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| The Pentagon now employs soldiers to create fake Facebook, and other social media, identities to spread military industrial propaganda across the land |
My talk on June 1 at the Moana Nui 2013 Teach-In held in Berkeley,
California
The Militarization of North American
Life
I live in Bath, Maine where Navy Aegis destroyers are built. These
ships are outfitted with so-called “missile defense” systems that the Pentagon
is today using to help surround Russia and China. Few people in my community,
including some activists, are interested in where these ships go (places like
Jeju Island in South Korea.) It’s not popular to raise these questions –
especially when Bath Iron Works is the largest industrial employer in our
state.
In fact today weapons are the number one industrial export product of
the US. And when weapons are your number one industrial export product, what is
your global marketing strategy for that product line? What does it say about the
soul of our nation when we have to keep selling weapons and killing people in
order to provide jobs?
The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the public a
window into the stunning militarization of our nation. During that incident the
entire domestic surveillance/military response system was field-tested and
culminated in the dramatic closing down of an entire urban center.
We have become an occupied nation. For the past 30 years, police
departments throughout the US have benefited from the government’s largess in
the form of military weaponry and training.
Obama has announced that 30,000 drones will be flying around the US in the
coming years. Thirty-seven states have applied to host one of six military
drone test sites planned across the country. Much debate has begun in local
communities about whether police should be required to have warrants before they
can snoop on us with drones. Should domestic drones be allowed to carry
weapons?
More than 500 aerospace companies are eager to develop this new drone
market across the US. The drone industry lawyers say we have nothing to fear –
that all we have to do is ask local police and they will be transparent about
their drone use.
Infrared and radio-band sensors used by the military can peer through
clouds and foliage and can even detect and hear people inside their homes.
During the last few years of the US military occupation of Iraq, drones
monitored Baghdad 24/7, turning the entire city into the equivalent of a
convenience store crammed full of security cameras. This technology is being
brought home to control us.
There is a $2 billion, 1-million-square-foot facility being built by
the National Security Agency outside Salt Lake City. It’s a phone, fax, email,
data storage and analysis warehouse called Utah Data Station - everything about
the facility is secret. It is scheduled to open this summer.
Today drones buzzing over Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Mali are “flown” by
pilots back in the US at places like Creech AFB, Nevada or Hancock Air Field,
New York. This is possible because the military satellites in orbit link the
pilot to the drone in “real time” - split-second time. Space Command downlink
ground stations spread around the globe help relay those signals. The Pentagon
brags that this high-tech warfare increases “the kill chain”.
In a way, you could call the military satellites the “triggers” that make
the drones work. These satellites allow the military to see everything, hear
everything, and to target virtually every place on the planet.
In June 2012 the second flight of the new military space plane (X-37)
touched down at Vandenberg AFB after 469 days in orbit. This unmanned super
drone is a first-strike attack system, part of the Global Strike doctrine now
underway at the Strategic Command. In annual computer war games at the Space
Command, set in the year 2016, the Pentagon launches a first-strike attack on
China’s nuclear forces and this new military space plane is the first weapon
used. It’s called the “successor” to the recently retired space shuttle, which
was paraded through streets of Los Angeles in late 2012…. 400 trees were cut
down to prepare its red carpeted path to a waiting museum. It is the perfect
symbol of our worship of the gods of metal. Technology trumps nature.
A friend in Maine has a son who recently spent a year in Afghanistan; my
friend worried every day. His son was then sent to Germany and he could breathe
a sigh of relief. The son thought about getting out of the military but there
are no jobs. The Army offered him a sizeable reenlistment bonus and he took
it.
In the US today
57% of every federal discretionary tax dollar goes (to the
Pentagon) to fund the cancerous war machine. Our communities have become
addicted to military spending. There is virtually no money for anything else
these days as we witness austerity cuts in social programs like so many other
nations around the globe.
Colorado Springs, Colorado (headquarters of
the Air Force Space Command) has 357,000 people living there, and 47% of the
population work for the military industrial complex.
The aerospace and military production industry in Alabama is a major job
provider as well. Huntsville, Alabama now calls itself the “Pentagon of the
South”.
In 1950, the U.S. Army moved former Nazi Wernher von Braun, and his team of
100 German rocket scientists, to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville to create the US
space program. Von Braun and his team also took over NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center and helped ensure that the “civilian” space program came under
military control. The Nazi rocket team brought “culture” to Huntsville by
creating the local symphony and ballet and lived on a hill overlooking the
town.
Was there an ideological contamination that came with these Nazi
scientists? One can easily note the similarity between the Nazi slogan
“Deutschland uber alles” and the Space Command logo that reads “Master of
Space”.
By the way, California is currently the #2 recipient of Pentagon spending
in the nation. The Republicans and Democrats now work together to ensure an
endless flow of war money into their states. They understand that it’s the only
game in town anymore for creating jobs. Both parties get nicely rewarded with
campaign donations from the weapons industry.
An activist friend in Halifax, Nova Scotia is now organizing weekly
protests outside a shipyard in her community that has begun building expensive
new warships for the Canadian Navy. The funding for warship building has
necessitated cuts in human needs programs. “Progressive” political parties are
going along with this largest military appropriation in Canada’s history because
of the jobs issue. (The ships will be used by NATO to control the melting Arctic
Region on behalf of big oil.)
The Pentagon says that our role in the US under corporate globalization
of the world economy will be “Security export” – thus we won’t have conventional
jobs making products useful to our communities. Instead we will build weapons
for endless war and send our kids overseas to die for the oil corporations.
A couple years ago I heard that the Sears department store had a new
kids clothing line so I went to see it in a nearby town. Military uniforms for
young boys were on the racks – the message “this is all you can ever be” – it’s
youth mind colonization.
The military industrial complex has become the primary resource
extraction service for corporate globalization and is preparing the future
generations for their dead end street.
In the US, approximately 40% of all scientists, engineers and technical
professionals currently work in the military sector. This is a colossal waste of
talent and intellectual resources as we face the coming reality of climate
change.
Due to the fiscal crisis across the nation engineering, computer science,
mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry departments in colleges and universities
have become increasingly dependent on Pentagon funding.
At the University of
New Mexico in Albuquerque there are “top secret” areas on campus these
days.
The Defense Alliance in St. Paul, Minnesota seeks to expand the weapons
industry’s presence in higher education, and among its members are military
contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.
The Navy granted the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation
Studies $150,000 to look into improving tracking, surveillance and intelligence
communications systems.
In 2011 the University of Minnesota reported the Pentagon was trying to
“restrict” the open publishing of research resulting from a military-funded
project. This indicates quite clearly that the Pentagon is not really trying to
further the state of education but instead views the students and faculty as
nothing more than military production workers doing classified work.
The militarization of everything around us is a spiritual sickness.
Lakota holy man Lame Deer talked about the green frog skin – the dollar bill –
and how the white man was blinded by his love for the paper money. His
spiritual connection to the Mother Earth was broken.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglas reminded us that power concedes nothing
without a demand, it never did and it never will. When it comes to our current
dark evil economic system, called militarism, we should be talking about its
conversion and the jobs that would result from that transformation.
Good jobs can be created by home weatherization, building rail systems,
creating a solar society, and hiring unemployed workers to plant town and city
organic gardens. As we transform our industrial base we lessen the impact of
the military machine on our lives and help deal with our major environmental
crisis.
There is no other way to pay for such a redirection without massive
cuts in the war machine budget now.
Join me in saying …… US out of North America!
