Wednesday, March 7, 2012

155 Universal Debt & Usury Holocaust - worse than Jewish Holocaust - Eric V. Encina

(1) Dissatisfaction with Capitalism takes gloss off Fall of the Berlin Wall
(2) Better sex Behind the Wall
(3) Philippine interest payments exceed 20% of Budget, more than Education & Public Works together
(4) Universal Debt & Usury Holocaust - worse than Jewish Holocaust - Eric V. Encina
(5) US tries to ensure no Change in Japan - Gavan McCormack
(6) Drone Race to a Known Future - Tom Engelhardt

(1) Dissatisfaction with Capitalism takes gloss off Fall of the Berlin Wall

From: Charles F Moreira <moreira_charles@yahoo.com.sg>  Date: 11.11.2009 02:31 PM

Free Market Flawed, Says Survey

By James Robbins
Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News

{visit the website to see the graphs}

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23931.htm

November 09, 2009 "BBC" -- Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.

Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

Economic regulation

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe.

It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.

Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis.

More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter - 23% of those who responded - feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil.

And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries.

If there is one issue where a global consensus seems to emerge from the survey it is this: there are majorities almost everywhere wanting government to be more active in regulating business.

It is only in Turkey that a majority want less government regulation.

Opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided.

Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way.

But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia.

(2) Better sex Behind the Wall

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org>  Date: 12.11.2009 09:45 AM

'Women's love lives were better in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell'

By Etienne Balmer

Published: 11:27AM BST 19 Oct 2009

The Telegraph (Britain)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/6373531/Womens-love-lives-were-better-in-East-Germany-before-the-Berlin-Wall-fell.html

'Sex at last' or 'Pleasure without borders,' were the West German headlines aimed at East Germans who thronged to Western sex shops after the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this November.

"It was curiosity born of great innocence," recalled Kurt Starke, 70, a sociologist and sex expert in Leipzig, eastern Germany.

"Couples went to sex shops, sometimes with grandmothers holding a child by the hand. We wanted to discover everything the West had to offer."

Under the totalitarian state in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as Communist East Germany was known, pornography and prostitution were serious taboos.

"The sex trade in West Germany was considered by the regime as bourgeois decadence," Starke remembers.

But "people were drawn by pornography, we could have sold it non-stop," said Wolfgang Förster, 55, who sold X-rated videos under the counter and then started one of the first striptease clubs in Dresden, eastern Germany.

Seeing a gap in the market, Western entrepreneurs jumped in as early as 1990 when the country unified.

Caravans of prostitutes parked outside dilapidated eastern cities and downmarket sex shops opened their doors, although their legal status was still uncertain.

"The girls liked East German guys because they were gentle and timid, but complained about Westerners who thought their money could buy anything," said Förster, whose club was located near one of the mobile brothels.

"When regulations were established, many of the operations shut down and the pioneers disappeared. Many were amateurs who had not managed to make it in the West," he said.

Sex businesses took over, the West German giant Beate Uhse in the lead. But once the curiosity for vibrators, dildos and other sex toys waned, eastern demand dropped off.

The lack of money had something to do with it. Reunification was harder than many expected and unemployment in eastern German states is still much higher than in the west.

Beate Uhse still makes most of its money in more prosperous western German states.

But in the intervening years, a nostalgia for "love as it was before" has risen in the east.

Back then, "men and women depended on their own imagination. That made sex less stressful," said Berlin writer Jutta Resch-Treuwerth, 67, who wrote for a lonely hearts column for young Easterners for 20 years.

"In a rigid state that wanted to control everything, citizens were more emancipated with respect to their sex life, women in particular," Professor Starke added.

Better access to higher education and jobs along with free abortion and contraception and generous family policies favoured a less traditional role for women in the East than in the West at the time.

And in bed, women took the initiative more often and reached orgasm more often than their Western counterparts, at least according to polls taken then.

"Eastern women did not talk about their orgasm for hours, they just let themselves go," Starke said.

(3) Philippine interest payments exceed 20% of Budget, more than Education & Public Works together {P=Peso}

From: Eric Encina <ericencina@yahoo.com> Date: 12.11.2009 02:46 AM

Philippine 2010 P1.54 Trillion National Budget - Unmitigated Disaster Capitalism!

Philippine 2010 P1.54 TRILLION NATIONAL BUDGET

 (UNMITIGATED DISASTER FINANCE CAPITALISM & TERMINAL CORRUPTIONS)

By Eric V. Encina

( I have tried to write this article in an hour  even though my eyes are very painful).

The Philippine 2010 National Budget has been finally approved by the Philippine Congress on the third and final reading on November  10, 2009 in the amount of P1.54 BILLION, with the votes of 175 Filipino Congress men and women while 6 abstained from voting. The next  phase would be approved by the Philippine Senate and the President expectedly this December 2009.

This budget as before will come from domestic, foreign and international borrowing cycles and increasing taxes.

The 2010 Philippine National Budget will be  allocated for the following:

1.      Interest Payments to domestic, foreign and international debts through the Philippine Department of Finance  - P 340.8 BILLION only for 6 months time, i.e. January to June 2010 through Automatic Appropriation Act by the power of the Presidential Decree for interest payments. Another P340.8 BILLION for interest payments for July to December 2010. The first beneficiary of the 2010 PHILIPPINE NATIONAL BUDGET is the private, commercial, foreign and international avaricious  bankers. VERY CLEAR EVIDENCE TO SHOW THAT ‘BILLIONS FOR THE BANKERS, AND DEBT DELIRIUM FOR THE PEOPLE’. AGAIN, THIS IS  THE MAJOR EFFECTS OF THE UNMITIGATED DISASTER FINANCE CAPITALISM AND TERMINAL BANKING CORRUPTIONS.

2.      Philippine Department of Education – P172.8 Billion. Alas, this budget allocation  is only for the benefit of the crooks in the corrupt-ridden Department of Education that is only brainwashing and misleading the pupils and students about the real purpose of education. The present education now is the Department of EDUCATED LIES backed up by the bankers, prostituted economics and money-poisoned politicians. There are no enough school buildings and school rooms in the provinces and villages. There are so many school children of poor and unemployed Filipino families  in the villages and even in the urban areas suffering hunger, starvation and malnutrition without any food  aid or nutritional aid for them. Teachers are struggling with their terribly delayed salaries being hog-tied in debt and usury for survival. There are no enough textbooks for the pupils and students. This is budget  is only for those Education officials who are not really educated in the real sense but educated to enrich themselves and never mind the people.

3.     Philippine Department of Public Works and Highways – P105.3 Billion.  This budget allocation is also for the corrupt officials of the public works and highways and not for the construction and improvement of the national and provincial roads. Most roads both national and provincial are very poor and risky for travelers that are still zig-zag and rugged, bumpy and no enough accident precautionary measures. Even the pedestrian ways have lack of traffic designs to prevent accidents. No wonder there are so many accidents every year nationwide because of these poorly-constructed roads. Most bridges are short-lived and prone to collapse by floods  and in times of typhoons. This department is one of the most corrupt agencies in the Philippines.  THIS DEPARTMENT MUST BE RE-NAMED AS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC THEFT AND HIGHWAY ROBBERY.

4.      Philippine Department of Interior and Local Government – P65.4 Billion.  This budget allocation will only go to national and provincial level officials who are only using the money for the elections and for their media advertisements. This Department is useless because it is also an agency where corruptions is heavily existing.

5.      Philippine Department of National Defense – P62.7 Billion. This budget allocation will only go to corrupt military officials who are the one creating regional wars for profits. The funds will be used for the purchased of some weapons to maintain militarization. Some funds are borrowed money from USA or from other nations for the purchase of new or second hand weapons that in turn are being used for business to keep war going in the Southern Philippines and in the countryside against the rebels. Poor and pitiful soldiers are only used like a bunch of  stupid cattle  to fight under the guise of patriotism to kill their fellow Filipinos in the countryside only with tiniest salary to survive their families while the military officials are feasting in plenty of funds for their criminal activities against the people. THIS DEPARTMENT MUST BE CALLED DEPARTMENT OF NATIONAL OFFENSE.

6.      Philippine Department of Agriculture- P37.8 Billion. This budget allocation will be for  the same purpose, for the benefits of the rascals in this department financing projects for the destruction of the environment and the indigenous farming only for the benefits of the multinational chemical corporations for chemically-based farming. THIS FUND IS NOT GOING TO BENEFIT THE POOR FARMING FAMILIES. There is no any assistance for any organic farming initiatives  for the poor farming families in the villages.  There is no any seed aid nor any assistance for the poor families to have plots of land in which to plant their crops.

7.      Philippine Department of Health – P28.5 Billion. This budget is only for the benefit of the callous MEDICAL MAFIA in this department  to the extent of giving profits to the multinational drug and vaccine companies and to population control agencies that promote artificial contraceptives, condoms, abortifacients and abortion machineries that keep the populations in the bondage of diseases  for profits. This department of health is managed by the mafia that actually creates diseases rather than help people  to have good health. This department must be called DEPARTMENT OF POISON.

8.      Philippine Department of Agrarian Reform – P19.7 Billion. This budget is just as useless as above, i.e. going to the corrupt officials of this department who claim they are distributing the lands to the landless when in fact most farmers are still landless  they do not have enough titles or securities on which to own the lands. THIS DEPARTMENT IS DECEPTIVELY WORKING TO DISTRIBUTE THE LANDS TO THE LANDLESS WHEN MOST LAND HECTARES ARE STILL CONTROLLED BY THE GOVERNMENT, BY THE RICH AND TYCOONS AND EVEN OWNED BY THE FOREIGNERS. In turn it is the budget money that is distributed to these damned crooks.

9.      Philippine Department of Transportation and Communications – P15 Billion. This budget is still useless because it is only going to the corrupt officials who only transport back and forth inbound and outbound for nothing, who only communicate to make the shares of billions of budget.  That even transportations  and communications are not reliable where bureaucracy is heavily existing for those who get licenses and documents from this department.

10. Philippine Department of Social Welfare and Development – P14.5 Billion. This is the smallest budget for the  so-called welfare of the citizens THAT ALAS DO NOT GET ANY WELFARE at all. This department is also one of the most useless departments in the Philippines. The budget does not go to the poor and indigenous Filipinos but go to the pockets of those officials in the Department of Welfare. In turn, the said welfare only goes to them while poor, sick, the needy, the beggars absolutely get  nothing. GOING TO THIS DEPARTMENT TO APPEAL FOR HELP IS COMPLETELY A WASTE OF TIME AND EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING. There have been so many deaths among poor Filipinos and indigents because of the refusal of aid from the Department of Social Welfare. BESIDES, this department does not do ANY DEVELOPMENT nor any people’s development for survival.

11. Philippine Judiciary – P13 Billion. This budget only goes to so-called legal and intellectual elites who are nothing but traitors, who are bribed in favour of the rich and the powerful few,  but biased and  disadvantageous to the poor, who support and finally made decisions in support of the IMF-WB’s imposition of the 12% Expanded Value Added Tax or E-VAT. Judges who are corrupt and get money in the name of law and jurisprudence.

12. Philippine Commission on Elections – P10.5 Billion. This budget is used for expenses during Philippine elections. Alas, the budget is used for ELECTION RIGGING AND FRAUD. Those officials at the Commission on Elections are in collusion with those mafia candidates pressured by those covert foreign and national agencies to make it sure the winners of election would be for their advantages and profits.

13. The Philippine Priority Development Assistance Fund-Pork Barrels – P6.94 Billion. THIS BUDGET IS PROPING UP CORRUPTIONS OF THOSE SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN. Every year Filipino congressman or woman receives P70 Million pork barrel while every Filipino senator receives P120 Million pork barrel.  THIS PORK BARREL IS SUPPOSED TO BE ‘PEOPLE’S MONEY’ for development projects  in the countryside representing their region but 80% to 90% of this pork barrels directly go to the pockets of those callous and money-poisoned Senators and congressmen and women and only the trickle of, or  the drop of, or the leaf of the vine of 10% to 20% of that pork barrel go to the projects that are not HELPFUL TO PEOPLE’S DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY.

AND YET IN ALL THESE BUDGET ALLOCATIONS ABOVE, THERE IS NO ANY ALLOCATION FOR THE BAIL-OUT FOR THE FILIPINO PEOPLE in which 80% are in penury, millions in hunger, starvation, unemployment, landless and saddled in the debacle of natural calamities.

(4) Universal Debt & Usury Holocaust - worse than Jewish Holocaust - Eric V. Encina

From: Eric Encina <ericencina@yahoo.com>  Date: 12.11.2009 02:45 AM

UNIVERSAL DEBT & USURY HOLOCAUST

By Eric V. Encina

As comrade-in-arms, fellow Social Crediters, Monetary Reformers and Economic/Monetary Justice Activists, let us continue the fight against Universal Debt & Usury Holocaust that is devouring us one by one.

The major design of the debt-based economic system is to exterminate the poor, the economically unfit, the children, the aged.

Universal Debt & Usury Holocaust causes billions of people across the planet as casualties worse than alleged Jewish Holocaust.

Just like the conflagration of fire, debt’s super-virus conflagrates by nano-seconds with the speed fastest than the destruction of fire.

Filipinos are damned destroyed, pillaged, plundered and there’s no hope in foreseen in sigh from the chains of debt slavery till death do us part.

Philippine debt-based economy is a subtle way of waging war against its own people while protecting the powerful few. Money-poisoned-lunatic politicians take hold of the stolen money from huge loans. The prostituted economists enjoy their rewards of money and privileges of formulating idiotic economic policies for government implementation while vulture-bankers sumptuously enjoy huge profits and bail-outs than they can afford to buy up the whole islands or nations. The media men talk like idiot parrots in conspiracy with the bankers, economists, politicians hiding all the truths about money creation and real picture of economy, repeating all damned lies.

‘IF THE GOVERNMENT WILL CREATE MONEY DEBT-FREE BEYOND THE CURRENT DEMAND, IT WILL LOSE ANY CONTROL OF INTEREST RATES IN THE ECONOMY, PHILIPPINE PESO WILL COLLAPSE, AND INFLATION WILL TAKE OFF”.

All attempts and proposals to attain a balanced economy by invoking the public credit, debt-free money creation to help the economy, save the hungry, starving poor inhabitants and save the country from total debt and usury holocaust are encroached and conspired in the highest degree.

 “I BELIEVE THAT THE BANKING INSTITUTIONS ARE MORE DANGEROUS TO OUR LIBERTIES THAN STANDING ARMIES. ALREADY THEY HAVE RAISED UP A MONEYED ARISTOCRACY THAT HAS SET THE GOVERNMENT AT DEFIANCE . THE ISSUING POWER SHOULD BE TAKEN FROM THE BANKS, RESTORED TO THE PEOPLE TO WHOM IT PROPERLY BELONGS.” US President Thomas Jefferson

(5) US tries to ensure no Change in Japan - Gavan McCormack

Yet another 'Battle of Okinawa'

By GAVAN McCORMACK

Special to The Japan Times

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20091111a2.html

CANBERRA — Elections in August gave Japan a new government, headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. In electing him and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japanese people, like the American people less than a year earlier, were opting for change. Remarkably, however, what followed on the part of President Barack Obama's United States has been a campaign of unrelenting pressure to block any such change.

Hatoyama honor an agreement known as the Guam Treaty. Under the Guam agreement of February 2009, adopted as a treaty under special legislation in May, 8,000 U.S. Marines were to be relocated from Okinawa to Guam, and the U.S. Marine base at Futenma was to be transferred to Henoko in Nago City in northern Okinawa, where Japan would build a new base. Japan would also pay $6.09 billion toward the Guam transfer cost.

The Guam Treaty was one of the first acts of a popular "reforming" U.S. administration, and one of the last of a Japanese regime in fatal decline. It set in unusually clear relief the relationship between the world's No. 1 and No. 2 economic powers. It was worthy of close attention because the agreement was unequal, unconstitutional, illegal, redundant, colonial and deceitful.

It was unequal because it obliged the government of Japan to construct one new base and to contribute a substantial sum toward constructing another for the U.S. while the American side merely offered an ambiguous pledge to withdraw a number of troops and reserved the right, under Article 8, to vary the agreement at will.

It was unconstitutional since under Article 95 of the Japanese Constitution any law applicable only to one local public entity requires the consent of the majority of the voters of that district and the Okinawan wishes were clearly ignored in the Guam Treaty. The Diet simply rode roughshod over Okinawa.

Since the treaty took precedence over domestic law, it also had the effect of downgrading, in effect vitiating, the requirements of Japan's environmental protection laws. Any serious and internationally credible environmental impact assessment (EIA) would surely conclude that a massive military construction project was incompatible with the delicate coral and forest environment of the Oura Bay area, but it was taken for granted that Japan's EIA would be a mere formality and the treaty further undermined the procedure.

The treaty was also redundant. It simply reiterated major sections of earlier agreements (of 2005 and 2006) on which there had been little or no progress. It merely added compulsive force to those agreements and tied the hands of any successor government.

The agreement/treaty was essentially colonial, with the "natives" (Okinawans) to be guided and exploited, but not consulted. The Guam Treaty showed the Obama administration to be maintaining Bush diplomacy: paternalistic, interventionist, antidemocratic and intolerant of Japan's search for an independent foreign policy.

Finally, the treaty was characterized by what in Japanese is known as "gomakashi" — trickery and lies dressed in the rhetoric of principle and mutuality. Although reported as a U.S. concession to Japan ("troop withdrawal"), it was plainly designed to increase the Japanese contribution to the alliance by substituting a new, high-tech and greatly expanded base at Henoko for the inconvenient, dangerous and obsolescent Futenma. The figure of 8,000 marines to be withdrawn also turned out, under questions in the Diet, to be also false. The more likely figure was less than 3,000.

While working to tie Japan's hands by the deals with the collapsing Aso administration, the U.S. knew well that the (then) opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)'s position was clear: No new base should be built within Okinawa, Futenma should simply be returned.

Drumbeats of concern, warning, friendly advice from Washington — that Hatoyama and the DPJ had better not take such pledges seriously, much less actually try to carry them out, and that any attempt to vary the Guam agreement would be seen as anti-American — rose steadily, culminating in the October Tokyo visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who delivered an ultimatum: The Guam agreement had to be implemented.

The intimidation had an effect. Defense Secretary Toshimi Kitazawa suggested that there probably was, after all, no real alternative to construction at Henoko. Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada also began to waver. Weeks after the election victory he had said, "If Japan just follows what the U.S. says, then I think as a sovereign nation that is very pathetic." And: "The will of the people of Okinawa and the will of the people of Japan was expressed in the elections . . . I don't think we will act simply by accepting what the U.S tells us. . . ." After the Gates statement, however, he suggested that the Futenma functions might after all be transferred within Okinawa, even though he declined to endorse the Henoko project, proposing instead they be merged with those of the large Kadena U.S. Air Force Base nearby.

The prefecture's Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper, in a passionate editorial, lamented the incapacity of the new Hatoyama government to counter the "intimidatory diplomacy" of Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and decried the drift back toward "acceptance of the status quo of following the U.S."

Nearly four decades have passed since Okinawa reverted from the U.S. to Japan, yet U.S. bases still take up one-fifth of the land surface of its main island. Nowhere is more overwhelmed than the city of Ginowan, reluctant host for the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station. The U.S. and Japan agreed in 1996 that Futenma would be returned, but made return conditional on a replacement, which also would have to be built in Okinawa. Thirteen years on, there the matter still stands.

The "Futenma Replacement Facility," the subject of such intense diplomatic contention today, is one that has grown from a modest "helipad," as it was referred to in 1996 to a removable, offshore structure with a 2,500-meter runway, and then in 2006 to its current version: dual-1,800 meter runways plus a deep sea naval port and a chain of helipads — a comprehensive air, land and sea base. Time and again, the project was blocked by popular opposition, but time and again the Japanese government renewed and expanded it.

Yet opinion in the prefecture has, if anything, hardened. An October Ryukyu Shimpo/Mainichi Shimbun poll showed that 70 percent of Okinawans opposed relocation within the prefecture and a mere 5 percent favored the Henoko design endorsed by the Guam Treaty and demanded by Washington. In the August national elections, DPJ candidates who promised they would never allow construction of a new base swept the polls in Okinawa, crushing the representatives of the compliant "old regime."

Both prefectural newspapers, the majority in Okinawa's Parliament, and 80 percent of Okinawan government mayors are also opposed, believing any Futenma base substitute should be constructed either elsewhere in Japan or overseas.

There has never been such a postwar confrontation between the U.S. and Japan. With the last shots of Washington's diplomatic barrage exploding around him and Obama's visit imminent, Hatoyama continues to study his options. If he rejects the U.S. demands, a major diplomatic crisis is bound to erupt. If he swallows them, he provokes a domestic political crisis and drives Okinawa to despair. Yet choose he must.

Gavan McCormack is an emeritus professor at Australia National University in Canberra. Japan Focus (japanfocus.org) will post an unabridged version of this article

(6) Drone Race to a Known Future - Tom Engelhardt

From: Paul de Burgh-Day <pdeburgh@harboursat.com.au> Date: 11.11.2009 06:29 PM

Drone Race to a Known Future

Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter
By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175137/droning_on

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.

What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter -- a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs, walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors -- and, of course, of drone weaponry like that "5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we're still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the "horseless carriage," as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.")
And here's another flash from the drone development front: the Navy wants in. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired's Danger Room blog, is looking for "a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier." Fortunately, according to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just that, is to make its first test flight before year's end. It could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011, and fully operational by 2025.

Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel -- along with the U.S. leading the way on drones -- will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.S. can't be far behind and it seems that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized.

Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System

Robot war. It just couldn't be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood you spill is the other guy's, since our "pilots" are flying those planes from thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas of rural Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce.

In Washington, drones are even considered the "de-escalatory" option for the Afghan War by some critics, while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership." Among the few people who don't adore them here are hard-core war-fighters who don't want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops. The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves 'em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone bandwagon early. He has long been pressing the Air Force to invest ever less in expensive manned aircraft -- he's called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft -- and ever more in the robotic kind. After all, they're so lean, mean, and high-tech sexy -- for Newsweek, they fall into the category of "weapons porn" -- that what's not to like?
Okay, maybe there's the odd scrooge around like Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who recently complained to the press that the U.S. program might involve war crimes under international law: "We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws."

But as Christmas approaches, somebody's always going to say, "Bah, humbug!" And let's face it, just about everyone who matters to the mainstream media swears that the drones are just so much more "precise" in their "extrajudicial executions" than traditional air methods, which can be so messy. Better yet, when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan seems to be working out, the drones are actually doing the job. They're reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior Taliban leader (aka "high-value targets") have been killed by the drones, according to the Long War Journal, and many more foot soldiers have been taken out as well.

And they're not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system for our present problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they're potentially the royal path to the future when it comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be excited about.

The Wonder Weapons Succeed -- at Home

So why am I not excited -- other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle -- that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any court or law.

And here's another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad -- if the history of air warfare has shown one thing, it's this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different?

Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I can see the future when it comes to drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -- it's only that I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we all have.

Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are forced to live out the same 24 hours again and again -- with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of those actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed as near-utopian paths to victory and future peace (just as the atomic bomb was soon after my birth). In the Vietnam War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned as an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.

In the 1980s, it was President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. ("If you will pardon my stealing a film line -- the Force is with us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield over the United States -- "like a roof protects a family from rain" -- that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time (or, if you were of a more cynical turn of mind, the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets).

In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population (which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators). And later, there was "netcentric warfare," that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would turn a Military Lite into an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any "rogue" nation or insurgency into submission.

Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.

In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. To date, in fact, there is at least as much evidence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the drones are helping to spread war as that they are staunching it.

Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the story. None of these wonder weapons or technologies succeeded in their moment, or as advertised, but that fact stopped none of them from embedding themselves in our American world. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite -- it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities.

True, Reagan's impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear fantasies, but the "high frontiersmen" gathered and, taking a sizeable bite of the military budget, went on a decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have struggled to emplace somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum.

Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technologies disappoint enough to disappear. Each of these is, in fact, now surrounded by its own mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with its own set of corporate players, special lobbyists in Washington, specific interests, and congressional boosters. Each has installed a typical revolving door that the relevant Pentagon officials and officers can spin through once their military careers are in order. This is no less true for that wonder weapon of our moment, the robot drone.
In fact, you can already see the military-industrial-drone-robotics complex in formation. Take just one figure, Tony Tether, who for seven years was the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which did its share of advanced robotics research. When he left the Pentagon in September, it was, according to Noah Shachtman, who runs Wired's Danger Room blog, to join "an advisory panel of Scientific Systems Company, Inc., which works on robotics projects for the Pentagon. In June, he joined the board of Aurora Flight Sciences, Inc., developers of military unmanned aircraft." He has also become "a part-time technical consultant and 'strategic advisor' for the influencers at The Livingston Group" which represents some large defense contractors like Northrup Grumman and Raytheon.

The drone industry, too, already has its own congressional representatives. Republican Congressman and former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, for instance, is a major drone booster. In April 2009, he insisted that "we must also press forward with the development of the next generation of UAVs, including the Predator C. During my service in the Marine Corps, I engaged targets with the Predator A and B Series, and I recognize the advantages offered by Predator C." In 2008, General Atomics, whose "affiliate" makes the Predator drone, gave $6,000 to Hunter's election campaign committee, making it his 13th largest contributor. That company was also the number two contributor to his Peace Through Strength political action committee.

In the American Grain

This, then, is the future that you can see just as well as I can. When the Obama administration decides to up the ante on drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as it's soon likely to do, it will be ensuring not the end of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the long life of robot war within our ever more militarized society. And by the time this set of robotic dreams fails to pan out, it won't matter. Yet another mini-sector of the military-industrial complex will be etched into the American grain.

Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7 assassination trade -- with our own set of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it's surely helping to pave the road to hell.

Haven't any of these folks ever seen a sci-fi film? Are none of them Terminator fans? Are they sure they want to open the way to unlimited robot war, keeping in mind that, if this is the latest game in town, it won't remain mainly an American one for long. And just wait until the first Iranian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla supported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan. Then let's see just what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies -- and anyone else in the vicinity -- by drone.

Is this actually what we Americans want to be known for? And if we let this happen, and General Atomics is working double or triple shifts to turn out ever more, ever newer generations of robot warriors, while the nation suffers 10.2% unemployment, who exactly will think about shutting them down?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

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