Sunday, July 8, 2012

Military-Industrial Kleptocracy


By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch The Military Solution
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/12312-focus-the-dark-side-of-roberts-ruling

[Excerpted] In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of “privatization” and now goes to war with the Pentagon.  With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded.  There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors,  all enswathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large,  mainly under the Pentagon’s aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington—and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized.  

Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own “covert” drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere.  Its director, a widely hailed retired four-star general, was previously the U.S. war commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the National Intelligence Director who oversees the whole intelligence labyrinth is a retired Air Force lieutenant general.  

In a sense, even the military has been “militarized.” In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding,  has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces. As the CIA’s drones have become the president’s private air force, so the special ops troops are his private army, and are now given free rein to go about the business of war in their own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from what are normally considered America’s war zones....

Majia Here  Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex is more relevant now than ever before.

Furthermore, the growing privatization of the military industrial complex means that there is even less transparency than ever before (not that there ever was much).

Here is an essay about the kleptocratic nature of the growing military industrial complex:

By William Astore at Commond Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/21-1

"Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system. War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their "expertise" in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides..."


Majia here: The US is evolving into a fascist, militaristic state. The state will eat its own.

Influence Industry: Little lobbying opposition to bill opening up U.S. airspace to drones. By Dan Eggen & T.W. Farnam. Washington Post April 26, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/little-lobbying-opposition-to-bill-opening-up-us-airspace-to-drones/2012/04/25/gIQAPIrphT_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&sub=AR


RELATED POSTS

Drone Makers and their Friends
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/kpbs-drone-makers-and-their-friends-in.html

Forging the American Garrison State by Privatizing the State's Repressive Apparatuses
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/forging-american-garrison-state-by.html

The Surveillance Society Meets Robotic Warfare http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/surveillance-society-meets-robotic.html

Despotism http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/despotism.html

Fascism at your local police force
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/fascism-at-your-local-us-police-force.html


1 comment:

  1. The U.S. Constitution has 4,400 words. It is the oldest and shortest written Constitution of any major government in the world.". The 600 billion defense spending appropriated by congres really takes the cake, the biggest kleptocracy, but completely legal, due to the text in the constitution. The constitution doesnt specify neither an upper dollar limit, nor an overkill factor, how many times over us military must win any real or theoretical opponent. The US congress probably would spend the entire tax revenue on arms deals, if they could get their wicked ways. Did anybody withness the furor when Obama helped Libya without congress involvement. Then the extremists attack of US embassy in Libya, but now the opposite, the event was not announced with language that is incendiary enough to get the wheels rolling for the next military spending spree. The motive for the rage from GOP's Mitt Romney was so thinly veiled, that it was disguting to watch.

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