Blackwater Connections

You all know how the fine people of Potrero defeated Blackwater in their attempt to establish a mercenary/police training camp in San Diego's back country, right?

Of course that was just another battle, now they have a new one, an indoor shooting gallery in Otay Mesa. This time they don't have an outraged community, environmentalists, and Native Americans to contend with, just the usual suspects of liberals and Democrats like Bob Filner and Raymond Lutz.

Filner: "This is a very sensitive area when it comes to human and civil rights. We don't need people who have no regard for human and civil rights to be part of that enforcement. It's dangerous, literally, to the lives of my constituents."

People who don't think that a corrupt, irresponsible, and unaccountable corporation enriched by the blood money of the Bush Administration and their illegal war in Iraq should be training our military, or using their position in an effort to privitize border security.

But that is their goal, and has been for a while. But what makes this even more interesting, is that in the process of keeping under the radar for this indoor training center, using front companies (that's one heckuva web site there, Shoaib) and the like, some strange and troubling connections are emerging.

It would appear that Blackwater is in bed with some folks from Pakistan, our great ally in the great war on terror, or not. Gopper loving Pakistani's who also operate in Saudi Arabia with our good friends the 16 out of 19 hijackers (maybe) Saudi's. Isn't that a great combination, the terrorist progenitor Saudi's and the Obama sheltering, A-Bomb exporting Pakistani's?

So there will be more to see here as this newest battle unfolds. Blackwater wants a piece of the border action. There's money to be made, oversight is limited, Boeing made $20 million(?) for off the shelf crap that didn't work, and Iraq/Afghanistan will give them plenty of practice and an opportunity to work out any bugs in their operation. Look at the specifics in that Army contract.

Blackwater has airships, Brown Field is an Airfield, and the contract tasks are perfectly suited to Blackwater.

A third "sample" task order requires the contractor to develop a program to train border police in Afghanistan to guard crossings, prevent the flow of contraband, and search people and vehicles...

As the work statement in the request noted: "Due to the rapid adaptability of the counter-narcoterrorist threat, special federal government spending authorities are available

They're going to fight for this one tooth and nail, a lot harder than they did in Potrero because this is too much up their alley, and given their corruption, could be profitable beyond belief. If the CIA could start the crack cocaine epidemic in the US to support Ronald Reagan's precious Contra's, what would Blackwater do just for money?

An Amusing Sensibility

I can't get past this paragraph in the latest battle over this Sunroad building being constructed near Montgomery Field, a commuter airport in the busy commercial district of Kearney Mesa here in San Diego. Home to Cubic and Titan and many other corporations, Sunroad has risen like a blight on the airport.

Despite FAA objections, but with the support of unnamed City planners, the building continues to reach skyward, 180 feet, alas the FAA has a limit of 160 feet, but nobody seems to care. Read the article, it gives a pretty good rundown of the machinations of business getting what they want despite governmental objections, but take especial stock of this graph and my bolded part:

Those permits were issued before the FAA was made aware of the building and declared it a hazard. City building officials have said they had no indication before the FAA's declaration that a tall building near the airport would be dangerous.

No idea at all!

The problem here is twofold, one that the City Planners are entrenched conservatives who have always favored business over the public and the community, and secondly that business is a part of the community peripherally at best. You can see that play out time after time, when Ford plays town after town against each other for the latest factory, when a Circuit City devastates their workforce with their disgusting job cut/pay cut proposal, when Blackwater tries to run roughshod over some tiny little mountain/border community in order to build a "training" facility, one that would sure make privatizing the Border patrol all that much easier.

Yes, it's as old as civilization, the dangerous overreaching always laying in wait to seize advantage and accumulate the wealth of the community for its self. Which is why we must oppose it, to restore balance and equilibrium. At all levels of society. From DC to SD to NOLA and all points in between.

Chalmers Johnson and the Dragon

I just got back from hearing Chalmers Johnson speaking at a Democratic Club meeting this evening, my advance copy of his newest book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" in hand. The thrust of his book is that the consequences of 60 years of American military imperialism has finally caught up with reality.

His talk was a history lesson, an explanation, and a warning, for future generations and would-be empires, here lay the foundations of your fall from grace.

His previous books discussed this as well, the notion of blowback, the coming home to roost of the consequences of our meddling and power projections, our arrogance and ignorance, and the power of the military industrial complex.

He's not real optimistic on our future, painting a bleak picture of the bind we're in thanks to our actions, beginning, perhaps, with the overthrow of the Prime Minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953.

The original initiative to oust Mossadegh had come from the British, for the ... Iranian leader had spearheaded the parliamentary movement to nationalize the British owned Anglo-lranian Oil Company (AIOC), the sole oil company operating in Iran. In March 1951, the bill ... was passed, and at the end of April Mossadegh was elected prime minister.... On 1 May, nationalization went into effect. The Iranian people, Mossadegh declared, "were opening a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon".

A dragon truly run rampant today.

Dr. Johnson posits that we do own this war since Bush did win the popular vote in 2004, and that we need to stop the policies of the M-I-C that only make matters worse. He said that we don't even see 40 percent of the military budget, it gets buried in the Veterans Department or Treasury war debts, or Homeland Security, or black operations, and this is feeding that dragon.

And that dragon, that's my word, he didn't use it, it just sounds so apropo from that article I referenced above, exists as Preventive War as Public Policy. It exists as our economy comes to depend on military spending, and he cites the Senators from Washington as an example, good liberals until someone mentions the word "Boeing" upon which they become ravenous blood thirsty hyenaes. It exists as deficit spending, "ruinous" spending that has brought us to the brink of losing our democracy to our imperialism. And he mentioned two examples of states that faced a similar choice, the Roman Republic-Madison's model for ours, and the British Empire.

The Romans chose, in a manner of speaking, to keep their imperialism, the Brits chose to give up their empire, albeit with many stops and starts and messy imperfections, but they saved their democracy in giving up their glorious empire, and they saved themselves in that choice. No Caligula or Nero for Britain, just the Good Queen Elizabeth II, her jewels and her castles and her pagaentry.

And he described Tony Blair as an atavistic response to old empire. My bold.

The American Heritage Science Dictionary -
atavistic (āt'ə-vĭs'tĭk)
Relating to an inherited trait that reappears in an individual after being absent from a strain of organism for several generations. Atavistic traits were formerly thought to be throwbacks to ancestral types but are now known to be due to the inheritance of a pair of recessive genes.

He was charming even as his message was somewhat depressing, but he did offer some solutions, abolishing the CIA, breaking the MIC, public financing of election campaigns, and busting up the media conglomerates. Here's his take on the quality of teevee news. "Watching the evening news is just a way of marking the end of the day." Sadly true, I would say.

But his other proscription was that our imminent bankruptcy would actually serve as some sort of salvation, as we would be forced to lower our standard of living, you know, live within our means, and throw the yoke of the MIC from around our necks in the process. Essentially he sees the US as enthralled by the dragon's yoke, our political system first broken, then tamed with little recourse in any of our failed institutions, the legislature, the judiciary, the press, the states. Of the states, he writes in his book,

[T]he drafters of the American Constitution produced a sophisticated scheme to balance power in a republic. The most basic structure they chose was federalism, setting up the states as alternatives to and limitations on the power of the national government.

Isn't it convenient that the National Guard is being destroyed by Bush in Iraq? And that's why I favor the Electoral College, it's another brake on power.

But that didn't sound very hopeful to me, so I asked him if he thought that the growth of the grassroots, the bloggers and MoveOn and DFA and Drinking Liberally and Code Pink and Cindy Sheehan and many others might not be helping to turn the Titanic from its doomed course? And speaking of icebergs, what impact did he think Global Warming was going to have on the dynamics of our current economic situation?

I didn't get a good answer on the first part, he liked the question but didn't have a ready answer, but he did think that educating the people was a good thing that might help, and he didn't address the GW part, which was okay. At least he's thinking about the question.

My thought on Global Warming is that it may indeed be our salvation, that it's so big and universal that it's going to change our paradigm entirely, that the issues that troubled us before won't matter so much in the future, that what cloud being you prefer won't matter much when all of the cloud beings are pissed off at all of us. That there will be such great opportunity in dealing with the problem and its manifestations that feeding the dragon of military spending won't enter into the decision making matrix of our policy makers.

Let me conclude this post with two more thoughts from Chalmers Johnson. One, he called Wal Mart an agency of China's industry, Wal Mart, that great All-American success story, and he said that Economics is the name of power, not aircraft carriers or cruise missiles.

And that's a war you could call a class war. Where the top 1 percent own 60 percent of the wealth of this nation, or whatever it is, see this DKos post for details. That's John Edwards Two America's, Jim Webb's divided America. And it's one we all need to participate in, from our purchasing decisions to our activism.

So all in all, a good show tonight, go ahead, buy the book, I don't agree with all of his assesments or views, but the facts are the facts, and this country needs to face up to them, if we want to have any hope of saving our Democracy from the Dragon.