Where are we going and why are we in Hillary’s hand basket?

Posted on September 11, 2015 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/where-are-we-going-and-why-are-we-in-hillarys-hand-basket.html 

Hillary Clinton’s favorite “Hitler” these days is Putin, with Assad in close second. Her days of giggling triumphantly over the murder of Gadaffi may be behind her. And one of her favorite ways of demonizing Putin has been denouncing his opposition to gay rights. Yet Hillary, along with Rick Santorum, was a supporter of proposed legislation that might have legalized the recently hyped refusal of a government employee in Kentucky to allow a gay couple to marry. Hillary has long favored bombing places that lack civil liberties, and sponsored legislation to criminalize the burning of a U.S. flag.
Some contradictions in U.S. politics (President Obama allowing Arctic drilling and then visiting the Arctic to lament his own destruction of the earth’s climate, for example) appear easily explained by sheer soulless corruption via the simple transfer of dollars. Other contradictions (the eagerness of Hillary and her then-president husband Bill) to launch a war over fictional atrocities in Yugoslavia but not over real ones in Rwanda) require at least a bit more analysis.
Diana Johnstone’s forthcoming book, Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, succeeds in providing an understanding of Hillary Clinton’s own worldview like nothing else I’ve read — and it does so despite being largely not about Hillary Clinton. Johnstone’s book is culture and political criticism at its finest. It’s a study of the American neo-liberal, with a particular focus here-and-there on Clinton. I strongly recommend reading it, whatever your level of interest in the “Queen of Chaos” herself, for its illumination of the ideologies underlying U.S. adventurism, exceptionalism, and “responsibility to protect” obsession with identifying believable threats of “genocide” in nations disloyal to Washington or Wall Street.

Johnstone has little interest in “proving” that a woman can be president, a point that she takes to be obvious. “Avoiding World War III is somewhat more urgent,” she maintains. Why World War III? Isn’t everything well with the world, other than a few evil Muslims trying to kill us all? And wouldn’t a woman president help ease tensions?
Johnstone’s account of Clinton’s record moves from her support of a right-wing military coup in Honduras to her active engagement in facilitating a right-wing military coup in Ukraine. In between, Johnstone looks in-depth at Clinton’s backing of her husband’s illegal war on Yugoslavia, and the lies she’s told about it, which go much deeper than her false claim to have braved sniper fire at an airport. Johnstone also examines the 2011 war on Libya for which she gives Clinton significant blame. (And lest we forget, here’s video of Clinton promoting the 2002 authorization for an invasion of Iraq.)
Then there’s Clinton’s allegiance to the right-wing Israeli government agenda, on exhibit in her speech this week and in Queen of Chaos:

“In July 2014, billionaire Haim Saban declared in a Bloomberg TV interview that he would contribute ‘as much as needed’ to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. This is significant because both Saban’s fortune and his zeal seem to be inexhaustible. Saban declares proudly that his greatest concern is to protect Israel through strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. ‘I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.’ . . . Saban showered seven million dollars on the Democratic National Committee, donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library, and above all, founded his very own think tank, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy within the Brookings Institution, previously considered the most politically neutral of major Washington think tanks. This was accomplished by a record donation to Brookings of thirteen million dollars. . . . As things look now, the 2016 presidential race could be a contest between Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson. In either case, the winner would be Israel.”

Johnstone does a good job of bringing out Clinton’s belief in the rightness of all U.S. wars, past and possible. In 2012 Clinton gave a speech in which she claimed that a “small group” was preventing the U.S. from going in and saving Syria from Hitler/Assad, a small group consisting of Iran, Russia, and China:

“She went on to say that: ‘we are also increasing our efforts to assist the opposition,’ before adding that if we are successful, ‘Assad will increase the level of violent response.’ At a moment like this, one must ask whether she realizes what she is saying. She is admitting that U.S. military aid to the opposition intended to prevent violence will provoke more violence. If there is indeed a possibility of ‘genocide,’ which is doubtful, this possibility will be increased by that very assistance to the opposition Hillary is calling for, since it will increase the overall violence.”

When asked about bombing Libya on Meet the Press, Clinton said, “Let’s be fair here. They didn’t attack us, but what they were doing and Gaddafi’s history and the potential for the disruption and instability was very much in our interests … and seen by our European friends and our Arab partners as very vital to their interests.’ In short, bombing the hell out of a sovereign country that did us no harm is perfectly okay if we consider it to be in our ‘interests,’ or in the ‘interests’ of our ‘European friends’ and our ‘Arab partners.’ Not only that, but bombing a country, arming rebels and overthrowing its government is the way to prevent ‘disruption’ and ‘instability.'”
Clinton is open about her view of the world, but would prefer the details remained unknown. She has condemned Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing as criminal and even suggested that he should face prosecution under the Espionage Act.
One way of grasping where Clinton is coming from is to examine, in her case, what she herself admits is the major corrupting factor in U.S. elections: money. Who funds her? Here’s Johnstone:

“Take a look at the list of Clinton Foundation donors who have contributed millions of dollars, supposedly for charity – the sort of charity that begins at home. These are philanthropists who give in order to get. Eight digit donors include: Saudi Arabia, the pro-Israel Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, and the Saban family. Pinchuk has pledged millions to a branch of the Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, for a program to train future Ukrainian leaders according to ‘European values.’ Seven digit donors include: Kuwait, Exxon Mobil, ‘Friends of Saudi Arabia,’ James Murdoch, Qatar, Boeing, Dow, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and the United Arab Emirates. Cheapskates paying their dues to the Clintons with contributions above only half a million include: the Bank of America, Chevron, Monsanto, Citigroup and the inevitable Soros Foundation.”

For an example of how Clinton does the bidding of her funders, look at the case of Boeing, examined by the Washington Post.
Does this help explain why Republicans on Wall Street are backing her?
Here’s a list of horrible governments to which Hillary supported transferring weaponry once they had donated to her foundations.
Can you get more corrupt that that? Hillary Clinton can. Here’s a collection of examples how.
For a deeper understanding of where candidates like Hillary Clinton, her husband, the three Bushes, Obama, and others come from, I also strongly recommend another forthcoming book called Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, by Laurence Shoup, who co-authored the 1977 book, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy.
The CFR, according to Shoup, is the world’s most powerful private organization. It has about 5,000 individual members and 170 corporate members, a staff of 330, a budget of $60 million, and assets of $492 million. It began at the end of World War I and included both wings of the wealth-and-war party, dedicated to spreading U.S. dominance and influence around the globe for the good of the heathen.
Madeleine Albright brought Bill Clinton into the CFR in the 1980s, and the contacts he made there, in Shoup’s view, brought him the media, funding, and insider advisers that made him president, not to mention his post-presidential fortune. Co-Chair of CFR Robert Rubin led Clinton’s National Economic Council and his push for NAFTA before being made Secretary of the Treasury and pushing the repeal of Glass-Steagall before moving on to the board of Citigroup — listed as a major Clinton-foundation funder above. Fifteen of Bill Clinton’s top 17 foreign policy officials were, like him, CFR members, five of whom had been or would soon be directors. Daughter Chelsea Clinton became a CFR member in 2013.
What’s wrong with CFR broadcasting its views on National Public Radio and holding its elitist meetings with movers and shakers? You might as well ask what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy, because the policy of the past decades has in fact been largely the policy desired, proposed, and enacted by the CFR and its members. And it is not what the U.S. public has wanted.
In 2013, a Pew-CFR effort polled CFR members and the general public. Among the public, 81% wanted protecting U.S. jobs to be a priority, but only 29% of CFR members did. Among CFR members, 93% favored corporate trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a much higher percentage than among the general public believed that drone murders make the United States safer. These results line up with the 2014 peer-reviewed study done at Princeton and Northwestern Universities, which found that the United States is not a democracy, but an “oligarchy,” that the demands of the wealthy are met by the government, whereas the desires of everyone else are ignored.
Changing that will require a nonviolent revolution, not a particular outcome from an almost completely corrupted electoral (and communications) system. But with the current corporate media behaving as if we need to know something more about Hillary Clinton before rejecting her, let me just say this to the infinitely annoying plague-like medium known as the email: My Dear emails, you little maggots eating away the minutes of my day, if your scandal rids us of the risk of installing Hillary Clinton in the White House, all shall be forgiven.

Empire Files Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Robert Barsocchini

 

The above is devastating for Clinton and will further diminish her wavering support among non-oligarch US citizens, relegating her to being elected by the anti-democratic means on which she relies, from kick-backs and slush-funds to hundreds of billions of dollars in arms sales to foreign dictators.  (Using and dealing in high-explosive devices is among Hillary’s most prominent trademarks.)
One of the key points in the investigation is that in what we are told is the US ‘democratic system’, a set of oligarchs with corrupt financial ties to the elite-catering candidates, like Hillary, literally get to have their individual votes count as thousands upon thousands of votes.
These oligarchs, dubbed ‘super-delegates’, bribe and support the candidate that works to make them (and in turn the politician in question) even richer and more powerful, and who is fine with, or in Hillary’s case gleeful about, mass-killing any ‘unpeople’ (1984) who stand in the way.
Another point raised is that Hillary’s first political work was “campaigning for the Donald Trump of the ’60s, far right Republican” and corporate oligarch Barry Goldwater.  Goldwater was a white supremacist reacting against the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, and Hillary was inspired.  (She regularly uses white-supremacist imagery in her own political campaigns.)  She later became president of the Young Republicans Club, and to many independent analysts and neo-cons today, it is obvious that Hillary is herself an ideological member of the neo-con terrorist organization.

Again in the eighties and since, Hillary strongly supported policies that top government staffers have said were designed to, and have succeeded terrifically at, imprisoning and killing vast numbers of African Americans and other impoverished or dissident groups.

Indeed, expert Roger Morris finds in his extensive interviews with Hillary/Bill staffers (Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America) that Hillary, as one might expect from her record, harbors utter personal disdain and disgust for honest, non-oligarch US citizens, whom she is known to call ‘red-necks’ and the like.
Morris further discusses the Clintons’ involvement in shipping money and weapons to the ‘secret’ US terrorist army known as The Contras.  For attacking Nicaragua with this and other forces, the US was found guilty in the world’s highest court and the UNSC and GN of international terrorism and aggression.  Due to the court’s inability to enforce judgments against history’s biggest empire, the US simply increased its terror against the poor nation that had been, according to international agencies, making great strides in improving the lives of Nicaragua’s population, which consisted predominantly of, as Hillary knew, poor people.
Since entering politics, the Clintons have increased their net worth hundreds of times over, and today have a net worth approaching two-hundred-million dollars, mainly derived from corporate bribery or, to use the touted phrase, ‘speaking fees’.  You know all those guys at Goldman Sachs just think Hillary is a genius and they need to pay her five thousand dollars a minute for financial advice.  But in reality, they really are interested in what she has to say, albeit for a reason that actually makes sense: they want to make sure they will get a return on their investment, hinting at why Hillary refuses to release transcripts of her ‘speeches’, and why the most intensive, comprehensive academic studies find that the US government responds only to oligarchs and swindlers, and never the actual population of the country.
While it is a widely held international and academic opinion that the US has the world’s most corrupt government because it is based on bribery and maintaining tight oligarchic control, professor David Graeber notes (Debt – The First 5,000 Years) that biased Western-run ‘watch-dog’ agencies are able to lower the US’s corruption ranking on the lists they create because in countries like Russia and China, bribing politicians is illegal, and thus considered corruption, whereas in the US it is rampant to the extent that the offending politicians and oligarchs simply declared bribery to be ‘legal’, and thus not counted as a form of corruption.
But not to worry: Hillary doesn’t just take millions from US oligarchs.  She is also flush with millions from foreign oligarchs and dictatorships, and responds to their ‘generosity’ by supporting them privately and publicly, such as backing their efforts to overthrow democracies, or when she recently propagandized for apartheid Israel, just after it was declared the world’s top human rights violator by the United Nations.
Martin ends the investigation by saying US citizens can and should fight both the Republicans and the Democrats, and that she “completely rejects Hillary’s brand of bourgeois ‘feminism’ because it leaves out millions of immigrant women, poor women, and the women [and girls] under her bombs” – all ‘unpeople’ who have stood, or accidentally been, in the way of expanding the corporate empire.
Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry.  Updates on Twitter.  Author’s essay ‘The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter’.

Is The GOP Risking Suicide?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2016 17:40 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/gop-risking-suicide
Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
Donald Trump has brought out the largest crowds in the history of primaries. He has won the most victories, the most delegates, the most votes. He is poised to sweep three of the five largest states in the nation - New York, Pennsylvania and California.
If he does, and the nomination is taken from him, the Republican Party will be seen by the American people as a glorified Chinese tong.
Last week, Ted Cruz swept 34 delegates at the Colorado party convention. Attendees were not allowed to vote on whom they wanted as the party’s nominee.
This weekend, Cruz shut out Trump in Wyoming the same way.
What does this tell us? Cruz has a better “ground game.” His operatives work the system better. Ted Cruz is the king of small ball.
But having gone head-to-head in some 30 primaries and caucuses, Cruz has fallen millions of votes behind Trump, and will fall millions further behind after New York, Pennsylvania and California.
Cruz will soon join John Kasich in being mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination on the first ballot. His fallback strategy is to keep Trump just short of the 1,237 votes needed for victory on the first ballot, and then steal the nomination on the second.
How? Poaching and pilfering. In state after state, he is getting Cruz loyalists elected as Trump delegates. After casting an obligatory vote for Trump on the first ballot, the turncoats will go over the hill and vote for Cruz on the second ballot.
Faithless delegates are preparing to switch to give Ted Cruz a nomination that he could not persuade Republican voters to confer upon him.
Like the 1919 World Series, the fix is in.
The rules are the rules, says Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus in defense of what went down in Colorado and Wyoming.

Priebus is correct. The rules are the rules. But what is also true is that the rules have been and are being manipulated by party elites to frustrate the expressed will of a Republican electorate, and to impose a nominee other then the clear winner of the primaries.
Republican elites are engaged in a conspiracy to frustrate and overturn the democratic decision of the Republican electorate.
Prediction: If Trump sweeps the remaining major primaries, comes to Cleveland with millions more votes than any other candidate, and then has the nomination stolen from him, the Grand Old Party will be committing hara-kiri on worldwide TV.
This political race ranks among the most exciting in American history. Seventeen Republicans entered the lists last summer in what party officials hailed as “the strongest Republican field since 1980.”
Then Trump came down the escalator, took them on, and bested them all. Can Republican Party elites think they will be celebrated if they substitute their wants for the will of the voters?
A Cruz nomination would be like taking the gold medal away from the man who won it, and handing it to a runner-up. The GOP elites would be about as popular as those Olympic boxing judges in South Korea.
The deeper problem here is the refusal of party elites to realize that the world has changed.
The Bush dynasty is done. Jeb Bush, the Prince of Wales, understands this. He will not be going to Cleveland.
The primaries have starkly revealed that a new era is upon us.
Even the neocons, the dominant element among the 121 foreign policy experts who declared in an open letter that they will never work for a President Trump, testify to this.
They see Trump’s victories as a repudiation of their legacy, and a Trump presidency as the end of their post-Cold War ascendancy.
And given the disasters they have produced for America, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya and Yemen, the nation would be well rid of them.
Indeed, Trump’s victories, and the energies he has unleashed, are due, not only to his outsized persona but to his issues.
People believe Trump will secure the borders, halt the invasion, embrace tariff and trade policies to reduce imports, and restart the production of goods, Made in the USA, by and for Americans.
In his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said, “The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose.”
Bush Republicans saw their “large and definite purpose” as creating a “New World Order” and “ending tyranny in our world.”
Trump seems to see repairing, rebuilding and restoring America to greatness as the “large and definite purpose” of the party he would lead. And a new emerging Republican majority seems to agree.
If Trump had been routed, as first expected, then his message could rightly have been regarded as outside the mainstream. But Republican voters rallied to the issues he raised.
To either ignore the clear instructions of its electorate, or renounce their chosen messenger, would be for the Republican Party to forfeit its future, and cling to a discredited and dead past.

Paul Craig Roberts: How The American Neocons Destroyed Mankind's Hopes For Peace

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2016 22:30 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/paul-craig-roberts-how-american-neocons-destroyed-mankinds-hopes-peace
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.
I know about this, because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpeona power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA’s claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA’s way of perpetuting the Cold War and the CIA’s importance.
The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.
The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents - George W. Bush and Obama - who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.
Thus was mankind’s chance for peace lost along with America’s leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existance over which American influence would have prevailed.
Instead the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.
The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons’ arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist. It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony. 
The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of America’s leading corporations, such as Apple. China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets.
To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skeptical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills.
Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia. What if Russia responded in kind?
NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO. NATO is a cover for Washington’s war crimes. It can provide no other service.
Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is modernized many decades before the neocons thought possible. China’s military forces are modernized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete.
The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Killary’s support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership.
Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Killary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocon’s war.
The neocons have flocked to the support of Killary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put Killary in office. Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president.
The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well informed population. The US owes its 20th century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries.
Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance.
Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to America’s Japanese vassal that it was defenceless if Russia and China so decided.
The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises.
The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China.
This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate.

Obama Arrives In Saudi Arabia To "Reassure" His Close Ally That Nothing Has Changed

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/20/2016 08:42 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-20/obama-arrives-saudi-arabia-reassure-his-close-ally-nothing-has-changed
While Congress is scrambling to sweep the recently introduced Bipartisan bill that would allow US families to sue Saudi Arabia for Sept 11, Barack Obama has just landed in Saudi Arabia to reassure his close ally that all is under control.

President Obama with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef,
center, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in May 2015
As the WSJ reports, Obama arrived today in the Saudi kingdom for a brief trip "meant to provide reassurances to Gulf allies and to bolster his own foreign-policy legacy."

With just nine months left in office, Mr. Obama is aiming to steady what have become rocky relationships in the region and to tackle issues ranging from the fight against Islamic State to addressing Iranian aggression, along with easing tensions between Tehran and Saudi Arabia. But in Riyadh, the president will find frustrated allies who already have begun to look ahead to the next administration.

Obama plans to spend about 28 hours in the Saudi capital, holding talks with King Salman Wednesday afternoon and attending a Thursday summit hosted by leaders of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. This trip, perhaps the last to Riyadh during Mr. Obama’s presidency, serves as a bookend for an administration that once sought a “new beginning” for the U.S. and the Islamic world, but now is confronting the prospect of a tense conclusion to this chapter.
Of course, the main reason for the simmering Saudi tensions has been the thawing of US relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia's self-proclaimed biggest regional threat.
Meanwhile, from the NYT, here are some pointers on what Obama should not do during his visit: sell even more weapons to the belligerent kingdom in exchange for goodwill that only lasts as long as the status quo is not threatened.

When President Obama visits Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with representatives from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, he should avoid doing what he did at Camp David last May, the last time he met with them: promise more arms sales. Since Mr. Obama hosted that meeting, the United States has offered over $33 billion in weaponry to its Persian Gulf allies, with the bulk of it going to Saudi Arabia. The results have been deadly.

The Saudi-American arms deals are a continuation of a booming business that has developed between Washington and Riyadh during the Obama years. In the first six years of the Obama administration, the United States entered into agreements to transfer nearly $50 billion in weaponry to Saudi Arabia, with tens of billions of dollars of additional offers in the pipeline.

The Pentagon claims that these arms transfers to Saudi Arabia “improve the security of an important partner which has been and continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.” Recent Saudi actions suggest otherwise.

The Obama administration says that it has urged restraint from the Saudis, but that doesn’t appear to have worked. Human Rights Watch has reported that two Saudi strikes on a market in the Yemeni village of Mastaba in mid-March killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. This was just one in a series of Saudi strikes on marketplaces, hospitals and other civilian targets, attacks that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said may constitute war crimes.

Alas, Obama is in a bind: threaten to expose Saudi involvement in Sept 11, or dare to suggest that the US military-industrial supply chain into Saudi Arabia is slowing, and the response is already clear: a threat to dump hundreds of billions in US securities. Which is why Obama has zero leverage and will fold to any Saudi demand presented during his meetings today.

Obama Succumbs To Saudi Pressure, Will Veto Sept 11 Lawsuit Bill

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2016 09:42 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/obama-succumbs-saudi-pressure-threatens-veto-sept-11-lawsuit-bill
Following Saudi threats to destabilize the financial system if the US were to enact a Bill that would allow an investigation into Saudi Arabia's support of September 11 terrorist attacks, many were watching closely how Obama would react. The president made it clear last night when as CNN reports, the White House threatened to veto the bipartisan bill to let families victimized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks sue Saudi Arabia while a GOP senator privately sought to block the measure.
The White House and State Department are bluntly warning lawmakers not to proceed with the legislation due to "fears" it could have dramatic ramifications for the United States and citizens living abroad to retaliatory lawsuits.
The President lands in Riyadh Wednesday for talks with Saudi Arabia over ISIS and Iran at a time of strained relations between the countries, making the bill's timing that much more sensitive.
The move comes as presidential candidates from both parties are seizing on the legislation to score points with New York voters ahead of Tuesday's critical primary there.
As reported over the weekend, one of the biggest supporters of the bill is none other than New York democrat Chuck Schumer, the likely next Senate Democratic leader, who has found himself pitted squarely against the Obama administration.
As CNN adds, the stepped-up lobbying against the legislation comes as it faces fresh roadblocks on Capitol Hill, with party leaders learning that a GOP senator is objecting to taking up the bill, according to a source familiar with the legislation. The senator's identity has not yet been revealed publicly.
Proponents of the measure, for their part, are intensifying their pressure campaign.
"If Saudi Arabia participated in terrorism, of course they should be able to be sued," Schumer said Monday. "This bill would allow a suit to go forward and victims of terrorism to go to court to determine if the Saudi government participated in terrorist acts. If the Saudis did, they should pay a price."
Obama, however, disagrees for whatever reasons.
As we reported yesterday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest fired back, warning that it would jeopardize international sovereignty and put the U.S. at "significant risk" if other countries adopted a similar law. "It's difficult to imagine a scenario where the President would sign it," Earnest said.
And that's the problem because to most Americans it is incomprehensible why Obama would roadblock something that is so critical to getting to the bottom of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.
As a reminder, the proposed Bipartisan Bill, which Schumer and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas are pushing, would prevent Saudi Arabia and other countries alleged to have terrorist ties from invoking their sovereign immunity in federal court.
Saudi Arabia has long denied any role in the 9/11 attacks, but victims' families have repeatedly sought to bring the matter to court, only to be rebuffed after the country has invoked legal immunity allowed under current law. However, as the White House itself admitted yesterday, it was the Saudis who were the source of Al Qaeda's seed funding.
"It makes minor adjustments to our laws that would clarify the ability of Americans attacked on U.S. soil to get justice from those who have sponsored that terrorist attack," Cornyn said of the bill, which is entitled the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Not Just Obama
It's not just Obama who is holding back the Bill: a GOP senator is privately holding up the bill, an obstacle that would require Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to file time-consuming procedural motions to move past. He would need 60 votes to overcome the objection, but it is uncertain whether he will move on the measure before his colleague's issues are ironed out. Not surprisingly, the objector has yet to step up: "no senator has yet claimed responsibility for privately voicing the objection."

Under the rules of the Senate, any one senator can privately inform his or her party leadership of plans to place a "hold" to block legislation. His or her name would not become public unless a senator took to the Senate floor and tried to advance the bill, forcing the opponent to object. That scenario has not yet occurred as negotiations to find a way forward continue behind the scenes. Cornyn said that while several senators originally had placed holds on the measure, they had all relented save one.

Cornyn added that "part of the concern is that somehow this is a thumb in the eye to Saudi Arabia, a valuable ally," he said. So because it is a valuable ally its support of terrorism on US soil should be ignored.
* * *
While Saudi Arabia has not been directly and officially implicated in the 9/11 attacks - yet - 15 of the 19 hijackers were of Saudi descent. Moreover, there has long been suspicion about ties between the royal family of Saudi Arabia to al Qaeda, speculation that has only intensified as 28 pages of a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks remains classified. As pressure grows on Congress to let 9/11 victims' families pursue their claims against Saudi Arabia in federal court, Saudi officials are quickly pushing back.
Following the Saudi threat to dump its US denominated assets, including billions in US Treasurys, Cornyn was quick to dismiss the threat: "It's seems overly defensive to me and I doubt they can do it," he said in response. "I don't think we should let foreign countries dictate the domestic policy of the United States so, no, it doesn't bother me at all."

Presidential Candidates Get On The Action
Presidential candidates were also unmoved. Ahead of the New York primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voiced muted support to align themselves with the Cornyn-Schumer bill. Or rather Bernie did: Hillary appears to be on the fence, and while she said in a Sunday appearance on ABC that she had to study the bill and would not take a position, a spokesman later said she backs the bill.
Sanders, in a statement Sunday night, announced that he supports the bill and called on the Obama administration to declassify the 28 pages of the 9/11 report that could implicate Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, Trump evinced no concern about Saudi Arabia's threat to sell off U.S. assets. "Let 'em sell 'em," Trump said. "No big deal."
Trump added: "Hey, look, we protect Saudi Arabia. We protect them for peanuts. If we weren't protecting them, they wouldn't be there for a week."
However, for now just one person's opinion matters: the one shown on the left.

 
*So... behind this medallion is my Swiss account number???*

Former Bush Official Laments "We Are The Death Merchants Of The World"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/30/2016 12:10 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-30/former-bush-official-admits-weve-privatized-ultimate-public-function-war
Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,
“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight, told Salon in an exclusive interview.
Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States through decades of war. He later became an ardent critic of such militarism and imperialism.
“War is a racket,” Butler famously said, and Wilkerson — who has also turned critical of U.S. imperialist policy — agrees with and admires the esteemed Marine.
Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state, Colin Powell, has grown tired of “the corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.”
Of the profiteering scheme that wars have come to embody, Wilkerson quoted Butler:

“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Noting Butler’s brief but accurate characterization of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, Wilkerson added that today’s war machine “is more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be.”
The willingness of such weapons and military equipment corporations to excuse the transgressions of repressive and abusive regimes in the Middle East and Asia for the sake of profit, Wilkerson asserted, stands as evidence Eisenhower underestimated the extent the to which the problem would manifest.
“Was Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO — after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn’t go an inch further east — was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapons sales?” Wilkerson asked.
“You bet it was,” he answered his own question.
“Is there a penchant on behalf of the Congress,” he continued, “to bless the use of force more often than not because of the constituencies they have and the money they get from the defense contractors?
“You bet.
“It’s not like Dick Cheney or someone like that went and said let’s have a war because we want to make money for Halliburton,” Wilkerson explained, describing such decision-making as “pernicious.”
Taking his description a step further, Wilkerson characterized those corporations flooding congressional elections and political PACs with cash as “another pernicious influence.”
Relating another ill of the U.S. war machine, Wilkerson repined the creep of privatization of “public functions, like prisons,” for which the former Bush official places greatest blame on Republicans — though Democrats appear as eager about the shift. Salon mentioned Hillary Clinton’s speech from 2011, during her tenure as Secretary of State, in which she stated, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”
Indeed, journalist Jeremy Scahill extensively reported and investigated the enormous army of private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan — with a particular focus on Blackwater. Run by notorious mercenary Erik Prince — who recently became the subject of an investigation by the Dept. of Justice and other federal agencies — Blackwater appeared to operate so unpredictably as to essentially be a rogue organization.
Scahill penned an article for the Guardian in 2007, revealing the exact troubles with privatization Wilkerson referred to — there were 48,000 ‘private contractors’ working for 630 companies in varying capacities in Iraq.
“In many respects,” Wilkerson continued, “it is now private interests that benefit most from our use of military force. Whether it’s private security contractors, that are still all over Iraq or Afghanistan, or it’s the bigger-known defense contractors, like the number one in the world, Lockheed Martin.”
Contractors have arguably done the most to damage U.S.’ international relations and accountability than any other factor — except for the corporations paying them. All of this profit for belligerence has clearly benefited one de facto policy: American imperialism.
“We now dwarf the Russians or anyone else who sells weapons in the world,” Wilkerson noted. “We are the death merchant of the world.”
Now, Wilkerson worried, “We’ve privatized the ultimate public function: war.”