Greetings friend. Recently an old drinking buddy on leave from a battleship in the Arabian Sea dropped by the Pub. If you ever wanted to know how sold-out our American government has become – how mired in the corporate quicksand and hung by a boardroom noose – just ask a soldier home from the war.
The subject is too vast for this space, so I’ll limit to a fraction the questions from the mind of this soldier on a particular morning:
The employment of Blackwater Worldwide (a private military company) and its demoralizing effects on the American Military. For whose interests does Blackwater fight?
What are the effects of too much corporate involvement in war?
Is a corporate coupe on the American government looming, or has it already happened? Could a private army take over the White House?
What are the domestic, global, and constitutional consequences when a nation of laws is mortgaged-out to the world’s largest companies and most adversarial nations? …
Presently operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans and other places there is a private army fulfilling no-bid contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, equal in presence to our own volunteer force. When it is reported that the U.S. has 130K troops in Iraq, double it for accuracy. They didn’t count Blackwater.
The average U.S. enlisted soldier earns approximately $1,200 a month. The average Blackwater soldier gets $600 a day. The behavior of the American soldier is bound by a military code of conduct, the Geneva Conventions, the pleasure of the President, and the over-sight of the Congress. The Blackwater soldier is bound to corporate guidelines, vague international law, the bottom line of an executive board and the dark vision of a billionaire CEO with deep religious-right connections — ideologically and financially — who wants to “do for the American military what Fed-Ex did for the U.S. Postal Service.” The American taxpayer pays for both.
Blackwater has its own air force, ground force, and intelligence agency. It trains 20-40 thousand new troops annually, internationally. It operates for profit. Not all troops are American.
For whom does Blackwater work? The highest bidder…
What if the highest bidder was a government or company – like China or The World Bank Group, from whom the U.S. Government had borrowed billions to finance a mad-grab for oil – and the day to pay up had arrived? Imagine 150 thousand paid mercenaries with pensions and post-war plans better than Private Ryan’s, marching on the Pentagon. America wouldn’t be the first eternal empire to fall.
But that’s too simple…
What if the President of the United States and the CEO of Blackwater were members of the same private organization, elite corporation, inducted at birth and tightly bound by an ideology of God-for-profit and the mantra of a ruling class: wealth to obtain power, power to protect wealth? 1
What if the only goal of war – our war – was to keep the ruling classes ruling, and the working classes paying for it? Did war ever have another reason?
Let us examine a small collection of facts…
President George W. Bush, whose father is an oil profiteer who shared lawyers with the Saudi Arabian Bin Laden family, is decided President by the U.S. Supreme Court after losing the popular vote to Al Gore. During a Congressional break, free of oversight, President Bush swears-in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales goes to work on a number of areas of the Constitution, chipping away at certain civil liberties, strengthening the corporate web of information and power; i.e. wire-tapping. Gonzales also changes the legal definition of torture, to exclude certain aggressive methods of information gathering like waterboarding, which had been illegal since the end of WWII when Japanese Generals were prosecuted and hung for using the very same methods. By changing the legal definition of torture, the President can now truthfully say to the American public, “America does not torture.” We hire others to do it…
Why the need for torture? To gain false information – the only kind it ever produces. False information was needed to make the case for war. War lines pockets and keeps the masses occupied.
For the first time in American history, instead of asking the American people to invest in war through labor and bonds, a U.S. President borrows billions from governments whose national ideologies are adversarial to ours, like China, in order to fund private armies and corporate contractors to destroy and rebuild a country rich with oil.
When it ain’t broke, break it and have the taxpayers pay you to fix it... So long as the American Military, and private armies, continue to need oil for fuel to roll tanks into battle for the acquisition of more oil, and the U.S. government continues offering tax cuts in trade for oil, the profits will keep the PMCs in business, and the fragile American democracy will continue to break apart.
How so? When it costs an American trucker $4 a gallon to ship e-coli contaminated food and date-rape laced, lead painted toys from China that missed inspection due to FDA cutbacks caused by the war to Katrina-torn Gulf Coast evacuees living in no-bid trailers manufactured with asbestos procured by a crony run FEMA short-handed from lack of national guardsmen state-side, thus the need to hire private security and air-lift services from companies like Blackwater, sooner or later, civility back home begins to lose a screw or two… How long before the private-army-proxies become legal corporate Pinkertons? How long before uniformed police use tazers on college students asking touchy questions of a U.S. Senator?
In my grandfather’s day, America would have cut off all trade with China until they cleaned up their act. If we cut China off today, they could call in our debt and break the nation. It’s an easy pill to swallow for an ex-president basking on a private island with retired CEOs.
Our military, once a self-contained unit, now contracts everything from food services to phone cards. When our military rolls out, so do a large number of corporations. Does anyone really expect the war to end when there is so much money in its perpetuation? Every time America picks a fight, a large corporation gets another contract. Every time America borrows money from a foreign nation waging its bets for a super power to fall, another CEO gets paid handsomely in a no-bid palm greaser, and the American taxpayer washes down an over-priced, under-insured Paxil to stave off the breakdown.
America is the Great Experiment, and the jury’s still out. In two hundred years we have yet to achieve its ideal, and lately it seems we have given up and sold out cheap. We would sell our freedom for a good cell phone plan.
What I’m trying to say is that all the conspiracy theories are quickly becoming indisputable, born-out facts. Our government and our freedom are being acquired, broken-up, and sold piecemeal by profiteers and the sons of profiteers.
There is more to honor than winning the good fight. More honorable by far, is choosing the good fight. Our enemies are at home.
Good to see you, Massey. Hope the gun gets fixed.
Thanks for reading.
1 – Medici family motto.
Parrish Baker is owner of Parrish Baker Pub on the Oxford, Mississippi Square. Email him at parrish@parrishbakerpub.com
