1. “Lockheed Martin’s Shadow Government
As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had been “war profiteers” and he would never forgive them. He practically spat the phrase out. I have no idea whether it was true. All I know is that, for him, “war profiteer” was the worst of curses, the most horrifying of sins. In 1947, Arthur Miller wrote a wrenching play on the subject of war profiteering, All My Sons, based on a news story about a woman who turned her father in for selling faulty parts to the U.S. military during my father’s war. It was a hit and, in 1948, was made into a movie starring Edward G. Robinson.
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Today, if my dad were alive to fume about “war profiteers,” people would have no idea why he was so worked up. Today, only a neocon could write a meaningful play with “war profiteering” as its theme, and my sarcastic column of 1990 now reads as if it were written in Klingon. Don’t blame my dad, Arthur Miller, or me if we couldn’t imagine a future in which for-profit war would be the norm in our American world, in which a “free-enterprise-oriented military” would turn out to be the functional definition of “the U.S. military,” in which so many jobs from KP to mail delivery, guard duty to the training of foreign forces, have been outsourced to crony capitalist or rent-a-gun outfits like Halliburton, KBR, Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), and Dyncorp that think it’s just great to make a buck off war. As they see it, permanent war couldn’t be a dandier or more profitable way to organize our world.
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True, Lockheed Martin doesn’t actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any other company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
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If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin’s sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf.”
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/01/11/lockheed-martins-shadow-government/
2. “
Geithner Says U.S. Insolvent
the two parties are both enamored of big government. Nearly all politicians are sensitive to public demands for free lunches. That is one reason why the fiscal gap is so huge in the first place. America did not exactly fall all over itself in trying to stop a prescription drug benefit. Consequently, the government is postponing actions to close the fiscal gap.
One fine day, there will be a discontinuity. There will be a many-sigma event. There will be a fiscal earthquake or a market earthquake or some combination of both. This will not be a pleasant experience for Americans, but those in government have little reason to fear it. They can label it a crisis, as if we do not already have a crisis. They can use such a “crisis” as the excuse for more radical government action. The government can demand even more power or simply exercise it, even if the results are to make matters worse for Americans.
For governments, crises are opportunities, a fact well known among analysts of government. This fact is one reason why governments postpone taking actions to remedy what appear to the rest of us to be bad situations.
Unfortunately, the fact that governments batten on crises and see them as opportunities is not well known among the general population which still looks to government to handle crises.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27238.htm
