Grand Theft Pentagon: by Jeffrey St. Clair

Grand Theft Pentagon: by Jeffrey St. Clair:

Grand Theft Pentagon tells the scandalous story of how some of the world's mightiest and must ruthless corporations exploited the tragic events of 9/11 to make billions upon billions in the form of government contracts with the connivance of the Bush administration.

In a riveting work of investigative reporting, Jeffrey St. Clair shines a merciless searchlight into some of the murkiest corners of the Pentagon, exposing the sweatheart deals between the defense department and its favorite coterie contractors: Boeing, Bechtel, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.

Among the many explosive revelations in Grand Theft Pentagon is a first--hand account from an emissary to Afghanistan of how the Bush administration refused an offer by the Taliban to turn over Osama Bin Laden and his top leadership.

They wanted total war instead. First on Afghanistan, then Iraq. In shocking detail, St. Clair unveils how the Bush administration hired a team of marketing and PR executives to sell their fraudulent war claims to a panic--striken public, a complicit congress engorged with arms PAC money and a gullible national press corps. Here you will find scathing portraits of the enablers of this corrupt system----

From George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, to Senators Ted Stevens and the pseudo--maverick John McCain---- and the war profiteers themselves, from DynCorp and Lockheed to the devious machinations of the RAND, Corp and Magnequench, the missile company that outsourced its work to China.

In the wake of 9/11, the Pentagon was handed a blank check, which it used to resurrect some of the most baroque relics of the Cold War, from the B--2 steath bomber and the F--22 fighter to the most fanciful of all boondoggles, the $80 billion Star Wars missile defense system. In this hard--hitting exposé, St. Clair shows, through the use of the Pentagon's own damning internal documents, that none of these big ticket weapons systems are needed and that none of them has ever worked as advertised. Indeed, these destabilizing arms programs have backfired, hurling the nation to the brink of bankruptcy and sparking a new global arms race.

From the war room at the White House to the board room of Halliburton, Grand Theft Pentagon is a harrowing trip through the new imperial order, where the weapons companies make a killing, while the citizens of the world cower under the shadow of perpetual war.

Global Starvation Ignored by American Policy Elites

Project Censored: "

Global Starvation Ignored by American Policy Elites
Thursday, September 11, 2008 4:53 AM

By Peter Phillips

A new report (9/2/08) from:

The World Bank admits that in 2005 three billion one hundred and forty million people live on less that $2.50 a day and about 44% of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas.
Simple items like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.

Starvation.net logs the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (85% children under 5) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The numbers of unnecessary deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years.

These are the people who David Rothkopf in his book Superclass calls the unlucky.
“If you happen to be born in the wrong place, like sub-Saharan Africa, …that is bad luck,” Rothkopf writes. Rothkopf goes on to describe how the top 10% of the adults worldwide own 84% of the wealth and the bottom half owns barely 1%. Included in the top 10% of wealth holders are the one thousand global billionaires.
But is such a contrast of wealth inequality really the result of luck, or are there policies, supported by political elites, that protect the few at the expense of the many? (you are getting WARMER)


Farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up 4% from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article

“Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution.

Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86% above 2007. World food prices grew 22% from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. The result is wild food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.


For a family on the bottom rung of poverty a small price increase is the difference between life and death, yet neither US presidential candidate has declared a war on starvation. Instead both candidates talk about national security and the continuation of the war on terror as if this were the primary election issue. Given that ten times as many innocent people died on 9/11/01 than those in the World Trade centers, where is the Manhattan project for global hunger? Where is the commitment to national security though unilateral starvation relief? Where is the outrage in the corporate media with pictures of dying children and an analysis of who benefits from hunger?


American people cringe at the thought of starving children, often thinking that there is little they can do about it, save sending in a donation to their favorite charity for a little guilt relief. Yet giving is not enough, we must demand hunger relief as a national policy inside the next presidency. It is a moral imperative for us as the richest nation in the world nation to prioritize a political movement of human betterment and starvation relief for the billions in need. Global hunger and massive wealth inequality is based on political policies that can be changed. There will be no national security in the US without the basic food needs of the world being realized.


Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research group. His new book Censored 2009 is now available from by Seven Stories Press.