{"id":102480,"date":"2017-11-27T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=102480"},"modified":"2017-11-23T19:47:14","modified_gmt":"2017-11-23T19:47:14","slug":"military-industrial-complex-shadow-world-exposes-greed-profit-and-the-business-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/11\/military-industrial-complex-shadow-world-exposes-greed-profit-and-the-business-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Military Industrial Complex: Shadow World Exposes Greed, Profit and the Business of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new PBS documentary looks deep into the shadowy world of the global arms trade, profit-making from war, and the politicians who sell the interests of their constituents to the highest bidder.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A fully armed MQ-9 Reaper taxis down an Afghanistan runway. (Photo: U.S. Air Force)<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Nov 2017 – <\/em>In his first year in office, President Donald Trump has earnestly played the role of salesman-in-chief for United States arms manufacturers.<\/p>\n

The U.S.\u00a0accounts<\/a>\u00a0\u201cfor more than half the world\u2019s annual arms deals.\u201d Trump may make it much easier for the government to sell weapons by enlisting the Pentagon and State Department to more aggressively peddle the products of U.S. arms manufacturers. His administration also has proposals and plans in the works to make nuclear weapons\u00a0more usable<\/a>, with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon each working on prototypes of a delivery system for \u201cfuture nukes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s actions reinforce all the most profoundly disturbing aspects of\u00a0\u201cShadow World,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a documentary based on Andrew Feinstein\u2019s book on the global arms trade that premiered on PBS at 9:30 pm ET.<\/p>\n

Feinstein was once an African National Congress (ANC) member of South Africa\u2019s Parliament. As he recounts in the film, Nelson Mandela\u2019s successor, Thabo Mbeki, spent $10 billion on weapons. Three hundred million dollars was spent on bribes to senior politicians, officials, and military officers. At the same time, Mbeki claimed there were no funds for developing life-saving medications for 6 million South Africans suffering from HIV\/AIDS.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe financial oversight committee on which I was the ranking ANC member started to investigate the deal and the corruption. The ANC leadership instructed me to stop the investigation,\u201d Feinstein\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in an interview with ITVS\/Independent Lens interactive editor Craig Phillips. \u201cWhen I refused, they thwarted the investigation, including removing me from the committee and then forcing me out of Parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Feinstein wrote in his first book on corruption in South Africa, he took an interest in global defense contractors, especially how they were propped up by their own governments. He recognized there was no comprehensive book on the subject and developed the \u201cShadow World\u201d\u00a0<\/em>project.<\/p>\n

The film manages to cover quite a bit of history from President Ronald Reagan to President Barack Obama. Commentators featured in the film also reach back before to reference developments that happened with CIA covert operations in the 1950s to the 1970s. And President Richard Nixon\u2019s disdain for diplomacy is highlighted through a clip of Nixon expressing the urge to use nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Many of the key arguments in the film come from journalist Vijay Prashad, who condemns policymaking on the \u201cassumption of greed\u201d and how it has ruined the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cA society that decides that the bulk of its budget is going to go to arms manufacturing, building up military, etc.\u2014they have made a moral decision that militarism is more important than the creation of well being for the population,\u201d Prashad declares.<\/p>\n

This policymaking, which capitalist Milton Friedman champions in the film, opened the flood gates for a world economy that incorporates and flourishes on permanent war.<\/p>\n

Millions in Latin America fought against oligarchs backed by the U.S. government. They had an \u201calternative imagination\u201d for how the world could function. Yet, as Prashad describes, \u201cIn the early 1970s, this attempt was destroyed, and it was stopped through a real genuine attempt by the global north to take over the institutions of the world, including the World Bank, the IMF.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s not simply that the people of the south were incapable of carrying forward their dreams,\u201d Prashad adds. \u201cThese dreams were assassinated.\u201d<\/p>\n

One-off killings and coups had a devastating impact, but beyond that, there were forces that recognized the dreams of Latin Americans had to be killed for their way of doing things to survive and continue to thrive.<\/p>\n

The film is punctuated by vignettes told by Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and writer. As Feinstein says, it is supposed to offer viewers a bit of relief from the \u201cdark nature\u201d of the material.<\/p>\n

There is an air of cynicism and despondency to the subject matter, like the behemoths that are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman can barely be challenged. However, the film\u2019s focus on the political leaders, who engage in bribes and engineer massive deals for corporations all under the guise of security, make it clear they keep this system of greed going.<\/p>\n

If there is to be an end to the insanity of arming Israelis to enable their occupation of Palestinians, which fuels their country\u2019s arms industry and benefits the global arms trade, the hope lies with people resisting their elected officials.<\/p>\n

If there is to be an end to the lying that creates pretenses for military action or the funneling of weapons to terrorists (so-called \u201crebels\u201d), the hope lies with people who become fed up.<\/p>\n

If there is to be a backlash against sending arms to Saudi Arabia so it can further tear apart and destroy the Middle East\u2014and\u00a0kill tens of thousands of children<\/a>\u00a0in the process, the hope can only come from citizens courageously telling politicians no more.<\/p>\n

While \u201cShadow World\u201d is primarily about past chapters in the global arms trade, little has changed. It is very much rooted in the present, and the dark horrors that make arms manufacturers record profits will not subside until something is done to address the ease in which heads of state from the U.S. and other countries can play salesmen and get away with it.<\/p>\n

Watch the trailer for\u00a0Shadow World<\/strong><\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=71AaDj_YQ6U<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Kevin Gosztola served as an intern for <\/em>The Nation Magazine and worked closely with Greg Mitchell, helping him to maintain his daily WikiLeaks blog. He contributed sections to both of Mitchell\u2019s books, <\/em>The Age of WikiLeaks and <\/em>Bradley Manning: Truth and Consequences. And, he\u2019s the producer of a weekly podcast \u201cThis Week in WikiLeaks\u201d that has been tweeted by WikiLeaks to their more than 900,000 followers. He has been writing and publishing to WikiLeaks Central.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 mintpressnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new PBS documentary looks deep into the shadowy world of the global arms trade, profit-making from war, and the politicians who sell the interests of their constituents to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}