- Eminem Accuses Trump Of "Brainwashing" Fans, Says "F**king Turd Would Be Better President"
Authored by Luke Morgan Britton via NME.com,
Rapper says he doesn’t mind losing half his fanbase to Trump
Eminem has hit out again at Donald Trump, arguing that both Hillary Clinton and “a fucking turd” would have made for a better President than the current US leader.
The Detroit rapper has been vocal in his criticism of Trump in recent months, saying that Trump doesn’t care about America and that he has “brainwashed” his supporters.
Now, speaking to Billboard, Eminem has claimed that he foresaw Trump’s election win.
“Watching the TV in fucking disbelief. I was in my basement, on the phone back and forth with friends like, ‘He’s going to fucking win’,” he said.
“I called it just from the rallies he was having when he first started running. Because just watching the impact he has, they were fanatics. There is something to be said about the person who really felt like he might do something for them – and he just fucking duped everybody.”
“I know that Hillary [Clinton] had her flaws, but you know what? Anything would have been better [than Trump]. A fucking turd would have been better as a president.”
Last October, Eminem slammed Trump in a freestyle performed at the BET Hip-Hop Awards, drawing a “line in the sand” between him and Trump, telling his fans to pick a side.
He later expressed his surprise at Trump failing to respond to the freestyle.
“I felt that everybody who was with him at that point doesn’t like my music anyway,” Eminem said. “I get the comparison with the non-political-correctness, but other than that, we’re polar opposites. He made these people feel like he was really going to do something for them.”
“It’s just so fucking disgusting how divisive his language is, the rhetoric, the Charlottesville shit, just watching it going, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying this.’ When he was talking about John McCain, I thought he was done. You’re fucking with military veterans, you’re talking about a military war hero who was captured and tortured. It just didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. And that’s some scary shit to me.”
“I knew [the BET freestyle] would get a reaction, obviously; that’s what I rap to do,” Eminem added. “But where I was coming from in that cypher was a genuine place in my heart. I [hesitate] to say [I have] hatred in my heart for him, but it’s serious contempt. I do not like the guy.”
“At the end of the day, if I did lose half my fan base, then so be it, because I feel like I stood up for what was right and I’m on the right side of this. I don’t see how somebody could be middle class, busting their ass every single day, paycheck to paycheck, who thinks that that fucking billionaire is gonna help you.”
Eminem recently hit back at critics who say that he’s “lost it”.
In his ‘Chloraseptic’ remix, Eminem rapped: “Not as raw as I was / ‘Walk on Water’ sucked? / Bitch, suck my dick.”
He continued:
“Y’all saw the tracklist and had a fit / Before you heard it / So you formed your verdict While you sat with your arms crossed / Did your little reaction videos and talked over songs / Nah dog, y’all saying I lost it / Your fucking marbles are gone.”
So that should clear a few things up.
- Feds Charge Democrat Florida Mayor With Money Laundering, Taking Bribes From "Bunch Of Russians"
The Mayor of Hallandale Beach, Florida surrendered to authorities on Thursday on third-degree felony charges of money laundering, official misconduct and exceeding limits on campaign contributions. Mayor Joy Cooper (D) is also charged with soliciting contributions in City Hall – a misdemeanor. Each felony carries a maximum five year prison sentence.
Hallandale Beach, FL Mayor Joy CooperAccording to prosecutors, the FBI began investigating Cooper in May, 2012 – posing as wealthy real estate developers from California seeking political favors from Cooper in exchange for a Hallandale Beach project. The undercover agents hired disbarred Hollywood attorney Alan Koslow to represent them, who funneled $5,000 in campaign contributions to Cooper in the form of “checks from a bunch of Russian names,” according to court documents. Koslow did not initially know that the men were with the FBI, nor that he was also a target in their investigation.
Alan Koslow“At the time, Alan Koslow was unaware that he was interacting with undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agents,” wrote investigators. Koslow, 63, would eventually wear a wire as part of the sting, as the FBI recorded audio or video of every meeting, according to court records.
Koslow represented himself to agents as an effective lobbyist who “had the vote of the mayor,” records show. During a July 10, 2012 meeting between Cooper, the undercover FBI agents and Koslow at City Hall, Cooper was recorded making assurances that she and two other commissioners were a “team of three” who could push the real estate project through, according to the arrest affidavit.
“Alan Koslow showed Mayor Cooper a number representing a proposed contribution and asked her if it was a good number. She replied ‘No. Add a zero.” Koslow confirmed ‘Three zeros, is that fine?’ and Mayor Cooper replied ‘Yes,’” according to the arrest affidavit. Later that month, Koslow assured Cooper she would receive a $10,000 bribe in the form of two $5,000 contributions – before and after the August, 2012 primary.
In an August, 2012 meeting, Koslow and the undercover agents went to Cooper’s home, after which they drove to the former Hollywood attorney’s house and gave him a Dunkin’ Donuts bag containing $8,000 in cash. Koslow told the agents he would have two Russian organizations write checks for them, according to investigators.
During a recorded meeting at the Flashback Diner on Aug. 20, 2012, one of the undercover agents told Cooper that “the pledged payment to her, via her campaign, would be in the form of checks from a ‘bunch of Russian names,’” according to court documents.
In September, Koslow told one of the agents he had personally handed 20 checks to Cooper at a Hallandale Beach Chamber of Commerce fashion show, court records say. The checks, totaling $5,000, were broken down into smaller amounts that appeared to come from people with Russian last names, according to the documents. Cooper said “that’s fantastic” when she got the checks, according to what Koslow told the undercover agents.
Cooper’s campaign reported nine contributions from eight teachers and a retired person in the amount of $500 each, matching names on a list of donors Koslow had given the so-called developers, the affidavit said.
-Sun-Sentinel
Between September 2013 and May 2016, four different undercover FBI agents met with Koslow at least 75 times, however their discussions remain secret due to ongoing investigations in other matters. The FBI’s had their final piece of major evidence after Koslow gave a sworn statement to investigators in November 2017, in which he admitted to the entire affair.
Cooper’s attorney responded, knocking the FBI for using Koslow:
“We look forward to our day in court and the mayor’s vindication,” said Cooper’s attorney, Larry Davis. “We’re extremely disappointed that the Broward County State Attorney’s Office is relying upon Alan Koslow, a disgraced and disbarred convicted felon, as the centerpiece of its case of alleged campaign finance violations.”
Koslow, 63, was considered one of the most effective and best-known attorneys and lobbyists in the state, specializing in representing developers and the gaming industry. He pleaded guilty in August 2016 to helping people prosecutors said he thought were “quasi-mafia” criminals hide the source of $220,000 linked to illegal gambling and drug dealing. –sun-sentinal.com
Cooper apparently began unraveling late last year – with her political rivals sending a letter to Gov. Scott asking him to remove her from office, after she allegedly showed up to a commission meeting and appeared to be under the influence of some type of “behavior-altering substance,” according to the letter.
Cooper defended herself, saying she was severely dehydrated after contracting diarrhea during a trip to Mexico. Cooper was also accused of spying on her political rivals, after Vice Mayor Keith London and others say she planted a GPS tracker in their cars. Cooper suggested the rivals had planted the trackers as a political stunt.
And so, once again, America is graced with tales of mystery, malfeasance, and incompetence by elected officials in Broward County, Florida.
- Economic Collapse And Dollar Hegemony – How Did This Start?
Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
In the previous article I explained why bitcoin should be considered a reaction to US dollar hegemony and how other nations and central banks are facing the crisis of the dollar brought on by de-dollarization. In this article I will go into how we came to this point and what mechanisms helped to bring about a debt-based society. In the third and last article we will examine the nature of the future geopolitical and geo-financial transition as well as the signals we need look out for in the immediate future.
From Gold to Paper
To understand what is happening today we must look back to simpler times, back when people bartered with each other. The utility and availability of commodities determined their value. Gold in particular represented a finite good that was difficult to find and was useful in various fields. For this reason gold has always been considered the highest example of a valuable good, together with diamonds, platinum, silver and other elements that are difficult to find but have a common or daily use. For example, the importance of utility transformed uranium, an otherwise worthless element, into a valuable commodity following the discovery of atomic energy. Returning to gold, one can understand how in the era of barter, gold was the reference element with which to price the value of everything. Little by little, gold was joined by silver and then bronze in simplifying the exchange of goods and increasing convenience of use.
Gold had its own intrinsic value and was valid in every empire around the world; the same with silver and bronze. Gold had become not only a means of exchange and a measure of value but also a reservoir of value to be bequeathed to heirs. Above all it was a means of payment. When silver coins began to become scarce, payment with currency printed on leather was introduced. However, they were often refused due to lacking the basic principles that gave gold, silver and bronze their measure and reservoir of value. The skin of this currency could wear out, and though it was a means of payment, it was not as solid and trustworthy as precious metals.
The real revolution began in the 1700s when the French central bank began to take gold bars from its citizens in exchange for pieces of paper with the corresponding value written on it. This change would have enormous repercussions on the world economy over the next 300 years.
The most important aspect of this change was psychological, whereby the ordinary person is willing to deliver his physical gold to the French bank in exchange for a piece of paper indicating the amount of gold owned. There are two fundamental reasons that have led to this choice, both relating to human nature: the simplicity of use, and trust in the system. The French state, through its central bank, withdrew from the public gold, silver and bronze and exchanged it for physical paper currency without any intrinsic value. But the paper currency offered a high degree of portability and ease of use, aiding in its use as a means of payment and exchange of goods. Capitalism was thereby born and the transfer of wealth complete. The world was transitioning from a real economy based on intrinsic value, such as with that represented by gold, silver and bronze, to a fictitious one anchored to pieces of paper.
World Reserve Currency
The British Empire, and then the American one, have thrived enormously on this arrangement, thanks to the accumulation of gold in their central banks. The Bank of England had accumulated huge reserves of gold, and so was able to issue massive amounts of pounds, building up the concept of a world monetary reserve. The pound had slowly replaced the French currency as the main medium of exchange around the world, leaving Britain in a privileged position as a result of London’s central role in the global economy. Throughout history, the rise of major empires has coincided with their currency being the global reserve currency. Up until the British Empire, currency had always been a mix of valuable currencies and substitute currencies. But with sterling, gold was completely replaced with the pound, giving Britain and its colonies a disproportionate power to manipulate the global economy. To make the system sustainable, the obligation was to print currency only in relation to the quantity of gold actually owned. Each pound issued corresponded with a gold fee that was only borrowed from the British central bank. Each currency holder, first in France and now in England, could theoretically have asked for his gold back instead of sterling or French florins. This arrangement relied on the trust placed in central banks and the state, liberating the average citizen from having to transport and protect the precious coins.
At the end of the Second World War the United States emerged as the biggest winner in the West and Washington soon replaced London as the premier global power, with the dollar taking the place of the pound as a global reserve currency. The real negative change came when Nixon decided in 1971 to drop the dollar from the corresponding gold value that had been established at the Bretton Woods Agreement. The Fed was no longer required to have the gold price printed on its paper money. The 1973 oil crisis further fixed the value of the dollar as a result of this oil shock, bringing Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries to sign a secret agreement with Washington. This agreement provided that in exchange for Washington’s political and military protection, the OPEC countries would be required to sell oil only in dollars. The petrodollar was thus born, being a replacement for the gold-linked standard that existed prior to Nixon.
Over the space of a few years, the world economy experienced a dramatic and catastrophic shift. American military and economic power had prevailed, and the FED was free to print endless amounts of dollars without worrying about its sustainability or credibility, relying on war, the media and consumerism to prop up the facade. The world began to send consumer goods to the United States in exchange for waste paper with no relationship to gold. The scam of the century was now complete. It is a farce that relies on the collusion between banks, federal agencies, rating agencies and governments to create the illusion that US government bonds are the safest asset in the world, even more so than gold itself, which began to slowly disappear from the radar as a store of intrinsic value.
Fast forward to the end of the 1980s and the situation began to worsen with the transition to a digital reality regulated by Wall Street and financial speculation. Central banks could create money simply by transferring money to banks digitally.
This phenomenon brought about an enormous divergence between real assets and the value of currencies. Many countries lacking a certain level of international credibility could see inflation rise in a matter of hours as a result of strong financial speculation, devaluing the value of their currency with disastrous consequences for the real economy.
Twenty years later, the crack revealed by Lehman Brothers suddenly amplified all the existing problems. The risk was that citizens would lose trust in the dollar or the euro, undermining the understanding that had existed since the 1700s, where citizens would exchange gold for paper safe in the knowledge that the integrity of this process was guaranteed by the central bank of their country. Rather than heal the financial system, the solution devised sought to increase the power of the banks and financial institutions, and to above all flood the market with money to save the banks that were too big to fail. The ordinary taxpayers all of a sudden found themselves saddled with an $800 billion debt with a simple mouse click, the Fed working through the night to create money from nothing in order to increase the liquidity of banks.
Thanks to a continuous stream of mainstream-media propaganda, the average citizen was little concerned by these actions and the global economy avoided going downhill. The central banks found themselves in an unprecedented situation, forcing them to admit that the only way to save the economy was to create more money out of thin air. Such an absurd situation has led Deutsche Bank in 2018 to accumulate such toxic financial instruments as derivatives worth approximately $46 trillion, twice the American economy. This is degenerating into meaningless madness, as we will see in the next and final article of the series.
In the next and last article of the series I will explain how cryptocurrency could save the whole financial system in the event of a new crisis and why this means the end of the unipolar moment for the USA.
- These Cities Have The Most Jobs In America's Fastest Growing Industries
At 4.1%, the US unemployment rate is at its lowest level in two decades. Still, as underemployment and stagnant wages erode consumers’ buying power, an employee’s ability to score a well-paying job today depends in part on their willingness to relocate.
To help those on the job market find the cities best for them, Adobo analyzed the data and create easy-to-read guides to the career opportunities available in each of the country’s top 50 metro areas.
Unsurprisingly, the field seeing the the fastest growth between 2012 and 2015 is computer and mathematical occupations, which have grown by more than 20% over the past four years. In a relatively distant second place, community and social service occupations have grown by 15.3%, followed more closely by business and financial operations occupations (13.4%) and construction and extraction occupations (13.2%). The fifth fastest-growing field involves health care practitioner and technical occupations, which grew 12.3%.
First, Adobo breaks down how many jobs per 1,000 jobs exist in each category in each of the top 50 metros…
Our nation’s capital tops the list for business and financial operations, with a solid 98.9 jobs in the field per every 1,000 – the highest density of any occupation in any of the top 25 MSAs. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO (79.5) and San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA (78.5) also posted solid numbers.
For the fastest-growing occupation – computers and math – Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV, offers the highest job density, with nearly 73 out of every 1,000 jobs being in the field. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA – recently named the country’s second-best tech city – has 67 job in the field per 1,000. Somewhat surprisingly, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA, scored the lowest of the top 25 MSAs, with only 11 jobs in tech for every 1,000 jobs in the area.
Tech-heavy jobs include everything from software and web developers, support specialists, systems analysts, network administrators, and programmers, to statisticians, mathematicians, and computer research scientists. They’ve been growing at an unsurpassed rate since 2012, at an average of 4.8% a year – which would be higher if not for a stumble between 2014 and 2015, when the sector’s employment grew only 1.5%. The year before, employment grew an incredible 8.1%.
Unsurprisingly, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA – the metro area that includes the San Francisco Bay area – leads with tech jobs, blowing nearly every other city out of the water.
* * *
Social workers, counselors, religious workers, probation officers, therapists, and community health workers comprise this universally important job category, which means that these workers aren’t concentrated in metros. Since these jobs are everywhere, many areas are on par with the national average, leading to lower overall location quotients.
In terms of jobs per 1,000 for the top 25 metro areas, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD, topped the list. But now that we’re looking at location quotient for the the top 50 metro areas, the Philadelphia area drops to #3, with about 1.4 times more jobs than the national average.
Instead, Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT, rises to the top, with 23.3 jobs in the field per every 1,000 and a location quotient of 1.6. Providence-Warwick, RI-MA, comes in second place with about 1.5 times more jobs than the national average concentration. Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH, and Buffalo-Cheektowaga-Niagara Falls, NY, both have a location quotient of 1.3.
* * *
Much like community and social service workers, business and financial operations – a group that includes accountants, real estate assessors, auditors, financial analysts, human resource specialists, claims adjusters, loan officers, logisticians, training and development specialists, event planners and similar employees – are scattered around the country, meaning the location quotients are fairly low.
As we mentioned earlier, our nation’s capital has nearly double the national average concentration of business and financial jobs, with a 1.9 location quotient. Sacramento–Roseville–Arden-Arcade, CA; Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO; and San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA, all have location quotients around 1.5.
* * *
When it comes to construction and extraction jobs, this broad category largely includes jobs that are necessary everywhere, such as electricians, floor installers, insulation workers, carpenters, roofers, masonry workers, painters, maintenance workers, and solar photovoltaic installers. As the name implies, this category also includes workers who deal with mining and oil and gas extraction, such as continuous mining machine operators, earth drillers, and derrick operators.
The preponderance of oil and gas extraction that puts Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land in first with 60.1, TX; New Orleans-Metairie, LA and Oklahoma City, OK are second and third, respectively.
* * *
Health care jobs, such as physicians, surgeons, lab technicians, dentists, physical therapists, and support technologists, must necessarily exist everywhere, which drives down location quotients. Still, some cities rise to the top. And they’re probably not the cities you’d expect…
Fortunately, for four out of the five fastest growing job categories, chances are, job-seekers won’t necessarily need to relocate in order to find opportunities in their field, but they might want to in order to chase the perfect position or pursue growth. The coasts are especially ripe with opportunity, but even Midwestern and inland areas, like Minneapolis and Austin, offer ample opportunity in these popular careers…
- "This Does Not Represent The Views Of the University…"
Authored by Professor Max Forte via Zero Anthropology,
I know that I am not the first person to ask this, but when did universities start having “views”? When some professors indulge their rights to free speech or put academic freedom into practice, they can sometimes express views that some members of the public find controversial, distasteful, or reprehensible. In such cases, one frequently reads their university administrations publishing memos to the effect that, “Professor X’s views on Subject Y do not represent the views of the university”.
What does that mean? Has “the university” studied the subject to the same degree as the professor, thus allowing it to conclude its views are the correct ones? Was the professor supposed to be instructed on the correct views to represent, since the job of professor apparently means not having an independent mind? Does it mean that Professor X does not represent the views of all professors and students at the university? How could anyone ever assume that one professor spoke for all others? Does it instead mean that the professor does not represent the views of those in the administration? The support staff? If so, who cares? And where exactly did the university administration publish its “party line”?
When I was twice hired for tenure-track positions, the one thing I recall no Dean ever telling me was: “Here is a list of the views of the university. Only if you uphold these views can you consider working here. Should you ever express any differing views, you may be subjected to disciplinary action”. Nonetheless, the attitude of some university administrations in North America is that they have a right to publicly castigate faculty for not toeing the line. It is as if “the university” has been reduced to working as a mere cell of a ruling political party.
One could ask similar questions as above, only in reverse. What entitles administrators to speak for the university as a whole? How do they know that Professor X’s statements really do not reflect the views of the university? Did they ever consult faculty and students? Where is all the survey data that reveal the views of faculty on any subject? How is “the university” defined? Is it just the board of governors? Whose views does the university represent? Since I work in a public university – Canada only has public universities, with maybe one or two little exceptions – can we then assume that the “views of the university” neatly align with the broad majority of the public that we presumably are meant to serve? Is it the job of professors to simply reflect the views of others? Since when did it fall to professors to “represent” their universities – and will they get paid extra for doing PR work?
Three transformations have happened more or less simultaneously, and relatively recently, which may explain these bizarre communiqués from university administrators. One has to do with the politicization of university directorates, especially as even public universities have turned to support from private donors, most of whom have big axes to grind. Private donors are keen to buy support, and silence. Few are the donors who give generously just because they are thrilled by learning – that would be too countercultural in the North American context in which we lionize our meat packers and vilify intellectuals. From this first point, where private donors act as lobbyists for special interests, almost all else follows. To assure donors that universities are being run in a “smart” fashion, administrators have multiplied administrative positions and stacked them with persons from the private sector, who draft “strategic plans” and design what are essentially corporate business models.
In other words, politicization stems from privatization and corporatization – this is the neoliberal transformation of the public university. To be clear, this transformation has its origins neither in university administrations nor the private sector, both of which lack the political power and authority necessary to effect such a transformation. Instead, governments are the ones that actively took the decision to cut back on funding for public universities, which is their responsibility, even as taxation levels either remained the same or continued to rise. They chose to redirect public funding away from universities, just as they did with education as a whole, as well as healthcare, social welfare, and so on. Governments pressed universities to raise funds from private sources, just as they pressed them to expand their governance by including more individuals from the private sector.
The second change has to do with universities seeking to raise their public profile, to gain visibility, and advance in the rankings through enhanced public recognition. To gain recognition, university websites have shed their traditional dull and dour functionality, and have become replicas of CNN. Even the university shields have been tossed, in favor of some terrible, and terribly expensive, brand logos produced by private consultants and graphic designers. Universities now also have “media relations” units, with expert staff that spend their days in Twitter and Facebook, and writing up newsy articles about what select faculty members and students are achieving (more on the political functions of “media relations” units, below). These same media units then do the rounds of the departments, advising faculty on how best to interact with journalists.
To the laughter of everyone in my Department, one team showed us a video that advised us to dumb down our research so that “even your grandmother could understand it”. I still have no idea why they focused on grandmothers, not grandfathers, and why they assume that all grandmothers are ignorant rubes – perhaps theirs are? In addition, the media units encourage us to list ourselves as experts, for any journalists perusing the university website, by listing the presumably edgy and sexy topics we have mastered with our unrivalled expertise. Not enough, they then invite professors to do professional photo shoots in which they pose playfully for the camera, with a single short sentence in huge print next to them which somehow encapsulates their decades of research: “Do humans really like food?”
The third major change has to do with how university administrations understand academic freedom, and separately, freedom of speech. One might say they understand these concepts very poorly, or not at all, but I think that misses the above points. The desire by administrators to chill speech, to counter the embarrassingly contrary statements made by publicly outspoken professors, has to do with assuaging private donors as the public university is realigned with the political interests of the so-called top 1%. The immense irony of this is that it is university administrations themselves that actively pushed faculty into the public limelight in the first place, under the strategic rubrics of “knowledge mobilization” and “community outreach”. My university has posted banners around campus that urge us to “mix it up,” “get your hands dirty,” and “embrace the city, embrace the world” – vapid commercialist fluff.
Even Hollywood took notice.
Bleak Ben Stiller bleakly walked past some of these same bleak posters in his recent bleak film, “Brad’s Status,” which apparently was partly shot on the campus of Concordia University (not that the university is listed in the credits of the film – in fact, the movie credits claim the film was shot either in Hawaii or Boston, Montreal itself is not even mentioned
Vapid commercialist fluff posted around campus: “Teach For Tomorrow” -“Double Our Research” – “Mix It Up” – “Get Your Hands Dirty”
Source: screenshot from the movie, Brad’s Status, via Zero AnthropologyHaving urged us to “get out there,” university administrators then later express regret when they feel compelled to counter a given professor’s statements with press releases affirming that “this does not represent the views of the university”. This is an “own goal” on the part of university administrators. They have worked assiduously to make the university into a media organization, to turn professors into celebrity advocacy-journalists, and to make the institution responsive to market audiences to such an extent that the autonomy of the university becomes untenable.
Firings of tenured professors by university administrations, over a difference of opinion, are still relatively rare in Canada, when compared with the US or the UK. In fact, it is not an easy option: tenured professors have not only the protection of their tenure, but of their union, and a legally binding contract negotiated with the union on behalf of faculty which ensures academic freedom and due process. Faculty unions in turn belong to a national umbrella organization, CAUT, which boasts a multi-million dollar academic freedom fund and gets actively involved in supporting faculty. Canadian universities are also deeply fearful of lawsuits which could easily demolish their already frail budgets, most of which are running deficits already. Poor financial management and the backlash of legal damage often results in the top administrators being toppled.
Rather than go the messy route which, heaven forbid, could also give rise to “bad press”—good lord, not “bad press,” that’s the other court which administrations fear – administrators have had to develop quieter, more insidious and subtle forms of suppression. The way to send “the right message” to the outside world, to properly convey the unspoken “views of the university,” is to publicly promote and praise certain select professors, the ones whose views and whose work best align with those of private individual and corporate donors, or with the ruling party, or the military. To take a recent example: as Donald Trump neared electoral victory, articles were published on the university website, in its magazine and elsewhere, that featured the expert analysis of select faculty – strangely enough, all of whom were clearly pro-Hillary Clinton, anti-Trump, a number of them American expatriates, and who evinced a certain Liberal Party affinity. Unlike in a real university, there was no debate among this small cluster of people bewailing the dawn of the “post-truth” world.
The paradox is that neoliberal university administrators have adopted a policy of containment, at the same time as they seek to publicly advertise themselves. Not wanting “the wrong views” to get notice, they engage in restricting speech by selecting that speech which suits their purposes. Speech is thus not just restricted, it is regulated, by promoting only those persons whose views are safe and deemed worthy of recognition. Speech is thus effectively restricted to those academics that the administrators judge to be “qualified” to speak, thereby limiting not only what is said, but who can say it. Media relations departments have the primary responsibility of inventing online rituals around speech, practicing containment through promotion. In some cases such departments actively tutor budding young “public intellectuals” through seminars and by shadowing them online, always ready for the opportune time for that strategic “retweet”. As weak, vain, and ineffective as these policies are, they serve as a useful reminder of how liberal authoritarianism works. In this case, liberal authoritarianism produces fictional representations of “the views of the university,” by thinning out the work actually done by faculty, spreading out the words of a few to represent the words of all.
Another method of indirect silencing is for the university to “celebrate” the media “accomplishments” of select faculty only, by listing stories of faculty who have appeared in the media…only in select media, depending on the “prestige” of the outlet. This is a way to ensure that professors whose views are worthy of being courted by the corporate, neoliberal imperialist media are the only ones featured. In other words, a professor mentioned in a story on CNN is deemed to be worthy of note; a professor who appears on RT, is ignored, as if the event never happened. Selective pride is a way of signaling selective shame. It has the effect of rendering silent the actual media accomplishments of faculty, in order to produce a false picture of where faculty stand, thus assuring the egos of financial donors and politicians. The policy is implemented with the naïve hope that misaligned professors will quietly yearn for that elusive little place on the university website, a place that amounts to nothing more than a few ephemeral pixels seen by few and forgotten by all.
On a range of other issues, near and dear to regime changers, liberal imperialists, and the pro-Israel lobby, one sees the pattern being reproduced, as I can affirm after close scrutiny that has endured for over a decade. If the topics are Iran, Libya, Syria, refugees, wars, nationalism, and so on, one sees the selectivity being actively enforced, even if it means publishing, praising and promoting the same two or three professors time after time. Rather than a university of hundreds of professors, added to tens of thousands students, we become a university of three individuals. Rarely, probably never, do we see university articles dealing with the working class, with poverty and inequality, critical of neoliberalism, globalization and imperialism. Thus the university presents its “views,” of such a one-sided nature and so bereft of any healthy dissent and disagreement as one would find on no university campus that ever took itself seriously.
Viewed from afar, there might even be something comical about a university administration busying itself with inventing a secret university, one that covertly lurks beneath the chosen public representation of the university. That is the point of creating “signature areas” that determine “strategic hiring”: lifting hiring decisions from the hands of Departments, now it is university executives who impose the parameters on what constitutes a desirable candidate, and decide which areas need to be filled. Slowly they thus invent for themselves the university they desire, as opposed to the real one that actually exists. Finally, they will have something they can sell with confidence. One has to almost feel sympathy for the administrators, who feel the keen pressure of public politics and special interest lobbies, into whose arms they have been driven by governments that renege on their obligation to support public universities.
The “views” of the university are a mercantile fiction, a falsehood designed to mislead the public and to caress donors and politicians, the kinds of individuals who are apparently empty and infantile enough to believe that the winning arguments are those that are advanced in the absence of criticism. What if we taught our students that the best way to learn is to ignore whatever they do not like to hear? That is indeed what is being pushed, ironically under the signs of “tolerance” and “inclusion,” the usual neoliberal claptrap. Thus we witness the university turned into a mere echo chamber for the comfortable, a safe space for moneyed elites to flatter themselves, creating a virtual world of unrivalled ideological purity, contrived harmony, and eternal hegemony.
Finally, messages from university administrators along the lines of “this does not represent the views of the university,” might serve an additional function, but I am just speculating. This might be a polite way of telling rabid members of the public to lay off. We heard you, yes it’s all quite disconcerting, and here is our little statement, now move along. Had universities with their bloated administrations and overt political leanings not wished to enhance their public profiles and represent themselves as quasi-media outlets, they would spare themselves such unnecessary exercises. In the end, pronouncements about “the views of the university” end up multiplying the damage to the university, both as a self-inflicted wounds within the university, and as a sign of intellectual cowardice in the face of bullies. A university administration that engages in such conduct has failed its first and most basic function: to administer university resources in order to facilitate teaching and learning.
* * *
Maximilian Forte is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He writes at Zero Anthropology and has authored multiple books, including Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa.
- UK Defense Secretary: "Russia Is Ready To Kill Us By The Thousands"
Brits woke up to read the following brazenly fearmongering headline in their daily paper today: “‘Russia is ready to kill us by the thousands’: Defence Secretary warns that Moscow could cause mass casualties by crippling crucial energy supplies.”
Recently installed in office, UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is already beating the drums of a new Cold War while seeking to expand Britain’s defense budget, claiming a new ‘Russian invasion’ of sorts is coming. In an interview with The Telegraph Williamson warned that Russia is actively seeking to bring about Britain’s economic collapse by attacking its infrastructure which he said will cause “thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths”. Meanwhile, Russian officials were quick to mock the scenario as “worthy of a Monty Python sketch”.
Tory Defence Secretary Williamson, considered by many to be a possible successor to Prime Minister Theresa May described the ‘Russian threat’ as more subtle than an outright conventional military invasion, saying “The plan for the Russians won’t be for landing craft to appear in the South Bay in Scarborough, and off Brighton Beach.” Instead, he explained “the real threat” as term of a cyber and electronic warfare doomsday scenario of “creating total chaos within the country.”
“What they [Russians] are looking at doing is they are going to be thinking ‘How can we just cause so much pain to Britain?’. Damage its economy, rip its infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths, but actually have an element of creating total chaos within the country.”
And Williamson’s evidence for such sensational claims of an impending attack that would bring down nearly overnight civilizational collapse?
He offered the following: “Why would they keep photographing and looking at power stations, why are they looking at the interconnectors that bring so much electricity and so much energy into our country,” and said further, “If you could imagine the domestic and industrial chaos that this would actually cause. What they would do is cause the chaos and then step back.”
To underscore that in his mind, he’s not envisioning this threat of a Russian-induced apocalypse far off in either the medium-term or distant future, nor advancing hyperbole or some imagined war game scenario, he added, “This is the real threat that I believe the country is facing at the moment.”
“They are looking at these things because they are saying these are the ways that we can hurt Britain,” Williamson said. Thought not stating who “they” are in terms of specific persons or organizations caught or observed in the act conducting such surveillance and war-planning as described (other than the ominously sinister ‘Russians’), he went on to delineate some ‘what if’ scenarios: “If we lost our interconnectors, which would be something that we know that they are looking at, there would be 3 million homes without electricity. In a few years’ time there will be 8 million homes that would be dependent.”
UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson: “Russia is ready to kill us by the thousands.” Image source: APShortly after the interview was published, UK energy and infrastructure experts addressed Williamson’s statement about losing electric interconnectors, dismissing the scenario of chaos, mass death, and “millions” without power as absurd and clearly based in scaremongering. One leading energy expert, speaking to The Guardian, admitted candidly, “It does sound a bit like scaremongering really. If you take out one interconnector it’s clear the UK can survive. We saw that last year with the one to France.”
Williamson’s warning echoed a scenario laid out previously by Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach in December, who warned that Russia could in an instant end 97 percent of global communications capabilities and disrupt trillions in daily financial transactions, ushering in a “catastrophic” economic collapse, as he claimed Russia has long targeted the roughly 200 international undersea network cables while seeking disruption of Western societies and the global economy (which nonsensically would undermine Russia’s economy as well).
Though a pattern of reckless Russia-baiting hysteria now seems to have become the default backdrop for any and all public discourse related to national security in the US and UK, it has remained a rarity for someone of Williamson’s rank and office – occupying the highest civilian position over the armed forces – to appeal directly to the common citizenry and Western world in general essentially with words of, “Russia is ready to kill us!”
Well, let’s just call it a slightly less sophisticated version of Condoleezza Rice’s infamous Saddam scare tactic line, “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Like with the deceptive and failed Iraq war, such statements – now recognized by much of the thinking public as worn-out jingoistic clichés – by design aim to immediately shut down critical thought or inquiry, whipping up a desperate survival mode mentality, as well as of course raising those defense budgets.
Indeed on Monday Defence Secretary Williamson sent the nation’s top general to push for expanded defense spending with Moscow as the primary justification for the change in a speech before the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). As The Guardian reported early this week:
Military chiefs calling for more spending is almost as regular an event as the first cuckoo call. Usually, the calls are left to retired generals and admirals. It is safer for them to make the case; for serving officers it is harder, with the risk of clashing with political masters….
He [chief of general staff Sir Nick Carter] is making the plea now because the government is about to announce a new defence spending review and the next few months will be dominated by a push by Williamson and the MoD for a rise in the £36bn defence budget.
Moscow was swift to respond, albeit in an appropriately humorous way, with Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov saying Secretary Williamson had “lost his grasp on reason” and that the comments were “worthy of a Monty Python sketch”. The Russian Embassy in London quickly tweeted in response, “Some British politicians bear no responsibility for their words,” and later in the day issued a formal statement.
The formal statement, issued through the Russian Embassy in London’s homepage and social media, slammed Williamson’s comments as cheap manipulation of the British public using “confrontational rhetoric” for the sake of getting “a couple of billions of extra pounds from the budget.” The statement reads in part:
We can see a wide rift between the opinions prevailing in the British society in favour of repairing our bilateral relations – and those among the military and political elite, who prefer to intimidate their own population just to get a couple of billions extra pounds from the budget.
In the modern world, you just can’t build a respectable policy on confrontational rhetoric. In the long run it will turn out badly for the prestige of the country itself, just like it was after UK actions in Iraq, Libya or Syria.
“Intimidation” is right, as the same build-up of baseless media and politicians’ fearmongering and subsequent demand for conformity to the prevailing narrative of ‘doomsday is approaching’ was used in the lead-up to every direct as well as covert military interventions of recent history – all of which proved disastrous, leaving blood-soaked chaos in the wake.
This time, however, it doesn’t appear the public is buying it as we’re not seeing too many British citizens rushing for their nearest bunker or prepper store.
- Pepe Escobar Puts 'Davos Man' Straight: "It's Inequality, Stupid!"
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
This is what ‘the great and the good’ in the business world were not discussing during the annual talk-fest at the Swiss luxury resort…
For billions of people, the Groucho Marx rule applies when talking about Davos. This is the exclusive club, which meets in the luxury Swiss resort each year to discuss the global business environment.
Groucho, of course, has been immortalized along with the rest of the Marx Brothers in the zany Hollywood movies of the 1930s, such as A Night a the Opera, A Day at the Races and Animal Crackers.
In one quick-fire response, he joked: “I sent the club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’.”
Well, to start off with those billions of people would not get past the bouncers, because the self-defined World Economic Forum is about exclusion. Yet even if, by divine design, they were handed free passes, what would be the point?
The austerity mantra holds sway over large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff maelstrom and the Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami – devaluation of the yen at all costs.
On the other hand, growth does apply to parts of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of emerging nations and selected members of Next 11.
Certainly, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea and Vietnam fall into this category in N-11, a BRICS-like organization.
So, what is the point of spending the GDP of a sub-Saharan country trekking to the Alps to Davos for a mere blabber fest, when basic membership plus access to private sessions at the summit cost a whopping US$245,000?
For instance, the slopes of Jackson Hole, where the annual central bank symposium is held in Wyoming, are way cooler.
In comparison, Davos is essentially double-dip land.
On one side, we have ‘Bad for Labor’, with millions in the West thrown into an unemployment hell or suffering from a wages freeze.
On the other side, we have ‘Good for Capital’, with companies flush with cash.
Yet the result is uncertainty, all over again. Quite simply, more “robust” companies are just not investing. Why? Because there is no demand. That is the “price” of the austerity mantra, and there is no evidence that the business, financial and government suits in Davos will address the drama.
After all, since the 1990s, the summit has always been about hardcore globalization and its prime spin-off – the absolute marketization of everything in life.
To get to the bottom of it, CEOs, bankers and techno-bureaucrats would have to engage in an in-depth discussion of hardcore neoliberalism.
To do that, they would have to bring in David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has been teaching Karl Marx’s “Capital: Critique of Political Economy” for more than 40 years.
They would have to hold global banking to account. They would also have to consign austerity to the dustbin of history, and level the playing field between capital and labor. Of course, that will not happen.
Still, this year’s Davos theme is “Resilient Dynamism.” As a definition of the current woes of turbo-capitalism, a five-year-old in a favela, or slum, in Rio could come up with something more meaningful.
But then, Davos is a one-trick pony. “Resilience” remains a euphemism for the ever-expanding markets and low pay for workers syndrome. In a nutshell, globalization driven by huge multinational corporations.
We should scrap “Resilience” as the name of their game is “Inequality.” Davos, of course, does not do “inequality.”
In a study released by UC Berkeley, the wealth of the top 1% of Americans accrued by 11.6% in 2010, while for the other 99% it was a mere 0.2%. This is what is at the heart of hardcore neoliberalism and capitalist.
Davos should be discussing how a key segment of elites concocted the Wall Street-provoked financial crash. That was only ‘virtual’ business, but it was not ‘virtual’ national governments that had to intervene afterward to pick up the bill and bail out the banks.
No, I am afraid “Resilient Dynamism” will not do for Davos. But it is a good definition of China. While European and American elites accrue their capital to contain Beijing’s advance in Africa and Asia, China’s interventionism is of the business kind. It is a case of building roads, not wars.
Still, the question Davos refuses to ask remains: Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by capitalism?
Stay tuned for that one.
- Mapping Out The World's Bitcoin ATMs
Bitcoin ATMs allow consumers to exchange their cash for Bitcoins, and vice versa. Although the Bitcoin machines are not ATMs in the more traditional sense that we are accustomed, these kiosks are connected to the internet in order to accept cash deposit, exchange for Bitcoins or send Bitcoin to a public key on the blockchain.
However, fees to using Bitcoin ATMs are known for being excessive. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) says that “they may also charge high transaction fees – media reports describe transaction fees as high as 7% and exchange rates $50 over rates you could get elsewhere.” However, the high fees have not slowed the growth of crypto kiosks popping up around the world. HowMuch.net decided to take a deeper look into the world’s Bitcoin ATM supply.
We gathered our data primarily from Coin ATM Radar and Bitnews Today. Using circle sizes, we mapped out geographical locations where Bitcoin ATMs are in operation. The larger the size of the circle, the greater total number of Bitcoin ATMs there are within the country. In addition, we used a light-to-dark color scheme in order to measure the ratio of Bitcoin ATMs to population. The smaller the circle, the fewer number of Bitcoin ATMs per 1 million people. On the other hand, the darker Bitcoin logos represent the greater number of Bitcoin ATMs available per million individuals.
U.S. Has Greatest Number Of Bitcoin ATMs, Austria Has Largest Concentration
According the visual, the United States is home to greatest number of Bitcoin ATMs with 1,330 machines.
However, Austria has the greatest concentration of Bitcoin ATMs per million people, which makes the country have some of the greatest accessibility to crypto funds in the world. With that said, North America dominates the Bitcoin ATM market, which accounts for 76.10% of the world’s cryptocurrency machines. Europe is home to the second most Bitcoin ATMs in the world with 18.80% of the total market. As Asian governments have continued to crackdown on cryptocurrency with imposing bans or strict regulations, the continent has fallen to the third largest region with 2.50% of the Bitcoin ATM market.
Making up the bottom half of the Bitcoin ATM market is Australia, Central & South America, and Africa. Australia accounts for 1.20% and Central & South America make up 1.30% of the world’s operational Bitcoin ATMs. While Africa has essentially no Bitcoin ATM coverage, with a meager 0.05% thanks to one machine located in Nigeria.
In the future, Africa will likely adopt Bitcoin ATMs as the continent further discovers the potential benefits that could help unlock economic growth. Cryptocurrency still remains in its early stages and it will likely take some more time before we start seeing further growth in the number of Bitcoin ATMs within the region.
Here is a breakdown of the chart, based on each continent’s percentage of the world’s Bitcoin ATM market share:
1. North America: 76.10%
2. Europe: 18.80%
3. Asia 2.50%
4. Central & South America 1.30%
5. Australia 1.20%
6. Africa 0.05%
Overall, the total number of Bitcoin ATMs doubled in 2017. As of the end of 2017, there were more than 2,000 operational machines across sixty countries. On average, there were five new cryptocurrency ATMs installed each day last year. While the United States may have the most Bitcoin ATMs, Austrians that have the greatest access to these crypto machines. By having the greatest concentration of crypto ATM machines, Austria serves as a stand-out model on how to increase adoption and accessibility to cryptocurrency funds.
- 2018 Looks To Be Another Good Year For Weapons-Makers
Authored by William D Hartung via The Mises Institute,
As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.
President Trump moved boldly in his first budget, seeking an additional $54 billion in Pentagon funding for fiscal year 2018. That figure, by the way, equals the entire military budgets of allies like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Then, in a bipartisan stampede, Congress egged on Trump to go even higher, putting forward a defense authorization bill that would raise the Pentagon’s budget by an astonishing $85 billion. (And don’t forget that, last spring, the president and Congress had already tacked an extra $15 billion onto the 2017 Pentagon budget.) The authorization bill for 2018 is essentially just a suggestion, however — the final figure for this year will be determined later this month, if Congress can come to an agreement on how to boost the caps on domestic and defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The final number is likely to go far higher than the staggering figure Trump requested last spring.
And that’s only the beginning of the good news for the big weapons companies. Industry officials and Beltway defense analysts aren’t expecting the real increase in Pentagon spending to come until the 2019 budget. It’s a subject sure to make it into the mid-term elections. Dangling potential infusions of Pentagon funds in swing states and swing districts is a tried and true way to influence voters in tight races and so will tempt candidates in both parties.
President Trump has long emphasized job creation above much else, but if he has an actual jobs program, it mainly seems to involve pumping more money into the Pentagon and increasing overseas arms sales. That such spending is one of the least effective ways to create new jobs evidently matters little. It is, after all, an easy and popular way for a president to give himself the look of stimulating economic activity, especially in an era of steep tax cuts favoring the plutocratic class and attacks on domestic spending.
Trump’s much-touted $1 trillion infrastructure plan may never materialize, but the Pentagon is already on course to spend $6 trillion to $7 trillion of your taxes over the next decade. As it happens though, a surprising percentage of those dollars won’t even go into the military equivalent of infrastructure. Based on what we know of Pentagon expenditures in 2016, up to half of such funds are likely to go directly into the coffers of defense contractors rather than to the troops or to basic military tasks like training and maintenance.
While the full impact of Trump’s proposed Pentagon spending increases won’t be felt until later this year and in 2019, he did make a significant impact last year in his role as arms-dealer-in-chief. Early estimates for 2017 suggest that arms sales approvals in the first year of his administration exceeded the Obama administration’s record in its last year in office — no mean feat given that President Obama set a record for overseas arms deals during his eight-year tenure.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump greatly exaggerated the size of his administration’s arms deals. Typically enough, he touted “$110 billion” in proposed sales to Saudi Arabia, a figure that included deals already struck under Obama and highly speculative offers that may never come to fruition. While visiting Japan in November, he similarly took credit for sales of the staggeringly expensive, highly overrated F-35 combat aircraft, a deal that was actually concluded in 2012. To add insult to injury, those F-35s that the U.S. is selling Japan will be assembled there, not in the good old U.S.A. (So much for the jobs benefits of global weapons trading.)
Nonetheless, when you peel away the layers of Trumpian bombast and exaggeration, his administration still posted one of the highest arms sales figures of the last decade and there’s clearly much more to come. In all of this, the president may not have done major favors for America’s workers, but he’s been a genuine godsend for the country’s arms manufacturers. After all, such firms extract significantly greater profits on foreign deals than on sales to the Pentagon. When selling to other countries, they normally charge higher prices for weapons systems, while including costly follow-on agreements for maintenance, training, and things like additional bombs, missiles, or ammunition that can continue for decades.
In fact, Trump’s biggest challenge in accelerating U.S. arms exports may not be foreign competition, but the fact that the Obama administration made so many high-value arms deals. Some countries are still busy trying to integrate the weapons systems or other merchandise they’ve already purchased and may not be ready to conclude new arms agreements.
The Good News for Arms Makers: More War
There are, however, a number of reasons to think that the major weapons makers will do even better in the coming years than they did in the banner year of 2017.
Start with America’s wars. As defense expert Micah Zenko of Chatham House explained recently at Foreign Policy, President Trump has been doubling down on many of the wars he inherited from Obama. The moves of his administration (peopled, of course, by generals from those very wars) include the increasing use of Special Operations forces, a dramatic rise in air strikes, and an increase in troop levels in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia. It remains to be seen whether the president’s favorite Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia, will be successful in goading his administration — replete with Iranophobes, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo — into taking military action against Tehran. Such calculations have been complicated by recent anti-government protests there, which the president and his inner circle hope will lead to regime change from within. (Trump’s crowing about unrest in Iran has, however, been decidedly unhelpful to genuine advocates of democracy in that country, given the low esteem in which he’s held throughout Iranian society.)
Such far-flung military operations will naturally cost money. Lots of it. Minimally, tens of billions of dollars; hundreds of billions if one or more of those wars escalates in an unexpected way — as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Bush years. As a study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute recently noted, our post-9/11 wars have already cost at least $5.6 trillion when one takes into account both direct budgetary commitments and long-term obligations, including lifetime care for the hundreds of thousands of American veterans who suffered severe physical and psychological damage in those conflicts. It’s important to remember that such immense costs emerged from what was supposed to be a quick, triumphant war in Afghanistan and what top Bush administration officials were convinced would be a relatively inexpensive regime change operation in Iraq and the garrisoning of that country. (That invasion and occupation was then projected to cost just a cut-rate $50 billion to $200 billion.)
Don’t be surprised if the conflicts that Trump has inherited and is now escalating follow a similar pattern in which actual costs far outstrip initial estimates, even if not at the stratospheric levels of the Afghan and Iraq wars, which involved the commitment of hundreds of thousands of “boots on the ground.” All of this spending will again be good financial news for the producers of combat aircraft, munitions, armored vehicles, drones, and attack helicopters, among other goods and services needed to sustain a policy of endless war across significant parts of the planet.
Beyond the hot wars that have involved U.S. troops and air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, there are scores of other places where this country’s Special Operations forces are on the ground training local militaries and in many cases accompanying them on missions that could quickly turn deadly, as happened to four Green Berets operating in Niger in October 2017. With Special Ops personnel engaged in a staggering 149 countries last year and a pledge to step up U.S. activities yet more in Africa — there are already 6,000 U.S. troops and scores of “train and equip” missions on that continent — spending is essentially guaranteed to go up, whatever the specifics of any given conflict. There are already calls by leading members of Congress to increase the size of U.S. Special Operations forces, which, as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse notes, already number nearly 70,000 personnel.
Boondoggles, Inc.
Rest assured, however, that so far we’ve only taken a dip in the shallow end of the deep, deep pool of military spending. Equally important to the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and their cohorts is the Trump administration’s commitment to continue funding weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t need at prices we can’t afford. Take the F-35 combat plane, a Rube Goldberg contraption once designed to carry out multiple missions and now capable of doing none of them well.
In fact, as the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, it’s an aircraft that may never be fully ready for combat. To add insult to injury, billions more will be spent to fix defects in planes that were rushed through production before they had been fully tested. The cost of this “too big to fail” program is currently projected at $1.5 trillion over the lifetimes of the 2,400-plus aircraft currently planned for. This means it is likely to become the most expensive weapons program in the history of Pentagon procurement.
Unfortunately, the F-35 is hardly the only boondoggle that will continue to pad the coffers of defense contractors while offering little in the way of defense (no less the usual offense). A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, for example, suggests that a projected three-decade Pentagon plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, initiated under President Obama and close to the heart of Donald Trump, will cost up to $1.7 trillion dollars. This stunning figure includes spending on new nuclear warheads under development at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, one of many channels for military spending that are outside the Pentagon’s already bloated budget. And given the history of such weapons systems and the cost overruns that regularly accompany them, keep in mind that $1.7 trillion will probably prove a gross underestimate. The Government Accountability Office, for instance, has released a report suggesting that the program to build a new generation of ballistic missile submarines, now priced at $128 billion, is going to blow past that figure.
In recent years, hawks in Congress have been pressing for more funding for missile defense and Donald Trump (with the help of “Little Rocket Man”) is their guy. David Willman of the Los Angeles Times reports that the Trump administration wants to spend more than $10 billion over the next five years beefing up a deeply flawed project for placing ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska and California. This is just one of a number of missile defense initiatives under way.
In 2018, Lockheed, Boeing, and General Atomics are also scheduled to test drones that will reportedly use lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles like those being developed by North Korea. It’s a program that will undoubtedly garner tens of billions of dollars more in taxpayer funding in the years to come. And Congress isn’t waiting until a final Pentagon budget for 2018 is wrapped up to lavish more money on missile defense contractors. A stopgap spending bill passed in late December 2017 kept most programs at current levels, but offered a special gift of nearly $5 billion extra for anti-missile initiatives.
In addition, a congressionally financed study of the best place to base an East Coast missile defense system — a favorite hobbyhorse of Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee that even the Pentagon has little interest in pursuing — is scheduled to be released later this year. The Congressional Budget Office already suggests that the price tag for that proposed system would be at least $3.6 billion in its first five years of development. Yet deploying it, as the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, would have little or no value when it comes to protecting the United States from a missile attack. If the project moves ahead, it won’t be the first time Congress has launched a costly, unnecessary spending program that the Pentagon didn’t even request.
Cybersecurity has been another expanding focus of concern — and funding — in recent years, as groups ranging from the Democratic National Committee to the National Security Agency have been hit by determined hackers. The concern may be justified, but the solution — throwing billions at the Pentagon and starting a new Cyber Command to press for yet more funding — is misguided at best. One of the biggest bottlenecks to crafting effective cyber defenses is the lack of personnel with useful and appropriate skills, a long-term problem that short-term infusions of cash will not resolve. In any case, some of the most vulnerable places — from the power grid to the banking system — will have to be dealt with by private firms that should be prodded by stricter government regulations, a concept to which Donald Trump seems to be allergic. As it happens, though, creating enforceable government standards turns out to be one of the most important ways of addressing cyber-security challenges.
Despite the likely spending spree to come, don’t expect the Pentagon, the arms makers, their lobbyists, or their allies in Congress, to stop crying out for more. There’s always a new weapons scheme or a new threat to hype or another ill-conceived proposal for a military “solution” to a complicated security problem. Trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later, the primary lesson from the perpetual wars and profligate weapons spending of this century should be that throwing more money at the Pentagon isn’t making us any safer. But translating that lesson into a change in Washington’s spending patterns would take major public pushback at a level that has yet to materialize.
Genuine opposition to runaway Pentagon spending may yet emerge, if, as expected, President Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Republican Congress follow up their trillion-dollar tax giveaway with an assault on Medicare and Social Security. At that point, the devastating domestic costs of overspending on the Pentagon should become far more difficult to ignore.
This year will undoubtedly be a banner year for arms companies. The only question is: Might it also mark the beginning of a future movement to roll back unconstrained weapons expenditures?
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