This week: • TWOT™ • Gaza • Vote Gringo •
• Spooks • TWOT™ game • Stuff •

 

Hot TWOT™ overtakes Cold predecessor

The military industrial complex had grown fat from the Cold War, and was caught short with the collapse of the USSR. Ever since, a right-wing clique has schemed to get the US back on the road to war. War equals money equals greatness equals POWER, so the thinking goes. Before, the government fed the military beast. Now, the complex IS the government! And the complex will use anything, absolutely anything, to ensure war is perpetual ­ a constant in Johnny Average’s mind, blaring on every news channel.

War sells, and there’s never been an administration that’s known that better than the current Oil II mafia. And the latest statistics from Oxfam suggest that the stated aims of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney — to make The War On Terror™ (TWOT™) as valuable to the Machine as its Commie bashing predecessor — has paid off.

Global military spending is set to break the previous Cold War record by the end of 2006, warned Oxfam last week.

Oxfam is calling on governments to ban arms sales that fuel poverty, conflict, and human rights abuses, by supporting an Arms Trade Treaty. A landmark vote to start work on such a treaty will take place next month in the General Assembly.

As military spending has increased, conflict has become the top cause of world hunger. Africa is particularly affected: 61per cent of African countries affected by food crises are in the grip of civil wars. In Afghanistan, 2.5 million people currently do not have enough food to eat and conflict is hampering relief efforts. During the past few months in Gaza, the ongoing conflict has left hundreds of UN food containers stranded at border posts, leaving Palestinians short of essential supplies, such as bread.

The USA and countries in the Middle East are responsible for the bulk of the growth in military spending, but some of the world’s poorest countries have also increased spending. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Botswana, and Uganda all doubled their military spending between 1985 and 2000. Between 2002 and 2003, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan spent more on their military than on health care.

“Year on year arms spending escalates and year on year conflicts are causing more hunger and suffering. Arms sales do not start conflicts, but they certainly fuel and lengthen them. It is time the world stemmed the uncontrolled flood of weapons into the world’s war zones. The world must agree to start work on an Arms Trade Treaty this October,” said Bernice Romero, Oxfam International’s Campaigns Director.

Global military spending this year is estimated to reach US$1,059bn, outstripping the highest figure reached during the Cold War in real terms, and roughly FIFTEEN times current international aid expenditure. This growth in military budgets has caused a boom for the arms industry, with the top 100 arms companies seeing their sales increase by almost 60 per cent, from US$157bn in 2000 to US$268bn in 2004.

And while the world spends more on weapons, the number and scale of conflict-related food crises is also growing. Last year, conflict became the leading cause of hunger, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Conflict and economic problems were cited as the main cause of more than 35 per cent of food emergencies between 1992 and 2003, compared to around 15 per cent in the period from 1986 to 1991.

Global military spending being FIFTEEN times current international aid expenditure — these are selfish times.

 

 

Gaza residents close to expiring

While it is as you were in Lebanon the media has, by and large, decided to forget about Israel’s daily violations in Gaza — who cares about the Palestinians — their suffering is so commonplace as to be not news worthy.

As Patrick Cockburn noted in the Independent earlier this month, “A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade.”

Israel planned this Gaza raid well in advance and used the kidnapping of one of their soldiers as the trigger to go ballistic. Since fighting kicked off in August 300 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded

As if the Israeli bombardment was not enough, extreme poverty is set to get worse. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face “a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population.” Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid.

In 2001, a dissenting Israeli official summarized his government’s policy toward the Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank thusly: “We’re strangling them to death.” Right now, they’ve flat-lined.

 

• Wanna see the Israelis taking bombing to new heights? — click here.

 

 

Gringo electoral tricks

Alarmed by the left leaning tendencies of its southern compadres, the United States took matters in to its own hands when it came to the recent Mexican elections. Rather than let democracy take its natural course and allow another person who might redistribute wealth at the expense of the multinationals the White House used a tried and tested method to ensure the result went their way, getting chum and outgoing president Vincente Fox to drastically obscure the counting process, whereby, a la Florida or Ohio in 2000 and 2004 respectively, more than a million votes were spoiled, and even huge caches of ballots were found in landfills.

The exit poll of 80,000 voters by the Instituto de Mercadotecnia y Opinion showed that Lopez Obrador beat right wing Felipe Calderon by 35.1% to 34.0%. The precinct-by-precinct returns were quite otherworldly.

The nation’s tens of thousands of polling stations report to the capital in random order after the polls close. Therefore, according to ace investigative reporter Greg Palast, statistically, you’d expect the results to remain roughly unchanged as vote totals come in. As expected, Obrador’s party was ahead of the right-wing candidate Calderon all night by an unchanging margin — until after midnight. Suddenly, precincts began reporting wins for Calderon of five to one, the ten to one, then as polling nearly ended, of one-hundred to one.

Paper ballots make democracy possible, but hardly guarantee it. “Null” votes, not voters, have chosen Mexico’s president. The only other nation with such a poisonously high percentage of “null” votes is the “Estados Unidos”, the US of A.

Ballot spoilage, not computer manipulation, stole Ohio and Florida in those elections — and will steal Colorado and New Mexico in the 2008 election.

In other words, says Palast, “we’d better stop fixating on laptop legerdemain and pledge our lives and fortunes to stopping the games played with registration rolls, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, voter ID demands and the less glamorous, yet horribly effective, methods used to suppress, invalidate and otherwise ambush the vote.” November’s Congressional vote in the US should be a Democratic given, yet since 2000 the Republicans have perfected the art of stealing elections.

 

 

Do not feed the spooks

The other day we had one of the most intriguing lunches we’ve ever attended, where we found out first hand the extraordinary ignorance of the Pentagon’s understanding of the People’s Republic of China.

The Revolution has many guises and some, believe it or not, are legitimate, nay almost respectable. And so it was that the ‘naval attaché’ from the US’ Hong Kong consul-general got in touch asking us out for a spot of lunch at the top of the American Club to discuss all things Chinese shipping related. We reached the top of the building, wondered over to the table and exchanged cards with the attaché and handed our cards to the Washington man — we didn’t get one back from him. This Johns Hopkins educated fellow tasked amusingly with being a China analyst for the Pentagon showed such an alarming ignorance over the mainland that left us nothing short of paranoid — ignorance leads to false assumptions and the way these guys think, war.

“In the event of an ‘incident’,” said the anonymous Washington defence man, “how quickly could the Ministry of Communications call in the merchant fleet to help out?”

By this point we had heard enough to know that we were dealing with an ignoramus shagwit so it was time to have some fun with that question.

“In the event of an ‘incident’ taking place,” I replied as seriously as I could muster, “the Chinese merchant fleet would be recalled so fast that by the next morning a fleet of tankers could be strung up across the Taiwan Strait from Xiamen ramming into Kaohsiung and forming a land bridge to Taiwan.”

At this the straight-faced Pentagon man barely flinched, greeting the idea with a “Huh” and then a “That’s interesting”. We left the meal, descended in the lift, guffawing at the thought that somewhere in the dark realms of the Pentagon basement someone somewhere was at that moment fixing a war simulation program with a whole host of tankers strung across the Taiwan Strait. The Pentagon’s ignorance is all of our peril.

 

 

TWOT™: the board game!

“It’s got suicide bombers, political kidnaps and intercontinental war. It’s got filthy propaganda, rampant paranoia and secret treaties… and the Axis of Evil is a spinner in the middle of the board. You can fight terrorism, you can fund terrorism, you can even be the terrorists. The only thing that matters is global domination — err, liberation.

“Everyone starts with the best intentions. Then things start to get cramped. Then you notice your neighbour has more oil than you. Before long, war is waged, nukes are dropped, revolutions are fought and terrorists are doing your dirty work, before turning on you,” so reads the website of a brand new board game called, yes you guessed it, The War on Terror, due out next month.

The game was created by web designers Andrew Sheerin and Andy Tompkins, both 30, and of Cambridge. They were castigated for promoting it on September 11 yet Tompkins neatly noted: “Some people suggest that turning the war on terror into a board game is a tad insensitive. I always reply that starting a war is insensitive; a board game is just fun for all the family.”

Check out the website it’s a blast, though like in real life we are unsure if anyone can actually win the War on Terror board game.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Video Friends of Terror — our shared responsibility in TWOT™
Professor Ted Honderich, a UK philospher casts his professional eye on TWOT™ in this Channel 5 documentary and comes up with a interesting moral philosophy twist to an argument more than a few have put forth: that Palestine is at the root of the current “clash of cultures”.

 

Media Critiques on Iraq press coverage
Dahr Jamail offers a withering broadside against AP, and reveals why the Iraq conflict continues apace despite three and a half years of almost constant moppings up, improvements, milestones and turning points as reported in the US media. Not to be outdone, MediaLens has also cast its jaundiced eye over the press coverage coming from the US’ expensive experiment in enforced “democracy”.

 

Video Halliburton convoy
Perhaps a more accurate view of how Iraq is going is graphically shown in this video shot on September 20, 2005 by KBR truck driver Preston Wheeler.

 

TWOT™’s Iraq franchise encourages torture and terror
After the WMDs were not found and congress admitted that there were no Al Qaeda links to Saddam, the US-approved casus belli was beginning to look decidedly light in the casus department. All that remained was: introducing democracy, ending the slaughter of innocent civilians, improved human rights and decreasing the risk of terrorism by “fighting them in their own backyard”. Democracy has been introduced, in name only, as the government has very little control over the country. How democratic it is also a rather moot point. The slaughter of innocents has continued unabated and possibly at an even greater rate than under Saddam. Most in the US & UK could however console themselves with at least the last two points: human rights were on the up and up, and fighting the terrorists there meant they weren’t attacking the US & UK (except for the troops). Enuff casus, one might say. Sadly for the casus belli crowd, according to the UN, torture in Iraq is currently worse than under Saddam, so bang goes the human rights. And now The New York Times and The Observer report that the US National Intelligence Estimate states the invasion of Iraq has created a flood of new Islamic terrorists and increased the danger to US interests to a higher level than at any time since the 9/11 attacks.

 

Exxon Valdez revisited
Here at the revolution we have our own shipping geeks. Greg Palast brings brilliant hidden details into the Exxon Valdez disaster here.

 

BP: Beyond Propaganda
Talking of the Exxon Valdez, Medialens has issued an alert at how the press is complicit in the “greenwashing” of corporations with special emphasis BP, and the confict of interests that is advertising.

 

Hugo a go go
Give us an H… give us a U… give us a G… give us an O… Yes we’re afraid we can’t help ourselves this week: despite looking more dodgy at home, Hugo is our god again, for the hilarious but straight-shooting UN speech. Hellfire & Brimstone! And a fresh batch of “Yankee imperialist, go home.” A phrase we haven’t heard used seriously since the ’70s. Watch and enjoy.

 

We wouldn’t wanna be: William R Brownfield
Who the heck is William R Brownfield? Billy Brownfield is the US Ambassador to Venezuela. Why wouldn’t we want to be him? Given that US authorities detained and strip-searched the Venezuelan Foreign Minister on his way home after the big UN meet, we reckon the Ambassador can expect a bit of embarrassing tit for tat next time he heads out of Venezuela. “Bend over and spread ’em, Ambassador Browneye… err …field.” The little red email is almost of a mind to send him a commiserative tube of KY.

 

9/11: Press for truth
We thought Loose Change: Second Edition couldn’t be beaten for taking down the official 9/11 story; maybe we were wrong. Check out 9/11: Press for truth for a great video that timelines events to brilliant effect.

 

Video Snuff ‘em out
Another potential 9/11 whistleblower falls by the wayside — this one poisoned before he could release crucial information.

 

Video Mibs and squibs
Check out this video showing what seem to us to be explosions at the WTC.

 

When war fails, the only option left is diplomacy
Our last issue was full of Israel’s invasion and bombing of Lebanon over the kidnapping of two of its soldiers. Now that the war failed Israel is negotiating for their return. So what was their reason for all the killing again?

 

Video 9/11 in da hood
A quick five minute rap rundown on life post 9/11.

 

Name: ChannelNews Asia   Specialised Subject: the bleeding obvious
You have got to love this headline on the Thai shenanigans: Internal political issues the likely catalyst to Thai coup: expert. Analysis of the highest order there, ChannelNews Asia: way to go!

 

Dafur Delays
The latest from Mark Fiore, “The Delaying Game” takes a snide look at Darfur — and how the world has utterly failed to prevent the genocide going on there.

 

Adbust Conan the Barbie Doll
This adbust is from Erland Howden’s flickr collection. We liked it a lot, but then we’ve always been suckers for pink stuff. It’s so nearly red.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then why is The new IPCC report on global warming set to be such a stunner?