The August 29, 2019 IG report identified “US criminal statutes that Comey had personally violated."...But the Trump Justice Department declined prosecution..."That’s the “swamp,” and Trump is part of it.”
9/12/19, “Why America’s Military Capabilities Are Failing," Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse
“Given that America spends around half of the entire world’s military budget, and yet gets very bad military results, there can be no reasonable doubt that the reason is massive corruption. One prominent example is James Comey, who served President Clinton 1996-2001, President Bush 2002-2005, and President Obama 2013-2017; and he was Lockheed Martin’s second-or third-highest-paid executive, and then the chief lawyer for Lockheed Martin’s second-biggest owner, during the interim period 2005-2013, between Presidents Bush and Obama….
On 17 January 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower famously introduced the phrase “military-industrial complex”, referring to what he said might become a threat to American democracy — a takeover of the US Government by a “complex,” composed of generals and other national-security brass on the one side, and corporations such as Lockheed and their financiers, on the other. That warning turned out to have been prophetic.
The revolving door, between the military top brass and the boardrooms of the arms-contractors and associated corporations and think tanks, spins ever-faster now, and it controls the news-media and the US Government ever-more, so as to produce more and more invasions, of countries that never had invaded, nor even threatened to invade, us. Such “aggressive wars” (unprovoked aggressions) are international war crimes, but are never prosecuted when the US does them. The threat that Eisenhower talked of was real, and it has actually won out against, and defeated, democracy in America, and it has since become a catastrophe, taking up more and more of the US Government’s resources, and delivering-to the people of the United States, and especially to the world-at-large–only more wars, and bloodshed, and poverty, and suffering, and less security, for everyone, but with increasing wealth for the few at America’s top, who have invested in this permanent militarization of the United States….
As I wrote in March of this year: “The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the US Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of US-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.
Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.
On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that, “After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in US military spending.…Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.”
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest US ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all US Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.”
That’s where the big money is being made: not in Government-service, but in the private-sector side of the revolving door between Government-service and the private sector. Phrased in a different way, and using a different metaphor: Government-service is the career’s entré, but the private sector is its dessert, in America’s corrupt system. Outright bribes aren’t necessary, in this system–the aristocratic system–where what matters is not what you know, but whom you know; not what skills you have, but whom your friends are. It doesn’t produce efficiency, but it does produce supercharged wealth at the very top, amongst the richest and most powerful few.
And it produces gargantuan and longstanding military failure.
On August 29th [2019], the US Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General issued its “Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda”, which identified US criminal statutes that Comey had personally violated in order to precipitate the Obama Administration’s Russiagate investigations against then-candidate Donald Trump. It noted that “Comey’s closest advisors used the words ‘surprised,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘shocked,’ and [expressed] ‘disappointment’ to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.” And it stated, not just once but a number of times, the terse phrase that “After reviewing the matter, the [Justice] Department [now under Trump] declined prosecution.” …
At the top, in the United States, corruption is not only massive; it is entirely bipartisan. There’s no way around it.
On 10 September 2019, the independent investigative journalist Sarah Carter headlined“Flynn Hearing Reveals Existence of Bombshell DOJ Memo Exonerating Michael Flynn”, and revealed evidence that Michael Flynn’s guilty plea in the Russiagate-Trump case had been based on Comey’s having hidden from Flynn exculpatory evidence, and that therefore the plea-agreement might be ruled invalid. Furthermore: “the existence of a Justice Department memo from Jan. 30, 2017 exonerating Flynn of any collusion with Russia,” and the document continues to be hidden from the public, but might soon be released. Yet the resulting war-mongering lies have shaped the public’s attitudes, and those attitudes could last for years and continue to shape American politics even long after the fraud has been exposed.
And that’s just one person’s case, Comey. The entire military-industrial complex operates this way, and long has been doing so, very successfully for America’s billionaires and their foreign allies, such as for the Sauds, and for the billionaires who control Israel. (Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, and virtually all of that aid from US taxpayers pays for Israel’s purchases of weapons from Lockheed Martin and other US weapons-firms.)
That’s the “swamp,” and Trump is part of it, like all recent US Presidents have been. There is no accountability, at the top. And this is why America’s military capabilities are failing….
The US military is so profoundly corrupt that there are“Trillions of Dollars in US Military Spending Unaccounted For”, and yet the US military remains, by far, the most-trusted and highest-approved, of all institutions in America, respected above the Presidency, above the Congress, above the courts, above the schools, above any, at all, year after year, for decades. And the public accept this even when the US public themselves disapprove of the Government’s wars. So: there is total impunity for the mega-profiteers from all of these international war-crimes that are so routinely perpetrated by the US. In fact, there is sound reason to believe that the corruption is so enormous that not only is the military-industrial complex the most corrupt part of the American nation, but this nation itself is actually, according to the most-reliable measures, the world’s most corrupt at its very top, and perhaps even below the very top. Perversely, the military is…also the most corrupt, of America’s institutions: it is corruption on top of corruption, the peak of corruption. And this is the reason why it’s [Dept. of Defense] the only federal department that is — and has always been — unauditable.”
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Added: Trump tasks his top “adviser” Ivanka with visiting and endorsing blood-drenched parasite Lockheed, 7/22/19. On 7/15/19 Trump cheered Lockheed for its alleged support of “25,000 American workers.” It’s actually the reverse. It’s US taxpayers that “support” parasite Lockheed. The money for those 25,000 Lockheed jobs was a gift. It was money already earned by efforts of US taxpayers, given to the government, then given to Lockheed:
Above, 7/22/19, Ivanka with Lockheed CEO, Marilyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin twitter
Above, 7/15/19, White House twitter praising blood drenched parasite Lockheed for allegedly “supporting” 25,000 American jobs.
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Comment: The only way to end the war machine is to end the US, ie break it up into a few parts. We're slaves now. We're the engine of their machine. We can separate ourselves from the machine by breaking up the US. Lots of people have been wanting to break up the US for a long time but for different reasons. Now we’ll take them up on it.
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