Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| ODINO (Oligarchy: America is Democracy in Name Only) and Snowden |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2014-06-05
Thoughts after reading the essay: Oliver Stone’s movie about Edward Snowden. Business and Government Really Do Work Hand-In-Hand Do business and government really work hand-in-hand? Do corporate contractors and the NSA really work hand-in-hand? ABC News says “Yes!”: All of the intelligence agencies, including the NSA, also began hiring contractors, like Snowden, to help carry some of that new load. How Government-Business Partnerships Harm America In my view business and government partnerships often work against the interest of the people in two ways. First, they do things that are either unnecessary or actually harmful. Second, they do these things at enormous expense to the people (as taxpayers). If businessmen want to make a lot of money in America these days, they have no better route than to offer “security” services. It appears that the USA cannot turn down any idea that identifies an “enemy” (real or imagined) and proposes to fight that enemy in a very expensive, often in a very technological, way. Snowden, for instance, worked for a corporation, not for the NSA. He worked for Booz Allen Hamilton (see: Edward Snowden’s Employer: 6 Shocking Facts About Booz Allen Hamilton) and it appears that although he “lacked a college degree” he earned $200,000 a year. I bet Booz Allen charged a lot more for his services than that! Booz Allen Hamilton, itself no slouch, “reported $5.8 billion in revenue for 2013, of which $219 million were profits.” Booz Allen exists almost entirely as a parasite on government.[2] Thus we have an almost unimaginably bloated “defense” and “intelligence” and “homeland security” bureaucracy,[3] generally funded via secret budgets presumably with vast sums. These enormous bureaucracies pay a great deal of those monies to corporations to which government work—which might better have been done by DOD or CIA or NSA employees—has been “out-sourced”. And the worker-bee employees of these corporations (I dare not imagine the emoluments of the managers) are, as we have seen, paid at more than $200,000 a year. I wouldn’t wonder if these systems of out-sourcing are justified—if at all—as cost-saving! Needless to say, these corporations make handsome profits. And also needless to say, these corporations turn a small part of those profits back in the pump-priming exercise called campaign finance (or other forms of near-or-actual bribery). The report citied above says that Booz Allen made an investment of a measly $1.2M (paid to congressional and administration aspirants)—perhaps over several years—to guarantee its enormous profits ($219M for 2013 alone). That’s probably far less than 0.5% for “pump-priming”! Not bad. Many things are expensive in this world, but government fealty comes cheap! When one hand washes another, the handi-wipes are of negligible expense. In many cases, these partnerships are even more damaging. Corporate folks manage to persuade government folks that the corporate folks should make decisions about what jobs need to be done and about which new projects should be undertaken and about how many new people should be hired—by the corporations in general.[4] Thus the corporations make not only outsized profits from the work they initially undertook to do but also, if they have managed to secure managerial duties, make even more money when their advice is taken and the job-description grows. Needless to say, these matters tend to be secret so that the work done and the decision-making about increasing the work and the work-force are not made known to the public, not reviewed by anyone whose mandate is pursuing the public interest. The End of Privacy Except for the Government The decision to throw out America’s widely-assumed protections against invasions of privacy by the state (4th amendment) was not made by citizens or voters, although it was made by American governments. But today’s American governments are responsive to the oligarchy (the CEOs of the great corporations) on most important matters, not to voters. So the NSA’s shenanigans were set up (essentially) by a government by which we, the citizens and voters, are at best ignored and at worst made semi-captive. America has become an Oligarchy—Democracy In Name Only, ODINO. So our government, ODINO, without asking us, the people, has decided not only to keep an outlandish number and type and especially amount of secrets from the people which it purports to serve (secrets which cannot be disclosed, not even secretly, in courts in trials which touch on such secrets—this because the courts, throwing away many citizen protections of the constitution, also caved-in to the national-security secrecy myths) but also (here cue NSA) to make sure that we, the people, no longer have much possibility of private (secret) communication. For a very learned law-professorial discussion of America’s secrets-keeping and its discontents, read Secrecy, Leaks, and Selective Prosecution by Gabriel Schoenfeld The government has gone too far. It’s out of hand. And Snowden is a hero for disclosing this secrecy and spying at great personal danger and cost to himself. American governmental spying has gone from a small-scale CIA thing to a big business, a massive imperial (NSA) enterprise, and big businesses always try to expand. And government bureaucracies always try to expand. And Conservatives, who usually speak against big government love it. And Liberals, who should hate it, feel obliged to go along with it. And thanks to our oligarchic (ODINO) system of governance, the spying business (including especially the corporations which do much of the NSA’s work, like the corporation for which Snowden worked) is free to make campaign contributions and to do all the other bribe-like things (purchase of government decisions in our commodified system of governance) that are the lubrication and the fuel of our oligarchic control of government by wealthy individuals and businesses. This mechanism, which makes possible our ODINO, is much, much bigger than “Citizens United” etc. See Constitutional Amendment to combat “regulatory capture”, “electoral capture”, and Citizens United. So spying, NSA-style and perhaps others not in the spotlight, are big business and getting bigger, out of control, and with no realistic “mission” except to grow as a business. Privatization and the Growth of Mega-Industries that Rip Off America The very rich have discovered that there is a lot of money to be made when the government can be persuaded to hire private industry to do big chunks of government work, work government itself should do, sometimes (often?) work that does not really neet being done at all. It’s called “let me do government work and let me make an out-sized profit doing so.” In the days of much smaller government, much of this privatization used to be called war-profiteering, and in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars we saw a great deal of privatization that was also, in fact, war-profiteering. Very high-cost high-profit mercenaries doing work soldiers could and should do. Very high-cost folks working for the CIA and NSA doing what government employees should do. And of course, where there is a profit being made, there is money available to be used to persuade legislators and administrators that more work needs to be handed out to the privatizers. So we see the familiar dinosaur-like DOD and the MIC: grown beyond any necessary “defense” function, telling us of the need for more and more weapons and foreign bases—and more wars. It’s the same with the private prison business and we should not be at all surprised by the prison-friendly legislation of criminal statutes and long-prison-sentencing guidelines to keep their prisons full of American prisoners at such a high cost to society and to the prisoners and their families. I imagine it’s the same with those corporation-run schools (called charter schools) run at public expense for private profit with little (I suppose) real educational advantage—if any—to students. And the same where corporate-run schools are funded publicly by “vouchers”. Taxes are pretty much only paid these days by the 99.9%, not by corporations and not by the 0.1%, and the people pay for these “services” and the rich make a profit. Whether the work ever needed to be done—or to be done in this way—is seldom asked. That’s how business works in America these days. Our loss of privacy in communications to the overzealous NSA is an almost accidental symptom of our system of governance, which almost guarantees that such grotesque over-reaching will occur. As Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Let’s all thank Snowden and look forward to Oliver Stone’s movie. ----------- [1] There are more problems for whistleblowers that work for corporations than for government. POGO: Outsourcing the War On Whistleblowers. ----------- [2] The group, located near DC with headquarters in McLean, Virginia, is an active political player. Reports show that Booz Allen contributed $1.2 million in recent years to campaign finance, with $176,757 going to Barack Obama, $54,360 to Hillary Clinton, $51,951 to Mitt Romney, and $44,264 to John McCain. Fifty-five percent (55%) of their contributions went to Democratic candidates and causes, while 44% went to Republicans. (Ibid.) ----------- [3] For fun, prepare to Google “Homeland Security” and look at the drop-down list of suggested topics! ----------- [4] {Booz Allen Hamilton: They employ over 70 individuals to sit on 54 federal advisory committees, including those that report to the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, Federal Communications Commission, NASA, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security. (Ibid.) |
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