“Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation, and a genuine sense of community—if we make the right choices today.”
Bill Clinton, Former President of the United States
“This is a book that defines both the nature of the new world which the internet is creating; and its challenges. It describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.”
Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
“Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume.”
This report is a trifecta of corrupted capitalism. It starts with the latest in the Prison Privatization trend, followed by the New American Slavery trend. In every way that one can measure these prison companies they consistently show what I can only characterize as depravity.
Consider for a moment the requirement that private prison companies be assured by the government paying them — that is to say you and me — that they will keep them at least 90 per cent stocked at all times. Just contemplate the implications of that sentence.
Then it moves on to the corruption of real estate investment trusts (REIT), the latest in the Deregulation trend.
Yet further corruption of our food system to the benefit of corporate profits. The Obama Administration is no better than the Bush Administration in this regard and, therefore, a tremendous disappointment. Once again, we have an example of the disconnect between Obama's words and his actions. He talks social progressive; he acts corporate servant.
Yesterday, during a radio talk show hosted by Mike Harris with Dr. James Fetzer and me as guests, Colonel James Hanke, a longtime friend and senior US Army intelligence officer (retired) phoned in. Hanke is the highest ranking intelligence official every to admit to false flag terrorism and to speak of it openly.
Hanke, former chief intelligence officer of NATO’s largest command, 3rd Army, former Military Attache to Israel and a recognized leader of the “mainstream” special operations community is still active within the intelligence community.
The interview below is a unique opportunity to view the “sea change” in awareness among senior intelligence personnel as to the breakdown in America’s government and security structure, enough of a “breakdown” to allow organizations to stage attacks, even assassinations, inside the United States.
Everyone knows this story, though fewer and fewer read it on paper. There are barely enough pages left to wrap fish. The second paper in town has shut down. Sometimes the daily delivers only three days a week. Advertising long ago started fleeing to Craigslist and Internet points south. Subscriptions are dwindling. Online versions don’t bring in much ad revenue. Who can avoid the obvious, if little covered question: Is the press too big to fail? Or was it failing long before it began to falter financially?
In the previous century, there was a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel. Then came regression to the mean. Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built. When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising and the shriveled newsrooms — there were fewer newsroom employees in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept — also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.
Deserting readers mean broken business models. Per household circulation of daily American newspapers has been declining steadily for 60 years, since long before the Internet arrived. It’s gone from 1.24 papers per household in 1950 to 0.37 per household in 2010. To get the sports scores, your horoscope, or the crossword puzzle, the casual reader no longer needs even to glance at a whole paper, and so is less likely to brush up against actual — even superficial — news. Never mind that the small-r republican model on which the United States was founded presupposed that some critical mass of citizens would spend a critical mass of their time figuring out what’s what and forming judgments accordingly.
The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (formerly the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya) is a Freedom House initiative that bills itself as the ”only private, nongovernmental organization in North America exclusively dedicated to promoting the peaceful resolution of the Russo-Chechen war.”[1] According to Freedom House, ACPC “coordinates with an international network of activists, journalists, scholars and nongovernmental organizations to advocate for and support human rights and rule of law, to monitor the upward trend of violence in the region, and to promote peace and stability in the North Caucasus.”[2] As of early 2013, the committee appeared to be largely defunct.
Founded in 1999 by U.S. liberal hawks and neoconservatives primarily interested in using the conflict in Chechnya to press an anti-Russian agenda, the ACPC eventually updated its name and broadened its focus after conflicts erupted between Russia and other parts of the Caucasus, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and North Ossetia.[3]
In early 2013, the committee attracted attention when the suspects in the April 2013 Boston marathon bombing were identified as ethnic Chechens. Although early reports did not indicate that the suspects were driven by Chechen nationalist motivations, some writers questioned whether the FBI had improperly ignored warnings from Russian authorities that one of the alleged bombers had met repeatedly with a suspected terrorist leader in Dagestan.
A writer for Antiwar.com suggested that groups like ACPC had promulgated an anti-Russian bias in Washington that precluded serious consideration of Russian warnings about potential Chechen terrorists. “How did [the bombers] manage to evade the multi-billion dollar ‘security apparatus, which was set up with so much fanfare after 9/11? The answer is to be found in the manipulations and odorous alliances dictated by our interventionist foreign policy, a throwback to the cold war era, which has deemed Russia an enemy and the Chechens the Good Guys.”[4]
Almost 23 years ago, I wrote a short pamphlet, Defense Power Games. My aim then (as it is now) was to explain why the end of the Cold War would not produce a peace dividend in the form of reduced defense budgets that were substantially lower that those averaged during America's Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Take a quick scan of Defense Power Games … now watch this 25 minute video — America's War Games — (also on youtube here) just released by Aljazeera for its People and Power segment. The video explains why the end of the War on Terror will not, like the end of the Cold War did not, result in a peace dividend
Santayana wrote that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. After watching “America's War Games,” ask yourself two simple questions:
“What has changed since the Defense Power Games pamphlet was published in 1990?”
“Will the end of the War on Terror produce a dividend?”
I submit the answers are self-evident: (1) “Nothing” and (2) “No”
But one thing that has changed: Our economy is in far greater trouble today than it was in 1990, although the seeds for the current disaster were being merrily planted during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, as well as in the 1990s, not to mention the first decade of the 21st Century. And this time around, it ought to be clear that continuing to assign grossly excessive amounts of scarce resources (capital and skilled labour) to defense spending will make America's current economic problems worse.
So, how can we reduce the defense budget to free up the funds needed by both the private and public sectors to reinvigorate our economy?
