects  it is merely an expedient device to  funnel  money to the Pentagon and its defense contractors for a fake project with the U.S. taxpayer the easy mark.  This, btw, is after the Pentagon has already lost track of trillions of dollars of funding, since at least 2002. (According to former analyst Chuck Spinney, see e.g.  
The Pentagon Merits NO Further Budget Increases Un...   )

So we are on the same plane of reality here (and why I used the term "specious") , let's note this is another one of those "bad ideas" exposed by Matt Miller in his book The Tyranny of Bad Ideas.  I.e. god awful, already proven disasters like trickle down tax cuts,  that keep coming back like bad pennies....or zombies.  In this case, no matter what Dotard and his cabal of lackeys claim about  being "a matter of national security', this is simply Reagan's Star Wars boondoggle in a new guise.  What's worse this time around is that this money waster could be approved under the "enactment" of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.  Talk about snake oil scams!

Indeed,  as we read in the Times' piece:

“Roughly 16,000 active-duty and civilian personnel who used to make up Air Force Space Command are now assigned to the Space Force following the enactment of the fiscal 2020 NDAA.” And, over the next year-and-a-half, "


So, in other words, those 16,000 recruited for this sham "service" will now be forced into a pretend job that supposedly makes us all more secure, but in reality is a Potemkin ruse.   ("Potemkin" is derived from "Potemkin Village" -  which term signifies any deceptive or false construct designed to mislead those within the false enclave and those peering in from the outside.)

For the benefit of those with poor memories, recall Star Wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was never proven workable or even remotely feasible.  It depended upon incorporating space-based interceptors as well as powerful lasers mounted on satellites to take down Soviet ICBMs.   The  most devastating exposure of the missile defense con appeared in the May, 1987 issue of Physics Today and was entitled "APS Directed Energy Weapons Study (Executive Summary)".   Versions of it  subsequently appeared in other journals, including the Reviews Of Modern Physics, e.g.
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.59.S1


The study basically took apart the SDI  piece by piece  with no fewer than 26 major  deficiencies identified on everything from the weaknesses of the proposed lasers to shoot down the incoming missiles (too weak by several orders of magnitude) to the problem of identifying the targets at sub-micro-radian resolution in the boost phase to "lack of precision tracking via active sensor systems".

 This more recent iteration of the Star Wars snake oil emphasizes the theme that "we need to protect our satellites from being shot down",  say by the Chinese, Russkies...or maybe even the Iranians.(According to a recent Pentagon report China and Russia pose the main threats  and are "making serious headway in space and could develop technologies to 'disrupt or destroy U.S. and allied satellites" in a future conflict.  

But let's get real here: satellites typically fly in predictable orbits and so will always be fairly easy to target, say by a determined bad actor.  But launching a typical weather or defense satellite is expensive enough without adding hundreds of pounds more weight for defenses (excimer lasers?) , or attempting to devise expensive ground A.I. systems to disable enemy satellites in orbit.  A more practical solution - which maybe trillion less in cost- is to employ greater redundancy in the satellites we do put up.  Thus, the military - say Air Force, not a redundant useless "Space Force"- could also deploy backup systems on unmanned aerial vehicles - integrating them into a fraction of the fleet.

But  here's the hard fact.  These wastrels and weasels in the Pentagon never ever got over their little 'Star Wars' (SDI) farce being exposed for the claptrap scheme it was.  As proof, I point to a little known 1989 congressional report entitled  "Military Space Forces - The Next Fifty Years".  Therein we learned that  the aerospace industry had a boner for the resurrection of a bottomless money pit  analogous to the original SDI but using fear, to concoct a "space force".    The money wastrels realized SDI had its day so they needed a new con and  new con artists. Enter the likes of Doug Lamborn - and later, Donald Trump - the ultimate con artist.   As Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space noted in a recent press release regarding this plan:

"The aerospace industry has long claimed that  this new Star Wars would be the largest industrial project in the history of our planet. So much money would be needed that the industry has identified the ‘entitlement programs’ for defunding to pay for ‘everything space.’ That means Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the remaining tattered social safety net would be cut to pay for Space Force.”

Which is exactly what defense analyst Chuck Spinney also warned when the  portion of  GDP allocated to national security, defense spending doubled  post 9/11, e.g.

Former Defense Analyst Chuck Spinney Predicted ‘Wa...

But now the spending for the "space force" will be on steroids.  While the malignant and malicious budget -busting cost is bad enough, there is also the destabilizing effect for global security.  Translation: the 'Doomsday' clock  (of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) will now move another minute closer to midnight, if this scheme is implemented -at least to the exent other nations believe it to be a real threat.
  

Writing for Counterpunch, Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and  the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, pointed out that the Space Force deal flies in the face of “the landmark Outer Space Treaty of 1967, put together by the U.S., then Soviet Union and the U.K., designating space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes”.

The Outer Space Treaty “bans weapons of mass destruction in space,” Grossman pointed out.  Further:

 “The Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty that the three nations have sought to expand would prohibit the placement of any weapons in space. But the U.S. “has opposed the PAROS treaty and effectively vetoed its enactment at the United Nations.”

Oh, one last thing you ought to know:  the magic words "Space force" have been a reliable applause line at Trump's political rallies  - appealing to the cabbage brains that flock to them and cheer. (I.e. those in the lower half of the IQ curve.)   Most of these goobers are delirious because no one explained to them that 'space force' doesn't really mean Trump will be leading a military unit against extraterrestrials, aka aliens.  Why would he if 'Captain Bonespurs'   wasn't even prepared to fight any wars on Earth,   choosing to get out of service five times using the ruse of bone spurs.   (He did this by getting a special doctor's letter each time as opposed to undergoing an actual draft physical - such as I had to take in March, 1965.)

But now this consummate con man and grifter pestilence has succeeded in getting even the Dems to sign on to his cockamamey bullshit space force idea.   No wonder so many Dem voters (and others) are terrified at the prospect of the ambulatory orange maggot getting reelected this year.

See Also:

Armed Forces | Donald Trump | Space & Astronomy

With Space Force, Congress Hands Trump a Major Victory

Excerpt:

"The idea for Space Force started out as a joke by Trump when he flippantly said, during a 2018 speech in San Diego, California: “I was saying it the other day because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the Space Force.’ And I was not really serious. Then I said, ‘What a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.’” A year ago, when Democrats won enough congressional seats to claim victory in the House, the fate of Space Force was in serious doubt. The Atlantic speculated that “[w]ith the House of Representatives flipped and Congress split, the Trump administration’s Space Force will probably never get off the ground.” But just 13 months later, Democrats and Republicans together gave the most unpopular president in memory the approval he needed to fast-track his idea into reality.

In 2018, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island expressed his opposition to Space Force, saying it was “not the way to go.” A year later, Reed capitulated when he voted for the latest NDAA encompassing the creation of Space Force, saying the bill was “a responsible compromise that strengthens our national defense capabilities.” Regardless of the liberal party’s feigned opposition to warfighting, militarism has always been a bipartisan project, and it is no surprise that the militarization of space is as well."

And:

Armed Forces | Donald Trump | Space & Astronomy

Trump: Make Space Great Again

by John Feffer | January 16, 2020 - 7:33am | permalink

Look For A New Shutdown As Impeachment Noose Tightens Around Trump's Orange Neck

"I will shut down the government again if the Dems do not stop impeachment!"

In the wake of the passage of the resolution for the House impeachment rules yesterday, too many have forgotten that a series of high priority federal decisions lay ahead - touching on every aspect of the government and beyond.  In particular, the chances for a government shutdown before Thanksgiving loom much larger given zero progress reported on any of the 12 key spending bills.  These actually expired one month go but have been given a temporary extension until November 21st.

As this goes on the risk grows with each passing week and day of a shutdown and one that would be far more sweeping then the 35 day partial shutdown earlier this year.

Besides the spending bills, other laws are expiring or lapsing and require attention and appropriate action. These include:

- The National Defense Authorization Act which sets Pentagon policy (approved every year since 1946)

- An ensemble of tax break bills, ranging from the health care industry (medical devices' tax) to paid family leave, all of which will expire on December 31st.

- A World Trade Organization appellate body ceases to exist unless approved for extension.


Alas, for many,  each of these is seen as separate from the House Democrats impeachment of Trump. But not for Dotard and his brash enablers. Despite  Repukes like Kevin McCarthy yammering for the Dems to "trust the people instead" (i.e. in the general election) any one with an IQ above moron knows if left to his own devices - with no oversight- Trump will be emboldened to do even more pernicious damage to the Republic. At least impeachment forces the mutt to lawyer up and focus on the impending open hearings and the eventual Senate trial to remove his orange ass.

For Trump himself, however, there is no assurance he sees the bills' passage as separate from impeachment.  This is given he tends to see critical issues as one large negotiation - linking together seemingly disparate threads and issues into one "legislative ball of wax"  in the parlance of one WaPo columnist.   A specific indicator of that and of how unfit this human swine is to hold office - any office - was spotlighted in his Dallas rally 2 weeks ago.

We know already that the man has zero interest in working (like Obama did for 10 hrs./day)  - and rallies provide him with a kind of ersatz "oxygen " to energize his dementia- afflicted brain.  Also,  a ready made excuse to get out of DC and the impeachment spotlight. - while railing against the Dems and his other enemies seen  (e.g. Never Trumpers)  and unseen ("the Deep state" in his febrile, CT brain).  At that Big D rally we beheld his return to all his greatest hits, each reeled off in a couple hours of irrational whining and loathsome, unpresidential behavior.

By last week Sunday, even his tweeting, Fox TV watching and other goldbricking became old hat so he had to get his staff to gin up the takedown of al-Baghdadi to start looking "presidential" again.  Never mind it was mostly a PR stage show and the raid on the Isis head was accomplished more despite Trump than because of any substantive contribution. See e.g.

Foreign Policy

The Baghdadi Scam

by Margaret Kimberley | October 31, 2019 - 5:45am | permalink

Excerpt:

"The corporate media, Democrats and Republicans all joined in celebrating Baghdadi’s reported demise. Even those who count how often Trump tells lies suddenly expressed complete confidence in the version of events. Once again we see the embrace of Trump by the so-called resistance if he adheres to imperialist orthodoxy. The same man who they claim to want to impeach suddenly gets praise as he did when he launched an attack on Syria in 2017. The man mocked as a buffoon can be seen as “presidential” if he kills or even claims to kill people in a far away land.." 

With the impeachment process now fully formalized, and hearings likely to begin by the middle of this month, Trump's ratlike,  cornered behavior is likely to worsen, and no matter how much his Repuke stooges (like McCarthy, Jim Jordan and Lindsey  Graham) grovel and kiss ass, he won't be satisfied.   Thus many congressional leaders worry that Captain Bonepurs might use any of the must pass bills as hostages to try and gain leverage against an impending impeachment.

My take is the probability is very high it could happen with an unstable sociopath and authoritarian like Trump in the Oval office.  All sentient citizens need to be paying attention to what happens to the above cited bills as the Nov. 21 deadline approaches. We may well be seeing another shutdown and just before Christmas.


See also:

• Republicans claim that Tim Morrison's testimony exonerated Trump, they couldn't be more wrong 

And:

Government | Republicans

Shutdown, Impeachment: Welcome to the Beginning of Another Crappy Holiday Season Courtesy of the GOP

Excerpt:

"Republicans are at the political positioning/finger-pointing stage of budget negotiations, ahead of a potential government shutdown in a few weeks. While Congress approved a budget for the next fiscal year before the August recess, it didn't pass the necessary spending bills allocating the money. The stop-gap funding bill it also passed last month is going to expire on Nov. 21, after which there are three possible scenarios, only two of which are feasible. The Congress could pass and Donald Trump could sign all of the 12 appropriations bills. That's not going to happen. The two real scenarios: another stop-gap bill going until Christmas or into the new year, or a shutdown."

Electors With No Coherent Strategy Leave Us Facing The Trump Reich

In the end, the great Electoral College resistance and 'fail safe' check on Trumpian power went out more with a whimper than a bang. An effort by anti-Trump activists to stop him reaching 270 fell pathetically short. Activists who had urged electors to back efforts led by academics (e.g. Prof. Lawrence Lessig) to cast their ballots at variance with election results to keep Trump from reaching the magic number came to practically nothing. With counts still ongoing in California and Texas, the number of electoral college members who attempted to cast a protest vote was likely to reach at least nine. Wow, nine of 538!

What happened? Basically a combination of too little will to overturn the Electoral College as a mere rubber stamp, and too little actual strategy. Specifically, I place the preponderance of blame on two factors: 1) A disorganized effort to thwart the fascists with too many distracting and unrealistic alternative choices, and 2) An unwillingness to rock the boat and just play it safe, especially among Republican electors.  As for the much ballyhooed "Hamilton electors', they turned out to be more a myth than reality.  If a person had to, he might have counted them on one hand, if that.

The result was predictable: with only external protests erupting - as in Madison, WI-  Trump cakewalked to his official electoral victory as millions tuned in to updated tallies, aghast.  While many of us expected it to be an uphill fight, we didn't believe the electors- charged with being the last bastion to protect the Republic would simply surrender their duty so easily.

But there were some interesting moments. More than 200 demonstrators were on the steps of Pennsylvania’s capitol in Harrisburg on Monday morning, waving signs and chanting in chilly, 25F(-4C) weather. They thundered: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!” and “No treason, no Trump!”

In respect of the latter, some on the Left have circulated that Trump ought to be hung for treason as a punishment for colluding with the Russkies to ambush Hillary, if ever impeached. There are several things wrong with this proposition including you can't just hang the man after being impeached (if he ever is, especially for "treason") and besides, there is as yet no proof Trump knew all along what was going on and "colluded". Besides, the Left has bigger things to worry about as I will get to.

Meanwhile, several dozen protesters gathered outside South Carolina’s statehouse in Columbia, waving signs with messages imploring electors not to back the president-elect.  But anyone familiar with the South ought to have known this would be a fool's errand. Most of those electors fly Confederate flags in their homes and would have laughed at the objectors.

Vermont was the first state to report the results of its vote. As expected, all three electors voted for Clinton. Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia and South Carolina followed for Trump, and Delaware for Clinton as the totals started to mount.

After a Hawaiian elector cast a vote for Bernie Sanders, the total was Trump with 304 votes and Clinton with 227. It takes 270 electoral college votes to win the presidency. Texas put Trump over the top, despite two Republican electors casting protest votes. Then there was Washington state which actually saw an elector or two voting for Colin Powell. In other words, they were 'all over the map' and had no coherent strategy to take down 'the Donald'.

In many cases, the Republican electors had taken their own kool aid, Jonestown-style, even as they were implored to do the right thing. Many admitted that they had been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many emails were part of coordinated campaigns, all trending with the same theme I had elaborated in my post from yesterday.

Lee Green, a Republican elector from North Carolina, told the Associated Press:

“The letters are actually quite sad  They are generally freaked out. They honestly believe the propaganda. They believe our nation is being taken over by a dark and malevolent force.”

Dark and malevolent force? But what would one call a faction that has ascended to power by way of foreign intervention in the election, fake news and racist vitriol? Also, is led by a tweet-happy lunatic who (as recorded in a Sunday Review NY Times piece:) has:

"encouraged violence among supporters; pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton; threatened legal action against unfriendly media; and suggested that he might not accept the election results.This anti-democratic behavior has continued since the election. With the false claim that he lost the popular vote because of “millions of people who voted illegally,” Mr. Trump openly challenged the legitimacy of the electoral process. At the same time, he has been remarkably dismissive of United States intelligence agencies’ reports of Russian hacking"

And as the piece further pointed out, political scientist Juan J. Linz definitely showed Trump passed the "litmus test" for an anti-democratic leader. His indicators included: a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.  All of which ought to incite lots of foreboding on the Left and especially among those who value civil liberties.

As my sister-in -law Krimhilde put it on learning of the electoral college results: "It reminded of the day Hindenburg turned over the Chancellorship to Hitler....and then the Reichstag fire"  Sometimes, indeed,, people who ought to know better lose track of the historical patterns, and resonances.  But maybe that's because they never learned history in the first place.

Her reference to the "Reichstag fire"  evoked the singular event many Germans (who were alive then) trace to the establishment of the Nazi Third Reich. It occurred on 27 February 1933. Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch council communist, was caught at the scene of the fire and arrested for the crime. Most Germans alive then -including Krimhilde, and three former Wehrmacht soldiers I spoke to in 1985-  believe the fire was a false flag and the kid was a patsy. A decoy used expediently to take the blame, as much as the Warrenites have tried to use Lee Oswald for assassinating John Kennedy.

But never mind, it led to pivotal changes in the nation, leading it to be unrecognizable within a few years. For example:

-  'The Decree for the Protection of the People and the State'  issued on Feb. 28, 1933 and which abolished basic rights, authorizing preventative arrest. That is, if you were even suspected of committing a "crime against the state" (including speaking out against it) you were arrested.

- March 22, 1933, the concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich, was opened. Among the first dispatched there were journalists who flouted the 'Decree for the Protection of the German People' which limited freedom of the press.

- August 2, 1934, Paul von Hindenburg dies, and Hitler becomes Chancellor and Fuhrer.

So, looking at the parallels to previous history, there is more than ample basis for fear among those who value civil rights, liberties.

Of course, it's understandable why many other electors punted. Take the case of the sole Republican, Christopher Suprun of Texas, who said: “Since I announced my intention to vote according to my conscience, I have received about half a dozen death threats against me and my family."

Make no mistake we can expect many more such threats as Trumpeters become emboldened after Trump's inauguration and especially the massive protests being planned to disrupt that event. These are people who fall into a proud group Chris Suprin referenced when he said:

“More happily, a person I’ve known for years who traces his ancestry back to the American revolution told me he thinks his forebears would have been proud of what I’m doing, which made me feel pretty good.”

And my own ancestor, Conrad Brumbaugh - who fought in the Revolutionary War- would have too!

Meanwhile, Wirt A Yerger Jr, a Republican elector in Mississippi, said: “I have gotten several thousand emails asking me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away.”

But what would one expect from a Rebel yokel who likely has the Confederate flag flying over his home and draped on every wall?

The first prediction I have for Trump's first year will be a sober one: a false flag, in many ways like the Reichstag fire, that he will use to invoke Martial law and the repeal of civil liberties under the "continuity of government" provisions. Also, look for a repeal of habeas corpus, which loophole had been left in place on account of the Military Commissions Act (2006) and the most recent National Defense Authorization Act.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

U.S.No Longer A Democracy But An Oligarchy- Gee,Yuh Think?

"The first truth is that liberty is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than that of their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It seems it took a bit of time for the economic cognoscenti at Princeton to catch up to my much earlier conclusion (20 years ago in my tract -now a book-  'The Elements of the Corporatocracy') posted to Usenet groups alt.politics, alt.politics-economics and alt.conspiracy.jfk etc. that the U.S. had ceased to be a democracy.

I  observed  the U.S. has already evolved from a democracy (or to be technical, a Republic that operates using democratic machinery) to a Corporatocracy which represents a government - corporate nexus by which corporate power is able to purchase legislative leverage and overtime contaminate the wheels of government itself.  Thus, the corporate sphere uses the power of its wealth and influence (especially in the media and via lobbying) to control a nation's political and economic destiny.

In the most glaring form, people can examine the laws that have been passed and then ask how these laws benefit them or whether in fact they hide an agenda. Thus, The National Defense Authorization Act falls into the negative category. Obama assured us he wouldn't invoke any or all of the extensive powers it conferred (enabling a potentially dictatorial executive) but that doesn't console us if someone less honorable or judicious were to become commander-in chief. Someone like the authoritarian Hitler wannabe Donald J. Trump - if he should survive the  election recounts. (His threat against freedom of speech ought to be  wakeup call to all, as well as his multiple appointments of billionaires, i.e. to Dept. of Commerce and Treasury Secretary. So much for the man "of the people")

The basic structure of our corporatocracy is like this:

Corporation - > Congress Critter -> [corporate welfare in laws]
---------------------------------------------------V
!----------------- -----------------------(tax breaks etc.) -------!

This loop assures the governance of the nation is sold to the highest bidders. Obviously if our legislators accept money from corporations to get elected, they are obligated to those corporations afterwards. That means that these obligations have to made good, most often in passing laws that favor the corporations over the average citizen.

The Princeton study, in an article  “Testing Theories of American Politics.” by Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I. Page, has now revealed the U.S. to be an oligarchy. This is defined as a society wherein elite wealthy interests control all the levers of power and ordinary citizens exert minimal impact on policy issues that affect their lives. In the case of oligarchy it is more the influence of hyper wealthy individuals, like the Koch brothers, who determine the political and economic landscape.

In the words of the Princeton profs:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

The professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organized interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted.

They conclude:

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

Eric Zuess, writing in Counterpunch, isn't surprised by the survey's results.

"American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media)," he writes. "The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious 'electoral' 'democratic' countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now."

Now with Trump hiring more and more billionaires into his administration the situation will be compounded and we'll likely become a full fascist corporate state unless he's somehow stopped in his march to the Oval Office. The best chance is perhaps the ongoing recounts which numerous Trump super PACS are now fighting tooth and nail, panicked as they are- and should be.

As Paul Krugman put it in a recent column, the working class who voted for him on the basis he'd improve their lives will now learn how wrong they were. They will soon face a "nasty, brutish, short life" as their Medicare and  Obamacare choices are withdrawn or winnowed to the point they're almost useless.

If we are lucky, the recounts will ultimately succeed and we won't decline into a further mess a la Trump and renegade pseudo patriots.

See also:  "The Voters Rejected Trump":

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jack-lessenberry/70081/the-voters-rejected-trump

And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/steven-rosenfeld/70121/trump-campaign-and-gop-allies-in-full-legal-panic-as-recounts-could-create-electoral-college-crisi

Why Russians Hate Neoliberal Imperialists - And Americans Should Too! (2)

"At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to homelessness" - Henry Giroux, 'The Politics of Cruelty - America's Descent Into Madness' (smirkingchimp.com)

In the previous installment I examined how Russia was brought to its economic knees using the "shock doctrine" of the Neoliberal capitalist imperialists, documented in excruciating detail in Naomi Klein's book,  'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).    But as Klein describes, the shock doctrine's basis of "disaster capitalism" was to deliberately use assorted confected crises - whether military  or economic- to justify subverting the will of many other nations and their citizens to make the world "safe" for global capital. In one chapter where Klein coins the term "disaster capitalism" she analogizes it to the electric shocks delivered via certain tortures, say to a person's head & genitals. The shocked victims became so mentally incoherent, terrified -  that they were ready to accept just about anything demanded of them.


In the aftermath of what the Neoliberals did to Russia, it perhaps wasn't surprising they'd turn their eyes to the U.S. itself. But how to do it? Capitalism in a way was already entrenched, at least in terms of a mixed economy, i.e. which also had aspects of mild socialism (for example, inherent in social insurance). But the Neoliberals and their military shock troops ensconced in a de facto shadow government (exposed in Kathryn Olmstead's Challenging the Secret Government, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996) needed a way to: a) keep citizens hostage to the Neoliberal imperative, which demanded ever increasing removal of economic security - especially in "entitlements", and b) demanded an ever expanded military  -surveillance structure to halt  anti-capitalist protests in the country, as well as establish global capital beach heads in others. This meant dramatically inflating the military-  surveillance budget. The problem was how to do it, given the old enemies had been brought to heel.

The ideal way to instill shock (in an already market-hostage consumer nation) if one wished to ramp up surveillance and defense budgets (at the cost of entitlements),  would be an attack on American soil - which would then be milked for all it was worth as justification for increased security-defense spending. The attack would be such that 99% of Americans would be so traumatized that they'd be prepared to give up anything (except maybe shopping), even long established rights- liberties, just to be protected from further attacks. If the attack was large enough or spread out, the putative security state could exploit it to instill more fear, paranoia by subsequent use of color coded "alerts". The media would help by replaying the images which would then permeate every neuron of every sentient citizen in every state - much the same way the public slaughter of John F. Kennedy has been emblazoned in the minds and eyes of later presidents to make them understand they aren't the real heads of state, only puppets. If the enemy was also demonized enough, it might rival the Cold War boogeyman of "Reds under the bed" confected by the McCarthyites and their latter-day  clones.

Whether one is a "9/11 Truther"  or shares a milder perspective (like me, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-responsible-was-bush-for-911.html) it is indisputable that the Bushite regime - shoehorned into power by five Supremes - benefited enormously by the 9/11 attacks. Not only did Bush's approval rating soar from the toilet (35%)  to over 90% in days, but within barely five years the defense budget had doubled, from 2.4% of GDP to 4.9% while the surveillance budget had exploded even more - thanks to the provisions in the "the Patriot Act" which most of our dutiful reps didn't even bother to read before they signed it into law.

Worse, these reprobates rolled over like beaten whelps as the Bushites pumped the false basis for invading Iraq - seeking to validate a nearly 10 -year long invasion that would suck our own nation dry in its domestic resources, as it ramped up deficits - which of course, was the plan. It was part of the shock doctrine to generate monstrous debt,  the better to justify cutting those nasty entitlements as the Neoliberals demanded.

Thankfully, at least one true patriot and courageous citizen, Joe Wilson, had the guts to expose the Bushie's "yellowcake- Niger" fakery (part of what they claimed was the reason to attack Saddam, since otherwise we'd all be incinerated in a nuclear cloud). However, his wife Valerie Plame paid the price by being outed by the Bushies as a CIA agent. Talk about treason! But some Americans- who now blather about Ed Snowden - seem lost at sea as to who are true traitors and who are patriots.

Amidst all this changes were being made in terms of mass surveillance. Though the Bushies were caught red-handed illegally going around the 1978 FISA law to get illegal wiretaps - of those terrible 'terrists,  at least suspects- a wimp congress looked the other way and actually approved the illegal wiretaps by CHANGING the law! Never in the history of these United States has a bigger consortium of treasonous rats been exposed. And to make it even worse, a subsequent congress actually approved the extension of the bastardized law several years later.

The seeds of the shock doctrine applied to the U.S.. were already well in hand. In her Chapter 15 ('The Corporate State') Naomi Klein describes in detail how the U.S. was transferred into a massive corporate state with the security apparatus to back it up. (Red flags about too many energetic citizen protests to globalization had already appeared with the anti-WTO Seattle protests in 1999, made famous in the movie, 'The Battle of Seattle'). So the privatization forces (who also at the time were making a full court press to privatize Social Security based on the Bush Texas plan)  needed mass surveillance to identify would-be trouble makers, and they also needed something more: a martial law fallback position to lock up anyone they deemed too 'activist".

Thus does Klein, in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 15, introduce us to the continuity of government (COG) program I'd blogged on earlier, i.e. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-skeleton-key-and-cog-how-close.html

She writes (p. 390):

"In the heat of the mid-term elections of 2006, three weeks before announcing Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, George W. Bush signed the Defense Authorization Act in a private Oval Office ceremony. Tucked into its 1400 pages was a rider that went almost completely unnoticed at the time. It gave the president the power to declare martial law and 'employ the armed forces' - including the National Guard - overriding the wishes of state governors in the event of a 'public emergency' in order to 'restore public order' and 'suppress disorder'"

Klein added that the declared emergency could  'be almost anything' including "mass protests".  Obviously, the Seattle 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests had given the Neoliberal imperialists a wake up call and they weren't about to take it any more. Hence also, the way they bore down on Occupy Wall Street in 2011, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/12/national-security-state-spied-on-occupy.html  to the extent of even aiming sniper rifles at them in Houston.

Klein notes that before Bush's treachery martial law could only be enacted in a time of actual insurrection. Worse, deploying military on American soil violated the Posse Comitatus law.

As time went on, the corporate gangster war-surveillance state was consolidated in multiple ways. But like the proverb about the frog who jumps from boiling water when dumped into it, but is boiled alive while immersed if the water temperature is increase only 1 degree at a time , Americans (most) were oblivious as their nation was slowly transformed into a fascist police state. Or maybe they were still too shocked from the events of 9/11 to do anything, especially with the Bushies manipulating them with a series of yellow, orange and other "alerts".

Because in 2006, right under their noses, the Military Commissions Act was passed which effectively removed the age old right of habeas corpus. Not long after the National Defense Authorization Act (of 2011, then 2012, then 2013, and soon 2014) which codified the indefinite military detention of American citizens without requiring they be charged with a specific crime or given a trial. (See also: http://truth-out.org/news/item/17070-indefinite-surveillance-say-hello-to-the-national-defense-authorization-act-of-2014

In Klein's examination we also learn that the Bush martial law insertion via hidden rider to implement continuity of gov't could be traced back to John Foster Dulles who defined a two -pronged priority for the country: 1) defeating communism, especially as manifested in Russia, and 2) protecting multi-national corporations - through whatever means necessary including coups staged in non-cooperative nations, who refused to allow resources to be exploited. Thus, the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala using the CIA to protect the profits of United Fruit.

Dulles made it clear that "coups and military interventions were the means to the end" of corporate hegemony- to thereby arrive at stable environments for business to prosper. Translation: make every country with ripe resources plum for the taking and be prepared to put down any nation or its government that got too uppity. Oh, and kill any upstarts!


But why worry? After all, we now know actual American citizens can be killed at the will or discretion of the executive.  Anyone paying attention? Maybe the shock doctrine has indeed worked because it has imposed shocks that benumb the populace into ceding everything away as they mutate into consumers - away from citizens.

Interested readers may then ponder the 14 characteristics of fascism, noting in particular: Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -because of fear of enemies and the need for security, Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - people rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe, Supremacy of the Military (Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding);  and Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

See more at: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/10/14-characteristics-of-fascism.html