| http://www.almartinraw.com/column56.html Plugging the Leaks in the Illegal Weapons Auctions, Etc. by Al Martin The DISU is frantically trying to suppress information about the illegal weapons auction at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The DISU, a little-known agency called the Defense Investigative Services Unit, investigates people's backgrounds for the Department of Defense, but their principal task is to plug leaks. And that's what they're trying to do in Huntsville - with little success. Enquiring DISU investigators wants to know how the Al Martin Raw.com website is getting its information about illegal weapons sales, frequented by unfriendlies and other foreign nationals. The Department of Defense is desperately trying to find out how the Al Martin Raw.com website is getting its information about their illegal weapons sales and auctions and the prime rib and lobster taxpayer-funded lunches. They have finally increased security. Their idea of increasing security is to put one guy at the gate in a jeep with a camera and two Wackenhut guys in the building. (For more background, see "Fraud As Usual at Redstone Arsenal"). The illegal weapons auctions have resumed as of last Saturday. They've re-jiggered the way they're doing the auctions to be even more "careful" about mislabeling the actual "merchandise." They're employing even more subterfuge than they did in the past. Before they would mislabel the various items as "Lot 313 - Miscellaneous Office Furniture," which would actually be a lot of missiles. Now they're even going to greater lengths by actually breaking down the weapons systems and shipping them out as components -- to further disguise what they're doing. Of course, what the Department of Defense is doing is selling front-line modern weapons technology under an auction program that is supposed to be for outmoded spare parts and outmoded systems. Obviously this is not some so-called "rogue" operation, but it is State-sanctioned - by virtue of the fact that it is happening and they're doing it rather openly. They're not trying to hide it. There are so many weapons dealers there as well as foreign military officers. Nobody really knows who they are because they all operate under disguised names and ranks. The Department of Defense and the CIA are waiving all of their rules about these guys -- having to register at all and the fifty-mile travel restrictions from Washington. Nine out of ten of these foreign military intelligence officers aren't supposed to be anywhere near a US military base -- let alone having giant prawn and prime rib lunches in the Officers' Clubs of US military bases at US taxpayers' expense. The DISU has been frustrated at their inability to plug the leaks regarding illegal weapons auctions at the Redstone Arsenal. At this week's auction, it was packed, and 80% of the attendees were Russians - Russian military officers and Russian arms dealers. They've gotten a big boost on their business, of course, because the Bush Administration lifted the arms embargo against Azerbaijan. Now there are Uzbeki and other arms merchants there as well. They actually have printed auction sheets listing the items to be sold, but it doesn't help you, because it just says "Lot 313 - Miscellaneous Department of Defense Used Office Furniture." The only way to really see what they have is to make a video of the actual contents, but you have to do that covertly. Meanwhile the Bushes' War Scam is being ramped up and their plan to crash the economy by increasing budget deficits is in full swing. The Congressional Budget Office has stated that the expenditures on the "War on Terrorism" during the next twelve months (if Bush expands the war on terrorism, as planned) will cost $125 billion. Bush has also asked for $1.3 trillion 10-year tax cut to be made permanent. It's quite likely that Congress will pass it, thus adding an additional $130 billion a year in deficit financing. Since we're already in a deficit now, it's all negative numbers. They act as if crashing the economy is their intent. The price of gold consistently stays around $300 per ounce. Interest rates are creeping up, and the stock market continues to decline. The point I've been consistently making on my radio shows is that I believe that the stock market's continuous declines are not due to any day to day factors such as release of corporate earnings or new jitters about accounting scandals. In fact, there is a longer-term recognition in the marketplace of where Bush Administration policies are taking us. And that is why the stock market is coming under such pressure. Now we are talking about enormous fiscal budget deficits down the line. As I have stated before, the Bush Administration has reneged on all of its previous campaign pledges - that it would act to reduce the surplus; that it would act in a fiscally responsible manner to restrict spending; that it would act to inure federal budgetary surpluses. All of this, of course, has been abandoned. And this bolsters my contention, as I have said before, that it's all falling apart. Even the recent Bill Moyers special on Corporate America, called The New Feudal Lords, described how there are probably a lot more accounting scandals out there, how this great Republican Cabal and its connections to corporate America has bled money out of Corporate America for years and years and years and now it's all coming to a head. Corporations are now taking on the power of feudal lords, determining the destiny of millions of workers. Will their pensions survive or not? Will their jobs even exist? Corporate America in conjunction with this right-wing Republican Bush Cabal have combined to take on the power of New Feudal Lords in our society, when it comes to determining the fate of the American people wearing their hats as workers, savers, investors and consumers. Moyers called it a new Corporate Megalopoly, or power concentrated in a very few hands. He even used the same quote I use all the time. The Bush I dream of "the continuous consolidation of money and power into higher tighter and righter hands" is coming to fruition, while the rest of the world outside of the United States continues to fall apart. As Moyers accurately pointed out, what makes the United States still look good is that despite what George Bush has done, the United States, at the current pace, isn't falling apart as quickly as the rest of the world. The theme of the show was that there are many more of these accounting debacles yet to come and that we are going to find that there have been, over the period of decades, massive transfers of shareholders' wealth in America's largest corporations to a virtually endless series of shadowy offshore Republican accounts. There is no viable way anymore for the American people, wearing their hats as workers, savers, investors, consumers, and debtors to protect themselves. The old routine of buying gold as a hedge against a destabilizing economy doesn't necessarily work anymore because of the overall debt deflation, which is permeating the world. The point he was making is that there is no longer any investment alternative that the American people can use to protect themselves from the machinations of their own government. The only thing the American people can do is make sure that George Bush doesn't serve a second term and after that ensure that the all-powerful military-industrial complex and the right wing political cabal which supports it never comes back to power. All anyone can do is just say no to the George Bush Cabal and the Bush Dynasty. Then we can all say goodbye to government by shadowy cliques, secret commissions and defacto star chambers. Meanwhile down in Venezuela, the Bush Administration was delighted when Hugo Chavez was out of power and immediately moved to support the new government. Now suddenly that gets reversed. Since Chavez has been reinstated as president, he said that he will go along with ending the oil strike and making sure that Venezuelan oil production and exports return back to normal. Frankly that is the only thing the United States cared about. The CIA was active in attempting to destabilize the Chavez regime. After all, Chavez moved very close to Cuba and became very friendly with Iraq and Libya. Although Chavez had alienated a lot of his political support in Venezuela, he still has a hard-core constituency that supports him. The Venezuelan military underestimated the support that Chavez still had within the civilian population because of his label as a reformer. Even though most of his economic reform program was never passed, what made Chavez so popular was that he said to the Venezuelan people that we're not going to be lackeys of the United States. We're going to set our own foreign policy and economic course. Chavez purposely set out to antagonize Washington by forming a very close relationship with Cuba -- for domestic political purposes. Chavez doesn't care about Cuba or Iraq or China. The only reason he did it was to make Washington upset and thereby give him the increased credibility within his own populace. The most likely scenario now is that Venezuela will restore oil production. Any cuts by Iraq, which has gone into its 30-day withholding program, will be made up by Saudi Arabia, which has already announced that it will make up for any lost Iraqi oil. One of the reasons the stock market keeps going down is because the people understand that George Bush's policies are going to inure enormous federal deficits at a time when economic growth in this country is weak and economic growth in the rest of the world is also weak. Bush says that his continuous tax cutting programs and economic stimuli effect, by pumping up spending, is going to take us out of the recession sooner, and therefore growth will return to 4% per annum. That, he claims, is the way we are going to dig ourselves out of a deficit situation. What he isn't saying, however, is that we are not in the same environment we were even two years ago. We are in the midst of a general worldwide slowdown and a debt deflation, wherein there are many countries teetering on the economic brink. The crashes of US helicopters also continue apace. These crashes, while not directly related to the war in Afghanistan, are directly related to our war on terrorism because these forces wouldn't have been activated unless we were in a war. (See previous column "Choking on the Enron Pretzel") All of the crashes, all of the munitions which aren't working the way they're supposed to be working, all of the equipment that blows up by "accident" - it's adding $100 million a month in cost to the "war on terrorism." Those are extra costs just from equipment that doesn't work, from crashes, from missiles that don't hit their targets, etc. You could call this the "Jiminy Surcharge." As George Bush says, there always has to be a "Jiminy Factor" in weapons systems. The Bush idea is that when you buy weapons systems, there are always going to be about 5% of them that won't work from the get-go anyway. They call it the "Jiminy Factor," an unquantifiable component that gets thrown into any equation. While this isn't an investment column per se, we would like to remind Al Martin Raw.com readers that several weeks ago, we published a warning about General Electric and its potential bookkeeping irregularities (See previous column: "The Bushonian Agenda: Citizen Profiling & Internal Security") GE's accounting practices were coming under the spotlight. As a matter of fact, our comment from a couple weeks ago about shorting General Electric stock has become very prescient, since the share value of General Electric has declined by 25%. Although, of course, we are not in the investment advice business, we always like to pass along market scuttlebutt from what we believe are reliable sources to our faithful readers. So remember -- when Al Martin Raw.com speaks, the smart money listens… |
