by Philip Giraldi, April 01, 2010
"....What is lacking is any restraint on the activity of the promoters of the war economy. The salesmen for total war would not be so dangerous if they were not portrayed as experts and given a platform to parlay their former government positions into private gain. A skeptical media would be nice, asking hard questions about what financial interests former senior government officials might have. But we are long past the point where we might expect the media to do its job or do anything at all but promote the long war, which presumably sells newspapers and ad time on television. It would also be nice to stop senior government officials from setting up their own companies like The Chertoff Group that then turning around to do contracting with the government. That’s not only unseemly, it involves potential conflict of interest and could lead to more serious forms of corruption. It would be far better to close the revolving door completely and send the Chertoffs and McConnells off to a comfortable retirement somewhere where they would no longer be reaching into in the taxpayers’ pockets to fund scanners we don’t need and a new global conflict, which, if the pattern holds true to form, will no doubt be dubbed the war on cyber."
"....What is lacking is any restraint on the activity of the promoters of the war economy. The salesmen for total war would not be so dangerous if they were not portrayed as experts and given a platform to parlay their former government positions into private gain. A skeptical media would be nice, asking hard questions about what financial interests former senior government officials might have. But we are long past the point where we might expect the media to do its job or do anything at all but promote the long war, which presumably sells newspapers and ad time on television. It would also be nice to stop senior government officials from setting up their own companies like The Chertoff Group that then turning around to do contracting with the government. That’s not only unseemly, it involves potential conflict of interest and could lead to more serious forms of corruption. It would be far better to close the revolving door completely and send the Chertoffs and McConnells off to a comfortable retirement somewhere where they would no longer be reaching into in the taxpayers’ pockets to fund scanners we don’t need and a new global conflict, which, if the pattern holds true to form, will no doubt be dubbed the war on cyber."
No comments:
Post a Comment