Tag: military industrial complex

The “Nation Rebuilding Industry” Salivates Over Ukraine

The powerful military-industrial complex, with generous campaign contributions funneled via K-Street lobbyists to both parties, celebrated a huge victory yesterday. By getting overwhelming majorities in both chambers to approve a whopping, unprecedented $856 billion Pentagon bill, America’s defense industries are assured of continued prosperity for years to come. Pentagon budgets are rarely cut year after year and generally only rise with time.

The amount was $45 billion more than what President Biden, a huge spendthrift who loves deficit expenditures, requested. The war in Ukraine and tensions in the Taiwan Strait were used as justification for the massive bill. Never mind that neither issue was on Congressional minds a year ago or need have been today had the State Department resorted to diplomacy rather than promoting war.

Keep reading

Woke Military Threatens Mother Who Questioned LGBTQ School Indoctrination

Tucker Carlson highlighted a story Wednesday concerning a New Jersey mother being told she is being “monitored” by local law enforcement at the behest of military personnel who didn’t like her social media posts questioning sexualisation of children in school.

Angela Reading alerted other parents of children in the North Hanover Township Elementary School District that children from grade 4 up are being encouraged to research topics of sexuality and create LGBTQ+ posters.

Suddenly, the concerned mom found herself the target of one Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Shilling, who stated that the Joint Base (McGuire, Fort Dix and Lakehurst) are looking into her posts and informing law enforcement.

Carlson noted “a military base is not a ‘law enforcement agency’. The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not to police our Facebook posts. This is mind boggling.”

Keep reading

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Developing Military Version Of Starlink Satellites

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced that it would expand its Starlink satellite system into the military sphere with a new national security line called Starshield.

The new program, unveiled on Dec. 2, will build on its launch and satellite communications technology and provide additional capabilities to provide a secured satellite network for government entities.

“Starlink is designed for consumer & commercial use, Starshield is designed for gov use, with focus on three areas: Earth Observation, Communications, Hosted Payloads,” said Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, and analyst in a tweet.

The “hosted payloads,” system allows users to utilize a satellite bus, which is the body of the spacecraft, as a flexible platform.

The most likely customers of Starshield would appear to be the U.S. military and intelligence community, which have already invested heavily into SpaceX’s satellite technology, with key stakes in the Starlink system.

“While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use,” wrote the company on its website.

“SpaceX’s ongoing work with the Department of Defense and other partners demonstrates our ability to provide in-space and on-ground capability at scale.”

The Ukrainian military relied heavily on Starlink’s constellation network of more than 3,200 communication satellites, which provides broadband internet access, but Musk attempted to terminate funding for Kyiv’s use of the Starlink system in October.

However, he later reversed course after the U.S. Department of Defense offered to negotiate to pick up the tab for the effort and partially due to online threats by Ukrainian officials, reported Defense News.

Keep reading

Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed

This week several major web browsers quickly severed ties with a mysterious software company used to certify the security of websites, three weeks after the Washington Post exposed its connections to a US military contractor, the Post reports.

TrustCor Systems provided ‘certificates’ to browsers to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, which vouched for the legitimacy of said websites.

“Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware,” said Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson in an email to browser security experts. “Trustcor’s responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla’s concerns.”

According to TrustCor’s Panamanian (!?) registration records, the company has the same slate of officers, agents and officers as Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which has sold communication interception services to the U.S. government for over a decade.

One of those contracts listed the “place of performance” as Fort Meade, Md., the home of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command.

The case has put a new spotlight on the obscure systems of trust and checks that allow people to rely on the internet for most purposes. Browsers typically have more than a hundred authorities approved by default, including government-owned ones and small companies, to seamlessly attest that secure websites are what they purport to be. -WaPo

Also of concern, TrustCor’s small staff in Canada lists its place of operation at a UPS Store mail drop, according to company executive Rachel McPherson, who says she told their Canadian staffers to work remotely. She also acknowledged that the company has ‘infrastructure’ in Arizona as well.

McPherson says that ownership in TrustCor was transferred to employees despite the fact that some of the same holding companies had invested in both TrustCor and Packet Forensics.

Various technologists in the email discussion said they found TrustCor to be evasive when it came to basic facts such as legal domicile and ownership – which they said was not appropriate for a company responsible for root certificate authority that verifies a secure ‘https’ website is not an imposter.

Keep reading

Ex-Military Intelligence Officer Reveals PSI Psychic Unit Used Remote Viewing to Predict Disasters

Retired U.S. Army Major Ed Dames is one of very few people with specialized knowledge of remote viewing as developed by U.S. military intelligence. Remote viewing operations are now declassified, though they were kept under wraps for decades. The power of remote viewing, an extra-sensory perception involving seeing distant places and people through one’s inner eye, is explored on Major Dames’s website.

He now teaches this skillset to the public and says successful predictions include the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, and Hurricane Irene in the United States.

Awards Major Dames has earned for his work for the U.S. government are testaments to the success of his remote viewing course. One award, cited in a video on Major Dames’s website, states: “His insightful threat analysis has contributed significantly to this country’s ability to maintain its military superiority.”

Another states: “Dames identified and confirmed the existence of an entirely new Soviet offensive weapon, and then personally briefed senior officials of the National Intelligence Agencies regarding the significance of this new Soviet capability.”

Keep reading

US Admits It Was Never About Ukraine, Taxpayers Shell Out Billions to Prop Up Military Industrial Complex

 In his March 21 press briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price told the gathered reporters that “President Zelenskyy has also made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.” A reporter asked Price, “What are you saying about your support for a negotiated settlement à la Zelenskyy, but on whose principles?” In what still may be the most remarkable statement of the war, Price responded, “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.”

Price, who a month earlier had discouraged talks between Russia and Ukraine, rejected Kiev negotiating an end to the war with Ukraine’s interests addressed because US core interests had not been addressed. The war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.

A month later, in April, when a settlement seemed to be within reach at the Istanbul talks, the US and UK again pressured Ukraine not to pursue their own goals and sign an agreement that could have ended the war. They again pressured Ukraine to continue to fight in pursuit of the larger goals of the US and its allies. Then British prime minister Boris Johnson scolded Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” He added that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, the West was not.”

Once again, the war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.

At every opportunity, Biden and his highest ranking officials have insisted “that it’s up to Ukraine to decide how and when or if they negotiate with the Russians” and that the US won’t dictate terms: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But that has never been true.

The US wouldn’t allow Ukraine to negotiate on their terms when they wanted to. The US stopped Ukraine from negotiating in March and April when they wanted to; they pushed them to negotiate in November when they did not want to.

The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals. It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.

Keep reading

Meta Confirms US Military Running Fake Social Media Accounts to Push Propaganda

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.

Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.

Keep reading

‘Is Washington still our ally?’: EU accuses US of PROFITEERING from Ukraine war through sales of guns and gas and threatens trade war – as top diplomats moan Biden’s green subsidies mean European businesses are relocating to US

The EU has accused the US of profiteering from the Ukraine war by selling guns and gas at ramped up prices.

Several high-ranking officials within the Bloc accused Joe Biden of capitalizing on the brutal Russian invasion by marking up the cost to import the vital products.

One senior official told Politico they believe America was standing to gain the most from the continuation of the fighting, nine months after soldiers first invaded.

‘The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,’ the official said.

In recent months, Europeans have weaned off Russian energy and gas with the countries forced to look to the US for their oil.

EU countries however pay roughly four-times as much for gas as it costs in America, with cheaper energy becoming hugely competitive in the states.

Businesses are looking to pump cash into the US fuel market with new investments – as some even relocate their firms to the other side of the Atlantic.

It has sent some world leaders in Europe into a frenzy, with French President Emmanuel Macron recently saying it was not friendly of the US to treat allies as it is.

Meanwhile European countries are suffering an arms shortage due to huge shipments that have been sent to Ukraine – with them racing to replenish supplies over the winter.

Yet the Americans continue to send more, with the cost of supplying Ukraine to the US now at over $19billion as another $400million was added earlier this week.

It comes at an already tumultuous moment between the Americans and several nations as Europe grapples with the fallout from Biden’s green subsidies.

‘The Inflation Reduction Act has changed everything,’ one EU official said. ‘Is Washington still our ally or not?’

Tensions came to a boil on Friday as EU trade ministers met and branded the act ‘discriminatory’, ahead of it coming into force in just over a month.

Keep reading

The Ukraine War Is a Sales-promotion Campaign for Lockheed and Other U.S. ‘Defense’ Contractors

On 3 December 2021, a year ago, Lockheed Martin shares cost $333.81. On 23 November 2022, they cost cost $481.07. That’s a 44% gain during this year-long period.

$4,027.26 is the S&P on 23 November 2022, and it was $4,701.46 on 24 November 2021. That’s a 14% decline during this year-long period.

A dollar invested in the S&P became $0.86, but in Lockheed became $1.44, and that is 68% more than the S&P market-average performance.

That’s the benefit of owning a controlling interest in a mega-corporation whose market is the Government in which you have purchased a controlling interest (by political donations and lobbyists), as compared to not.

And you will see there that though the stock-price of Lockheed soared after Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the rise in its stock-price actually started on 3 December 2021. Perhaps that was when U.S.-Government insiders got their first clear indications that the U.S. Government was going to force Russia to invade Ukraine in order to prevent Ukraine from ever being able to join NATO so as for the U.S. to place its missiles only 317 miles away from The Kremlin.

Here are all of the headlined news-stories at the New York Times site on 3 December 2021, all 45 of them, and here are all 3 of the ones there featuring national defense or international relations:

  • “Shell pulls out of a U.K. oil field targeted by climate activists”
  • “With No Resources, Authority or Country, Afghan Ambassador Presses On”
  • “Why Peng Shuai Has China’s Leaders Spooked”

NONE has to do with national defense or international relations at all, but 100% of the news-stories are instead domestic-affairs articles, even the ones on global warming and on the former Afghan Ambassador, and on the Chinese tennis star. This fact (0 out of 45 being ‘defense’ or international-relations) goes to exemplify that if anyone is interested in warfare or other international-relations topics, it’s NOT the general public. Who might it be, then? Perhaps it’s the types of people who control firms such as Lockheed and other ‘Defense’-contractors — firms that sell onlyto the U.S. Government and to its allied (or vassal) Governments such as in NATO, and so these firms need to control their own Government in order to control their sales-volumes and their profits — which they manifestly do (the U.S. Government is bipartisanly neoconservative — pro-increasing the U.S. empire).

Keep reading

Killing By Drone: Hunting Enemies In Urban Combat

A new drone from Israel’s Elbit Systems called Lanius combines a number of technologies that put it at the forefront of how drones are transforming war.

At the same time, reports about the drone may raise questions about how this technology may make war more controversial as “robots” play a larger role in it.

The more armies and defense companies invest in new technology that enables combat to take place remotely — without soldiers interacting with civilians, for instance — the more it seems like “robot wars.”

Elbit Systems has said that Lanius is “part of the Legion-X robotic and autonomous combat solution.” Elbit is one of Israel’s three largest defense companies and is at the forefront of defense technology.

Its website says the drone “is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition designed for short-range operation in the urban environment.”

The drone can scout and map buildings, flying around small corridors and through doorways. This means it can help a user find “points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. Lanius can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.”

Keep reading