Tag: military industrial complex

3 Military Industrial Execs Indicted for Illegal Campaign Contributions to Sen. Susan Collins

Three military-industrial executives with Department of Defense contracts have been indicted for allegedly making illegal contributions to Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) reelection bid.

According to a statement by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the three executives under investigation are Martin Kao, former chief executive of the firm Martin Defense Group, Clifford Chen, its chief financial officer, and Lawrence “Kahele” Lum Kee, an accountant for the firm.

Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, restrictions are placed upon who can make donations to candidates and the maximum amount that they can donate to those campaigns. Military contractors are among those prohibited from making campaign contributions under the legislation, in part due to the conflicts of interest that such contributions entail.

In an effort to get around this restriction, the three indicted men allegedly formed a shell company in 2019 called the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers. From there, they funneled $150,000 to the Collin-supporting 1820 PAC.

According to the DOJ statement, the three men also “allegedly used family members as conduits to make illegal contributions to the campaign committee of the same candidate, and then reimbursed themselves for those donations using funds obtained from their employer.” Donations given this way exceeded $52,000.

The charge, if proven to be true, would put the three men in clear violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which prohibits the use of “conduits,” or go-betweens to give donations in a secretive or roundabout way.

The trio has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make conduit and government contractor contributions, making conduit contributions, and making government contractor contributions, according to the official indictment (pdf). Kao, the chief executive, has also been charged with two counts of making false statements for causing the submission of false information to the Federal Election Committee.

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Another Banner Year For The Military-Industrial Complex

Twenty twenty-one was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste—from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

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Biden admin names Mike Bloomberg to lead military board

On Wednesday the Pentagon announced billionaire former Republican New York City Mayor and 2020 Democrat Presidential Candidate Mike Bloomberg will lead the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.

In a press briefing, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby announced Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had nominated Bloomberg to serve as the chair of the Defense Innovation Board.

“Mr. Bloomberg, as you all know, an entrepreneur and a leader who served three terms as the mayor of New York City, will bring a wealth of experience in technology, innovation, business and government to the Defense Innovation Board,” Kirby said.

“His leadership will be critical to ensuring the department has access to the best and brightest minds in science, technology and innovation through the team of diverse experts that he will lead as chair of that board,” Kirby added.

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New DARPA Black Hawk A.I. War Machines Set to Take to the Skies

Anyone who has been following Activist Post for any length of time knows that we continue to sound the alarm about how the military has been working on A.I. systems that will increasingly become fully autonomous — it’s part of the Internet of Battlefield Things. The only area seemingly left up for debate is whether these machines will be unleashed without any human input whatsoever in the decision-making process.

Now that we are seeing the rollout of robo-dogs on the border and tests of putting them on American streets, any advancement in A.I. war capabilities should be assumed to eventually trickle down from foreign lands into the United States. Remember, it used to be a conspiracy theory back in the early 2000s that standard drones would ever fly over America.

Now Defense One is reporting that A.I.-infused Black Hawk helicopters have made an advancement to the extent where they can autonomously carry out a directive set by a commanding officer. This also raises the question of how many of these can be commanded by one human. We recently saw a demo of a drone swarm consisting of 130 separate drones being managed by a single human operator utilizing virtual reality.

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Let’s Not Have A War

No one will say it out loud, but the greatest argument against U.S. support for military action of any kind in Ukraine is the inerrant incompetence of our missions and the consistent record of destabilizing areas of strategic interest through our involvement, including in these two specific countries. At the moment the Berlin Wall fell the United States had almost limitless political capital with these soon-to-be ex-Soviet territories. We blew it all within a few years. Now that we’re really in trouble in Ukraine, why would we keep to the same playbook that got us here?

Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.

Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.

We back Our Men in Havana to the hilt, no matter how corrupt they may become in their rule, a process we call “democracy promotion.” The cycle is always ends the same way, whether we’re talking about Hamid Karzai or Ayad Allawi or Boris Yeltsin. The white hat ally turns out to be either overmatched or a snake, usually the latter, and siphons off Western aid to himself and his cronies in huge quantities while smashing opposition by any means necessary. That brutality and corruption, combined with efforts to implement our structural adjustment policies (read: austerity, and the de-nationalization of natural resources) inevitably results in loss of popular support and/or the rise of opposition movements on the right, the left, or both.

Rising discontent in turn inspires further requests from the puppet for security aid, which we happily provide, since that ultimately is the whole point: selling weapons to foreigners to fill those Washington rice bowls. You will soon hear it in the form of increased calls for defense spending amid the Ukraine mess, but we’ve been at it forever.

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NATO as Religion

The US/NATO/Ukraine/Russia controversy is not entirely new.  We already saw the potential of serious trouble in 2014 when the US and European states interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine and covertly/overtly colluded in the coup d’état against the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, because he was not playing the game assigned to him by the West. Of course, our media hailed the putsch as a “colour revolution” with all the trappings of democracy.

The 2021/22 crisis is a logical continuation of the expansionist policies that NATO has pursued since the demise of the Soviet Union, as numerous Professors of international law and international relations have long indicated — including Richard Falk, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Kinzer and Francis Boyle.  NATO’s approach implements the US claim to have a “mission” to export its socio-economic model to other countries, notwithstanding the preferences of sovereign states and the self-determination of peoples.

Although the US and NATO narratives have been proven to be inaccurate and sometimes deliberately mendacious on numerous occasions, the fact is that a majority of citizens in the Western World uncritically believe what they are told.  The “quality press” including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Times, Le Monde, El Pais, the NZZ and FAZ are all effective echo chambers of the Washington consensus and enthusiastically support the public relations and geopolitical propaganda offensive.  I think that it can be said without fear of contradiction that the only war that NATO has ever won is the information war.  A compliant and complicit corporate media has been successful in persuading millions of Americans and Europeans that the toxic narratives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs are really true. We believe in the myth of the “Arab Spring” and “EuroMaidan”, but we never hear about the right of self-determination of peoples, including the Russians of Donetsk and Lugansk, and what could easily be called the “Crimean Spring”.

Often I ask myself how this is possible when we know that the US deliberately lied in earlier conflicts in order to make aggression appear as “defense”.  We were lied to in connection with the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident, the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  There is abundant evidence that the CIA and M15 have organized “false flag” events in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Why is it that masses of educated people fail to take some distance and question more?  I dare postulate the hypothesis that the best way to understand the NATO phenomenon is to see it as a secular religion.  Then we are allowed to believe its implausible narratives, because we can take them on faith.

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US will send Russian-made helicopters to Ukraine

The US government is expediting the transfer of five transport helicopters to Kiev, as Washington insists that Moscow could “invade” Ukraine any day now. The Mi-17 helicopters were originally purchased from Russia and intended for the former Western-backed government in Afghanistan, before it surrendered to the Taliban last August.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed on Friday that Congress has been notified of the move, which will be conducted under the Excess Defense Articles program. The State Department said on Thursday this was the “fastest transfer ever” for the US government.

The helicopters are already in Ukraine, which was servicing them on behalf of the Pentagon and was supposed to send them to Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover disrupted those plans. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov requested them from the Pentagon in late November, along with ammunition also earmarked for the defunct Afghan Army, Foreign Policy reported last month.

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