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Winner of Project Consored top 25 articles for 2009 - 2010 news stories: Pentagon's role in global catastrophe

By Sara Flounders

In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen -- with more
than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of
state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets -- it is important to
ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other
toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or
proposed restrictions?

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of
petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket
exemption in all international climate agreements.

The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in
Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its
6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet
aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S.
greenhouse gas limits or included in any count.

The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the
Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the
single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285
combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army
had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled
Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing
aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and
aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles
run on oil.

Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries
(out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

The U.S. military officially uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. However,
this total does not include fuel consumed by contractors or fuel consumed in
leased and privatized facilities. Nor does it include the enormous energy and
resources used to produce and maintain their death-dealing equipment or the
bombs, grenades or missiles they fire.

Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, reports: "The
Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide
equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. ... The war emits
more than 60 percent of all countries. ... This information is not readily
available ... because military emissions abroad are exempt from national
reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on
Climate Change." (www.naomiklein.org, Dec. 10) Most scientists blame carbon dioxide
emissions for greenhouse gases and climate change.

Barry Sanders in his new book, "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs
of Militarism," says that "the greatest single assault on the
environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed
Forces of the United States."

Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the
time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of
signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it
participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from
measurement or reductions.

After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then
refused to sign the accords.

In a May 18, 1998, article entitled "National security and military
policy issues involved in the Kyoto treaty," Dr. Jeffrey Salmon d

According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine part of the reason to exclude Baath party members from the Government was to simply sack nearly everyone in the Iraqi Government. The US had an agenda of privatising Iraq and freeing its markets and it didn't need a local Government to slow them down.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein provides an insightful history and sadly predicts the future (i.e. our present) quite well.

The late Anne McCaffery has written or co-authored many wonderful trilogies and the many "Dragonriders of Pern" novels. Fabulous stuff.

Exactly.
Maybe you want to check out this:
Naomi Klein on China's all seeing eye.
That was two years ago.

Please remind me to invest in atomic clock manufacturers.

Why to the Japanese always get the short end of the shit stick when it comes to nuclear power? Also - earthquakes and tsunamis courtesy of underwater nuclear detonations along fault lines. Reconstruction courtesy of Halliburton and subsidaries with special guest Disaster Capitalism(tm).

Here in San Diego, there are "Tsunami Evacuation Route" signs posted for a tsunami that hasn't happened yet.

When money and power are king, and technology is sufficiently advanced, the only thing we are left with is disaster capitalism.

It won't happen because of aliens or zombies, it'll happen because disaster capitalism is America's future.

Another explanation for the constant buzzer is...radio waves are reflected from ionosphere inhomogeneities. Changes of an ionosphere state can be caused by solar geophysical or seismic events. This method involves comparing a continuous radio transmission which is reflected by the ionosphere with a stable basic generator. The continuously transmitted carrier frequency currently used for this research matches that of the Russian Buzzer (4.625 MHz).

If the ionosphere can change state from seismic events, why couldn't seismic events be changed through manipulation of the ionosphere? It is indeed possible to control large-scale events with small-scale signals with phenomina such as resonance. What of all of the earthquakes which seem to hit the people we don't like, providing opportunities to rebuild and sieze their resources as part of the growing trend of disaster capitalism, the ultimate way to make money and spread influence without declaring war?

And why is there no comparison to HAARP in that article?! From the HAARP wiki:

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).Its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance purposes (such as missile detection)...The current working IRI was completed in 2007, and its prime contractor was BAE Advanced Technologies.

Which is a big, big military industrial comglomerate.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to change the state of my tinfoil hat into a pipe, so I can put some more weed into it and smoke out of it.

9/11 Was set up by the government as a form of "shock therapy", a blank slate to enable corporate interests to "go wild" at the expense of the common man.

We know it's bullshit, we just rationalize it away because we can't believe anybody working for us would cause such a Reichstag Fire er.. 9/11. Explosives in the towers. The mysterious collapse of building 7. The cruise missile that hit the pentagon. The lack of wreckage in Pennsylvania. The hijackers still being alive. The setup, smear-campaign, and mysterious death of germ scientist Bruce Ivins. The corporations' claims to the newly-conquered Iraq and the reconstruction money that vanished mysteriously through bogus shell corporations.

This is disaster capitalism, my friend, and it's here to stay.

Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the "War on Terror" to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans's residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.... These events are examples of "the shock doctrine": using the public's disorientation following massive collective shocks - wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy.

Isn't it convenient how the most powerful quakes and tsunamis have hit countries like Iran, China, and Indonesia(because of its Muslim population)? More recently, there were quakes in Mexico and Chile. America has a stake for transforming all of the above nations from the inside out, invading their territories under the guise of "aid" and establishing a cancerous presence before rendering them docile with its culture before sucking them dry. Chile in particular was mentioned in Shock Doctrine as an example of a country who has thumbed their nose at America's financial control of South America to become independent and stable. There's been a lot of Tsunami FUD in San Diego lately, to build hype for the climate weapons and persuade its overwhelmingly Christian population to buy into the "end times" madness.

Not as epic as her book Shock Doctrine but it is a must read for any tech with a conscience.

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

Not as epic as her book Shock Doctrine but it is a must read for any tech with a conscience.

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

Make sure to read Naomi Kleins book "The Shock Doctrine" or at least one of her online articles: The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans.

Milton Friedman is pretty smart.

Says who?

You're on the right track. Read Shock Doctrine . You'll be disappointed to learn that it is a tried and true formula.

This is the sad and tragic truth. For further reading: Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. Check out the short promo by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men .

This is the sad and tragic truth. For further reading: Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. Check out the short promo by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men .

With this NSL stunt, we see the entire Bush/Cheney Doctrine at its most blatant. The Doctrine is exploit any crisis first to expand Executive power far past Constitutional limits, without any accountability, then attend the crisis only so much as necessary to preserve those powers, then abuse them elsewhere without restraint. It's "Shock and Awe" for every occasion, especially domestically. Shocking and awful, though we're pretty numb to it by now, as the details finally start to leak out after years of digging by unsung heroes like the people at EFF.

You can look at any crisis, unexpected or manufactured, through the long 7 1/4 years of Bush/Cheney's presidency, and see that Doctrine hard at work (the only hard work done by the regime).

Or you can read Naomi Klein's book _The Shock Doctrine_ for the (literally) gory details.

But people go bankrupt all the time, just not so many, though for these reasons (bad mortgage/debt planning). There are a lot more people who would be asked to bail out those extra going bankrupt. Including some already going bankrupt who'd either be asked to bail out the "special" ones as extra new debt from extra taxes, or be asked to go the usual harsh bankruptcy route while those special people didn't get punished as hard, or both. The tiny minority of people getting bailed out from this bankruptcy would also include people not just bad decision makers, not just down on their luck, but lots of speculators who banked more profits through the bubble years than they stand to lose on their last mortgage when it hit the wall. And lots of fraudulent borrowers, among both flippers and actual primary homeowners alike.

So there's a lot of political hay to be made from doing it right. From making the fraudsters and speculators pay. From assigning personal responsibility, and from saving taxes which would be spent on people just because they tied themselves to the railroad tracks. Since there's so many more people who'd have to pay to bail them out, but receive nothing (and have all missed the free money while it lasted), but so relatively few who'd get the free ride, among whom are plenty of people for the rest to resent out of either simple integrity against crooks or just jealousy of aggressive speculators, I think the politics strongly favors letting people fail as closely to the way we have all along, except in the bailout bubble that the real estate market offered to our fake economy after the realer (but still pumped up) 1990s boom. If part of the solution unlocked everyone's IRAs/etc for homebuying to create liquidity, and left a housing glut at plummeting prices for the majority of proper planners to pick from, I think such a reform regime would be politically very popular.

The problem is that the politicians are holding the defaulting borrowers hostage as ransom to be given to the banks. They're trumping up sympathy, and playing down the unfairness (yet again) of the costs and indemnifications which reward the bad at the expense of the good, because they will shunt the bailout through the banks, which are the least deserving of it in every way. If there were some politicians with courage to disregard the banks bribes and threats of backlash, it would be an easy sell to the public, whose best interests could be easily illustrated.

And if we don't have at least some of those, at least tempering the bailout, then this crisis will just be used, according to the shock doctrine, to make all the problems even worse, to make even more money for even less accountable banks. At the expense of an American public even less able to afford it. Possibly for the last time.

I think the American system is borked mainly by creating artificial citizens as corporations, then elevating them to first class status above second class humans. It was fairly recent, a scam in 1886 that a railroad monopoly's monopoly newspaper fraudulently reported creating those "persons" despite the underlying court decision doing no such thing. Fixing that basic injustice would go a long way towards deborking the system.

Political parties are too institutionalized with privileges and immunities. If they, like their patron corporations, were reduced to second class status behind humans, the deborking processes would be a lot less obstructed all the time.

Some other backwards institutions like respecting religion establishments ("churches") more than nonreligion establishments (and nonestablishments), rather than the prescribed "no respect" would also go a long way towards deborking our system. Reversing those perverse doctrines would probably follow as their institutions were no longer propped up with artificial privileges and immunities as corporations and patrons of corporate political parties.

Americans have shown that we (most of us, anyway) kneel before the "shock doctrine". We gave up our military integrity, and so much connected to it, under the shock of the 9/11/2001 attacks. If we have an economic shock like what mismanaging our current descent into recession and unsupportable debt will produce, we will give up everything else.

But if we make it through the next year without losing much more of our ability to govern and manage our country, we might emerge stronger. We could eliminate a lot of the debts and disabilities we now face with just some radical legal revisions throwing out the rot we grew the past 7-13 years. We'd be able to cope that way: Americans work hard, stick together and produce a lot, more than anyone else on Earth. But if we fail, and aren't on the mend by this time next year, I expect we will stay economically shocked indefinitely, and produce the greatest shock of all, global environmental collapse, within 10-20 years.

Then it's permanent Mad Max time, and we should just rename the planet to "Planet Bork".