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Karl Grossman - Star Globalization - Missile $ Target - Enron Hiding - Treaty Termination

25 January 2002

We need a transformation soon, or we will all go over the edge into oblivion. At the end of item four, you can do something -- Link to an online petition to encourage the Senate to consider, "who has the right to terminate a treaty?" The truth, the obvious incentives behind star wars, the globalization, the money, the power, the fear, were splendidly expressed in this issues first two articles, by Karl Grossman and Jerome Richard. They show the greedy confines, the mind-set, the organized insanity of Corporate rule; and unless we do something, soon, we all will have a free ticket to ride deeper into destruction. Next issue Flyby News will include the text of the newly re-introduced Kucinich Act to the US House of Representatives – to ban space-based weapons, (including research and development). This is a requirement, in the House, Senate and World, to defeat the insanity threatening our lives of those ruling our government, and the people accepting such death provoking leadership.



1) Star Wars Protecting Globalization From Above
2) Missile Defense Shield: The Real Target
3) The Enron Story: What are they hiding?
4) Missile Defense: Who terminates a treaty?

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1) Star Wars Protecting Globalization From Above

Bush's revived Star Wars program got a boost after 9-11. He's asking for $8.3 billion for a missile program from Congress, and the big defense contractors are hoping to make a fortune.


Star Wars Protecting Globalization From Above
by Karl Grossman
Special to CorpWatch
http://www.corpwatch.org

January 18, 2002

Marketing Missile Defense

The United States is moving full-speed ahead on a missile defense program with events of September 11th giving a big boost to the scheme. Missile defense, or "Star Wars," advocates maintain the terrorist attack demonstrated the kind of future assault -- the next time around with missiles -- that the U.S. must seek to offset. They also point to the need to protect "US interests and investments" around the globe. Opponents argue the most likely threat to the U.S. continues to be relatively low-tech terrorist attacks, not sophisticated missiles. Star Wars supporters are now riding high.

Meanwhile the troubled aerospace industry is hoping to be shored up by big-ticket defense contracts.

Some $95 billion has been spent on missile defense since Ronald Reagan first advanced the program in 1983, according to the Center for Defense Information (CDI) in Washington. Despite the billions the program has never produced a successful missile system. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW have been the "Big Four" among aerospace corporations receiving program monies. Many billions more will be spent in coming years. All four companies aggressively lobby Capitol Hill on defense spending.

These companies have close ties to the Bush administration, as they did to the Democratic administration that proceeded it. The military machine is alive and well more than a decade after the end of the cold war. This time globalization is the rationale for arms build up -- and some of the same corporations that promoted and profited from the cold war are behind it.

The Star Wars Debate Revived

President George W. Bush cleared a legal path for a renewed missile defense program in December when he advised Russia that the U.S. is withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. September 11th was part of his message as he warned that the threat to both countries came from terrorists and "rogue states".

"We know that the terrorists, and some of those who support them, seek the ability to deliver death and destruction to our doorstep via missile. And we must have the freedom and the flexibility to develop effective defenses against those attacks," Bush said.

On the other side of the debate, Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space, held that "September 11th ultimately is irrelevant" because missile defense is a Trojan horse for the "real objectives" of the U.S. space military program.

"It's never been about defense. It's always been about controlling space, dominating space, denying other countries access to space and the U.S. being the master of space," said Gagnon. "And that isn't a defensive posture."

But others reached a different conclusion.

By September 17th , O'Dwyer's PR Daily was reporting that President George Bush's full $8.3 billion request for missile defense in 2002 "has now gotten new life in the aftermath of the terror attacks."

In the days following the attacks Senate Democrats backed away from a pre-September 11th pledge to cut the amount by $1.3 million and agreed to remove a provision requiring the administration to seek Congressional approval to spend money on activities that would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Media commentators widely interpreted the move as an effort to avoid a partisan debate in the middle of a national crisis. And the White House made it clear that opposition to its legislative agenda, on a variety of fronts, would be branded unpatriotic.

Militarizing the Heavens to Enforce Globalization

While the push for a Star Wars program was buoyed by the September 11th attacks, plans for the administration's space military program were well underway when Bush took office.

Prior to being appointed U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization -- known as the "Space Commission." Just days before Rumsfeld was named Pentagon chief, the Space Commission issued a report championing Star Wars.

Before there was a director of "homeland defense," this report spoke about "homeland defense" -- against missiles -- urging an array of military hardware, including space-based weapons systems, to "destroy a missile shortly after launch, before either warhead or countermeasures are released."

The 13-member Space Commission advocated elevating the U.S. Space Command, established by the Pentagon in 1985 to "coordinate" U.S. space military operations, to a "Space Corps" like the Marine Corps, to then possibly to become a "Space Department" at the same level as the Departments of Army, Navy and Air Force.

General Richard B. Myers, current chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed up Space Command before being tapped by the Bush Administration for his current post a year ago.

The January 2001 Space Commission report was proceeded by its Long Range Plan, which framed the space missile program in terms of furthering corporate-led globalization and maintaining US economic and political dominance. "The United States will remain a global power and exert global leadership," stated the 1998 plan.

"Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality of life -- contributing to unrest in developing countries. The global economy will continue to become more interdependent. Economic alliances, as well as the growth and influence of multinational
corporations, will blur security agreements. The gap between 'have' and 'have-not' nations will widen, creating regional unrest" the Long Range Plan continued. This worldwide gap between rich and poor, the Space Commission reasoned, would lead to conflicts threatening US dominance.

The Long Range Plan opens by declaring that it has "U.S. Space Command's #1 priority investing nearly 20 man-years to make it a reality. The development and production process, by design, involved hundreds of people including about 75 corporations."

And it subsequently lists these 75 corporations-beginning with Aerojet, Aerospace Corp., BD Systems and Boeing, to Lockheed Martin, Rand Corp., Raytheon, Spaceport Systems International, Sparta Corp., Stella Solutions, TRW Space and Vista Technologies.

Bush Administration Ties to the Aerospace Industry

The Bush administration is intimately linked with the corporate interests behind the missile defense program. Vice President Cheney is a former member of the board of TRW. His wife, Lynn Cheney, was a longtime member of the Lockheed Martin board stepping down only as her husband prepared to take office.

"I wrote the Republican Party's foreign policy platform," Bruce Jackson, vice president of corporate strategy and development of Lockheed Martin, flatly told this reporter in an interview last year, referring to his role as chair of the Foreign Policy Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention where he was a delegate.

Bush's appointee as deputy director of the National Security Council -- whom he has also assigned to travel the world to promote the U.S. missile defense program -- is Stephen J. Hadley, previously a partner in Shea & Gardner, the Washington law firm of Lockheed Martin.

"Space is going to be important. It has a great feature in the military," Hadley, speaking as "an advisor" to Bush, told the Air Force Association in a speech during the Bush campaign.

Other Bush administration officials drawn from the aerospace industry include Albert Smith, a Lockheed Martin vice president, appointed undersecretary of the Air Force; Gordon England, vice president of General Dynamics, named Navy secretary; and James G. Roche, retired
president of a Northrop-Grumman division, appointed as Air Force secretary.

Campaign Contributions.

Then there are political contributions.

William D. Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca of the Arms Trade Resource Center have tracked these contributions focusing on what they term the "Big Four" of missile defense -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW. These four corporations, which have been receiving 60 percent of government missile defense contracts, have been "making a major political investment," they say.

Their report, Tangled WebThe Marketing of Missile Defense, lists millions of dollars in "soft money donations" and "PAC contributions" to members of Congress in the last several years. The preference has been for money to Republicans, they say. But "the bottom line" is that "both major parties have been bought off."

As a result, "under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the Democratic Leadership Council, the Democratic Party [was] almost as pro-military as the Republicans throwing billions at missile defense. The answer is to get special interest money out of politics by supporting full public financing of presidential and congressional races."

Other Star Wars critics see the space missile program as a government bail out for the ailing aerospace industry. Missile defense is especially important to Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon "as a medium-to-long term source of revenue and profits to help them recover from recent management and technical problems that have slashed their stock prices in half and reduced their profit margins," according to the Arms Trade Resource Center.

"Our government is being bribed by these corporations pushing for Star Wars," charges Alice Slater, president of the New York-based Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE). "They have absolutely no regard for the safety and well-being of the world. This is almost a cliche about corporate greed--at a grand scale."

On the other side, aerospace corporations say that they are working to protect the U.S. -- more necessary now than ever after September 11th, they stress.

"This notion that space is going to remain a peaceful area in the future is absolutely putting our heads in the sand. It is just a fact of life," emphasized retired U.S. Space Command commander-in-chief, General Howell Estes, to the Colorado Springs Independent in December. "The fact of the matter is man is a warlike being. That's the nature of the beast, and we just can't be naive about it."

Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space sees the Bush Administration's massive military build up in direct competition with funding for social programs.

"Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Star Wars will take money away from education, programs for women and children, and health care," said Gagnon. "There is a direct link between promoting weapons for space and the destabilization of our communities. People must connect these struggles."

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=1333

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Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is the author of Weapons in Space from Seven Stories Press and narrator of the TV documentary Star Wars Returns, from EnviroVideo .

To find these resources and other information, visit Flyby News Links.

For more background, vist the Karl Grossman Cassini-NoFlyby page


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2) Missile Defense Shield: The Real Target
by Jerome Richard

The September 11 attack by suicidal terrorists should have blasted a hole in the Bush administration plan to spend as much as $100 billion on the Missile Defense Shield. Obviously, we have real threats to worry about. Still, the administration is pushing ahead with its shield and the reason must be that intercontinental missiles are not the program's prime target.

According to the administration, the global warming treaty endorsed by 178 other countries is flawed, the small arms pact is not perfect, and all the science is not yet in on stem cell research. Yet, the Missile Defense Shield, which by all the evidence so far has a fifty percent chance of hitting an incoming ballistic missile provided that we are appraised of the precise time and place of launch and given its exact trajectory, is worth this enormous investment. Other conditions for the missile defense's success include good weather (the last test was postponed because of the threat of rain), and, oh yes, the incoming missile would have to be accompanied by no more than one decoy.

The administration admits that the tests so far have not been realistic, but they feel good enough about them to want to proceed, even though it means abandoning the ABM Treaty which has served the world well for over thirty years. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said it is not necessary for the system to work perfectly. Apparently, anyone crazy enough to launch such a missile at us will be deterred by knowing that his chances of success are only fifty-fifty. Why that would be more of a deterrence than nuclear retaliation is not explained.

President Bush says the system is not directed against Russia or China, the only two likely adversaries with ICBM capability. Those countries don't believe him, and besides threatening a new arms race in response, have signed a pact that harkens back to the early days of the Cold War. Reuniting Russia and China is so far the only solid achievement of the program. President Putin, while proclaiming Bush's abandoning of the ABM Treaty a mistake, says that he doesn't feel threatened by the tests, perhaps because he doesn't think they will succeed.

The object of the president's missile defense desire is supposed to be "rogue nations." That, at the present time, would be Iraq, Libya, and North Korea, none of whom yet have a missile we need to defend against. Try to envisage circumstances in which a Saddam Hussein or a Kim Jong Il would launch a missile against the United States and you quickly see why Russia and China suspect that they are the real targets of this strategy.

Many scientists doubt that the proposed system will ever be effective in a realistic situation. President Carter, an engineer by training, called the idea "technologically ridiculous." But suppose they are wrong. Imagine that you are the leader of a country and have been contemplating a missile attack against the United States only to learn that we have nearly perfected a missile defense shield. (It would be useless as a deterrent if we kept it a secret.) Would you go ahead anyway? There is more than one way to deliver a bomb. Even without a missile defense shield, a submarine, car, or package would make a cheaper and more reliable carrier. Or even a hijacked airplane, as the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon tragically demonstrate. And why even think about missiles when germs can be put in the mail? Even a clever computer hacker can wreak widespread damage to our economy.

In fact, the more feasible the missile defense shield becomes, the less likely it is that any country would rely on a weapon susceptible to it.

Surely, the administration is aware of all this, so why press ahead with such an expensive, probably unworkable, and futile program? Precisely because it so expensive. Not only does it feed money to defense contractors that are major Republican Party contributors, but it drains money from the federal government. That's why Bush recently called the disappearance of the non-Social Security surplus, "incredibly positive news." He gloated that it would halt the growth of the federal government.

What separates the Republican Party from the Democratic Party more than anything else is the Republican belief that the federal government should do as little as necessary vs. the Democrats' conviction that government should do as much as possible. This is true even after Clinton announced that the era of big government was over. That moved the Democrats closer to the middle of the public opinion spectrum, but still left it on the other side of the divide. It was the deficits left by the Reagan administration that siphoned away available money for new social programs. (It was also the defense industry that got much of the money.)

Republicans have always believed in small government. The preamble to their 2000 party platform says: "Since the election of 1860, the Republican Party has had a special calling to advance the founding principles of freedom and limited government and the dignity and worth of every individual."

For Republicans, the best way to limit government is to starve it of funds. One way to do that is to cut taxes. The current proposal to refund the Alternative Minimum Tax to large and mainly profitable companies is to do so with shovels. The other way is to spend funds on expensive projects that don't establish ongoing entitlements. It doesn't matter if the missile defense shield never works. It wouldn't matter if the money was spent on producing widgets that were then rocketed into space. It does matter that expenditures not be so large that they trigger a tax increase. That's what happened with the Reagan deficits.

Republican aversion to government programs is not, as many people believe, because they are mean-spirited. Rather, it stems from a blind faith in the private sector. The administration would turn welfare and social security over to the private sector if it could. And if there aren't enough funds in government to provide for welfare and social security, then that might happen.

The real target of the missile defense program is the U.S. Treasury.


Jerome Richard lives in Seattle. He has written for The Humanist, Pacific Discovery, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Seattle Weekly, TomPaine.com and SocialAction.com.

Posted by Comon Dreams on Thursday, January 24, 2002
http://commondreams.org/views02/0124-05.htm

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Related Link!

- Bush To Ask For 48 Billion Extra In 2003 Defense Budget
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-02a.html
Washington - Jan 23, 2002 - US President George W. Bush said Wednesday he would propose a 48-billion dollar increase in the US defense budget for fiscal 2003 in order to complete the war on terrorism.

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3) The Enron Story: What are they hiding?


From"Wes Boyd" Date23 Jan 2002
SubjectWhat are they hiding?

The full story is finally coming out. Enron gamed the energy markets, brought California to its knees, invaded our political system, and stole from its own employees and stockholders. These same "corporate leaders" have been intimately involved in policymaking in the Bush administration, but the White House has refused to release information about who and how.

Enron is not a tale of accounting errors. It is a story of the powerful few buying their way into the Texas governor's mansion and the White House and using their access for their sole advantage at the expense of employees, stockholders, consumers and taxpayers. This is a tale of corporate greed and corruption aided and abetted by "public servants." Vice President Cheney and the White House are still refusing to release any information about the meetings they held, who they met with, and how they developed their proposals. They claim they have nothing to hide. But why then did they say that they never met with Enron, only later to admit that Cheney met with Enron CEO Lay once and his staff met with Enron executives six times? The White House and Enron have a great deal of explaining to do, and we need to be sure that happens.

The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told reporters, "I really think the public does not share the judgment that there is somehow some political malfeasance here." (NY Times1/18/02, Congress Rebuffed on Energy Documents). They must think we're fools.

The moveon.org website include links to several good articles that document the extent of the White House - Enron connections. Here are some key facts:

* Enron has been President Bush's #1 financial backer over his career. Enron and affiliates gave more than $110,000 to the Bush/Cheney election campaign, and $300,000 to the Bush/Cheney inaugural fund.

* Enron and its executives spent more than $2.4 million supporting various candidates and parties in the 1999-2000 elections. The vast majority of these contributions went to Republican candidates and the GOP (see website for sources).

* Marc Racicot, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, planned to continue drawing a seven-figure salary partly as an Enron lobbyist. He now says he won't lobby but he will still receive that salary from his law firm.

* Enron participated in secret meetings of the Cheney task force which crafted a national energy strategy and the White House has refused to turn over records of these meetings.

* That energy plan includes tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies to the energy industry. It would also open the Arctic to oil drilling, but not substantially increase car mileage or energy efficiency.
The House has approved it; Bush is pushing the Senate to do the same.

* Last summer, Enron and other companies manipulated the California energy market, costing taxpayers and consumers billions. Enron was a key player in lobbying for the California deregulation plan.

* Enron stands to gain $254 million in rebates of back taxes under the "stimulus" bill President Bush supports. The House has already passed it, and Bush is now leaning hard on the Senate to follow suit.

* Senior Enron executives allegedly made millions selling their stock at high prices, collectively walking off with $1.1 BILLION, yet prevented rank-and-file workers from selling theirs, causing many employees to lose their life savings.

* America's top law enforcement official, Attorney General John Ashcroft, has excused himself from investigating Enron because of his own connections to the bankrupt company. Here's a good summary by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post (Jan 15):
"The fact remains that these guys -- these pals of Bush and Cheney and others in the administration -- made money off a shell game. They sold stock backed by smoke. They cashed out, but when their employees tried doing the same thing, they blocked them. The stock went from $85 a share to 68 cents and the employees lost everything -- their savings, their pensions, their dreams of a comfy retirement with maybe a little boat on the lake. The big shots got the boat. Their employees got the lake. They can go jump in it."

Join our call for accountability. To send an instant email to the administration and Congress demanding a full accounting of Enron's influence, go to http://www.moveon.org/levelwithus/

Thank you. This item is from http://www.MoveOn.org

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4) Missile Defense: Who terminates a treaty?
By Walter C. Clemens, Jr.

The Bush administration has heard plenty of reasons why its national missile defense plans are unrealistic: that a good defense can never beat a good offense; that, even if it works, it will break the budget and deprive U.S. forces of funds needed for other purposes; that a shield could make Americans less secure if it goads Russia and China into building more spears; and that if lightly armed terrorists can penetrate U.S. security to attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers, couldn't a determined rogue state evade or poke through missile defenses?

But these practical considerations aside, the Bush team could also face a stiff legal challenge from Congress if the White House attempts to jettison the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to make way for missile defense. Does the White House have the right to flout or void treaties—described by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823 as the "supreme law of the land"—without approval by one or both houses of Congress? If it takes two branches of government to make a treaty, can the White House alone terminate it? The U.S. Constitution provides no clear answers to these questions, and the courts have handed down contradictory or highly qualified rulings. But the precedents established over the past two centuries suggest that the president may not act alone to abrogate U.S. treaty obligations.

The Constitution

The Constitution assigns far more foreign relations powers to Congress than it does to the president. Article 1 grants Congress the power to lay and collect duties, provide for the common defense, regulate foreign commerce, establish rules on naturalization, regulate foreign coin, define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations, declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, make rules concerning captures on land and water, raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, make rules for the government and regulation of the land and sea forces, and provide for calling for the militia to repel invasions as well as for domestic security..


..Whatever the recent practice, the founding fathers did not take treaties lightly. It seems doubtful that they would have allowed a president acting alone to abrogate a treaty entered into with the approval of two-thirds of the senators voting—in this case, the ABM Treaty, which was ratified by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 after the Senate gave its consent, 88 to 2, with no reservations or special understandings..


For the complete article posted at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists web site:

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2001/nd01/nd01clemens.html


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IMPORTANT NOTE! TAKE ACTION!

A petition to the Senate asking them to exercise their duty to vote on treaty matters has gathered 450 signatures in just 6 days. Signing takes 1 click of your mouse on the link below.

This is just a small step in the process of reclaiming our democracy from the imperial/corporate forces that have taken over the executive branch. Every step counts. We need many more signatures to get the Senate's attention. Please sign and send this to your email list.

You can also print it out, gather signatures and FAX it to your senator.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/abmtrty/petition.html


Online locator for fax and other contact info for your Congressional Reps can be found from Flyby News Links
http://www.flybynews.com/links.shtml


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