Apparently, today is “the day” where, once and for all, the public becomes privy to the greaterfacts about U.S. government double-speak concerning corporate “personhood” and we’re informed, as a country, that—a topic about which many have written for many centuries—our government’s ongoing war-planning efforts are primarily focused upon supporting the welfare and blatantly enriching the bottom lines of America’s largest corporations. Period.

Based upon articles published by Marcy Wheeler (with a big assist from Kossack joanneleon) and Glenn Greenwald over the past few hours, it would appear that our country’s military-industrial-surveillance complex has abandoned all moral pretenses when it comes to legitimizing why it must plan for war.

Finally, the truth goes mainstream––well, at least in the blogosphere…

The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy
for American CorporationsBy Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
09/05/2014 6:47 AMThroughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does **not** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line…”

The Intercept article references a document obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: a “secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office,” titled “2009 Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review,”  which “explicitly contemplates doing exactly that.” Described by reporter Glenn Greenwald as a “fascinating window into the mindset of America’s spies as they identify future threats to the U.S. and lay out the actions the U.S. intelligence community should take in response. It anticipates a series of potential scenarios the U.S. may face in 2025, from a ‘China/Russia/India/Iran centered bloc [that] challenges U.S. supremacy’ to a world in which ‘identity-based groups supplant nation-states,’ and games out how the U.S. intelligence community should operate in those alternative futures—the idea being to assess ‘the most challenging issues [the U.S.] could face beyond the standard planning cycle.'”

…One of the principal threats raised in the report is a scenario “in which the United States’ technological and innovative edge slips”— in particular, “that the technological capacity of foreign multinational corporations could outstrip that of U.S. corporations.” Such a development, the report says “could put the United States at a growing—and potentially permanent—disadvantage in crucial areas such as energy, nanotechnology, medicine, and information technology.”How could U.S. intelligence agencies solve that problem? The report recommends “a multi-pronged, systematic effort to gather open source and proprietary information through overt means, clandestine penetration (through physical and cyber means), and counterintelligence” (emphasis added). In particular, the DNI’s report envisions “cyber operations” to penetrate “covert centers of innovation” such as R&D facilities…