Tag: Think Tanks

Complicit: The Countries, Companies and Think Tanks that Support the deadly Nuclear Arms Trade

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Posted on August 8, 2021 by beyondnuclearinternational From ICAN report ..shared with thanks

A new report from ICAN — Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons spending — names names and produces some horrifying spending numbers, made all the more immoral by the desperate needs around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the ever worsening conditions brought on by the climate crisis.

Complicit: The Countries, Companies and Think Tanks that Support the deadly Nuclear Arms Trade

How the NED, Open Society Foundations and NATO collectively fund institutions driving development of Canadian political thought

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

How the NED, Open Society Foundations and NATO collectively fund institutions driving development of Canadian political thought

NATO, along with the Europeans and Americans are playing a crucial role in driving Canadian political thought. While some elements of the Canadian left understand the influence which foreign foundations and semi-NGOs play in Canadian politics, very few hard examples have been provided to back up this inherent understanding. The paranoia being spread by Canada’s political elites, think tanks and national security friendly public figures about “Russian and Chinese infiltration” and “elite capture” appears as projection, designed to deflect from the overwhelming sources of foreign financing in Canada’s civic sphere. The funders only involve themselves in Canadian civil society because there is something to be gained from it. They are responsible for part of the intellectual bedrock that upholds Canadian militarism and interventionism.

Lost In Translations – The Dangers Of Being Misled By Them

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Lost In Translations – The Dangers Of Being Misled By Them

The issue of errors in translations, innocent as well as intentionally misleading ones, may soon become an even bigger issue. The U.S. Congress is providing money to produce many more of them:

The House bill introduced by Democratic Representatives Joaquin Castro and Bill Keating and Republicans Mike Gallagher and Brian Fitzpatrick would provide for the establishment of a federally funded Open Translation and Analysis Center (OTAC) focused on China.

It would be based on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which provided translation and analysis of Soviet bloc and other foreign government media during the Cold War.

The bill calls for funding of $80 million for fiscal 2022 and that same amount annually for each fiscal year through 2026 as well as “such sums as may be necessary for each fiscal year thereafter.”

…

Referring to the acronyms of the People’s Republic of China and its ruling Communist Party and armed forces, the aide said OTAC would “systematically translate PRC/CCP/PLA speeches, documents, reports, strategies, news articles, commentaries, journal articles, procurement contracts into English and publish them freely online.”

…

Castro said that for the United States “to effectively both compete and cooperate with” countries like China and Russia it needed a better understanding of them.

“A nuanced understanding of foreign countries is impossible without reading how they communicate in their own languages,” he told Reuters.

Faux Populists Shill for the Permanent War State

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Faux Populists Shill for the Permanent War State

In 2018, the Pentagon announced a shift away from their failing policy of counterterrorism in the Middle East and North Africa toward a new National Defense Strategy of so called “Great Power Competition,” with Russia and China. Instead of turning toward peace, free trade, and diplomacy, this policy change will come at enormous opportunity costs such as further distorting our economy, practically guaranteeing boom-bust cycles of ever intensifying severity, as well as reducing the average American’s standard of living. It would impoverish the very people who desire genuine populism.

Old Normal vs New: From 1980s Neoliberalism to the ‘Great Reset’

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Old Normal vs New: From 1980s Neoliberalism to the ‘Great Reset’

Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny).