If the scenario of minority governance painted by Ezra Klein–about which I blogged a few days ago–persists, if the current iteration of the Republican Party continues to control all three branches of America’s government despite being the choice of a dwindling minority of America’s voters, what can we expect?
Rather obviously, we can anticipate tax and spending policies benefitting the rich and well-connected at the expense of the rest of us. And speaking of the rich and well-connected, there have recently been several reports involving rich and connected Erik Prince, and his “vision” of privatized warfare.
Prince is Betsy DeVos’ brother, and the former head of Blackwater. Actually, former is a misnomer: Blackwater still exists, but its name was changed after it became a dirty word.
According to the Washington Post,
More than a year after his plan to privatize the Afghan war was first shot down by the Trump administration, Erik Prince returned late last month to Kabul to push the proposal on the beleaguered government in Afghanistan, where many believe he has the ear — and the potential backing — of the U.S. president.
That speculation continues, despite a statement from the President of Afghanistan to the effect that the country would “under no circumstances” allow the counterterrorism fight to become a “private, for-profit business.” American military figures are equally negative
At the Pentagon, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, told reporters that “I absolutely do not agree” with Prince’s contention that he could win the war more quickly and for less money with a few thousand hired guns.
In addition to such a plan violating signed agreements with the Afghan government, Votel said, “the most significant downside is that we turn our national interest over to contractors.” Quoting earlier comments by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Votel said, “I don’t think this is a very good strategy.”
The fact that people who understand warfare are negative only goes so far with a President who thinks his gut knows more than “the generals” (or climate scientists, or economists, or pretty much anyone). The article notes the existence of
a widespread belief in Kabul and Washington that Prince has a willing audience in President Trump, who is known to be frustrated with the cost and slow progress of the strategy he adopted a year ago — a belief buttressed by the White House’s refusal to reject the idea out of hand.
The Afghans aren’t convinced; Qadir Shah, spokesman for the country’s National Security Council, has been quoted as saying that Prince possesses a “colonialist type of arrogance” and is “a war profiteer who stands to make $10 billion a year from such a plan,” assessments that are hard to dispute.
Since severing his ties to Blackwater — the company he founded that was accused of heavy-handed practices, including the killing of civilians, while under U.S. contract in Iraq — Prince has cycled through several iterations of the same business and now runs a Hong Kong-based company called Frontier Services.
It isn’t simply that Prince is an out-and-out profiteer, an accused murderer, and as despicable as (although clearly brighter than) his sister. Privatizing war is a terrible idea, and we’ve already gone too far down that path. In 2005, I wrote a paper titled “Outsourcing Patriotism” about dubious practices during the Iraq War.
During that war, private corporations were the second biggest contributor to coalition forces after the Pentagon, and nearly a third of the budget earmarked that year for the war, or $30 billion dollars, went to private companies. Wherever possible, soldiers were replaced with highly paid civilians not subject to standard military discipline. As I noted at the time, whether such contractors are mercenaries (whose use is banned by the Geneva conventions) is one concern, but the practice raised much graver issues, among them whether the ability to “hire” soldiers allows policymakers to wage war by proxy and without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject.
In such a world, Congressman X doesn’t have to come home and justify sending a constituent’s son or daughter to war. In such a world, lobbyists for companies being hired to fight would agitate for military rather than diplomatic “solutions” to international issues. And in such a world, those companies would inevitably be available to the highest bidder, not just to the U.S.–and to the extent they employed former members of our armed forces, our tactics and capacities would become an open book our enemies could read.
But people like Erik Prince would make a lot of money. And idiots like Donald Trump wouldn’t understand why hiring soldiers wasn’t a great idea.
Trump’s imperial guard. Now that is one very scary thought.
By any measure Blackwater/Frontier Services are mercenaries. W’s wars employed thousands and thousands of them. So did Obama. The fact that using mercenaries is a violation of the Geneva conventions was not troubling to W who used rendition, torture, and an illicit prison at Guantanamo–also in violation of those same conventions.
Along with privatizing prisons and profiting from that atrocity, mercenaries are the final step in a long list of illegal/immoral decisions by our national leaders. When one considers the violent overthrow of the Iranian elected government and installation of the Shah, propping up a puppet government in South Viet Nam, the coup against Aristide in Haiti, Pinochet in Chile and countless other U.S. backed coups/revolutions in South America–each one replacing a duly elected government with a U.S. backed dictatorship (except in Viet Nam where we had our ass handed to us), we as a nation have a shameful history of interference with, and destruction of democracies throughout the globe.
In Noam Chomsky’s treatise, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, one can find a cogent and revealing discussion of just this subject. I highly recommend it.
We must resist these policies at every turn. Too much profit is generated by innocent deaths; too much policy is dictated by the bottom line, and too little concern is given to our moral responsibilities. If there is a hell for countries we are, as my grandmother would say, “headed there in a handbasket.”
Mea Culpa: I should have said “the installation of Pinochet in Chile”
This morning I awoke to the news…or announcements from Trump…that he will give middle-Americans a new tax cut and will end the nuclear pact between U.S. and Russia. Ending that pact, which can mean the start of a new arms war between U.S. and Russia; China will become part of this picture because they have never ceased increasing their arms buildup. Add to that Trump dumping NATO, the environmental Paris Agreement and leaving the UN Human Rights Council and that does present a more important “New World Order” picture of this country than another tax cut…which will increase our current budget deficit due to the already imposed large tax cut to the wealthy in addition to the tax cut George W left behind. And, sadly yes, President Obama did not end on the date George W had set.
For those of you who are against changing or ending the Electoral College regarding the presidential election, or are not interested in changing the current red state law that all members are required to vote for the state favorite rather than allowed to vote their conscience, there is an issue you should consider. Totaling Hillary Clinton’s popular vote with Jill Stein’s, Gary Johnson’s and those mostly Bernie Bot write-ins…more people in this country voted AGAINST Trump in the popular vote than vote for him yet there he is dragging this country down to the “shithole” level of countries he did not want to help after disasters and no other countries will want to come to our aid…WHEN we need them.
Congress is filled with those Republicans such as Corker and Flake who spoke publicly against Trump’s words and actions and those others of his own party who spoke against him in private but all voted FOR him when it came time to show their true selves. This, people, is our “New World Order” and Betsy DeVos’ brother Eric Prince is waiting in the wings with his Blackwater troops at the ready when all nuclear control pacts are ended for us as a country by Trump who won the presidency with more people voting AGAINST him than voted for him.
VOTE BLUE!
While I do not disagree with the criticism of Erik Prince, we in fact do “hire soldiers” and war profiteering is ubiquitous. That’s the more fundamental underlying reality we often choose to ignore.
“On Sept. 16, 2007, a convoy of Blackwater contractors guarding State Department employees entered a crowded square near the Mansour district in Baghdad, Iraq. But versions of what caused the ensuing bloodshed diverge. Employees from the firm claim they were attacked by gunmen and responded within the rules of engagement, fighting their way out of the square after one of their vehicles was disabled. Iraqi police and witnesses instead report that the contractors opened fire first, shooting at a small car driven by a couple with their child that did not get out of the convoy’s way as traffic slowed. At some point in the 20-minute gunfight, Iraqi police and army forces stationed in watchtowers above the square also began firing. Other Iraqi security forces and Blackwater quick-reaction forces soon reportedly joined the battle. There are also reports that one Blackwater employee may even have pointed his weapon at his fellow contractors, in an effort to get them to cease firing.
Since then, the Iraqi and U.S. governments have launched separate investigations, likely ensuring that the differing versions of the story will never meet. The only thing agreed upon is the consequences: After a reported 20 Iraqi civilians were killed, including the couple and their child, who was subsequently burned to the mother’s body after the car caught fire, the Iraqi government and populace exploded with anger.”
Just an example of Prince’s Blackwater troop action; do we have access to the outcome of our own government’s investigation into this attack? Or is that investigation another “fundamental underlying reality we often choose to ignore.”?
VOTE BLUE!
John is absolutely correct. Our “all volunteer” army is a first step. Even though the army is made up primarily of U.S. residents, what it boils down to is paid, professional soldiers.
It should worry everyone that we will soon be left standing alone on a world stage that requires cooperation to accomplish even the smallest of victories.
VOTE BLUE!
JoAnn,
Worried about Trump withdrawing from a 1987 nuclear pact? Not to worry we are still “protected” by 2010 START in which each side (Russia and U.S.) is left “with a reliable ability to destroy up to 300 urban targets each.”
Source: http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/pub1103.pdf
We should all sleep well.
John; loss of any of the pacts Trump has pulled us from is like leaving gaps in a fence or holes in your roof, every little bit helps. He is simply removing more regulations which were set by anyone other than himself. Why Congress is allowing it to continue is where the answers lay. Withdrawing from that 1987, decades old pact, leaves that gap in the fence or hole in the roof giving him easier access to put START into action. Remember some of his campaign questions; “If we have nukes, why can’t we just use them?” and “Why don’t we just nuke ’em?” There is a “method to his madness”; if we could understand what is inside the minds of those who are senile, suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, we would find their reasoning – however senseless it is in reality. His reasoning is usually his ego; nothing more and nothing less, he is building his presidential legacy to this country with each of his senseless Tweets and insane actions.
VOTE BLUE! Let’s “clean House” and “clean out the Senate” while we are at it.
One would think that Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to do in the “Hired Hessians” would be a lesson worth remembering, or that various Geneva protocols would end the idea of hiring killers, oops, I mean soldiers under Erik’s control rather than that of political figures subject to public control, but one would be wrong. It appears that capitalism, or privatizing of everything and everybody, has found that there are big bucks in killing people as well as building state of the art planes, more deadly bombs etc. for oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and politically-rich Israel who, respectively, have their problems with the Yemenis and Palestinians, but flag-waving shareholders and executives of Lockheed and Raytheon would disagree, as would congressmen whose districts big “defense industries” grace.
The fundamental problem is one of public or private control and removal of profit as an incentive for policy. Our present system makes our service people killers at the beck and call of our politicians in order to enforce “policy” just as Prince’s people are, but the difference is in who gives the enforcement orders. We have already wastefully farmed out hundreds of billions of dollars annually for the manufacture of planes and bombs to our “defense industries,” large hunks of which are paid to the executives and shareholders of such “industries.” We could nationalize such “industries” and save taxpayers untold billions annually but, Horrors! That would be socialism and is to be avoided at all costs! Our warlike instincts are thus already farmed out in substantial part to private enterprise; Prince just wants to take it one step further, adding killer personnel to building better bombs for export, thus adding Hessians to our payroll (with a healthy cut of such appropriations to his Swiss accounts and that of his shareholders). I think our present murder for profit system is wrong and inhumane but I don’t want to make it worse with killers like Prince making public policy. The good news? With a Democratic House (keeper of the purse), we could deny appropriations to such a plan should Trump endorse publicly funded-privately-run war games.
Wray,
You stated, ‘Along with privatizing prisons and profiting from that atrocity, mercenaries are the final step in a long list of illegal/immoral decisions by our national leaders. ” You should change the word “final” to “latest”. These bastards aren’t done.
Today’s blog is certainly one of the more disturbing written here. It shows how terribly close we, the United States, are to anarchy and a tyrannical dictatorship operated by a crime family whose head is a true, uncompromised despot. Power is truly run amok in our country and the Constitution is flouted daily by a man and his complicit party – and their criminal associates like Erik Prince and his dumb-assed sister – whose certain intent is to rule, not govern.
If these mid-term elections don’t adequately repudiate this cabal of villains, then we may not have another election.
Our United States of America were acquired or taken from whom?
Einstein in the 40’s said we must evolve past the predatory mindset of human development. Much of what I see at the World Economic Forum concerns itself with these problems and solutions but convincing someone with a pea-sized sized brain is futile.
Capitalism only works if highly regulated. We have been operating under steroid capitalism for decades. Neoliberalism started under Reagan/Thatcher. When Lindsey Graham opens his mouth Big Defense does the speaking.
Profiteers always believe they can do things better than the collective government. But as we ‘ve discussed many times in this blog, the profiteers want to circumvent the laws (locally, nationally and internationally) and most of all, they want to socialize the costs.
Our commons have been exploited for profit while leaving us with the bill to clean up the social costs related to food, health, energy, etc.
We absolutely must move past this predatory phase of human development because we cannot maintain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. Period.
This is why socialism or social planning becomes so critical. Neither political party is conscious of this. Progressives embrace the sustainable models emerging across the globe, but capitalists and parties owned by capitalists won’t consider it as long as the stock market keeps rising.
Prince and his sister are products of our meritocracy age of monied entitlement. Naomi Klein would call them Pampered Princelings. They were born rich which means that God must have chosen them to lead. I believe there are biblical lessons about this but may be wrong…
A corporations only responsibility is to its shareholders. It has zero social responsibility. War profiteering fits this mold perfectly because they can do whatever they see fit to get the job without being held accountable. The likes of Trump will push this to the very edge of the abyss because the ends always justify the means.
Pampered Princelings use their money and blame other people for their negative choices. When you can buy away your negative consequences, you’ll not learn a damn thing. You’ll never mature beyond being a taker.
Kind of sounds like the USA…doesn’t it? Those organizations holding us accountable…well, Trump has simply withdrawn from to the cheers of #MAGA. 😉
Well I don’t know about a dwindling number of voters – if any thing a lot of folks who didn’t vote before ARE voting and they are PISSED. (as am I!)
Another thing; you can only press a people so far and things begin to get edgy. mr. wannabe dictator and his imps should make note of that. Some folks remember that freedom is hard fought for – and they are not afraid to do so if need be. And that is not a threat – that is fact. And they can call me and my fellows a ‘mad mob of liberals’… no we are not ‘mad’ we are aware that they do not even consider us human! And THAT is untenable. We are not dead, we are not weak, and we are not ‘consumers’ and we sure are not FASCISTS – we are American Citizens – and we will fight for our Freedom and our Constitutional Rights! Have done it before and will do it again. And DAMN THE FASCISTS!!! SO let those who will – tell us we have no power… they will soon answer for their crimes!
I thought that the shooting war that will displace the propaganda war for America would end up between our military and the NRA. Paying the NRA army by making them mercenaries under a war lord is a disturbing wrinkle.
To the folks here who compare that outcome to the fact that soldiers have always been paid: it’s not the soldiers who are the problem, it’s the command and control of them that is. That was always the flaw in the NRA army strategy. They had a significant and competitive number of soldiers with boots on the ground but totally inadequate command and control to have a chance against our military. This may well be the plot to correct that.
The military vs propaganda war against freedom is the gift from the Bush’s and Cheney that just keeps on giving. Our endless holy war with Islam has created the fodder for private armies just like it has among the Muslim countries who owe us the fuel under their feet. As was in the Crusades there are plenty of minds available for capture that know killing and insufficient else. As the economy collapses they will be more motivated to fall back on what they know best.
So far the differences between Trump and Sadaam Husein’s take over of Iran using family and friends has remarkable parallels. I don’t know if it can be stopped in a couple of weeks. I do know that this will be our final opportunity if we fail to.
At the risk of being condemned by all on this blog may I make a suggestion?
Why not re-institute the draft?
All would have “skin in the game” as it were. Few, if any families, would have no one whose life was on the line and would likely take our country’s war actions more seriously. Men and women from differing segments of society would be forced to live and work with each other. Political leaders would no longer be able to avoid the ramifications of their decisions. The defense of the nation would be everyone’s responsibility.
Ideas anyone?
Teresa: We absolutely should reinstitute the draft–for young men AND women, and this time, without the ability of well-to-do Americans to evade it–for a number of reasons. We’d be much less likely to initiate military actions, and service would require Americans of different backgrounds to work together.
Theresa:
This is an idea I have toyed around with for several years. If all young people were enrolled (not all at once, of course) it would cause politicians and parents to be more cautious. Another added benefit might be that those not engaged in fighting (hopefully that would be all of them) could be used for service projects throughout the nation as well as peace-corp type activities abroad.
One other benefit would accrue. All youth would then be eligible for G.I. benefits making school possible. Of course there would have to be regulations on schools not allowing them to jack up tuition and reap massive profits.
Your point about living and working together is excellent.
Theresa, Sheila and Wray; we all seem to have the same basic thoughts, much as I would fear for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren being drafted. I am proud of my grandson who is a paramedic in the Navy, his mother is career Army veteran, and heart-broken for my grandson whose only desire was to join the Army but discharged during basic training due to severe asthma. My reasoning for considering the draft has been that this country is so changed, in an unavoidable war (NOT Trump’s hoped for nuclear disaster) is that finding volunteers would be a difficult source of filling our military. I believe we can be sure those young Trump supporters would not be among the volunteers; their fighting spirit is street fighting level.
VOTE BLUE!
Thank you Sheila!
Eric Prince’s ideas regarding privatized military forces are farcical. This is not in any way the right road for this country to take under any circumstances where we rely on mercenaries to either augment our standing military forces or to fight wars for us. It is totally wrong headed and one only has to look at the experience of his previous outfit, Blackwater, and their conduct regarding Iraqi citizens now more than 10 years ago to see just how bad that this idea is.
The real rub is that we do not have enough forces in being to meet all the demands being placed on them. We have currently have roughly 48% of the military forces we had during Desert Storm of 1991 with our forces being drawn down across the board because of the supposed safety that we were all going to have as a result of the end of the Cold War. Additionally, it was envisioned that we would commit military forces from then on as part of a coalition under perhaps a United Nations mandate, again as we did during Desert Storm. That, obviously, nowhere near ended up working out as planned.
Currently, our military forces are stretched to the bone with both people and equipment wearing out at a very rapid rate with the spares of equipment, such as aircraft, vehicles, ships, everything, not being made available because of the congressional sequestration orchestrated by the Republicans. We currently have in aircraft, combat aircraft, listed as being available for immediate service that are not capable of flying. We have ships, combatant ships, woefully needing maintenance while the Navy lacks proper funding to provide it. These types of situations exist in every one of the military services with horror story after horror story in regard to logistics and maintenance. Add to that we’re flying aircraft that are having to be constantly refitted to extend their available flight hours because there’s nothing in the pipeline to replace them. Many, many horribly wrong decisions were made regarding procurement and upkeep of our military forces over the last 15 years.
You have to add to that something that is absolutely remarkable and also very disturbing that impacts both our readiness and the configuration of our military forces for their role in defending this country and also being able to fight along by our coalition partners and prevail. We have no grand strategy. We have no orchestrated long-term goals for what we would use our military forces for and when it would be necessary to use them. Instead, we have flag rank officers (general officers and admirals) that, due to the quality of their training, often times do not know the difference between strategy and tactics. Thus, we enter into conflicts with no plans in being in regard to resolving them. We have politicians, some of whom who should know better because of their military backgrounds, that like to talk about just how easy warfare would be against the Iranians, as an example, but have no conceptualization in their minds as to what happens on day two or day three of such a conflict. War is never easy.
When you read the literature that’s out there, and there’s a dearth of it available, you find just how unprepared we’ll really are for any sustained military operations which is truly horrifying. 40 years ago this country’s main strategy was predicated on the ability to fight 2 ½ wars simultaneously while now we would be very lucky to fight one and prevail. Things are just that bad and that thinking has always involved just the military not what all of us basically defenseless civilians would be doing while this is all happening.
There’s an old concept born out of nuclear strategy called escalation dominance. Basically, it is akin to a ladder where for every move and antagonists may make against us we have to have a corresponding and more powerful response. To win in the end we have to be able to top in every move that antagonist makes all the way up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. Right now, we are poorly prepared for such an eventuality.
Fortunately, a few people in Washington and at the Pentagon are thinking about these things finally after a long and torturous delay in coming to grips with dealing with the huge gap between what we think we can do and what we can actually do. We need to have, at long last, a grand strategy for what we would potentially use military force for and use it as an anchor to uphold our alliance postures, match procurement to mission and nowhere in that should there be any reliance on any organization that would buy its very nature fall outside the existing military chain of command and not be answerable to that chain of command. Additionally, the very last thing we need to have is a mercenary force led by Eric Prince getting into more mischief or, the even worse, getting their rear ends waxed and needing our military and the use of massive force to bail them out, making a mess an even bigger one.
All of this, unfortunately, is going to cost a lot of money which our dear friends in the Republican leadership of the Congress have already earmarked for their buddies and cash cows in the form of the massive tax cut it was passed last year. All of what we need to procure and organize for our defense is going to add a great deal to that so we need to have a Congress that acts responsibly and provides for an enhanced defense without laying an even greater tax burden on the average citizen. We also need Presidential leadership, Yuk, Yuk that drives this process along in an effective and equitable way where pork-related spending to satisfy political needs is either eliminated are kept to a bare minimum.
Right now, the Air Force is proposing to add 46 additional squadrons of aircraft to its existing force so they can cope with that needs being placed upon it and to keep up with the attrition that occurs as a result of constant military operations all over the world at an operational tempo that is greater than during the Cold War. The other services are contemplating the same things because they know, far better than the politicians, what they need to prevail in a war and in operations short of war and at protecting this country.
Given the current leadership we have in this country and the chaos that it is created, both here at home and globally, even with these efforts to enlarge are standing military forces to meet the needs placed on it we will still face the fact that we have a veritable infant running a whole show with, most unfortunately, a constitutional mandate that will affect how this country will respond to the threats currently presenting themselves and those that are evolving.
Fortunately for us we have a Defense Secretary that understand this business from the practitioner’s point of view. We need a hold our government accountable in regard to its most basic job and that’s the defense of this country and all of us and we finally need to have the rethinking and recalibration in regard to our military forces and what they are to be used for that is decades overdue. In this emerging global security environment for us to prevail, to continue to wield influence, positive influence, and remain safe here at home, all of this must happen.
Tom,
As a former engineer in the defense industry, the drumbeat for more profit continues apace as it did back in the day. And that day goes all the way back to the start of our re-arming for WW II when it took the Truman Commission to shame the contractors into providing quality products in a timely way. Profiteers from death are NORMAL to our capitalists.
Re-instituting the draft will be more expensive than what we stumble through now. Re-fitting the out-of-service equipment doesn’t generate enough profit for the defense companies; they make their bundle on the new stuff. We have depots overflowing with un-maintained and inoperable equipment of all types just waiting for those spare parts. But spare parts aren’t as profitable for the defense contractors. So, they tell their employees in government to cut the funding for maintenance and refurbishment and direct the purchase of new equipment. In my neighborhood, this is called a racket.
Mercenaries? Hey. Just another profit center brought to us by BRIBE, LLC. The whole thing is rotten to its core thanks to Republicanism and their criminal enterprise with really bad people like Prince and his pals reaping the windfalls. That all said, we still build the best war-making materiel in the world from soldier outfitting to aircraft carriers and all the planes they can carry. Our military can deliver the most stupendous amount of firepower the world has ever seen WITHOUT nuclear weapons. BUT over 51% of our entire budget is for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. By removing the idiotic sequester, we’d probably increase our spending by another 10%, or so on the military equipment refurbishing…if we could find vendors and companies who would do the work.
Meanwhile, what passes for leadership in the White House is confusing and degrading military thinking and planning by ITS idiotic behavior that does little more than scare half the world to death. Now, we’re going to go build more, modern nuclear weapons so we can keep up with Russia. O.K. Does anyone ask why? Haven’t we been through this drill before about total annihilation of most life on Earth? Are there insufficient nuclear disaster movies and books to hold our attention?
Why do humans persist in being the only species on Earth who actually plans its own extinction? This is our WTF moment. For those of you still clinging to your religious teachings, what does your God have to say about his “glorious creation” behaving this way? Hmmm? Any ideas? Thoughts and prayers? When we finally wake up to the reality of our own stupidity, there isn’t enough humble pie for the 7.8 billion of us (the most populous mammal on Earth) to eat before we finally decide that we can’t make ourselves extinct for any particular reason.
Then, war is good for business and business has never been better.
Sorry for the rant, but this particular topic covers SO many issues.
Tom Lund; you speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth while Trump continues bragging he knows more than the generals as he sucks up to each of our enemies and makes enemies of our allies, And Congress sits idle complaining their $174,000 annual salary isn’t enough to live on.
Any idea what Trump’s recent comment, “General Mattis may go.” really means? Does it mean he may be removing the General or the General my be considering leaving on his own? Or was it another distraction? Will UN Ambassador Nikki Haley be replaced by Ivanka Kushner or maybe Kellyanne Conway or will he pull us out of the UN? And Congress sits idle.
“Right now, the Air Force is proposing to add 46 additional squadrons of aircraft to its existing force so they can cope with that needs being placed upon it and to keep up with the attrition that occurs as a result of constant military operations all over the world at an operational tempo that is greater than during the Cold War. The other services are contemplating the same things because they know, far better than the politicians, what they need to prevail in a war and in operations short of war and at protecting this country.”
The above military shortfalls and necessities must be paid for; we have no debt level remaining to pay for any of it by IOU; he is now making further enemies of our long term enemies and our credit rating is in the toilet with the world at large. This IS our New World Order. And Congress sits idle.
VOTE BLUE?
“War is good for business and business has never been better.”
That in a nutshell is a perfect example (one of several) of why we should never privatize the military and so many other public services. Profits will supercede the public interest and public service nearly every time.
The reason to go into business is business. The reason for government service is that such service must serve everyone in the PUBIC interest, and profits cannot be permitted to come first.
Thank you Vernon – it was a great rant! What you keyed is right on the mark and I refrained in going that direction out of fear of taking up too much space since it definitely covers SO many issues. Mucho kudos to you for following up with a wonderful second strike!
Thank you also JoAnn but I must admit that I wish I was either horribly wrong or drifting into even more whacko fiction that this current “Administration” doles out each and every day. This is extremely serious stuff and just because we don’t think about it like we did in October 1962 it is very, very real and with us each and every day. We are always about 30 minutes from Armageddon all the time.
Of all the things Trump scares me about this is always at the top of the list. He’s the one that said, actually said, “why do we have nuclear weapons if we’re not going to use them?”
seems its a mercinary territory anyway. its been used before like central america 1980s.. except the u.s. cia..gov allowed the flow of cocaine to the u.s,to pay the private league,..its a fact,,brits,french, and u.s. spl forces,ret, have been facilitated into a private army to protect corp intrests, even in saudi arabia.. if its a war,and they faulter, have war crimes issues,then were again dishonored by a bunch of war criminals.were spending 717 billion this year to finance the protection of corprate interests, and they pay little in taxes, the working class gets to kiss wall streets ass either way..id like to see the green generation become fact, and begin a new generation of good jobs, for the many,and not just some good ol boy oil boom.. obviously,wall street kisses oils ass,and thier suppliers. maybe we should stop this madness of a congress bent on killing off innocent bystanders , and keeping the working class a cash cow, just to further distroy what America really is,, people who do care.. vote blue,not the red hue…