Weapons corporations infiltrate our schools and charities, promoting war-mongering to our youth
REPUTATION LAUNDERING,
https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/03/31/reputation-laundering/ DeclassifiedAUS2 The weapons companies spruiking the ‘benefits and opportunities’ of the wars in Ukraine and Yemen and tensions in the South China Sea are infiltrating our schools., MICHELLE FAHY, 31 MARCH 2022
A Lockheed Martin missile blows up a school bus in Yemen, while in Australia the company gains kudos by sponsoring the National Youth Science Forum.
BAE Systems supports the education of kids in Australia, while being complicit in the killing of thousands of children in Yemen.
Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons-maker, is raking in billions from ongoing wars like the four-week Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the eight-year long Saudi-led war in Yemen.
A Lockheed Martin laser-guided bomb blew up a bus full of Yemeni school children in 2018, killing 40 children and injuring dozens more.
Meanwhile, in Australia, Lockheed Martin was busy cultivating kudos with kids as major sponsor of the National Youth Science Forum, a registered charity originally set up by Rotary.
Then there’s US missile-making giant Raytheon which now has a significant new manufacturing facility in Australia. It has continued to supply the Saudi-led coalition with weapons for the Yemen war, despite extensive evidence pointing to war crimes arising from its missiles being used to target and kill civilians.
In January 2022, a Raytheon missile killed at least 80 people and injured over 200 in a so-called precision strike in Sa’adah in Yemen.
Within days of this horrific incident, Raytheon’s CEO was telling investors that rising tensions represented “opportunities for international sales” and he fully expected to “see some benefit” from “the tensions in Eastern Europe [and] the South China Sea”.
There’s no mention in Australia’s media of the big profits Raytheon is making from the Yemen war, which has now entered its eighth year, killed or injured at least 19,000 civilians, and possibly many more, and also caused the deaths of tens of thousands of children through starvation, due to disruption of food supplies and militarily-enforced trade blockade.
Instead, we’ve seen pictures of Aussie school kids having fun with the Australian snowboarding Paralympian who Raytheon Australia hired to front the launch of its Maths Alive! educational exhibition.
And we also heard about Raytheon’s sponsorship of Soldier On and the Invictus Games, despite the irony of a weapons company using its support of injured military personnel as a public relations exercise.
There’s a name for this cynical behaviour by corporations: ‘reputation laundering’.
Weapons companies are now ‘Innovators’
The world’s weapons producers have also taken to promoting themselves as ‘innovators’ in the areas of science, technology, engineering and maths, called STEM.
This enables them to target children and young people as future employees (see, for example, BAE Systems Australia, Boeing Defence Australia, and Saab Australia), often with the willing partnership of respected institutions. Many Australian universities now have MOUs, joint ventures, strategic partnerships, or other forms of collaboration with the weapons industry.
This enthusiastic support of STEM serves a double purpose: reputation laundering, and a socially acceptable way to promote the weapons industry as a future employer directly to children and their parents.
Promoting STEM education is essential to creating a well-trained workforce for key industries of the future, particularly those that can tackle the existential risks associated with climate change. The concern with the weapons industry’s activities in this domain is the way it is using STEM to target children as young as primary school age for weapons-making careers, often with the support of government.
The spin and glamour being associated with Australia’s increased militarism is a concern on several levels, particularly as the marketing omits pertinent information: weapons and warfare aren’t mentioned.
Nor is there information about how children might use their STEM skills to enhance the ‘lethality’ of their employer’s products.
Nor about a future in which the need for human involvement in the ‘kill chain’ is eliminated by creating autonomous robots to make life and death decisions instead. (This is not science fiction, these research and development programs are already happening.)
Working for companies involved with nuclear weapons isn’t discussed, either.
Instead, a world of euphemism has been created: ‘advanced technology systems, products and services’, ‘high end technology company’, ‘leading systems integrator’, ‘security and aerospace company’, ‘defence technology and innovation company’.
It is also likely to be weapons company marketing material if the phrase ‘solving complex problems’ appears, especially if accompanied by claims of ‘making the world safer.
None of these euphemisms conjures up realistic images of the bloody and brutal destruction the world is witnessing in the world’s latest war in Ukraine.
The ways global weapons giants have cultivated relationships with organisations of good purpose in Australia is highlighted in the following examples.
Lockheed Martin and the National Youth Science Forum
The National Youth Science Forum was created by Rotary, which remains involved. The Forum, now a not-for-profit organisation overseen by a board, has numerous programs, the flagship program being for Year 12 students interested in a career in science.
“The ban treaty embodies the collective moral revulsion of the international community,” according to the Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University, Professor Ramesh Thakur.
Lockheed Martin and the Gallipoli Sponsorship Fund
In 2020, Lockheed Martin Australia became the first corporate sponsor of the Gallipoli Scholarship Fund and provides $120,000 to fund 12 Lockheed Martin Australia bursaries for the educational benefit of descendants of Australian military veterans.
Lockheed Martin is providing these Australian educational bursaries through to the end of 2023, with an opportunity to extend.
Referring to Lockheed Martin as a “defence technology and innovation company”, the Gallipoli Sponsorship Fund’s website also does not disclose Lockheed’s status as the world’s dominant weapons-maker nor its position as a major nuclear weapons producer.
BAE Systems and The Smith Family
This example illustrates that public pressure can and does make a difference.
The UK’s largest weapons-maker, BAE Systems, has been working inside Saudi Arabia supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s role in Yemen since the start of the war.
A BAE maintenance employee was quoted in 2019 saying, “If we weren’t there, in 7 to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.” BAE Systems has sold nearly £18 billion worth of weaponry to the Saudis since the war in Yemen started in 2014.
Yet in Australia, BAE Systems started a $100,000 partnership with The Smith Family in August 2020, sponsoring a STEM education program for under-privileged children.
BAE’s role helping the Saudis prolong one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in Yemen was pointed out numerous times to The Smith Family, a children’s charity, after news broke of its BAE sponsorship.
The Smith Family initially resisted but after increasing pressure and activism from peace organisations and many complaints from the public, The Smith Family soon dropped its controversial ‘partnership’ with BAE Systems Australia, mere months after it had started.
Morally indefensible positions
Benign-sounding sponsorships of Australian school children such as these might appear less self-serving if weapons companies behaved consistently and stopped supplying weapons to those nations known to be serial abusers of human rights.
Saying they are merely doing the bidding of their governments in supplying the Saudis, and other abusive and repressive regimes, as these companies have, is not a morally defensible position.
It is particularly not defensible in the face of evidence of ongoing war crimes being committed using their weaponry.
MICHELLE FAHY is an independent writer and researcher, specialising in the examination of connections between the weapons industry and government, and has written in various independent publications. She is on twitter @FahyMichelle, and on Substack at UndueInfluence.substack.com An earlier version of this article was published in Michael West Media in November 2020.
NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner Australia to deliver armored vehicles to Ukraine
Ukranews
April 1, 2022
Australia To Send Bushmaster Armored Personnel Carriers To Ukraine – Yermak
Australia will send Bushmaster armored personnel carriers to Ukraine.
Head of the Presidential Office, Andrii Yermak, has written this on Telegram, Ukrainian News Agency reports.
As Ukrainian News Agency reported, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an address to the Australian Parliament, asked Australia to provide Ukraine with Bushmaster armored vehicles and invited to take part in the project to restore the southern regions of Ukraine.
====
Rustavi2
April 1, 2022
Australia to send armored vehicles to Ukraine after request
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Australia will send armored Bushmaster vehicles to Ukraine after President specifically asked for them while appealing to Australian lawmakers for more help in Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Australian Parliament on Thursday and asked for the Australian-made, 4-wheel-drive vehicles.
Morrison told reporters the vehicles will be flown over…
View original post 54 more words
Chernobyl: radiation sickness in soldiers, theft of radioactive materials, wildfires – a frightening case of the multiple dangers of nuclear power.
Russian soldiers in Chernobyl suffering from radiation poisoning, Several Russian soldiers in Chernobyl have fallen sick with radiation sickness after digging trenches in contaminated forests, news.com.au , Katie Davis and The Sun, 1 Apr 22,
Dozens of Russian troops stationed at the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine have reportedly been struck down with radiation sickness after digging trenches in the contaminated forests.
Seven buses of soldiers suffering from acute radiation syndrome were taken from the exclusion zone to a hospital across the border in Belarus, The Sun reports.
Chernobyl was captured in the opening days of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops. However it was the site of a nuclear disaster in 1986 when a reactor exploded, contaminating the surrounding area.
As Russian soldiers took hold of the site, it sparked fears of a major radioactive disaster as a result of heavy fighting around the plant
Already, just three days after entering the area, the disturbing of soil by military vehicles saw radiation levels spike.
It also has been alleged Russian troops dug trenches in the highly toxic Red Forest zone, according to UNIAN News Agency.
And according to workers at the site, Russian soldiers drove their tanks and armoured vehicles without radiation protection through the area – kicking up clouds of radioactive dust.
A Chernobyl employee branded their actions as “suicidal” because the dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies.
The two Ukrainian sources said soldiers in the convoy did not use any anti-radiation gear while in the Red Forest – the most contaminated part of the zone around Chernobyl.
Dozens of Russian troops stationed at the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine have reportedly been struck down with radiation sickness after digging trenches in the contaminated forests.
Seven buses of soldiers suffering from acute radiation syndrome were taken from the exclusion zone to a hospital across the border in Belarus, The Sun reports.
Chernobyl was captured in the opening days of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops. However it was the site of a nuclear disaster in 1986 when a reactor exploded, contaminating the surrounding area.
As Russian soldiers took hold of the site, it sparked fears of a major radioactive disaster as a result of heavy fighting around the plant.
Already, just three days after entering the area, the disturbing of soil by military vehicles saw radiation levels spike.
It also has been alleged Russian troops dug trenches in the highly toxic Red Forest zone, according to UNIAN News Agency.
And according to workers at the site, Russian soldiers drove their tanks and armoured vehicles without radiation protection through the area – kicking up clouds of radioactive dust.
A Chernobyl employee branded their actions as “suicidal” because the dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies. The two Ukrainian sources said soldiers in the convoy did not use any anti-radiation gear while in the Red Forest – the most contaminated part of the zone around Chernobyl.
Yaroslav Yemelianenko, an employee at the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management, said Russian troops were taken to the Belarusian centre of radiation medicine in Gomel.
“Digging the trenches in the Rudu forest?” he wrote on Facebook. “Now live the rest of your short life with this.
“There are rules of handling this territory. They are mandatory to perform because radiation is physics – it works regardless of status or chases………………
Radioactive material stolen from Chernobyl
Earlier this week, it was reported that radioactive material was stolen from the site of the damaged nuclear power station…………………….
Ukraine’s State Agency blamed Russian troops for stealing “unstable” nuclear samples from Chernobyl after ransacking a lab.
They are believed to have then destroyed the November Central Analytical Laboratory which was full of nuclear waste and located in the radioactive exclusion zone.
The agency said the stolen radionuclides are “highly active”…………
Just last week, wildfires around Chernobyl sparked by Russian shelling scorched 10,000 hectares of forest.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk accused Russia of “irresponsible” acts around the Chernobyl power station as she urged the United Nations to dispatch a mission to assess the risks.
She claimed Russian forces were preventing firefighters from bringing large numbers of fires in the zone under control……….
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Lyudmila Denisova warned an increased level of radioactive air pollution could threaten neighbouring countries.
“Control and suppression of fires is impossible due to the capture of the exclusion zone by Russian troops,” she wrote on Facebook.
“As a result of combustion, radionuclides are released into the atmosphere, which are transported by wind over long distances. This threatens radiation to Ukraine, Belarus and European countries.”
The politician warned that failing to intervene could see “irreparable consequences” for “the whole world”.
“Catastrophic consequences can be prevented only by immediate de-occupation of the territory by Russian troops,” Ms Denisova said………… https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/russian-soldiers-in-chernobyl-suffering-from-radiation-poisoning/news-story/d98c53269a9602841331453438c482dd
Caitlin Johnstone: The Target is China
One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world. If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.
On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/01/caitlin-johnstone-the-target-is-china/ April 1, 2022 The Pentagon’s current strategy document clearly identifies Enemy No. 1. And it’s not Russia. By Caitlin Johnstone, CaitlinJohnstone.com
The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the U.S. war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.
You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the U.S. power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy No. 1 in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The U.S. “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
“The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”
The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:
-Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
-Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
-Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
-Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem”
“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.
Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the U.S.-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.
“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.
And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years. It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the U.S. intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.
The U.S. government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world. During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the U.S.S.R., which was when we saw business ties between China and the U.S. lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the U.S. as an economic superpower.
Once the U.S.S.R. ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.
In what history may one day view as the U.S. empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy No. 1 in China. Instead, the exact opposite happened.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the U.K., the U.S., because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come groveling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship. NATO just kept on expanding and the empire got increasingly aggressive and belligerent in its games of global conquest.
This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once. Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.
And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the U.S. empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:
On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the U.S. empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”
Basically, all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.
This is the Hail Mary pass of the U.S. hegemon; its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it. Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature. The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.
One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world. If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.
Coastal communities across the world already feeling the impacts of climate change.
Coastal communities across the world are already feeling the disastrous
impacts of climate change through variations in extreme sea levels. These
variations reflect the combined effect of sea-level rise and changes in
storm surge activity.
Understanding the relative importance of these two
factors in altering the likelihood of extreme events is crucial to the
success of coastal adaptation measures. Existing analyses of tide gauge
records agree that sea-level rise has been a considerable driver of trends
in sea-level extremes since at least 1960.
However, the contribution from
changes in storminess remains unclear, owing to the difficulty of inferring
this contribution from sparse data and the consequent inconclusive results
that have accumulated in the literature. Here we analyse tide gauge
observations using spatial Bayesian methods to show that, contrary to
current thought, trends in surge extremes and sea-level rise both made
comparable contributions to the overall change in extreme sea levels in
Europe since 1960.
We determine that the trend pattern of surge extremes
reflects the contributions from a dominant north–south dipole associated
with internal climate variability and a single-sign positive pattern
related to anthropogenic forcing. Our results demonstrate that both
external and internal influences can considerably affect the likelihood of
surge extremes over periods as long as 60 years, suggesting that the
current coastal planning practice of assuming stationary surge extremes
might be inadequate.
Nature 30th March 2022
Hotter Antarctic summers posing increasing threat to stability ofworld’s largest ice sheet
Hotter Antarctic summers posing increasing threat to stability of
world’s largest ice sheet, satellite observations show. The East
Antarctic ice sheet is the biggest land-based piece of frozen water on the
planet. It holds about 80 per cent of all ice in the world, stretching up
to 4,800 metres in thickness in some places, and containing enough water to
raise global sea levels by 52 metres. Humans are generally keen for it to
stay in place. But new research shows that warmer summers due to the
worsening climate crisis are seriously threatening the floating ice shelves
which fringe the ice sheet, helping hold it in place.
Independent 31st March 2022
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/antarctic-heat-ice-sheet-threat-b2048301.html
Conservationists in bid to kill WA’s last uranium project
Conservationists in bid to kill WA’s last uranium project
While investors cheered the merger of uranium hopefuls Vimy Resources and Deep Yellow this week, conservationists began steeling themselves for the fight of their lives against its flagship Mulga Rock project.
It’s been three years, but tourism operators say there’s no sign of $276m promised for Kakadu National Park
Hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to an Australian world heritage site has been left sitting in the bank as tourism operators scream out for new facilities.
Wondering when the wet weather soaking Australia’s east coast will end? The news isn’t good
Wondering when the wet weather soaking Australia’s east coast will end? The news isn’t good
A wetter than average April to June is likely for parts of eastern and northern Australia, meaning the risk of widespread flooding persists in many hard-hit areas, which already have full catchments and wet soils.
Taylor calls on carbon market players to defend offsets scheme labelled a “fraud” — RenewEconomy
Taylor calls for carbon market players to defend government’s troubled carbon offset scheme, but refuses to help drive the market by imposing stronger emissions caps. The post Taylor calls on carbon market players to defend offsets scheme labelled a “fraud” appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Taylor calls on carbon market players to defend offsets scheme labelled a “fraud” — RenewEconomy
April 1 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “The World Is Stuck Between Gas Prices And Climate Change” • The West needs more oil now. The world needs to get off oil and gas ASAP. It is an epic quandary of the oil addiction that runs the world economy. President Joe Biden announced a plan he said would address all of […]
April 1 Energy News — geoharvey
1.This month.
The Road to War brings a sharp focus to why it is not in Australia’s best interest to be dragged into a war with China which will almost inevitably go nuclear very quickly. The filmmaker has interviewed some of Australia’s senior foreign policy analysts who have vast experience behind them in analysing what really is going on here as the United States rattles its sabres with China. And sets us up to be its proxy, like the poor Ukranians have been fed into the Meatgrinder. So America can remain the Top Dog. The Road to War reveals how the United States through its spy base at Pine Gap and by stationing six nuclear capable B52 bombers in the Top End (without permission from the traditional owners) is making Australia a prime nuclear target if the current war of words suddenly melts down into full scale war.
The Road to War shows the implicit connection between Carbon emissions (the US military uses a whopping 70% of America’s annual petroleum to move its armies and vast War Machine around the globe to its 800+ military bases..but under a loophole wangled at Kyoto, the US military does not have to report its C02 annual emissions). The Road to War starts screening at selected cities and regional centres in March. See the trailer end for details.
Antinuclear 