by Sean Jobst
30 November 2020
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| Enabled by 'Woke' cultists, who prefer their wars couched in "social justice" |
If the recent shake-up at the Pentagon's highest positions wasn't enough, on November 25th the Pentagon's White House liaison sent a directive from President Trump, firing an eleven-member policy board that included such interventionists as Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. While opposing Biden as the most authoritarian and warmongering by far, one of the blight spots upon Trump in my opinion was his strange inclusion of Palpatine Kissinger who is a Swamp creature if there ever was one. Also fired was Rudy De Leon, who served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Clinton and then two months of the Bush administration, epitomizing the continuity of such bureaucrats regardless of the duopoly. De Leon was senior vice president of Boeing from 2001 to 2006, and has been foreign policy expert for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank founded by John Podesta. Why he was hired to begin with only makes sense in light of what Douglas Macgregor and others have noted about the appointment process.
These advisors were associates of former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who apparently wielded influence at the Pentagon long after his own firing by Trump on New Year's Day 2019. De Leon was "once considered for a high-level policy role" by Mattis, according to the Foreign Policy article that broke the news. "Also booted in today's sweep of the board, which is effective immediately, were former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and David McCormick, a former Treasury Department undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration. Both had been added to the board by Mattis in 2017." The members of this policy board personify the duopoly that is the Republican and Democratic Establishment, it being business as usual for them whenever it comes to interventionism and the profits that come with it. Despite being a military man, Mattis epitomizes this nexus of a corporatized Pentagon, the Military-Industrial-Complex, lobbyists and war-profiteers. Its no surprise then he has been hailed as a hero by the Legacy Media and the Duopoly Establishment.
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| Mattis with CFR President Richard Haass |
Mattis agreed with their consensus opposing U.S. withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan now being carried out in spite of their invectives. The same Corporate Media that helped Neocons lie the U.S. into Iraq and applauded bombings under the Obama/Biden administration, and ran propaganda for American meddling in Libya and Syria, is now fear-mongering that ending a 20-year war is a "hasty withdrawal". Mattis has long advocated arming Syrian rebels and American involvement with the Saudi war in Yemen. Ever the Corporatist, Mattis has served on the Boards of Directors for disgraced health technology firm Theranos and defense-contractor firm General Dynamics, earning a $900,000 profit with the latter. He also serves as senior counselor with the Cohen Group, a lobbying firm with ties to China founded by Clinton's Defense Secretary William Cohen. The aspiring Biden/Harris regime has expressed its plan to hire what it termed "Mattis people" at the Pentagon, perhaps Mattis himself or several of the Swamp creatures recently purged.
While not Neocon, Mattis has long cultivated close ties with them. In the 2016 campaign, Bill Kristol and other Neocon strategists tried to persuade Mattis to run as an Independent against Trump. Even while there was no love lost between Trump and himself, John "Bomb Iran" McCain supported Mattis' appointment as Defense Secretary. As a self-professed "internationalist" with a long association with war-profiting firms, its no surprise Mattis would oppose a peaceful, non-interventionist foreign policy. The Neocons themselves have their origins in the old Trotskyite Left, moving to take over the Republican Party after breaking with many Leftists over Israel. But its still internationalist, replacing "international revolution" with wars to spread "democracy" or "human rights". This pedigree was recently on full display in an op-ed Mattis co-wrote with Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and two of Mattis' colleagues at the establishment Hoover Institution, Jim Ellis and Joe Felter.
Entitled "Defense in Depth", it was published in the CFR magazine Foreign Affairs on 23 November. The authors were triggered by the phrase "America-First", misrepresenting it vis a vis their own internationalism: "In January, when President Joe Biden and his national security team begin to reevaluate U.S. foreign policy, we hope they will quickly revise the national security strategy to eliminate 'America first' from its contents, restoring in its place the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades." Their "cooperative security" is really a euphemism for the endless wars that have been our reality these decades. Given the links these think-tank figures have to defense contractor firms, its clear what's really beyond Mattis' and his co-author's platitudes about "cooperation" and "alliances": A repudiation of George Washington's famous warning about avoiding entangling alliances and John Adam's admonishment to not go in search of "monsters to destroy". Indeed, their piece of war apologia decried the tendency "to dismiss U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as 'endless' or 'forever' wars" because it "misses the point."
The hubris and projection behind these neocon slogans is astounding - "self-absorption" is condemned and "leadership" hailed because they want to maintain America as the policeman of the world, carrying out their own narrow ideological and economic interests. The "comfort with the authoritarian leaders" never bothered them before when they would ally with some while overthrowing others who had run afoul of their interests. They betray their Trotskyite internationalism in their fear of "belligerent nationalism", which aligns them closely with Liberal internationalists who want more power consolidated into Globalist institutions. Although Trump has unfortunately maintained the pro-Israel status quo, even that is not enough for such Neocons. In an op-ed dated Nov. 21, 2019, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a neocon former editor of the Jerusalem Post, bluntly said: "Israel will not be safe in an America First World."
One of the most noticeable results of the Trump administration has been the realignment within American politics, with assorted Neocons and old-style "Never Trump" Republicans aligning with and coalescing around the Biden/Harris campaign. George W. Bush has openly supported and congratulated Biden. Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney, has been a public critic of Trump, while Biden has praised the legacy of her father. Among the Bush cronies to support and endorse Biden were Colin Powell, the Secretary of State who pushed the Iraq WMD lie; Tom Ridge, first secretary of the Homeland Security department created by that same administration that brought us the bipartisan Patriot Act; William H. Webster, former CIA Director and chief of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Dov Zakheim, staunchly-Zionist Under Secretary of Defense; John Negroponte, the career diplomat with a decades-long warmonger record across the world; Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission that rubber-stamped the official story; and Bush's Neocon speechwriter David Frum. They also include Bill Kristol, the "godfather" of Neoconservatism, and both founders of the neocon think-tank Project for the New American Century, Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan.
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| Tony Blinken, Biden's aspiring Kissinger? |
Aside from these Neocon links, Biden primarily surrounds himself with Liberal interventionists whose only difference is the slogans used to couch their wars. Perhaps as a virtue signal to the Left, Mattis cited climate change to argue against decreasing the defense budget (which is merely a euphemism for profits of the contractor firms dominating the the Pentagon and not actual "defense") and expressed his hope to use American troops to "fight climate change". How they would be used to fight such a broad concept he failed to explain, but one thing is clear - it would be yet another boon for these war-profiteer networks. Spearheading those efforts under a Biden/Harris administration would be three of Biden's longtime corporatist-lobbyist cronies, already appointed to positions by that demented one the media has anointed "President-Elect".
Named Secretary of State, former Biden speechwriter Tony Blinken served as a member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council from 1994 to 2001, then as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008, when Biden was the ranking Democrat on that committee. He then served as Vice-President Biden's national security advisor (2009-2013) and deputy Secretary of State from 2014 to 2016. According to his official bio, Blinken then served as managing director of the University of Pennsylvania's Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, from its establishment in 2017 until he left to join his crony's latest presidential campaign in 2019. A May 2020 complaint filed by conservative watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) cited official financial documents revealing the University's donations by anonymous Chinese donors increased to $22 million after the Biden Center was established, further accelerating when it opened a separate location in Washington, D.C. "This center was an incubation for Biden's foreign policy team and it's a natural place for his choice of secretary of state," as NLPC public integrity project director Tom Anderson told Fox News. "Every person in this center will likely have some role in a Biden administration. Chinese contributors knew Joe Biden might run for president, and if Biden won, they would have connections to the future administration officials. Corruption isn't always about money. Sometimes it's about access."
Lest these be dismissed as partisan conservative sources, some leftist outlets have also put out good exposes on these cronies. Along with Biden's apparent Secretary of Defense, Michèle Flournoy, Blinken founded the consulting firm WestExec Advisors, whose objective Flournoy defined as "building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government." Thus revealed are the continued links between this network of Bureaucrats' lobbying firms and think-tanks, with the same Big Tech that worked overtime this year to favor the Biden/Harris campaign. As noted by Lee Fang for The Intercept, WestExec worked with Big Tech firms and an Israeli A.I. firm in a venture for Pentagon defense contractors called Project Maven. An expose by Jonathan Guyer for The American Prospect reveals more about this A.I. firm and WestExec's other clients: "The Prospect can confirm that one of those clients is the Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward. With surveillance software that tracks ships in real time, two former Israeli naval intelligence officers established the company in 2010. Gabi Ashkenazi, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, serves on its board. Windward also claims former CIA director David Petraeus as an investor, as well as a Hong Kong billionaire (most U.S. military-tech companies avoid money from China, experts told me, so they turn to investing in Israel)."
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| Flournoy at the Orwellian-named Institute for Peace |
These connections reveal what we could expect with Blinken and Flournoy controlling the State and Defense Departments. Windward is staffed with members of Israeli military intelligence's Unit 8200 and military officers, and received awards from Israel's cybersecurity establishment. That a former CIA director would invest in such a firm with deep links to Israeli intelligence is similar to those of Carbyne - its all business. Blinken would now cash in on what the Prospect article called his "international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders". Flournoy was policy undersecretary at the Defense Department in Obama's first term, earning the support of pro-Israel hawks according to Haaretz. She is a "humanitarian" interventionist who wanted U.S. military involvement in Libya. As a fellow opponent of withdrawal from Afghanistan, its no surprise that Mattis wanted to hire Flournoy as his deputy but she preferred her lucrative career outside government.
Flournoy founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), whose contributors includes various Big Corporations, especially defense contractor firms. As noted in a recent Politico report, CNAS "gets a significant amount of funding from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, according to a study published last month [October] by the Center for International Policy." She has been awarded "Care Global Leader" by the orwellian-named Institute for Peace, a semi-governmental Establishment institute whose members included former Defense Secretary Mike Esper and academic Maria Stephen, who appeared as one of the ringleaders of a Zoom call "coup" discussion of subversive bureaucrats with ties to far-left groups. Always looking for an excuse for wars, CNAS used the climate change issue to create a new interventionist theory called "natural security". One of CNAS' leading board members is futurist Peter Schwartz, a former activist with the marxist Students for a Democratic Society who co-authored a climate change report for the Pentagon and moderated a panel at the World Economic Forum.
"Many of the people who work closely with Biden are enmeshed in the opaque world of strategic consultancies and by extension a network of the world’s biggest businesses," writes Guyer in The Prospect article cited earlier. "In addition to Blinken, advisers include Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors), and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them." The Wall Street Journal noted on November 11th: "At least 40 people serving on President-elect Joe Biden's transition team are or were once registered lobbyists." The third corporatist crony (in addition to Flournoy and Blinken) in relation to Biden's foreign policy is Steve Ricchetti, named Biden's counselor and liaison with Congress.
Ricchetti began as a lobbyist for the medical insurance industry before working for the Clinton administration, on whose behalf he lobbied Congress to support trade deals that harmed American workers and industries. "At the Clinton White House in 1993, Ricchetti was the point man for muscling NAFTA through a very skeptical Democratic Congress," Robert Kuttner notes for The Prospect. In 2000, Clinton used him as White House deputy chief of staff to "ensure that we have as strong and responsive an effort as possible in both parties in Congress" in relation to China's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), as reported by CNN at the time. He then partnered with his brother to form the Ricchetti and Associates lobbying firm, followed by Ricchetti Inc., whose clients included various defense contractor and big communications firms. He became then-Vice President Biden's chief of staff in 2013 and succeeded Blinken as managing director of the Biden Center in 2019. Ricchetti Inc.'s profits picked up steam after Ricchetti became involved with Biden's campaign this year, according to both the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. One of their clients is Applied Materials, which has supplied semiconductor equipment for the Chinese military.
We can expect these cronies to benefit Israel and Communist China with their policies as any pretense of America-First falls to the wayside of their Globalist virtue-signaling. The Unit 8200-directed subversion of American hi-tech will benefit even more with their tech firm lobbyists at the helm of the State and Defense Departments. In his Nov. 24th call congratulating Biden, Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping said he hoped "the two sides will uphold the spirit of win-win cooperation," using the exact same phrase he used to "advance the Belt and Road". Nor is it any coincidence that with the "climate change" interventionists surrounding him or the Green New Deal Socialists representing his activist wing, Biden's express intent to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement would benefit China while not only harming American workers and energy prices, but sets one standard for Western countries while ignoring the CCP's environmental abuses.
"But Biden has promised to go further, entirely eliminating carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035 and imposing strict gas-mileage standards to reach zero emissions by 2050," notes New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. "In terms of American decline, the Paris climate treaty is this decade's version of China's entry into the WTO." Its no coincidence Clinton's WTO and NAFTA point-man Ricchetti is now Biden's counselor. And as I have frequently observed, waiting in the wake of this decline are other "multipolar" power forces cashing in on the latest Globalist talking-points. Expect any criticism of the CCP to be construed as "racist" by the elites, who ignore that such a narrative is actually rejected by most Asian-Americans, but allows the cronies to continue business. Enabled by the low-information activists who have obediently consumed such well-funded trends, these cronies recognize their personal power and profits would actually increase in such a world - and we can expect that principle would guide their trade deals and foreign policies. As we wait to see how the rigging unfolds.
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