Tag: military industrial complex

US Marines Activate Space Unit As Race To Secure Low Earth Orbit Intensifies

On Friday, the Marine Corps activated a new, specialized unit called the Marine Corps Forces Space Command (MARFORSPACE) as a subordinate organization to US Space Command, which will “provide space operational support to the Fleet Marine Force while building a convergence capability to increase warfighter lethality,” read a US Space Command press release. 

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Pentagon Fails Another Audit, Will Likely Get Budget Increase From Congress Anyway

The third time wasn’t the charm for the Pentagon, which has once again failed to successfully complete an audit.

Thomas Harker, the Pentagon’s comptroller, told Reuters that it could be another seven years before the department can pass an audit—something that it has never accomplished. Previous attempts in 2018 and 2019 turned up literally thousands of problems with the Pentagon’s accounting system and millions of dollars’ worth of missing equipment.

In a statement, the Pentagon lauded the fact that auditors had “cleared” more than 500 issues identified in previous audits. That serves as compelling evidence that the effort is worth it, even if a clean review is still impossible. The Pentagon had resisted being audited for years. Though Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring all federal departments to be audited every year, it still took nearly two decades for the first Pentagon audit to be attempted. The department now says it is benefiting from the process.

A full report on this year’s audit, which covered more than $2.7 trillion in military assets, is expected to be released in January.

Before that, Congress is likely to sign off on a boost in military spending. As part of a new $1.4 trillion discretionary spending bill expected to be passed during the upcoming lame-duck session, the Pentagon is expected to get about a $10 billion boost in funding. That will happen in spite of another failed audit and regardless of the fact that America’s budget deficit has soared to record highs in the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll.

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How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps

The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

Through public records, interviews with developers, and technical analysis, Motherboard uncovered two separate, parallel data streams that the U.S. military uses, or has used, to obtain location data. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which creates a product called Locate X. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), a branch of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, bought access to Locate X to assist on overseas special forces operations. The other stream is through a company called X-Mode, which obtains location data directly from apps, then sells that data to contractors, and by extension, the military.

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Biden Will Likely Be Worse Than Obama. The Left Must Lead The Backlash, Or The Right Will.

Unlike Obama, Biden did not campaign on hope and change, he campaigned on opposing the socialist inclinations of Sanders progressives and an aggressive foreign policy of planetary domination. He assured rich donors that nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency and his transition team is full of corporate sociopaths, war pigs and propagandists. Biden has been a corporatist warmongering authoritarian throughout his entire career, and as his mental capacity continues to deteriorate he will function as nothing more than an empty vessel for his establishment handlers to advance their most pernicious agendas through. The empire has not gotten less desperate since Obama was in office, it has gotten more desperate.

If I prove right about this, the Biden administration will generate backlash just like that which arose in response to the Obama administration, and that backlash will be more severe than its previous iteration. This is absolutely guaranteed. You can only oppress, neglect and enrage a population so much before the discontent begins to grow.

There is absolutely nothing American leftists can do to prevent this backlash from coming. They will have absolutely no say in this administration’s policies or behavior; BidenCorp has no reason to listen to them, has made no pretense of having any interest in listening to them, and is even freezing Sanders and Warren out of cabinet roles already.

All US leftists will have any control over is whether this backlash will break to the left, or if it will break to the far right.

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Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers Ever Assembled

Well you’ll be happy to know that the next US president and his crack team of ventriloquists are assembling a cabinet of mass murderers that’s as diverse, inclusive and intersectional as America herself. 

It’s been obvious for a long time that Joe Biden’s cabinet would be packed with Obama holdovers, war pigs and whatever primary opponents he owes favors to, but now that he is the media-anointed winner of the presidential election we’re getting a bit more confirmation on who they’re expected to be.

A new Politico report informs us that the heavy favorite to lead the US war machine into further imperial conquest as Secretary of “Defense” is a butcher of the fairer sex named Michele Flournoy, who was Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012.

In an article titled “Biden: A War Cabinet?“, Antiwar‘s Mariamne Everett writes the following:

Flournoy, in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review during her time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton, has paved the way for the U.S.’s endless and costly wars which prevent us from investing in life saving and necessary programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It has effectively granted the US permission to no longer be bound by the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force. It declared that, “when the interests at stake are vital, …we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power.”

While working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a “Top Defense and National Security Think Tank” based in Washington D.C., in June 2002, as the Bush administration was threatening aggression towards Iraq, she declared, that the United States would “need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary’s weapons stockpile” before it “could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them.”

“In 2009, she joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where she helped engineer political and humanitarian disasters in Libya and Syria and a new escalation of the endless war in Afghanistan before resigning in 2012,” report Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies in another Antiwar piece on Flournoy. “From 2013-2016, she joined Boston Consulting, trading on her Pentagon connections to boost the firm’s military contracts from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. By 2017, Flournoy herself was raking in $452,000 a year.”

Flournoy would be the very first female head of the US war department, and if that doesn’t make you want to listen to P!nk and kiss your Hillary Clinton pendant I don’t know what will.

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This Isn’t Feminism, It’s Imperialism In Pumps

This word “moderate” which the AP news agency keeps bleating is of course complete nonsense. Standing in the middle ground between two corporatist warmongering parties does not make you a moderate, it makes you a corporatist warmonger. Flournoy is no more “moderate” than the “moderate rebels” in Syria which mass media outlets like AP praised for years until it became undeniable that they were largely Al Qaeda affiliates; the only reason such a position can be portrayed as mainstream and moderate is because vast fortunes have been poured into making it that way.

As we discussed recently, Flournoy is a bloodthirsty imperialist and war profiteer who peace activists Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies accurately labeled an “angel of death” for the American empire. As leader of the laughably titled Department of “Defense” she can be expected to oversee the same agendas of unipolar global domination at the expense of rivers of blood as her predecessors, in more or less exactly the same ways.

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