RW ONLINE: Pentagon's Betting Parlor of Assassinations\r\n and Coups\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n Pentagon's Betting Parlor of Assassinations and Coups\r\n <\/p>
Revolutionary Worker #1209, August 10, 2003<\/i>, posted at rwor.org<\/p>\r\n
Deep within the Pentagon, a plan slowly took shape to use\r\n free market greed to predict international events. The Defense\r\n Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called their little\r\n project \"FutureMAP\" (Futures Markets Applied to Prediction).\r\n The private market, they believed, would sort out truth and\r\n rumor automatically, and without all that paper work and\r\n academic talk.<\/p>\r\n
Here is how it was supposed to work: The Pentagon would\r\n endorse a website marketplace called the Policy Analysis Market\r\n (PAM). Wealthy, anonymous people would go online to buy and\r\n sell \"futures\" on international events. Will the King of Jordan\r\n be overthrown? Who will win the next election in Iran? Will\r\n there be \"terrorist strikes\" somewhere? Will Palestinian leader\r\n Yasser Arafat be assassinated?<\/p>\r\n
The thing was patterned on the futures speculation within\r\n Chicago's Merchantile Exchange. (\"Buy pork bellies futures!\r\n Sell corn futures!\"<\/i>)<\/p>\r\n
According to FutureMAP, big-time players would register with\r\n the PAM site and deposit their money into a special account.\r\n They would bet these funds on particular world events--winning\r\n and losing money based on how events turned out.<\/p>\r\n
Senator Ron Wyden explained: \"For instance, you may think\r\n early on that prime minister X is going to be assassinated. So\r\n you buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each. As more people\r\n begin to think the person's going to be assassinated, the cost\r\n of the contract could go up, to 50 cents. The payoff if he's\r\n assassinated is $1 per future. So if it comes to pass, those\r\n who bought at 5 cents make 95 cents. Those who bought at 50\r\n cents make 50 cents.\"<\/p>\r\n
The website for FutureMAP promised: \"Whatever a prospective\r\n trader's interest in PAM, involvement in this group prediction\r\n process should prove engaging and may prove profitable.\"<\/p>\r\n
What a classic corporate \"win-win opportunity\"! Successful\r\n speculators would walk away with a rich payoff, while\r\n government officials would get a magic mechanism for predicting\r\n events.<\/p>\r\n
If the secret buying and selling was (say) \"bullish\" on a\r\n coup in Nigeria, then U.S. policy-makers would notice the\r\n \"spike\" in prices--and know that something big was up. A \"run\r\n on the market\" would send the White House a warning, all\r\n without having to wade through messy position papers or\r\n considering shades of gray!<\/p>\r\n One Little Problem\r\n
Operation FutureMAP was moving along.<\/p>\r\n
It was overseen by John Poindexter, notorious former\r\n National Security Advisor under Reagan. Under the current Bush\r\n administration, Poindexter also became the head of the\r\n military's other DARPA operation, the Terrorism Information\r\n Awareness program (TIA), designed to \"mine\" the details of our\r\n lives from countless electronic databases.<\/p>\r\n
DARPA had two private companies finalizing the details of\r\n FutureMAP--Net Exchange, a San Diego-based \"market\r\n technologies\" firm, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, an arm\r\n of the Economist<\/i> magazine. About $750,000 was spent on\r\n their work. An additional $3 million had been requested from\r\n Congress for set-up costs, plus another $5 million to run the\r\n operation into 2005.<\/p>\r\n
Registration was scheduled to begin on the first 1,000\r\n traders on August 2. Actual trading was supposed to begin on\r\n October 1, and the players were expected to reach 10,000 by\r\n January 1, 2004.<\/p>\r\n
There was only one little problem:<\/b> When news of this\r\n scheme leaked out on July 29, the world was outraged by the\r\n cold-heartedness and blinding stupidity of Bush's free-market\r\n geniuses.<\/p>\r\n What Were They Thinking?\r\n
\"Can you imagine, if another country set up a betting\r\n parlor, sponsored by the government itself, so that people\r\n could go in and bet on the assassination of an American\r\n political figure or the overthrow of this institution or that\r\n institution?!\"<\/i><\/p>\r\n
Senator Byron L.\r\n Dorgan (North Dakota), July 28<\/p>\r\n
\"What's next? Calling Psychic Hotline?\"<\/i><\/p>\r\n
The<\/i>\r\n Missourian<\/i> 's headline, July 31<\/p>\r\n
From the moment Senators Dorgan and Wyden went public on\r\n this hare-brained scheme, FutureMAP was covered in ridicule.\r\n People mocked the idea that you could predict events by having\r\n rich people bet on them. Politicians asked how it would look if\r\n the U.S. government handed out big payoffs whenever foreign\r\n officials got bumped off.<\/p>\r\n
And an obvious flaw was pointed out: The people with the\r\n best \"inside track\" would be whoever was planning some action.\r\n It is not hard to imagine the CIA (or some other shadowy\r\n outfit) betting on a coup or attack, then launching it, then\r\n walking with away with some quick funding.<\/p>\r\n
Even DARPA announced it had discovered \"technical\r\n challenges\" in their concept. They wondered if big speculators\r\n might get pissed off if they bet a lot of money behind some\r\n event--and the U.S. government then prevented<\/i> it from\r\n happening. Wouldn't they feel robbed and stop betting?<\/p>\r\n
Within one day, the whole project was laughed off the stage.\r\n The Pentagon's spokesman announced that DARPA had decided that\r\n PAM \"was not worth pursuing.\" Deputy Defense Secretary Paul\r\n Wolfowitz insisted he had never heard of the plan. Admiral\r\n Poindexter announced his resignation.<\/p>\r\n
The top Senate Republican Bill Frist said, \"I cannot\r\n conceive of any reason why the United States should be involved\r\n in a project of this nature.\" But the rest of us CAN<\/i>\r\n conceive of a reason. We can imagine those fevered little\r\n rightwing brains dreaming all this up. Anyone who has ever\r\n argued with some typical Campus Republican type knows\r\n exactly<\/i> the mix of imperialism, arrogance, ignorance,\r\n and free-market dogmatism that created FutureMAP.<\/p>\r\n
This bizarre episode is a window into a worldview.<\/p>\r\n Big Brother's Invisible Hand\r\n
\"The point is, ladies and gentlemen: greed--for the lack\r\n of a better word--is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed\r\n clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the\r\n evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms--greed for life,\r\n for money, for love, knowledge--has marked the upward surge of\r\n mankind, and greed--you mark my words--will not only save\r\n Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called\r\n the U.S.A.\"<\/i><\/p>\r\n
Gordon Gekko, in\r\n the film Wall Street<\/i><\/p>\r\n
As FutureMAP disappeared, Pentagon masterminds still\r\n defended the theory<\/i> behind it.<\/p>\r\n
The Defense Department explained in a statement: \"Research\r\n indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and\r\n timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information.\r\n Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting\r\n such things as elections results; they are often better than\r\n expert opinions.\"<\/p>\r\n
In high government offices, the \"invisible hand\" of market\r\n forces is worshiped as capitalism's great engine of rationality\r\n and efficiency. Markets and privatization are treated as an\r\n answer to virtually any<\/i> problem facing this system.<\/p>\r\n
Admiral John Poindexter, the daddy of FutureMAP, is himself\r\n a classic example of all this--he was a genuine pioneer of\r\n privatized foreign policy and war. In the 1980s, as Reagan's\r\n National Security Adviser, Poindexter helped the CIA create the\r\n private global arms corporation that secretly sold U.S. weapons\r\n to Iran, and funneled the profits to the death-squad Contras\r\n waging war against Nicaragua. One special innovation of the\r\n Iran-Contra operation was creating a privatized airlift of arms\r\n by hiring the planes of the cocaine cartels (and allowing them\r\n free border crossings in exchange). Poindexter was sentenced to\r\n prison in 1990 for lying to Congress about the CIA's \"private\"\r\n operations--and the current Bush administration put him back\r\n into power.<\/p>\r\n
We are living in a time when--under both Democratic and\r\n Republican administrations-- everything<\/i> in the world is\r\n considered ripe for privatization and U.S. takeover. The\r\n world's \"only superpower\" insists that other countries must\r\n \"open up\" their state-owned industries--and allow corporations\r\n to \"cherry pick\" the profitable parts and leave the rest to\r\n rot. All across the world this has produced empty factories,\r\n closed railroad stations, unemployed workers, and a gutting of\r\n already threadbare social services.<\/p>\r\n
Washington corridors are abuzz with schemes for privatizing\r\n Iraq from top to bottom--starting with its oilfields. Problems\r\n with occupying Iraq? Hire mercenaries. Ruined infrastructure?\r\n Hand over the country to private war profiteers like\r\n Haliburton.<\/p>\r\n
The U.S. government even proposes an international market in\r\n \"pollution credits\" -- where each country gets pollution\r\n quotas, and the poorer industrialized countries can sell<\/i>\r\n their \"pollution credits\" to wealthier ones for cash. The U.S.\r\n would get to pollute more, and poorer countries would get cash\r\n (that would quickly flow back out to the world banks).\r\n Another brilliant free market idea!<\/i><\/p>\r\n
Meanwhile, inside the U.S. itself, is there a single social\r\n function that isn't slated for free market \"improvement\"? The\r\n possibilities are endless: McPrisons, McSchools, McHospitals,\r\n McForests. We are told privatization will produce great\r\n rationalization and efficiency: High medical prices, you see,\r\n are the market's way of explaining it is irrational for you to\r\n get a new kidney. High unemployment is the market's way\r\n rationalizing your inefficient ass out of the workforce. And at\r\n the end, this is all supposed to produce a leaner, more\r\n aggressive capitalist America dominating a more efficient world\r\n empire! Meanwhile, settling to the bottom of it all, there will\r\n inevitably be billions of people--labeled \"the losers\" in\r\n free-market dogmas--who will keep sinking into deepening\r\n poverty and exploitation.<\/p>\r\n
In other words, this FutureMAP affair is just a looney tip\r\n of a much larger iceberg of raging extremism, imperialism and\r\n privatization. The Pentagon think-tankers were planning to\r\n free-marketize intelligence predictions long before planes hit\r\n the twin towers. They first contracted out their plans in May\r\n 2001, but September 11 gave them a new \"anti-terrorist\" excuse\r\n for rushing toward implementation.<\/p>\r\n
Paul Wolfowitz explained that DARPA was funded to be\r\n \"brilliantly imaginative\" and added: \"Maybe they got too\r\n imaginative in this area.\" Yeah, maybe.<\/p>\r\n
But, is it REALLY<\/i> weirder to have gamblers predicting\r\n Turkey's future than it is to believe that more greed and\r\n profit will \"improve\" education or medical care?!<\/p>\r\n
FutureMAP went public, and sank. But think of all the other\r\n gems of free market madness, known and unknown, that are\r\n working their awful magic on our futures!<\/p>\r\n
The Bush doctrine insists that the U.S. military can invade\r\n countries \"preemptively\" based simply on U.S. government\r\n predictions of future danger.<\/p>\r\n
And the FutureMAP project gives just a hint<\/i> of what\r\n passes for evidence and prediction in the corridors of the\r\n Pentagon. Isn't it pretty obvious that capitalism's true\r\n believers can't<\/i> be allowed to rule our world?<\/p>\r\n
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