“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin
Four decades of neoliberal policies have given way to an economic Darwinism that promotes a politics of cruelty. And its much vaunted ideology is taking over the United States.[1] As a theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity capable of challenging market-driven values and social relations. At the same time, economic Darwinism promotes the virtues of an unbridled individualism that is almost pathological in its disdain for community, social responsibility, public values and the public good. As the welfare state is dismantled and spending is cut to the point where government becomes unrecognizable – except to promote policies that benefit the rich, corporations and the defense industry – the already weakened federal and state governments are increasingly replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state and what João Biehl has called proliferating “zones of social abandonment” and “terminal exclusion.”[2]
Keynote Speech at the UN Human Rights Council SOCIAL FORUM – Oct 1, 2012
Your Excellencies!
Johan Galtung
The title for this Sixth Social Forum – in the context of the 10 Articles of the UN Declaration on the Right to Development of 4 December 1986 – is very well chosen. The focus is on people-centered development – as opposed to system – centered economic growth. And on globalization, a challenging process involving all states and regions, nations and civilizations, humans and nature – as opposed to a globalized market with only three free flows, of capital, goods and services, not labor; increasing the global economic gap.
And this in the context of rampant poverty, widening domestic inequalities, economic crises due to the disconnect between real and finance economies and greedy speculation, rising unemployment and popular unrest. Yesterday’s map dividing the world in developed and developing countries makes little sense when many of the developed are de-developing, declining, and many of the developing, emerging, on the way up–like BRICS–pass them on their way down. A new world.
Permit me Twelve Theses addressing this serious situation.
The mantra is: Nothing is too good for our boys in combat; that means our equipment is expensive but also so effective it is the master of the battlefield. The cost is actually even more than you are told and the demonstrated performance is far less. There are many examples of this bad bargain (extremely high cost for very disappointing performance), but the F-22 is perhaps the pinnacle of the myth.
I explain in the second part of a series at Time's Battleland blog at and below.
The most prominent effect of a major increase of money in the defense budget since 2001 has been decay in our forces. It has consisted of fewer combat units (such as Air Force squadrons and battleforce ships), aging of our major weapons inventories, and declining readiness of fighting personnel, such as pilots and tank drivers. It has actually been occurring for decades, as some insightful people have been pointing out for a long time.
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Less training for F-22 pilots and a potentially toxic environment in an airplane that cannot vastly outperform older, cheaper “legacy” aircraft is just one example of the high cost technological bloat that clogs our armed forces. Other examples include, but are hardly limited to, the hapless Littoral Combat Ship, the unaffordable F-35, missile defenses that fail even in cooperative testing, and high cost, low effectiveness Reaper drones.
Afghanistan-NATO: The withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan could come sooner than expected, according to NATO Secretary General Rasmussen. He conceded that the recent Taliban strategy of ‘green on blue' killings had been successful in sapping NATO morale.
In an interview with The Guardian Rasmussen acknowledged he felt pressure for a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan and said all options were being studied and should be clear within three months.
Rasmussen also said NATO's forces in Afghanistan have recommenced joint operations with Afghan forces. He said, “Almost all partnered activities have now been resumed and that reflects an assessment made by our commanders as regards the overall security situation.”
Special Comment: Two developments indicate the Coalition command does not know how to deal with the surge in green-on-blue murders. The first is the Afghan government's issuance of a cultural guide to Afghan forces advising them to not over-react to the cultural insensitivity of the Western soldiers.
Those arguing for more defense spending lean heavily on misinformation to make their case; many of the critics–previously including myself–have relied on myth. The first of a two part series starts today in Time's Battleland blog at http://nation.time.com/2012/10/01/adventures-in-babbleland-desperate-rhetoric-for-mundane-times/. Tomorrow's piece probes further into the myth of American military superiority by looking into one of its prime hardware examples.
Imposing itself only infrequently on the consciousness of the noise-makers who dominate presidential campaign coverage on TV and in the newspapers, the defense budget has been a second-tier issue in the 2012 elections.
That may properly be so, but the inattention of the top of the line political pontificators, who can be excused for not understanding the issue except at the most superficial level, has not elevated the quality of the debate at the lower tier.
Leaving the discussion to people like the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, sitting and former secretaries of defense, and the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has-surprisingly only to some-left us with a debate on the Pentagon budget that is hysterical, misinformed, and, most of all, misinforming. Moreover, many of the critics of these histrionics from the other side, including myself, have been so wedded to myths that both parties should be seen as the source of the dismal babble, not just the one.
Harvard Business Review | 2:00 PM September 20, 2012
For soldiers in the field, immediate access to — and accurate interpretation of — real-time imagery and intelligence gathered by drones, satellites, or ground-based sensors can be a matter of life and death.
Capitalizing on big data is a high priority for the U.S. military. The rise in unmanned systems and the military's increasing reliance on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies have buried today's soldiers and defense professionals under a mountain of information. Since 9/11 alone, the amount of data captured by drones and other surveillance technology has increased a jaw-dropping 1,600%. And this avalanche of data will only increase, since the number of computing devices the Armed Services have in play is expected to double by 2020.
Rising to this challenge, defense companies have made major strides in image processing and analysis. Companies like our own have deployed technologies and software solutions for troops in Afghanistan that help soldiers quickly make sense of imagery and video feeds captured by unmanned systems flying overhead. And we are working on enhancing such technologies to decrease the lag time between gathering and interpreting data.
A shocking new Federal Security Service (FSB) report circulating in the Kremlin today alleges that an entire American family that sought Russian protection from the Obama regime was massacred by US intelligence agents within hours of their planned escape from the United States.
According to this report, on 22 September a woman who indentified herself as Kathleen Peterson visited the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Washington D.C. under the pretense of signing up to take a course titled Russian Language Express Course A-1 for beginners set to begin on 26 September whereupon she approached director Yuriy Zaytsev and “slipped into his hand,” while shaking it, an encrypted computer thumb drive covered in a small note that said “please help us we’re in danger.”
Following “standard protocols” for such instances, when Russian officials are approached on American soil by US citizens, this report continues, the note and thumb drive in question were “processed” according to “established procedures” and revealed the plans of Mrs. Peterson, her husband Albert [both pictured 2nd photo left], and their two children, Mathew and Christopher, to leave Washington D.C. on 23 September on a flight to Paris where it was requested they be met by Russian security personal as this family feared their lives were in danger.
Within 24 hours of Mrs. Peterson passing her information to Russian officials, this report says, she, her husband and two children were violently gunned down in their Fairfax County Virginia home on 23 September with this massacre being blamed by US police officials on a murder-suicide plot initiated by her husband, Albert, with at least one Western news source, quoting a source indentified only as “Maggie L.”, stating this tragedy was due to his, Albert’s, fears over Obama being reelected as US President.
According to US news sources, Albert Peterson was a longtime employee of the US defense giant Northrop Grumman until he resigned in 2009, and Kathleen Peterson was employed by the US defense contracting firm Blackbird Technologies located in Herndon, Virginia.
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This FSB report further notes Blackbird Technologies “tracking and tagging” of those US citizens destined to be placed in America’s most feared prisons called Communication Management Units, or CMU’s. These secretive political prisons for “domestic terrorists” radically restricts prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the dreaded “Supermax”, and any other such prison operating in the Western world.
