What are their names?

[DrVolin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaW0TIAx9B4

[IanEye]

I like how there is a song called "What Are Their Names" on an album called "If I Could Only Remember My Name".

Reminds me of this:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=414184#p414184

What's the shitting password ?!

eye don't know, nowhereman.


The Beatles in the Philippines: 1966

how do we know you don't have a Hidden Agenda?

[whipstitch]

"I'm sure they will edit this out..."

[JackRiddler]

...

Sure they have names.

Anthony Cordesman. Richard Haass. Henry Kissinger. Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. Pete Peterson. Bill Gates. Eli Broad. Charles and David Koch. Mellon-Scaife. Rupert Murdoch. Richard Perle. Bill and Hillary. Tony Blair. The people at RAND and AEI and Heritage and Manhattan and Hudson and CSIS and the Bipartisan Policy Center and the DLC and Demos, and more than a few at the Brookings Institute. Lee Hamilton. Zbig. David Rockefeller. Baker and Gates. GWHB. Obama, just on the brink of entry, if he doesn't fuck it all up too badly. A bunch of European royalty with well-hidden assets, pretending they're just celebrities. A bunch of oil kingdom royalty and their own multi-millionaire international factota. The fellows who meet every year at the conferences and retreats the corporate media doesn't cover, because they're busy with the MTV awards and the Oscars. Mr. Schwab. The people running the big international orgs, IMF and World Bank and WTO. UBS and Swiss Re. Andrew Marshall and Ray Kurzweil, our Official Futurists. Stephen Schwarzman and Larry Silverstein. Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, the latter more for the media empire than the mayoralty, which is a passionate hobby. The authors of the Plutonomy Memo. The chiefs of the central banks and intel agencies. Bernanke and Greenspan Emiritus. DSK. Volcker, out of fashion. The chiefs and main shareholders of the big six Wall Street banks, the top six or ten oil companies, the top ten "defense" and intel contractors, the top five pharmaceuticals giants, the top insurance companies, the top agribusinesses, the top 20 hedge funds, the six media corps who own all the television. Their law firms, their PR companies and big advertisers, their fixers, Burson-Marsteller and the like. DTCC. The chiefs and equity managers of the biggest philanthropic foundations, also the Ivy and other elite universities. Larry Summers. Abramoff was so close, now he's out. Schwarzenegger. The annual "Top 400" and the top 4000 from whom the 400 are each year drawn. The (not-so) "Hidden 400," the old money who have tucked it into foundations that show losses. They're not all one monolith, and some of them might have taken a stand against invading Iraq -- especially after the fact! Yankees and Cowboys, Prussians and Traders. Sometimes they fight like wildcats, like when trying to distinguish between Democrat and Republican, since the election winner gets the spoils, but they are most of the ones occupying the bridge on this Titanic, and they can agree at least that capitalism and workerism and statism and class society and patriotic feeling for the right fucking piece of cloth and service in the military by people who are not their children all totally rock. Their differences however passionate are about 30 degrees on a 360-degree spectrum of possible political views, but make up about 97 percent of what will be covered as politics in the corporate media. None of them could read this list and not gag at the inclusion of some of the others; or claim that they really don't belong on the list and ask why I hate them; or say that the world is too big and chaotic and multipolar to imagine that there really is an oligarchy, other than in tyrannies; or cry that it's all undifferentiated communist pap. Some of them, on the contrary, will laugh inwardly at how I've neglected their magic powers, the ones who think they're Chosen, the ones who believe in magic triangles of power or that they have a special nod from Jesus. There's probably more of the latter than I am willing to tolerate. Others still believe they're self-made and revolutionary. Mark Cuban? Now add their counterparts in other nations, the men from the Academie Francaise and Oxbridge and The City, the principals of the German banks and multis and state. The old G7, now a bit more open to receiving and merging with the top-tops from the emerging powers. But not that open, really. Still mostly old rich white men, not quite dead. Undead. Name a policy, name a program, name a war, and with a bit of research you can determine with which of them it originates, at least most of the names, and also which of them (if any) don't like it. They are what P.D. Scott calls the Overworld. In the list so far, have I even named 5000 operative heads? I doubt it. The power elite and their servants. Did I mention the alpha pundits? Well, they're getting irrelevant, Broder's dead and print is following him, few people can read and any ape can operate a Twitter. You need to add a few figures from the more successful religious rackets, while you're at it. Some of them have lots of unaccounted, untaxed and offshore assets, all legal, which translates into serious leverage. Offshore and unaccounted and hidden cash-flows are leverage multipliers, like an Archimedean crux out of a mailbox in Aruba. That's the C.A. Fitts insight, isn't it? Weighing the relative power of the various institutions, individuals and factions can mean a lot of debate, of course. The hardest time you might have identifying them properly is when we get into the Deep State and the parapolitical Underworld, the spook masters and the drug lords and money launderers and covert arms dealers, but okay: those guys do tend to rotate (or get shot) after 10 to 20 years, while the ones I've mentioned by name almost all have been around a lot longer than that. They seem to live fucking forever, and never go away. Then they die. Replacements are plentiful.

Here's a toast to the douchebags.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-uCke17A5g

.

[norton ash]

Ridd-ler, Ridd-ler

[Allegro]

.
Jack, your single essay of highlighting all those people and their accomplishments is so very helpful for attempting to grasp very complex stories however difficult to imagine. And I’m with this guy.

Ridd-ler, Ridd-ler

[Joe Hillshoist]

I'll third that.

Nice one Jack.

[82_28]

Speaking of Jack's mention of the replacements, we've been "investigating" a number of crimes and such done on progressives, especially progressive leaders and mang, you just follow the family lines and biz connections and it comes right out in the wash. It's time consuming, but very, very easy to see who was behind what. Maybe not who gave the orders or who patsies definitely were, but there is always and I mean always the mark of a conservative corporatist behind all crime. The little petty things were always the little people, the unions, the poor workers, people with family issues, social problems (such as probably being stretched so thin by the ultimate overlords) -- the things that pop up in archives all however point to corporatist conservatives manipulating everything.

I really liked Jack's allusion to "royalty" running around the world like they're celebrities. That's exactly right. Royalty may not be as in vogue as it was 100 years ago. But you cannot open a paper from say, 1907 or something and not find stories of royalty doing this or that. Not just England though. England's royalty celebrity brand has stood the test of time. What happened was, I surmise, this was right around the advent of Hollywood and celebrity obsession simply switched to the moving picture and music and on into all of media's forms it has taken unto today. Thus the celebrity of royalty died out in what was popularly paid attention to as media sources were so rudimentary. But the lines, the blood lines and lineages and money and power are all still there, intact, as they always have been.

The empire never ended.

[Perelandra]

Near poetry, thanks Jack.

[JackRiddler]

.

Thanks everyone.

My little song of yesterday is undoubtedly broad-brush, incomplete, and debatable on particulars.

To take an example that I think is typical: What do I know about Bill Gates's views on war, or on blind patriotism, or on the concept that "service" to society consists in joining the military? Nothing. But in a way, that's the point. What counts is what Gates does operatively. He has not gone on the record prominently to tell us what he thinks about these matters. He didn't spend a billion dollars to advocate for whatever his views might be on war or the military-industrial complex. However, he has devoted a billion dollars to a campaign to beat up on the teachers' unions and subordinate teachers to the vision of numerical evaluations and computerized/remote classrooms (with Microsoft software?). This is destructive in itself to the children and schools Gates claims to care for, and it is also one of the cutting edges in the class war generally. Meanwhile, as we learn from Wikileaks, the State Department aggressively lobbies on behalf of Microsoft and its dubious "intellectual property rights" in many nations, even against the interests of those nations. Microsoft hardly asks the State Department to scale back on its imperial pretensions; rather, it uses US imperial power on behalf of its own corporate interests, thus strengthening that power. Justice, individual rights, freedom and democracy, or just doing the right thing (meaning: NOT doing the wrong thing) are not concerns worth working for. Microsoft's profits are. These then are his operative impacts: business as usual, actions that fit into the system as a whole, the same system that produces the wars of empire and class. He may not be operative in every crime of the system, but he partakes in the system's crimes. Gates has the power to dance out of line, but it doesn't interest him. Same might be said of Mr. Peterson. This incredibly influential and moneyed individual with a long career in government and governance, himself a billionaire, is said to have opposed the invasion of Iraq. But he didn't put a billion dollars into that cause; he put up a billion dollars toward the goal of dismantling Social Security. So that's where his priorities lie, and these again are a piece of the same big picture. His actions do not put imperialism, let alone the capitalist system, at any form of risk. By emphasizing the big lie that Social Security is at risk (when it is in fact in massive surplus, and can be easily kept that way), and by ignoring the 800-pound deficit gorilla of the wars and defense budget, he contributes to war, even when his personal opinion is supposedly against it.

Those guys nowadays are practically liberals, compared to the right wing. (Soros, for actually being a touch outside the 30-degrees out of 360 of the aceptable political spectrum, even putting up money for causes like ending the drug war, counts as a flaming commie.)

So that being said, I was trying to take a census of who the ruling class (the owners) and the power elite (the operative officials and executives and policymakers and decision-makers and consultants) are. I've revised it a little since.

.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/15/ ... hing/print
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

September 15, 2011

A State of Permanent War
Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH


The American people are told, again and again, that 9/11 “changed everything.” Is this really true?

The answer is both yes, and no.

Yes, because 9/11 prompted policies of regime change, preemptive strike, and humanitarian intervention, which, in turn, triggered the wars and military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya. At home, it provided justification for the institution of the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, outsourcing of torture, restriction of personal/civil liberties and the ballooning of the Pentagon budget.

And no, because the militaristic policies and security measures that were thus put into effect in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks had been in the making for nearly a dozen years before the attacks took place.

There is overwhelming evidence that the US policies of preemptive strike and regime change started not with the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001 but with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Beneficiaries of war dividends, that is, the military-industrial-security complex, were alarmed by the demise of the Soviet Union, by the end of the “communist threat” as the ready-made justifier of continued escalation of the Pentagon budget, and by the demands for “peace dividends.” “What we were afraid of was people who would say . . . ‘Let’s bring all of the troops home, and let’s abandon our position in Europe,’” acknowledged Paul D. Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense under President Bush Sr. “It’s hard to imagine just how uncertain the world looked after the end of the Cold War.”

Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and in the face of widespread demands for “peace dividends,” the powerful interests vested in the military-security capital moved swiftly to fend off such demands by successfully inventing all kinds of “new threats to the national interests of the United States.” Instead of the Soviet Union, the “menace of rogue states, global terrorism, and militant Islam” would have to do as new enemies. Having thus effectively substituted “new sources of threat” for the “communist threat” of the Cold War era, powerful beneficiaries of military spending (working through the Pentagon and a number of militaristic think tanks like the Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and National Institute for Public Policy) managed not only to maintain but, in fact, expand the Pentagon budget beyond the Cold War years.

The 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, global terrorism, and US military aggressions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere in the Muslim-Arab world can be better understood against this background: the systemic or internal dynamics of the military-industrial-security complex as an existentially-driven juggernaut to war and militarism that, in the aftermath of the Cold War era, needed all kinds of enemies and boogiemen in order to justify its continued usurpation of the lion’s share of the public finance, or the US treasury.

Major post-Cold War US military strategies such as regime change were formulated not after the 9/11 attacks, or under President Bush Jr., but under President Bush Sr., that is, soon after the demise of the Soviet Union. The early 1990s Pentagon architects of those strategies included the then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, Paul D. Wolfowitz, then Undersecretary of Defense, Zalmay Khalilzad, then a Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Strategy and Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most of what the Pentagon team crafted in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War was published as a government document under Cheney’s name as America’s “Defense Strategy for the 1990s”—the document also came to be known as Defense Planning Guidance.

Almost all of the Pentagon’s post-Cold War aggressive military strategies such as preemptive strike, expansion of NATO, regime change, nation building, or humanitarian intervention can be traced back to the notorious Defense Planning Guidance of the early 1990s. As James Mann (of the Center for Strategic & International Studies) put it, “What the Pentagon officials had succeeded in doing, within months of the Soviet collapse, was to lay out the intellectual blueprint for a new world dominated—then, now and in the future—by U.S. military power.”

Although President Clinton did not officially embrace Cheney’s Defense Planning Guidance, he did not disclaim it either. And while he slightly slowed down the growth in the pentagon budget, he too had his own share of military operations abroad—in Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, and various provinces of the former Yugoslavia. The Federation of American Scientists has recorded a list of US foreign military engagements in the 1990s which shows that in the first decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that is, under Presidents Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, the United States engaged in 134 such operations. Here is a sample: Operation Eagle Eye (Kosovo), Operation Determined Effort (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Operation Quick Lift (Croatia), Operation Nomad Vigil (Albania), Operation Desert Thunder (Iraq), Operation Seva Verde (Columbia), Operation Constant Vigil (Bolivia), Operation Fundamental Response (Venezuela), Operation Infinite Reach (Sudan/Afghanistan), Operation Safe Border (Peru/Ecuador), Operation United Shield (Somalia), Operation Safe Haven/Safe Passage (Cuba), Operation Sea Signal (Haiti), Operation Safe Harbor (Haiti), Operation Desert Storm (Southwest Asia), and many more.

With the accession of George W. Bush to the presidency, all the Pentagon contributors to the notorious 1992 Defense Planning Guidance also returned to positions of power in the government. Cheney of course became Vice President, Powell became Secretary of State, Wolfowitz moved into the number two position at the Pentagon, as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, became the Vice President’s chief of staff and national security adviser.

Although George W. Bush’s administration thus arrived in the White House with plans of “regime change” in the Arab-Muslim world, it could not carry out those plans without a pretext. The 9/11 attacks (regardless of who planned and carried them out) provided the needed pretext. The evidence thus clearly shows that, contrary to the claims of many critics, including some distinguished figures like Noam Chomsky, 9/11 served more as an excuse, or boogieman, than a “trap” laid by Osama bin Laden in order to bleed and disgrace the United States by prompting it to wage war and military aggression against the Arab-Muslim world.

Apropos, heard a snippet of Chomsky deriding "truthers" with the usual platitudes from a recent speech. Therein he asked: Why would they [the Pentagon or Bush regime or imperialist PTB] take this risk just to justify the things they were going to do anyway, and would have found pretexts for? Seems downright naive to me, or as though he hasn't looked around much at a populace kept in 9/11 frenzy continuously for the last 10 years. Would it really have been possible that war could today be kept out of discussions of the deficit and economy, or that the protests would not have gotten stronger and stronger as the Treasury is bankrupted by wars that could not be justified as defense against potential strikes on the homeland? I submit the possibility of unrest at home was certainly a concern of the war planners prior to Sept. 11th. And even with 9/11, the Iraq war protests were initially larger than those against Vietnam at a comparable point.

The administration wasted no time manipulating the public’s fear of further terrorist attacks to rally support for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the administration was preparing for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, it also dusted off the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance and promoted it as the “Bush Doctrine” for the new, post-9/11 world. The post-9/11 version of Defense Planning Guidance retains—indeed, strengthens—all the major elements of the 1992 version, although at times it uses slightly modified terminology.

That the U.S. military response to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its response to the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001 were basically the same should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the dynamics and profit imperatives of the business of war: continued increase of the Pentagon budget and continued expansion of the sales markets for the war industry. The pretexts or tactics for pursuing higher war dividends may change (from the “threat of communism” to the “threat of rogue states, or global terrorism, or militant Islam”) but the objective or strategy remains the same—permanent war and, consequently, continuous escalation of the Pentagon budget and higher profits for the interests vested in military/security capital.


Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.