02/17/15 – Christian Stork – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
More bad news and Jason Ditz coming up.
But first, it's Christian Stork.
He's at whowhatwhy.com, and here he is writing at medium.com slash at Christian Stork.
That's a weird way they do that.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Good to talk to you again.
And a great piece of writing here.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
It's called Meet the Forces That Are Pushing Obama Toward a New Cold War.
And, boy, it sure is, I don't know how wide, but a pretty deep array of forces aligned to work to keep America's Ukraine policy at least where it is.
Apparently, as mad as that sounds in terms of what the average American might imagine as the national interest, it's in somebody's interest.
So break it down, man.
What's behind all this?
Sure.
So my article basically gives a background on the authors and the organizations behind the authors of the recent joint think tank report.
It was put out by the Brookings Institute, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
And the Atlantic Council.
And I know you've had a few guests on recently.
I think Scott McConnell was one of them discussing that report.
The report was infamous for the way it advocated sending $1 billion in military aid to the coup government in Kiev to help, in their words, deter Russian aggression.
And I came across it because I saw the press conference that Obama had given with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
And in that, he said that he was considering the idea of defensive weaponry.
And all of the news articles about that conference linked to the think tank report.
And I was curious about what would defensive weaponry mean?
Defensive and offensive, they seem like labels that only pertain to the matter in which weaponry is employed, not in the sense of the way weaponry is designed.
But then in a number of the articles, they specifically referenced the Javelin anti-tank missile.
And so I read about the Javelin.
I found out it's made by General Dynamics.
And then I look at the first author of this report.
And it's Ivo Dalder.
He's a former US ambassador to NATO and the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
And I go to the Chicago Council's website.
And then, boom, right there, you see that the chairman of the board is Lester Crown, who owns $3.5 billion in General Dynamics shares.
So it was really just, there's no feat of journalism being done here.
It just basically took me an afternoon and some digging.
And what you find is this huge nexus of former government officials and defense contractors and think tank analysts.
And it's just a giant pool of, I would consider it, basically, corruption.
But in a sense, just these people are hawking wares that they're getting paid to.
Yeah, it's funny.
You know, maybe it's even though Ike said it, and Ike is the definition of normalcy and legitimacy in modern America or whatever, pre-modern.
He said it, but maybe it's the word complex that people go, oh, that sounds complex.
You know, something just sounds like you're the one connecting the dots.
The dots aren't necessarily connected.
For some reason, that phrase, rather than being, you know, so explanatory to people that everybody understands it and agrees that, you know, obviously, that's some of what's at play, it marginalizes the person using it.
It sounds like at least the tinge of a conspiracy theory or whatever.
When instead, as you're writing here, this is just business and politics.
That's all it is.
You don't need any fancy terms for it at all.
It's just, how does a Raytheon salesman get rid of weapons?
Well, he lobbies.
You know, he comes up with, he hires people to write reports about why they need his weapons.
That's no surprise.
There's nothing fancy or even, it's almost, in our imperial society now, it's not even considered a conflict of interest at all.
It's just exactly how business works.
It's like, I interviewed this professor a couple of weeks ago about the Iron Triangle and the economics of it and how none of these people believe what they're doing is wrong at all.
It's just, this is the system.
Yeah, I mean, and nor, I guess you could say that they really shouldn't believe that they're doing anything wrong.
They're just capitalizing on their knowledge that they've accrued throughout their entire life, particularly in government service.
And when you're working for the military and then you take all that knowledge and you put it to good use and make a buck off of it and take care of your family, what's wrong with that?
But there is something wrong with that in the sense that it's bringing the U.S., in this particular case, perilously close to a conflict with a nuclear armed power like Russia.
And luckily, there's been a lot of pushback from the more realist centers in the Washington think tank ecosystem.
But nevertheless, the report itself, I think, is astonishing for the way that the organizations are so intimately connected with the firms that would benefit the most from this sort of military assistance to Ukraine.
So in the report, the Brookings Institute is one of the primary authors of the, Strobe Talbot is the author listed from the Brookings Institute in the report.
And he was the president, he's been the president of Brookings since 2002.
Now, Brookings has a pretty interesting history.
It's founded in 1916.
It's the oldest think tank in Washington.
It was founded by Robert S. Brookings, who was a commissioner of finished products on the War Industries Board and the commissioner of price, he was the commissioner of the Price Fixing Committee.
So you see, when you investigate the history behind a lot of these think tanks, particularly the Council on Foreign Relations, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which used to be the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, they all basically come up after World War I.
Now, I haven't nailed this down, Pat, but I do know that following World War I, U.S. business was extremely keen on maintaining the level of industrial output that they had reached during the war mobilization.
So essentially, you see these think tanks coming up with all sorts of nifty intellectual justifications for keeping American military industry going following the war and following the demobilization that came after it.
So Brookings is basically the first one in the line of those think tanks.
And Strobe Talbot became its president in 2002.
Now, Brookings used to have a very large endowment, and it would get these huge grants from foundations.
And a lot of the foundations themselves were funded by military industry and any sort of business that was interested in impacting U.S. government policy, particularly in the international arena.
But from 2003 to 2013, under Strobe Talbot's reign, Brookings went from $32 million in annual revenues to $100 million.
So he went on an aggressive corporate fundraising tact, and among those donors was Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and really a whole host, like I said, any organization, any corporate organization that was interested in impacting government policy toward its financial interests.
And one of the biggest donors to Brookings in that period has been Booz Allen Hamilton, donating between $1 and $2.5 million.
If you look at Brookings' disclosure forms, they only set out levels, basically levels that corporate donors give in.
So you'll have $50,000 to $100,000, and then they'll list a bunch of corporations.
And then $1 million to $2.5 million, they'll list a bunch.
So Booz Allen Hamilton was one of the main donors during that time.
And then when you look at the Brookings Institute board, you find that their co-chair of their board is David M. Rubenstein.
David M. Rubenstein is the co-founder and CEO of the Carlyle Group.
And I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the Carlyle Group.
It's a private equity firm based in D.C.
It's made most of its money off of defense investments and profiting off of extremely close connections between its personnel and the Pentagon and defense industry.
It's actually divested from a number of its defense investments since it became pretty famous following 9-11.
But Carlyle, it took Booz Allen in 2010.
And by 2013, Carlyle, which owns a majority stake in Booz Allen, has made over $2 billion off of Booz.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll talk about Brookings money a little bit more with Christian Stork right after this.
All right, guys.
Welcome back.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him talking with Christian Stork.
He's at WhoWhatWhy.com.
This one is at Medium.com.
It's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
Calm, calm, calm.
It's called Meet the Forces That Are Pushing Obama Toward a New Cold War.
And we're right at the good part.
So we're talking about the Brookings Institution, the oldest, as he says, and right there with the Council on Foreign Relations, most prestigious and perceived realist and responsible and center-left-ish realist.
Did I say realist already?
And yet Brookings is completely for sale by arms manufacturers, even more than bankers now, it looks like.
And so we're talking about all that.
Christian's explaining about Raytheon and hadn't even really gotten into Lockheed yet, I don't think.
But now we're at Booz Allen Hamilton, Carlisle Group, and Booz Allen Hamilton and their role in bankrolling Brookings, which is calling for the arming of the Ukrainian coup government, as Christian explained.
But you say here, too, Booz has been working with USAID in Ukraine.
They helped bring us to this crisis in the first place.
That's exactly right.
They've been involved with USAID since at least 2011.
I haven't been able to find any contracts prior to that.
But as I'm sure many of your listeners are aware, USAID is essentially – it's taken over what used to be functions of the CIA that would be conducted in antagonistic countries, countries antagonistic toward the U.S., in terms of whipping up public support for a, quote, unquote, democratic movements, propaganda against the ruling regime, all sorts of shady things.
USAID was instrumental in creating that whole Cuban Twitter.
I knew that was a story from last year.
So USAID has a pretty shady history, and Booz has been involved in that.
Now, Booz is majority-owned by the Carlisle Group.
So you have the co-chair of the board of trustees at Brookings is the co-founder and CEO of Carlisle, who's a major company – a major company of his is one of the premier donors to – or, excuse me, one of the premier donors to Brookings.
And then Brookings, in turn, is advocating for more business for Booz.
And Booz is literally the definition of the revolving door.
They have nine executives who used to work for the NSA, 20 executives who used to work for the Navy, 17 who used to work for the Army, 12 who used to work for the Air Force, seven who used to work for the CIA, and three who used to work in upper-level management in the Pentagon.
And Ronald Sanders, who's a – who also used to work at the Pentagon, he's now on a faculty at Brookings as well.
And Ken Duberstein is on – is also a trustee, and he is a director at Boeing.
So Brookings – I wouldn't necessarily say it's entirely bankrolled by the arms manufacturers.
If you look at their trustees, they have a – they have a wide swath of corporate America represented.
But if you look at the sorts of industries, they're all industries with really strong international market – basically, they're industries that are heavily involved in exporting.
So the – Well, of course, there's the Sabin Center there now from – Haim Sabin from the Power Rangers, who gave millions and millions to create a whole special center at Brookings just for Middle Eastern studies.
So it's just kind of a taste of where they're coming from.
He's basically like a Sheldon Adelson type.
I don't know if anybody's that bad, but pretty close.
Yeah, he's actually the – he's the mirror image of Sheldon Adelson.
He was one of the top Democratic Party fundraisers, whereas Sheldon Adelson is one of the top Republican Party fundraisers.
And it's not just pro-Israel hawks.
It's also – the government of Qatar was one of the premier donors to Brookings, and then they set up the Brookings Doha Center on their behalf.
There's a great Washington Post investigation of Brookings.
I think it was either last year or in 2013, and I link to it in my article that goes into all of this.
They focus mainly on the foreign funding because that was the most nefarious in the Washington Post's view.
But if you look at this – at Brookings in general, it's essentially a pay-to-play research hub for all of corporate America and indeed the entire corporate world.
Awesome.
All right, now tell us all about the Atlantic Council.
Sure.
So the Atlantic Council was formed in 1961.
It was – according to its website, it was formed as a consolidation of U.S. citizen groups that were supporting NATO.
Major donors to the Atlantic Council include SAIC, EADS, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, all the usual players.
The Atlantic Council, I would say, is in a similar line – in a similar vein as Brookings in a sense that it builds itself as very centrist and it basically culls most of its intellectual prowess from the – that whole trilateral commission area of expertise in terms of the major economic centers on both the – on both sides of the Atlantic.
So if you look at the Atlantic Council, its chairman is James L. Jones, who is a former director of Boeing as well as a former director of General Dynamics.
One of its directors is Stephen Hadley.
And Stephen Hadley plays a very important part in this entire push against Russia, really beginning after the Cold War.
He was a national security advisor to George W. Bush.
He was also on the chair of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, which was a half-lobby group, half-think tank that was started in 1996 to aggressively push for including the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO, and then that resulted in massive weapons sales on behalf of mostly Lockheed Martin, basically the entire U.S. defense industry.
He was a former lawyer to – for Shea and Gardner, a D.C. boutique law firm that used to represent Lockheed Martin.
And he's currently a director at Raytheon.
Also a director of the Atlantic Council is a long-time Republican operative named Julie Finley.
She was also on the board of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.
She was famous for hosting many congresspeople at her house where they would be wined and dined and convinced to fund NATO expansion.
Also a director at the Atlantic Council is retired General James Cartwright.
He is a director at Raytheon as well.
He got $124,000 from them in 2012.
He's also an advisor to TASC, Accenture, and Enlightenment Capital, which is an investment firm with heavy defense investments.
Also a director, Atlantic Council, is Michelle Flournoy.
She's also a report – one of the report's authors.
She's a former undersecretary of defense.
And her – Well, and she's very important.
She was part of the ringleader of the Center for a New American Security counterinsurgency crowd pushing for the surge in Afghanistan and that whole little consensus with McChrystal, Petraeus, and all them, and rolling Obama, forcing Obama sort of against his will in November of 2009 to do the surge, which then she was in charge of implementing in the policy shop at the Pentagon where she failed completely.
Sorry, but important.
No, it's completely right.
And I don't focus on her in the piece because, as you said, she's more affiliated with the Center for a New American Security.
But, you know, these conclusions basically extrapolate broadly.
You can – you know, the Center for a New American Security is just as corrupted as both the Atlantic Council, Brookings, and the Chicago Council.
In fact, the Center for a New American Security, one of its former directors he recently stepped down was Norm Augustine, who was the former CEO of Lockheed Martin.
So back to the Atlantic Council, though, another director is Michael Hayden, who everyone should know is the former director of NSA and CIA.
He is also a principal at the Chertoff Group.
He serves on the board of Allianz Science and Technology and on the advisory board of Next Century Corp.
Those are both technology-related defense contractors.
And an honorary director of the Atlantic Council is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
She is a chair of the National Democratic Institute.
That's one of the organizations comprising the National Endowment for Democracy, who – which is involved heavily with USAID on all of these shady democracy promotion activities abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe.
I'm sure your audience might be familiar.
I know that Justin Raimondo has done a lot of great work on this.
The color revolutions that have occurred in many of the post-Soviet states, all of those have very strong links to the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.
And she's also the chair of Albright Capital Management, which invests in emerging markets.
Now, I haven't been able to find any investments in Ukraine just yet, but I know that in 2012, Albright Capital Management bid for a Kosovo telecom, which is pretty interesting because Madeleine Albright, in her capacity as Secretary of State, was instrumental in pushing a hard anti-Russian line in the entire Kosovo conflict.
So she is very – I would consider just as corrupt as any of the other players we're discussing.
MR.
HOFFMAN All right.
Now, in the last very little time – no, we've got none.
Well, everybody, you've got to go read it now because there's a whole section, too, on harvesting Ukraine and the role of giant agribusiness.
Monsanto.
That makes everybody alarmed.
Monsanto, everyone.
Go and finish and read this great article by Christian Stork.
It's at Medium.com.
It's the spotlight on Antiwar.com today.
Meet the forces that are pushing Obama toward a new Cold War.
Thank you very much, Christian.
Great work.
MR.
STORK Thank you, Scott.
MR.
HOFFMAN Okay, guys.
Couple of notes very quickly before we go to our next guest.
First of all, Christian Stork has a correction.
He has it right in the article, but he misstated it on the show.
It is not General Dynamics.
It's Raytheon and Lockheed that produced the Javelin missile.
So slight point of fact, but he wanted to make sure everybody's clear on that.
MR.
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