A short documentary on the effects of thr racist Orange order marches through the small Republican community of Ardoyne in North Belfast on the 12th of July.
Filmed by Robin Wallace. Starring Joe Gilmartin. Thanks to the Ardoyne community for their cooperation in making this film.
Gadi military base (disused) – location of new settlement
Israeli settlers are establishing yet another new colony in the Jordan Valley. With the support of the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, they are taking over a disused army base close to two Palestinian communities and claiming the land for themselves, just as the notorious Maskiyyot settlers did in 2002.
In recent weeks the settlers’ contractors have started to renovate the buildings of the disused Gadi military base, in the Abu Al Ajaj area of Al Jiftlik village, in the heart of the Jordan Valley. These new colonialists are clearly working closely with the settlement run ‘Jordan Valley Regional Council’ and the neighbouring settlement of Massu’a. One of the most aggressive colonies in the Jordan Valley, Massu’a settlers are responsible for a series of land grabs whereby they have violently stolen land from Abu Al Ajaj on three separate occasions in recent years.
Gadi military base
The establishment of a new settlement was announced on Israeli Army Radio on 10th March 2011, when Netanyahu visited Gadi base. At the time David Alhiani, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council, said:“Neither the defense minister nor the prime minister will build a new settlement in the Jordan Valley, not now. Maybe later, when there’s sovereignty in the valley”.
Israel doesn’t have sovereignty of the Jordan Valley today, any more than they had a year ago. Their occupation is just as illegal as it was a year ago. But their attempts to take over the valley have become more aggressive and transparent. Thus, in September 2011 news broke of Israel’s plans to embark on the systematic removal of 27,000 Bedouin from East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the rest of Area C.
It has been reported that the new settlement will be run by the Israeli Bnei Hamoshavim youth organisation, and will specifically encourage young Israeli’s who have experienced poor mental health or addiction, to join in the Jordan Valley colonisation project.
Prior to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967 the Gadi military base was used by the Jordanian army, and around 10,000 Palestinians lived to the south and east in Abu Al Ajaj refugee camp. All that remains of the refugee camp today are the cemetery and the UNWRA school. The mosque still stands on the hill, within the fence surrounding the new IOF (Israeli Occupation Force) base, and Palestinians have been prevented from using it for the last 45 years.
Mosque confiscated and within fence of IOF military base
Since the refugee camp was destroyed, soon after the occupation, the Palestinian community of Abu Al Ajaj has eked out a living by farming a little land and grazing their sheep on the hillsides. There are around 120 families now living in the community, some originally from the Al Jiftlik area, and others who came as refugees from Yata’ near Hebron, when they were driven out by the settler’s there.
UN OCHA: Expansion of Massu’a settlement
Over the last eight years the settlers of the nearby Massu’a settlement have worked hand-in-hand with the IOF to attempt the drive the Palestinians from the land. On three separate occasions (in 2004, 2008 and 2010) they have selected an area of land that they want, removed any Palestinian buildings or possessions that were there, and taken the land for their own use: They erected greenhouses to cultivate grapes in 2004, took a field to grow their crops in 2008, and in 2010 attacked local Palestinians when they came and fenced off yet more land, and later erected another row of greenhouses. See UN OCHA Humanitarian Report . On each occasion the IOF stood by and supported them. During the same period the community has received countless demolition orders, and been subjected to dawn raids, with many of their homes and animal shelters being demolished and destroyed by the IOF.
Demolitions in Abu Al Ajaj November 2010
There are around 30 homes that have had demolition orders served against them. The families live with the fear that one day the IOF will arrive, and it will be their turn to have their home and livelihood destroyed. They have had their water pipes destroyed, their animals killed, and their access to grazing land stopped, and their land stolen in front of their eyes.
Other local farmers have also been harassed by the IOF. Waleed Abu Hania, living near the cemetery, has been uprooted from his farm three times by the IOF, each time attempting to claim that he’s using state land! A little further up the road, the Saaidh family have received a demolition order for the metal shipping container on their small farm of date trees.
The small nearby community of Koursiliyya, comprised of four families, is even more vulnerable. Tucked away in the valley to the west of Gadi military base, they have already been stopped from accessing water from a small nearby natural spring, and are under threat of forced transfer.
All these Palestinian families are continuing to live on their land against the odds. They are showing a steadfastness beyond belief, but also have nowhere else to go. This is their home. They are facing the concerted effort of the Israeli state to forcibly remove them from their land, and have experienced verbal abuse and physical assault from the illegal settlers from Massu’a. Now they face the prospect of another group of young settlers, given impunity by their government to use violence, aggression and harassment against their Palestinian neighbours.
Syrian foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Maqdissi told a press conference on Sunday that UN and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan had sent a letter to Syria’s foreign minister that did not conform with the facts on heavy weapon use.
“We received a letter from Mr Kofi Annan addressed to Foreign Minister Walid Muallem. The least that can be said about this letter about what happened in Treimsa is that it did not rely on facts. As diplomatically as possible, we say that this letter was very rushed.”
The spokesman denied that Syrian forces used tanks and helicopters in the assault on Treimsa, saying what happened in the central village was the result of clashes with terrorists and not a massacre.
“Government forces did not use helicopters and tanks,” Maqdissi told a news conference in Damascus, adding: “What happened was not an attack by the army on innocent civilians.”
The Syrian foreign minister said the aim of this news conference was to tell people that what happened was not a massacre. “It was a clash between regular forces and armed groups who do not believe in a peaceful solution. This is the reality, politically and militarily.”
Maqdissi staunchly denied reports suggesting that the Syrian army used aircraft in the assault on Treimsa. “This is absolutely not true. Only troop carriers and lights weapons were used, the most powerful of weapons being RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades),” he said.
Only five buildings were attacked by the Syrian forces during the assault on Treimsa that only lasted a few hours and was aimed at getting rid of the terrorists, Maqdissi said, adding that the five buildings were used to launch attacks against the army and they also contained various kinds of weapons and explosives.
The Islamic Republic offered to host a meeting between Damascus and the opposition aimed at solving the Syrian crisis.
“Iran is ready to host the Syrian opposition for dialogue with the Syrian government,” Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told Arabic-language Al-Alam television on Sundy. “We believe that the Syrian issue should have a Syrian solution,” he said.
Earlier on Saturday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the Islamic Republic will use all its capacities to resolve Syria’s crisis and establish security in the region.
He added that the security of the region and all regional countries depends on the security of Syria and said, “We believe that in case of [adopting] an unrealistic approach towards the issue of Syria, not using influential countries with complete capacity to resolve the crisis in this country and also not taking necessary actions in various international summits to stop the violence, no result will be achieved and these summits are doomed to failure.”
Mehmanparast said grounds for dialogue between the Syrian government and the opposition in an atmosphere away from foreign interference and violence must be provided so that they could make their demands clear.
The Iranian official said Tehran supported the UN-Arab League joint envoy’s plan, adding that in the current situation, the best solution to resolve Syria’s crisis is that all countries and governments also support Kofi Annan and his six-point plan.
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance, Hamas, condemned on Thursday, the kidnapping, torture and murder of 17 soldiers of Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) by the Zionist collaborators, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) armed thugs. It looks as though Hamas leaders are learning from their mistake of betraying their long-time ally, the Assad regime in Syria.
In April 2012, two Israel-Firster US Senators, Joe Lieberman (a Zionist Jew ) and John McCain (a Zionist Christian) paid a surprise visit to the Turkish-Syrian border to meet with the leaders of the USrael-backed FSA. In a joint statement, both of them urged US and its allies to arm the Syrian rebel militants.
PLA chief of staff Major General Mohammad Tareq al-Khadraa told Syrian TV SANA: “The fact that the armed terrorist groups kidnapped and killed 17 troops from the Palestinian Liberation Army in Syria proves the criminal, dirty role that these groups play and their links to Western and Zionist agendas.”
The PLA is a battalion in the Syrian army, although it is made up of Palestinians living in Syria and who are conscripted to the armed forces. Roughly 470,000 Palestinian refugees live in Syria.
Faruk Logoglu, former Turkish ambassador in Washington, was quoted saying recently: “Turkey’s hosting armed FSA fighters and allowing them to carry out attacks in Syria – is against all international norms; against all neighborly relations. It’s a basic rule that countries must respect the sovereignty of others“.
Some Turkish commentators believe that Washington expects Turk soldiers to die in Syria to topple Bashar al-Assad, while some want Ankara to exploit the downing of the Turkish spying aircraft by Syria overflying Syrian airspace – to isolate al-Assad’s three main supporters; Russia, Iran and Hizbullah.
It would be better if Hamas and the rest of the Muslim leadership come out of its mindset of; “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They must judge their “newly found friend” by its past which has proven, again and again to be poodle of Zion. It wants to destabilize and breakup every Muslim nation-state which the Zionist regime thinks may pose a threat to Israel’s survival in the future.
Gen. Robert Mood, chief of UN monitoring mission in Syria has already confirmed that the arms deliveries from abroad (the US, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) is the main reason the bloodshed is on the rise.
On Friday, July 13, several protesters were injured when the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fired tear-gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at the weekly peaceful demonstration in the Palestinian village of Kufr Qaddoum. One man was shot in the head by a tear-gas grenade and was taken to hospital. Two other men were badly injured by rubber-coated bullets.
A home adjacent to the demonstration was hit by tear-gas grenades and caught fire. One child, 2 men, and 4 women were injured by the fire and smoke. An ambulance arrived but was delayed for 30 minutes because of the IOF attacks on the village.
The IOF also employed use of the ‘skunk’ truck which pumps out a foul smelling water and released several sound bombs to terrorize the village. Although illegal, most of the tear-gas was fired at body-level rather than in an arch in the air. Often, 10-12 canisters were fired at a time.
The purpose of the weekly demonstration in Kufr Qaddoum focuses on the closure of the main road that connects the village with Nablus. The road, which passes alongside the nearby illegal settlement of Qedumim, was closed to Palestinian access. As a result, the journey to Nablus has increased from 15 minutes to 40 minutes. This has resulted in hardships because many residents travel daily to Nablus for work, studies, or health care.
On Thursday, June 12, the residents of Kufr Qaddoum celebrated the one year anniversary of their Friday demonstrations. During this year, 60 people have been arrested, 65 people have been shot and badly injured by tear-gas canisters, 200 olive trees have been burned, and the town has suffered systemically from nightly raids and harassment by the IOF.
While nothing in its policy guidelines say it’s supposed to be this way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has distributed the vast majority of its nonprofit security grants to Jewish organizations.
During one three-year period (2007-2010), Jewish groups received 73% of DHS’ Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) awards. This share grew larger in 2011 (80%) and still larger in 2012 (97%).
In total dollars, Jewish institutions will take in $9.7 million in NSGP grants this year out of $10 million available.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano explained the results of the program’s grant awards this way: “Unfortunately there are risks attendant on the Jewish community that are not attendant on all other communities.”
The point of the NSGP funding is to help nonprofits at risk of terrorist attacks to better protect themselves. Orthodox Jewish groups in particular have done better than non-Orthodox Jewish groups in receiving assistance, presumably because they are more likely to be targeted by anti-Semitic movements. Of the 109 NSGP grants in 2012, 35 went to groups linked to Chabad, an orthodox Hasidic organization. A majority of the funding went to groups in the areas of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Only a few the NSGP recipients this year were not Jewish. These included a San Diego church, a Planned Parenthood center in Washington and a New York City Catholic church.
DHS policy defines preferred recipients as those having “the highest risk of terrorism-related activity due to their ideology, beliefs and mission.”
Venezuelan Defence minister Henry Rangel Silva and his Argentine peer Arturo Puricelli signed on Friday a cooperation agreement to further advance in the integration of the two armed forces in the framework of the Unasur Defence Council.
“For us it is essential, we were really missing having this first agreement with Venezuela” said Puricelli on Friday following the ceremony at the Venezuelan port of La Guaira where the Argentine navy tall ship ARA Libertad on a world tour called specially for the occasion.
Puricelli said that the decision of the Argentine government is to continue advancing in defence cooperation with Venezuela and above all “with the training of our officers”.
“Precisely the presence of our ARA Libertad in Venezuela is part of that integration target which both our countries have established” in the framework of the Union of South American Nations.
The bilateral agreement also includes areas such as science, technology development and joint military exercises between the armed forces of the two countries.
Minister Rangel said that the “first purpose of Unasur and the Defence Council is to ensure peace in South America”, a mission which is already taking place with the visit of an “important vessel from the Argentina Navy”.
The Venezuelan minister also revealed that currently there are over 80 officers from the Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela training in Argentina.
Puricelli on Thursday was received at the Ministry of Defence in Caracas where he said that the current defence situation is entirely different: “we are living in a process of democracy in the whole of Latin America”.
But he also recalled the path of unity displayed by the liberators of South America from the Spanish colonial empire and “which is now reflected by our presidents when they created Unasur”.
Tightening security screws in the US serves the ultimate goal – to implant the atmosphere of fear in the American society. It serves to raise sales of security equipment, independent journalist Charlie McGrath told RT.
The latest initiative of the US Department of Homeland Security is to develop laser-based security scanners capable of identifying any chemical substance in human body. Independent journalist Charlie McGrath sees it as a further erosion of the basic human rights in favor of Military-Industrial Complex profits.
Officials insist the scanners will be used to detect explosives at airports and border crossings. They say that if a person has nothing to hide he won’t mind subjecting to the procedure.
But some experts are prompting concern for civil liberties in America.
“There is no threat of terror, that is a canard,” states categorically the founder of Wide Awake News Charlie McGrath. He explained that as an American he has a 662,000:1 chance of winning an Olympic medal. While taking a bath he has a 685,000:1 chance of drowning in that bath. Walking outside he has a 2.3 million:1 chance of being struck dead by lightning. But the chance of being killed by a terrorist amounts to 3.2million:1 for an average person on our planet.
“What we see built out of 9/11, the Patriot Act… and every other peace of the so-called legislation protecting people is the enriching of the financial super-elite in the Security Industrial Complex,” states Charlie McGrath.
The journalist predicts that the American society will soon be under the eye of Big Brother, explaining that the declared security reasons behind governmental initiatives have no grounds whatsoever.
“All this talk of fearing Ahmadinejad coming out of every closet and from underneath of everybody’s bed is nothing but a fear tactic so that we can enrich a very few people on this planet,” McGrath proclaimed.
The reason why Americans should be concerned with the laser security scanners is that this “humiliation on steroids” is going to be paid for with the taxpayers’ money, reminds McGrath.
“Since introduction of the Patriot Act we’ve seen non-stop legislation eroding our liberties one after another,” McGrath claims. “It has come to point we’re just coming used to it. But we need to understand that with every passing piece of legislation, every piece of equipment installed every other day, we’re becoming more and more a Stasi-style police state,” he concluded.
McGrath assures that the equipment installed to be on the guard of security in airports and other public places will definitely make it into everyday life of Americans. He recalled military drones that were once made for the army and CIA operations overseas, but now are flying American skies to protect security at home.
The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.
The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.
Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.
The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing for the middle and working class.
The Ascendancy of the Police State
Central to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of the welfare state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in the Middle East, launched by every President from Bush (father), Clinton, Bush (son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against Muslim countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the massive police state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.
The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism against countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a domestic police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars designed to enhance Israel’s overwhelming power in the Middle East. These American Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured strategic positions within the US police state apparatus in order to terrify and repress activists, especially American Muslims and immigrants critical of the state of Israel.
The events of 9/11/01 served as the detonator for the biggest global military launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police state powers in the history of the United States. The bloody terror of 9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda – transforming the US into a police state while launching a decade-long series of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and, now, Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon. The military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while social programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the ‘Global War on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to maintain or raise living standards for millions and increase access to services for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.
As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy tanked. On the domestic front vital public investment in education, infrastructure, industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying mercenaries (private contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and providing a golden opportunity for military procurement officers and their private contractor-cronies to run up (and pocket) huge billion dollar cost overruns.
As a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military policy, which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial economic interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil contracts negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism. Indeed, the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has become far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy than any combination of Big Oil – and all to the benefit of Israeli regional power.
Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State
From the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed to successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding welfare state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare legislation took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war, under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of welfare-militarism was the powerful industrial-technological foundations of the US war-machine and its dominance over world markets. Subsequently, the declining competitive position of the US in the world-economy and the massive relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs) overseas strained the ‘marriage’ of domestic welfare and militarism to the breaking point. Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands for welfare and unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift from stable well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work. While the global US economic position declined, its global military expansion accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes of the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military alliance.
The demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global welfare systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash welfare to fund their massive global military expansion. There was virtually no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western trade unions into highly authoritarian organizations run by self-perpetuating millionaire ‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union membership from 30% of the work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012 (with over 91% of private sector workers without any representation) meant that American workers have been powerless to organize strikes to protect their jobs, let alone apply political pressure in defense of public programs and welfare.
Militarism was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched his multi-billion dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy wars’ throughout Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US Marines into the tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation of military spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union with a new ‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and then Iraq, the first of many US invasions in the Middle East. President Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way slashing public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and destroying Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing colonial enclaves in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military presence in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.
The constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular anti-Vietnam War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese Communists, were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like Grenada and Panama) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome –public opposition to militarism. This prepared the American public for incremental militarism while chipping away at the welfare system.
If Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill Clinton provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders in the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to the ‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly, Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel’s military view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington. Clinton put in place the first series of repressive police state ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and expanded the national prison system. In sum, Bill Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of the US economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards the Arab world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led directly to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state into the police state .
Exploiting the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes nearly tripled the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab states. The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544 billion in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military expenditures financed major foreign military occupations and colonial administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan, border wars in Pakistan and US Special Forces covert operations (including kidnappings and assassinations) in Yemen, Somalia, Iran and seventy-five other countries world-wide.
Meanwhile financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits ballooned, living standards plunged, international trade deficits reached record levels and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years. Multiple imperial wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars multiplied while the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between domestic welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back of basic social programs for all Americans topped the Presidential and legislative agenda.
Previous ‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the US Post Office, public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly and handicapped and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At the same time the federal government increased its funding of private military and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the scope and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents in support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan and Yemen. They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya, Syria, Iran, and Somalia. By the first decade of the new century it had become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism were in a zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic programs were slashed.
The severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare programs were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally important was the huge increase in the funding for personnel and surveillance technology for the burgeoning police state at home.
The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State
The precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of social services, public education and access to affordable health care for the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental to the process: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate) economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police legal-political-administrative state apparatus engaged in permanent ‘internal warfare’ at home, designed to sustain and complement permanent imperial warfare abroad.
Agencies and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically during the first decade of the new century. The police state penetrated telecommunications systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets; dominated judicial procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’, academic and professional associations. The expanded police state covertly and overtly entered the private lives of tens of millions of Americans.
The loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has been staggering.
As the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state apparatus, christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the budget and agencies providing welfare and public services, health, education and unemployment shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies have been hired and costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with tax-payer money, while hundreds of thousands of teachers and public health and social welfare professionals have lost their jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is composed of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and contracted agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has faced no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred at the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social Security Administration, which currently face large scale ‘retrenchment’.
Among the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to key positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have been the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and Michael Mukasey.
Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (from 2001 – 2003). During that time he was responsible for the arbitrary arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of Muslim and South Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without charge and subject to physical and psychological abuse – without a single resident alien or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast, Chertoff quickly intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff has been the chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ – co-author of the notorious ‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other essential components of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted ‘military tribunals’ and organized the vast internal spy network, which now preys on private US citizens.
Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an enthusiastic defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals, torture and overseas assassinations of individuals suspected of what he called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.
Both Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties to Israel. Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli citizenship as he launched the Administration’s domestic war on US citizens.
A cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state apparatus and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ – code languages for military imperialism – reveals a disproportionate number of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting potential US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in upholding Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights.
Back in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the bogus ‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning technology in airports throughout the US and Europe. He established his own security consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the manufacturers of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael Chertoff every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport body scan.
The fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security complex and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security counterparts in the state of Israel, underscores the imperial state’s ties to the Israeli military establishment.
As the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high tech surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal and state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.
The police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare has a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and its budgetary allocations.
Unlike the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a population of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor force’ is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts, traders and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of ‘contract’ office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the bottom. They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants, cooks, caterers, gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’, health coverage and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own private networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems and messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body guards; it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it certainly does not want national wealth to support high quality public health and educational systems. It has no interest in supporting this mass of public institutions which it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing up’ vast amounts of public wealth for speculation. In other words, the dominant sector of capital has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’; indeed it shares many sentiments with the proponents of the police state and supports shrinking the welfare state. It is concerned about lowering taxes on finance capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds for Wall Street while controlling the impoverished citizenry.
Conclusion
The conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of militarized imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at home, as well as the proliferation of security state agencies and related private industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists in top positions of the police state apparatus.
This convergence of international and domestic structural changes took hold during the 1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the first decade of the 21st century. The downgrading of the vast public services of the welfare state was covered up by a massive government propaganda campaign to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a fabricated widespread domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most hapless of suspects (including oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped by FBI agents). The supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state found themselves on the margins of any national debate. The mass media/regime propaganda campaign demanded and successfully secured massive increases in centralized powers of domestic policing, surveillance, provocations, disappearances and arrests. Throughout the past decade what the welfare state lost in support and funding, the police state gained. The rise of financial capital and the deregulation of the financial system crowded out any public subsidies to promote and sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing sector. This has led to a major break in the links between industry, labor and the welfare state. Huge tax write-offs to big business, combined with the growth in expenditures for a non-productive police state bureaucracy and the series of costly overseas wars, has caused unsustainable budget and trade deficits, which then became the pretext to further savage the welfare state.
Significant political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the rise of the police state over the public welfare state. The success of prominent American Zionists in securing power within key media propaganda mills and obtaining appointments to critical positions in the top echelons of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the imperial state bureaucracy (Treasury and State Department) has put Israel’s colonial interests and its own police-state apparatus at the center of US politics. The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled repression targeting US citizens and residents.
US society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to the expanding and lucrative financial – security complex embedded in the police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing – welfare sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’. The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First doctrine’ of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector, embedded in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the total gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and middle classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to finance bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while paying the bondholders of US debt.
Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to be reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to affordable health care and unemployment support will be slashed. The police state cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies, greater policing, more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while financing the existing welfare state with its vast educational, health and human services and pension benefits.
In sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States within its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for further cuts in social welfare.
The American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase of US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both military spending and welfare support and where US military spending was constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors of manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist influence was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’ — they did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting the agendas for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.
Times have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to militarism and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained ascendancy and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth of the police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of an inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step. The enormous budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US welfare. The police state erodes real public services and undermines social movements. Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding bailouts and subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key decision-making positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state against the interests of the American people. The state of Israel is the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial settlements, clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.
Today the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare established through public programs of the recent past requires that we transform an entire structure of power: true welfare reform requires a revolutionary strategy and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement breaking with the entrenched ‘two party’ regime tied to the financial- imperial- internal security system.
Federal regulators have released the most detailed information to date on damage at California’s idled San Onofre nuclear power plant, according to KFI-AM in Los Angeles reporting an Associated Press story. (Via Drudge)
“Records posted Thursday show the extent of wear in 3,400 tubes that carry radioactive water in the plant’s troubled steam generators. The tube wear caused by vibration and friction was found in 15,000 places at varying degrees of erosion. The report has implications for the fate of the plant shut down since January.”
A fuller version of the story at the AP site said: ”The steam generators, which resemble massive steel fire hydrants, are one of the central pieces of equipment in a nuclear plant. At San Onofre, each one stands 65 feet high, weighs 1.3 million pounds, with 9,727 U-shaped tubes inside, each three-quarters of an inch in diameter.
“The alloy tubes represent a critical safety barrier – if one breaks, there is the potential that radioactivity could escape into the atmosphere. Also, serious leaks can drain protective cooling water from a reactor.
“Gradual wear is common in such tubing, but the rate of erosion at San Onofre startled officials since the equipment is relatively new. The generators were replaced in a $670 million overhaul and began operating in April 2010 in Unit 2 and February 2011 in Unit 3.
“Tubes have to be taken out of service if 35 percent – roughly a third – of the wall wears away, and each of the four generators at the plant is designed to operate with a maximum of 778 retired tubes.
“In one troubled generator in Unit 3, 420 tubes have been retired. The records show another 197 tubes in that generator have between 20 percent and 34 percent wear, meaning they are close to reaching the point when they would be at risk of breaking.
“More than 500 others in that generator have between 10 percent and 19 percent wear in the tube wall.”
A pension crisis of major dimensions is growing in the US across all three forms of defined benefit plans (DBPs)—public, private single employer, and private multi-employer plans.
Corporate America and its political friends have begun to use the economic crisis that commenced in 2007 as an opportunity to initiate and expand yet another offensive aimed at further undermining defined benefit pensions in the U.S. Having already begun in 2009-10 with a new attack by governors on public employees’ pension plans, the Corporate Offensive over the subsequent eighteen months has expanded to include new coordinated attacks on private sector multi-employer and single employer DBPs as well.
Contrary to corporate, press and politicians’ claims, the crisis in pensions has had nothing to do with pension benefit increases for the workers. In many cases pension benefits have been frozen or actually reduced over the past decade and especially so since 2008.
Rather the crisis is directly attributable to government and corporate policies that have been implemented over the past thirty years—including, but not limited to, two decades of government encouraged management practices reducing pension funding, stagnant jobs and wage growth since 2001, massive speculative investment losses by pension funds, the collapse of the economy, jobs, and pension contributions after 2007, and the failure of the US economic recovery to restore jobs and wages the past three years, 2009-12.
Brief Overview of the Pensions Funding Gap
Multi-employer defined benefit pensions in the 1990s averaged shortfalls in funding (i.e. ratio of assets to liabilities) of only a very manageable $30 billion throughout the decade.
A 2009 Report by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, the quasi-government agency responsible for ensuring pension funds stability and solvency in the private sector, had a funding shortfall of $355 billion. A similar scenario applies to ratios and shortfalls in funding for single employer pensions, with funding shortfalls of approximately $407 billion. The highly respected Pew Center’s 2008 estimated public sector pensions gap for 2008 of $452 billion.
But the shortfalls in all the defined benefit pensions are overwhelming the result of economic conditions, government policies, and corporate practices over the past 12 years. In 1999, state public employee pensions were 103% funded, according to the Pew Center. Similarly, private pensions—multi-employer as well as single employer—were in good shape at the beginning of 2000. Whatever has happened is therefore clearly a consequence of events and policies since 2000.
Employers sense an opportunity today to falsify the facts regarding the causes of defined benefit pension shortfalls, and to use that falsification to attack and dismantle what’s left of defined benefit pensions that now cover barely 18% of the workforce compared to three decades ago when the percentage of coverage was two thirds or more. What facts are being conveniently ignored in this new corporate offensive?
Corporate Manipulation of the Pension Funding Gap
Corporations have not hesitated to take advantage of the funding gap that they themselves have largely created, with the help of compliant politicians.
On the multi-employer side, the employer new offensive is evident in a series of banks’ reports claiming the funding gap is even greater than it is. By making extreme low-ball assumptions on returns, banks’ research departments and corporations argue the gap for multi-employer plans is significantly higher than even the PBGC has estimated. Their conclusion is major reductions in pension benefits are therefore required, even though pension benefit payments are not the source of the problem.
This strategy of overestimation of the funding gap, cherry-picking the worst assumptions and then extrapolating the losses in a straight line out for decades, has been adopted as well by governors and state politicians intent on cutting pension benefit payments to resolve a crisis workers did not create.
A typical, extreme case is New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, who over-exaggerates an estimated $2.5 trillion funding gap in 2010—i.e. six times greater than that estimated by the respected Pew Center. Christie’s answer to the shortfall in New Jersey is a massive gutting of public employee pension benefits. However, Christie conveniently hides the fact that his state, New Jersey, only made 31% of the required contributions to its employee pension fund in 2009, thus contributing significantly to its relatively low funding ratio of 66%. Like Christie, governors complaining the most about State pension funding gaps are typically those who created those gaps by refusing repeatedly to make the required contributions to their pension funds in the first place.
Single Employer Pension funds are also under a similar direct attack, exemplified by the latest efforts of American Airlines to project massive losses in its fund as a way to justify dumping it on the PBGC and thereby shedding $9 billion in contributions it should have made, but didn’t, for decades. American Airlines for decades has been one of the most egregious practicers of ‘pension contribution holidays’, refusing year after year to make legally required contributions to its fund, and thereby ensuring it would be under-funded.
Fundamental Causes of the Pension Funding Crisis
The deterioration in defined benefit pensions over the past decade has had virtually nothing to do with providing more generous benefits for workers. Nor is it the case that workers are retiring in greater numbers all at once. The causes of the pension shortfalls are due to reductions in employer contributions to the pension funds for multiple reasons, to speculative investments gone bad and massive losses in pension funds over the preceding decade, a major collapse in jobs since 2000 due to repeated and protracted recessions, jobless recoveries, and shifting of jobs offshore that have further undermined total pension fund contributions, and government policies since 2008 that have ensured pension fund returns on investment are reduced to below-normal historical rates of return..
The following is a partial summary short list of a dozen true causes of shortfalls in defined benefit pension funding.
Two recessions since 2000 and two bouts of ‘jobless recoveries’ (2002-05 and 2009-12) resulting in sharp reductions in contributions to the funds
Structural unemployment due to offshoring and free trade that has in addition to #1 progressively reduced jobs and therefore contributions, especially in tech and manufacturing industries
Government allowed ‘pension contribution holidays’ that permitted suspension of employer contributions for decades, thus further lowering the contributions base of the funds
Employer manipulation of actuarial assumptions, like phony overstated rates of return and projected hirings that never happen, that covered up the shortfalls
Government rules that allow the diversion of pension funds to cover 20% of rising employer health care insurance costs
De-unionization of the workforce, resulting in employers suspending private pension plan participation for new workers, thus further reducing contributions.
Shift in U.S. job markets to part time and temp ‘contingency’ jobs and workers by tens of millions, who are excluded from participating (and thus contributing) to DBPs
Legislation and court decisions over the past decade that have promoted 401k plans and conversion to ‘Cash Balance Plans’, diverting contributions to what would have been to defined benefit pension funds.
Phony business bankruptcy policies that have permitted easy dumping of pensions on the PBGC, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation that ensures DBPs, encouraging employers to underfund the pensions to create justifications for dumping the pensions.
Easing of restrictions allowing companies to leave multi-employer plans and for single employers exiting the PBGC
Pension Protection Act of 2006 that allowed pension funds to partner with high-risk speculators like hedge funds, resulting in pension funds’ headlong rush into speculative investing in subprime mortgages and other high risk real estate and financial markets, the consequence of which was massive fund losses in 2000-02 and again in 2008-12.
Low rates of return in general over the last decade on investments by pension funds, attributable largely to the protracted recession since 2008 and, even more so, to the Federal Reserve Bank’s still continuing policy of zero interest rates for four consecutive years.
Fundamental Solutions to the Pension Crisis
Pension funds are financial institutions. They perform much like commercial banks by lending to other non-financial institutions.
In 2008-09, the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks to the tune of $9 trillion by providing zero interest loans to banks for the past four years. The Fed also bought up bonds, especially mortgage notes, from the banks at their full value instead of their real depressed market values, thus further directly subsidizing the banks. The Fed in this manner not only bailed out banks and investment banks, but big conglomerates like GE and GM and their credit arms. So why shouldn’t it similarly provide assistance to financial institutions like the pension funds?
Given that the real causes of current pension fund shortfalls are: insufficient contributions by employers, bad investments by fund managers as a result of high risk speculation and losses, government rules allowing the undermining of pensions, and poor rates of return on investments by funds due to government economic policies since 2000—real solutions to the crisis should tackle the real causes.
Therefore, Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve should:
Provide short term 2 to 5 year bridge loans as needed to pension funds temporarily whose funding falls below 70%–i.e. funding provided at the same rate the Federal Reserve has been bailing out banks for the past four years, at a rate of 0.25% interest.
Allow pension funds to issue their own bonds, much like corporations now issue bonds, and the Fed purchase those bonds long term, 10 and 30 years, to provide additional funding as necessary to pension funds.
Prohibit pension funds from partnering in investments with hedge funds and other high risk financial institutions and financial instruments.
Cities and local municipalities should be reimbursed for losses due to banks’ fraudulent and false promotion of derivatives and interest rate swap deals of the last decade, just as other institutional investors have been reimbursed for fraudulent subprime mortgages deals of recent years.
Pension funding contribution holidays should be legally banned. Diversion of pension funds’ resources to subsidize employer health plans should be further prohibited.
Corporate bankruptcy laws should be amended to prevent dumping of single employer plans. All non-pension assets in bankruptcy should be ruled subordinate to pension assets, requiring all other assets disposed of before pension funds are considered.
Restrictions on employers exiting from multi-employer plans and from the PBGC should be strengthened.
Public employee plans’ spending on consultants should be limited by law to no more than 1% of annual contribution levels.
Employers should be prohibited from exempting ‘contingent’ workers from participation in plans, and should be required make pension fund contributions for all part time and temporary workers proportional to their total hours worked.
Restore jobs and wage growth. The most important long run source of restoration of pension fund solvency is the creation of jobs at an historically acceptable rate.
A sustained economic recovery—not the current ‘stop-go’ economy—that would raise rates of return on normal pension fund investments to restore losses of recent years
The crisis in Defined Benefit Plans is a crisis that has been brewing for decades, but that has appreciably worsened since 2000 and significantly further deteriorated after 2007. It is a crisis of falling and insufficient contributions fundamentally and not a crisis of excess liabilities or benefit payments to workers. Employers, both private and public, are now using the crisis they created that reduced contributions for decades to attack benefits. Fundamental solutions to the pension funding problems in DBPs must rectify the source problems on the contributions side of the fund ledger.
Jack Rasmus is the author of the April 2012 book, “Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few”, published by Pluto Books and Palgrave-Macmillan, which includes a final chapter on ‘An Alternative Program for Economic Recovery’.
By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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