|
|
|
|
Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
 Posted - 03/15/2007 : 01:12:41
|
The logical extension of what George Soros calls "Market Fundamentalism" is the privatization of all governenment functiosn including the military. Here is aninterview (Real Audio Format) with Jeremy Scahill about Blackwater, the Mercenary Army Security Contractors hired by the Bush adminstration to fight in Iraq. They are accountable to no one and Blackwater is owned by right wing Christians - surprise surprise. This is a story that the mainstream media are largely ignoring although the LA Times published an Op Ed by Jeremy Scahill author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
In the interveiw, he gives an example of a Marine taking orders from these Mercenaries Security Contractors.
|
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
|
|
HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/15/2007 : 14:55:24 [Permalink]
|
Let me simply state that this seriously reeks of the worst kind of NeoCon old-style imperialism. And I hate to even imagine what a right-wing theofascist like Erik Prince might do with his few tens of thousands of heavily armed mercenaries back in the States. Brownshirts, ready to use in a coupe? This is one of the ingredients of a new American fascism that I'd thought was missing. Thank goodness that many of the other ingredients are falling apart for the NeoCons. But the outside possibility of a theofascist dictatorship is not entirely past.
|
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/15/2007 14:56:15 |
 |
|
|
beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
|
|
marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2007 : 11:06:45 [Permalink]
|
The Humanist magazine ran a cover article on this issue in their September October 2003 issue: http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/SeptOct03.html Unfortunately they make this article unavailable to read online. Fortunately, a search for the author and title made it easy to find on another website: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles8/Gordon_Outsourcing-Abuse.htm
I love the Internet.
Anyway, the article covers a whole slew of outsourcing issues, including military outsourcing with sometimes truly outrageous and repulsive results, as mentioned in this passage: quote:
The advantage of subcontracting to PMCs is clear: it allows the executive branch to avoid public debate or legislative controls.
While Congress capped the number of U.S. soldiers who could be sent to Colombia at five hundred, the Pentagon together with the Colombian government have been employing additional corporate soldiers from DynCorp to carry out anti-drug operations. According to Peter Singer from the Brookings Institute, the firm utilizes armed reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships designed for counterguerrilla warfare, and has been involved in several firefights with local rebels. DynCorp has lost several planes and employees to rebel fire, but there has been no public outcry about the losses, simply because “corporate soldiers” were killed rather than “real soldiers.”
In Bosnia, the addition of two thousand corporate soldiers helped evade the Congressional limit of twenty thousand troops. The issue isn't only that the Pentagon uses PMCs to undercut restrictions made via democratic procedures, but also that corporate soldiers are accountable solely to the corporations that retain them, rather than to governments.
Employees of DynCorp in Bosnia were caught operating a sex-slave ring of underage women and even videotaping a rape. Leslie Wayne from the New York Times reported that while DynCorp employees trafficked in womenincluding buying one for $1,000the company turned a blind eye. Since the DynCorp employees involved weren't soldiers, their actions weren't subject to military discipline. Nor did they face local justice; they were simply fired and sent home.
A 1991 U.S.-approved United Nations arms embargo prohibited the sale of weapons to or training of any warring party in the Balkans. But the Pentagon referred Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), another private military contractor (currently a subsidiary of L-3 Communications) to Croatia's defense minister. MPRI trained local forces in Croatia, which used their education to drive more than one hundred thousand Serbs from their homes and kill hundreds in a four-day ethnic cleansing campaign. No employee of the military firm has ever been charged.
This is from an article that is 4 years old and yet this issue isn't even understood, much less on the lips, of most voting American citizens.
What I don't get is how this is married to economic conservatism? The government is still taking our (the taxpayer's) money and doing corrupt shit with it. Isn't this exactly what economic conservatives have a problem with? The only explanation I can come up with is that too many conservative followers are engaging in willful ignorance. They hear the word "privatization" and automatically associate it with smaller government and less taxation. They do not bother to discover the ugly truth. And of the rest that know the truth and still support this corrupt way of managing things, well, I dunno, but I'm sure they come up with some sort of pretty-sounding rationale to soothe their conscience. |
"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
|
| Edited by - marfknox on 03/16/2007 11:07:19 |
|
|
|
Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 16:21:57 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
Let me simply state that this seriously reeks of the worst kind of NeoCon old-style imperialism.
I can understand being against this, but I don't see applying the "imperialism" label. How do you figure it fits?
quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
And I hate to even imagine what a right-wing theofascist like Erik Prince might do with his few tens of thousands of heavily armed mercenaries back in the States. Brownshirts, ready to use in a coupe?
That would be a legitimate fear if these soldiers adhered to a common ideology with Erik Prince as its leader, but mercenaries by definition sell their services for pay, so there is no reason to believe they would go along with such a plan. Further, mercenaries are [i]expensive and even a billionaire such as Prince wouldn't be able to pay the bill from his personal funds for a very long time.
It's kinda like theorizing that Bill Gates might turn his “private army” of computer experts over to hacking the internet. Sure, it would be a very bad thing if he did that, but if he tried it's not likely his employees would go along with it.
quote:
[i]Originally posted by HalfMooner
This is one of the ingredients of a new American fascism that I'd thought was missing. Thank goodness that many of the other ingredients are falling apart for the NeoCons. But the outside possibility of a theofascist dictatorship is not entirely past.
Are you kidding?
Can you describe a sequence of events that would bring “theofascists” to power in the United States?
|
|
|
|
beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 17:15:31 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Mycroft
...
Can you describe a sequence of events that would bring “theofascists” to power in the United States?
Control of the media and massive election fraud.
|
|
|
|
Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2007 : 17:21:26 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
quote:
Originally posted by Mycroft
...
Can you describe a sequence of events that would bring “theofascists” to power in the United States?
Control of the media and massive election fraud.
Control by who?
Fraud by who?
Let's have some more detail, please? |
| Edited by - Mycroft on 03/31/2007 17:21:58 |
|
|
|
Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2007 : 00:36:54 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Mycroft
quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner]
And I hate to even imagine what a right-wing theofascist like Erik Prince might do with his few tens of thousands of heavily armed mercenaries back in the States. Brownshirts, ready to use in a coupe?
That would be a legitimate fear if these soldiers adhered to a common ideology with Erik Prince as its leader, but mercenaries by definition sell their services for pay, so there is no reason to believe they would go along with such a plan. Further, mercenaries are expensive and even a billionaire such as Prince wouldn't be able to pay the bill from his personal funds for a very long time.
It's kinda like theorizing that Bill Gates might turn his “private army” of computer experts over to hacking the internet. Sure, it would be a very bad thing if he did that, but if he tried it's not likely his employees would go along with it.
There is a big difference between Prince's mercenaries and Gates's computer experts in that a soldier of fortune has to have a certain lack of ethics to take up such a trade in the first place - or they have to buy into Prince's ideology.
quote:
Originally posted by Mycroft
quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
This is one of the ingredients of a new American fascism that I'd thought was missing. Thank goodness that many of the other ingredients are falling apart for the NeoCons. But the outside possibility of a theofascist dictatorship is not entirely past.
Are you kidding?
Can you describe a sequence of events that would bring “theofascists” to power in the United States?
It would start with a major terrorist attack and/or an economic collapse - the latter is not inconcievable given the extremely high levels of personal, corporate and government debt in America. The theofascist movement in the US relies heavily on econmicaly marginalized people.
Pullitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges was written extensively on the Christian fascist movement and published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
Fortunately thay have had a setback and do not have sufficient numbers, but the threat still remains. I see Prince's private army being the nucleus of a "Brownshirt" force in a worst case scenario.
|
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
|
|
|
Mycroft
Skeptic Friend
USA
427 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2007 : 16:04:23 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Ghost_Skeptic
Pullitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges was written extensively on the Christian fascist movement and published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
Fortunately thay have had a setback and do not have sufficient numbers, but the threat still remains. I see Prince's private army being the nucleus of a "Brownshirt" force in a worst case scenario.
I think what the Christian right would do with the United States given the opportunity is indeed disturbing, but the suggestion that they could, I think, is a bad joke.
Serriously, what kind of numbers do you think they really have? |
| Edited by - Mycroft on 04/01/2007 16:04:58 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Privatizing The US Army - Its Already Happening
