Redacted Tonight #313 – The New Anti-China Military Industrial Complex

6 comments

1. An Australian writer John Menadue breaks down The Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
   Part of what he said:
   “ASPI has clearly strayed from its original purpose to provide policy advice to the government. It has become an active participant in the political debate. It’s claim to be ‘independent and non-partisan’ has a hollow ring.

   Consider how ‘independent’ ASPI really is.

   Funding

   Its 2014-15 annual report, tabled in October 2015, reveals that 56% of its $5.9 million funding came from the Department of Defence.
   22% of its funding was from sponsors which include corporations heavily involved in supplying military hardware or services across the world– Airbus Group, BAE Systems, Boeing, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, MBDA, Raytheon, SAAB and Thales.
   17% of funds were received in ‘partnerships and projects’ which included the Australian Army, Australian Defence College, Defence Materiel, Department of Defence, Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

   Governance

   The board includes:

   Stephen Loosley, who is also on the Advisory Board of Thales, which describes itself as ‘part of a leading international electronics and systems group which services the defence, aerospace, security and transport markets in Australia and throughout the world’.
   Kevin Gillespie, former Chief of the Australian Army.
   Margaret Staib, who served for over three decades in the RAAF.

   Senior Staff

   The executive group comprises:

   Peter Jennings, Executive Director and formerly Deputy Secretary of Defence; In 2016 he was awarded the French decoration of Knight in the National Order of Legion d” Honneur
   Anthony Bergin, Deputy Director and formerly Associate Professor of Politics at ADFA (UNSW);
   Andrew Davies, Senior Analyst and Director, Research, who spent 12 years in the Department of Defence in capability analysis and intelligence.

   The funding, governance and senior staffing of ASPI is heavily dependent on the Defence department, its associates and military suppliers. In governance and funding it is hardly ‘independent and non-partisan’.”
   “john-menadue-australian-strategic-policy-institute-by-their-fruits-you-will-know-them”

2. Thanks Ed!

3. The soldiers are the ones at the head of the pay line of the asinine imperialist power structure before one dime of tax is collected. Without the soldiers the imperialist has no one to kick ass for them. From there it becomes an easy control mechanism to get the populace to support the military even if they do not want war. The feudal lord simply paid the soldiers and military folk in the coin of the realm, and the populace would then have to ‘do business’ with the ‘military complex’ (or get their asses kicked by them) in order to obtain the necessary coinage to pay taxes. There is nothing substantially different in our present system. The additional problem with this structure, apart from the supply chain from people that would not otherwise support war, is that the perpetual shortage of the “money supply” (whether by official restriction of that by government or by the asinine process of bringing the money into existence as debt) is used as a means to keep up the recruitment of soldiers that are brought to this subjugation by way of poverty.
   One cannot legitimately challenge the war machine without challenging the very structure and conceptual base of what we call money.

4. Why is it that the anti-war clan NEVER talks about the very structures and illegitimate claims over money creation itself that pay the soldiers!?
   The sovereign ‘authority’ to spend and then tax is a trap by which The People are ensnared into militarism they do not want. An ancient strategy called out by David Graeber in his book “Debt: The First 5000 Years.” Simple plan really – government declares its supreme authority to issue currency and first spends it into existence on the military. Then the self proclaimed authoritarian government (same self declared nonsense as the Divine Right Of Kings but disguised under the façade of ‘free and fair elections’) declares that The People must pay a tax with the ‘coin of the realm’ that the government first spent into existence with the military. (Yes, that very military industrial complex – the MIC – Eisenhower warned against.) And, wham, The People must do business with the MIC.
   Historian Michael Parenti: “Imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do,” as “one country brings to bear…economic and military power upon another country in order to expropriate [its] land, labor, natural resources, capital and markets.” Imperialism ultimately enriches the home country’s dominant class. The process involves “unspeakable repression and state terror,” and must rely repeatedly “upon armed coercion and repression.” The ultimate aim of modern U.S. imperialism is “to make the world safe” for multinational corporations. When discussing imperialism, “the prime unit of analysis should be the economic class rather than the nation-state.”
   It is precisely the framework of the operating system of authoritarian control over the creation of the economic unit that precludes democracy.
   That then compels us all to look at the history of the asinine notion that some ‘authority’ exists that must create the acCounting unit ahead of and apart from the genuine economic activity that these units will be used to represent. It is acceptance by the populace of the assertion of that kind of authoritarian control over the very creation of the unit of acCount (a long history presented by Graeber and others) that leaves the populace helplessly and hopelessly at war. If we are going to stop the war mongering then We The People must stop whining about the misuse of this illiterate power to create the acCounting unit by the imperialist and define the thing called money in a logical manner according to its acCounting/annotation/record keeping function. We are at a place where we must acquire monetary literacy and establish a rational system as opposed to attempting some kind of behavior modification within a system that is completely irrational and illiterate! Buckminster Fuller has already told us about this:
   “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
   To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

5. Thank you, Lee Camp!

6. Brilliantly funny expose of the unthinking unthinkable think tank. Thank you Lee Camp

   Ed in Australia