Category Archives: Morality

Mum’s The Word About The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, Etiquette, Government, Healthcare, Military, Morality, Republicans

Mark Levin the radio Mouth could be heard inveighing against what is surely a sickening specter: “Healthcare lobbying on K Street.” As The Hill divulged:

More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010.
Major lobbying firms such as Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, The Glover Park Group, Alston & Bird, BGR Group and Akin Gump can all boast an Affordable Care Act insider on their lobbying roster — putting them in a prime position to land coveted clients.
“When [Vice President] Biden leaned over [during the signing of the healthcare law] and said to [President] Obama, ‘This is a big f’n deal,’ ” said Ivan Adler, a headhunter at the McCormick Group, “he was right.”
Veterans of the healthcare push are now lobbying for corporate giants such as Delta Air Lines, UPS, BP America and Coca-Cola, and for healthcare companies including GlaxoSmithKline, UnitedHealth Group and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

This, no doubt, is ANC-style corruption; the stuff of banana republics, carried out with considerable aplomb and within the bounds of what is considered The Law.

You won’t hear conservatives like Mark Levin protesting or even mentioning the tentacles of The Thing that enervates every corner of the American government, economy, foreign policy, you name them: the military-industrial-Congressional complex, where corruption and “influence peddling” are the order of the day.

Over to the formidable Chuck Spinney:

… SPINNEY: Right. Let’s say I’m the program manager for the F-16 in the Pentagon. I get a call from one of my wholly owned subsidiaries over on the Hill on the armed services committee. “We got it funded for you guys, but those guys in the House are gonna screw us.” So you know, “You got to do something.”

So all I have to do is I call up the program manager at the prime contractor, who I know because I work with him on a daily basis. And say, “Hey, we got a problem.

“The House is gonna kill our program. The Senate’s on board. Turn on the pressure.” Well, at that point, I don’t have to do anything in the government. The rest of it takes care of itself because the people whose future it…are at hand are gonna work overtime to solve that.

The contractors then start calling up the subcontractors. They unleash the fax attacks. They unleash the emails. And then of course they start calling the lobbyists, the Gucci shoe crowd on K Street, and say, “Hey, you got to start beating the… beating the pavement in the halls of Congress. We need some newspaper op-eds.” The whole process takes care of itself. One phone call turns it on.

MOYERS: Who gets the money?

SPINNEY: The contractors get it. The Congressmen get it, you know through… they get the power because they keep getting voted back in office. They may also get some Congressional contributions. But I think the bigger benefit is the power, the stability of their job.

And remember the people in the Pentagon that are promoting this thing are basically… they’re also creating a situation where they can roll over and get into that sector and make the big bucks. All you have to do is look at the number of retired generals working for defense contractors.

MOYERS: The revolving door?

SPINNEY: Yeah, yeah. The revolving door.

… Over in the Pentagon, we’re not holding people accountable.

I think basically here is you have in Congress the oversight committees for defense, which are essentially the armed services committee. And the defense appropriations subcommittees in both houses are so tied in to the Pentagon and the defense contractor base that essentially oversight has been displaced by what some of us call overlook. They’re basically watching the money flow out the door and encouraging it to go.

And basically it’s in members of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s best interest to keep the money flowing. It’s in the Pentagon’s best interest to keep the money flowing.

MOYERS: Because?

SPINNEY: It’s in the defense contractors’ best interest to keep the money flowing. Because it’s the military industrial Congressional complex and this is their way of life. They live on the money flow.

MOYERS: The military industrial Congressional complex?

SPINNEY: Right. Which I believe was a term that Eisenhower considered using in his speech, but he dropped the reference to Congress.

MORE WITH MOYERS.

Glenn Beck Awakens To The Color Of Hate Crime (But Fails To Credit Those Who Went Before)

Crime, Ethics, Glenn Beck, Morality, Race, Racism

“Oprah Winfrey, you disgust me.” Those were powerful and dramatic words—Glenn Beck’s—but they were probably the only original comments he came up with today on his radio show, during which the broadcaster finally deigned to chronicle one of the most heinous black-on-white hate crimes to have been ignored by mainstream, second-hander media and The Man himself for years.

When Beck used the words “the boyfriend was actually the lucky one,” to segue into a description of the butchering by 5 blacks of twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian, I had an idea where the material might have come from.

Those were words I lifted, last week, from my 2011 book (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”), for the WND column. Here’s the excerpt from “Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!”:

“Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash.”

White trash.

For the information that he and his much-touted researchers had missed, Beck credited a nameless listener, who, if he exists, is probably an avid reader of what Peter Brimelow dubbed the Guerrilla Press.

Yes, the superb reporters at VDARE have been doing the work Beck and the Republican Lincoln idolators have hitherto refused to do. As has Michelle Malkin, the departed Larry Auster, Jack Kerwick (a much-needed, new arrival), this writer, WND reporters, and others.

Ego has no place in telling the story of, as I put it, the “racial hatred … seared into the mangled white bodies of these victims and many more like them.”

What is important is that Glenn Beck, a powerful broadcaster, may have finally awoken to the color of hate crime.

Still, I do not trust individuals who fail to cite their sources, and do not credit those on whose shoulders they stand. Neither should you. If you want the unvarnished goods on crime from the correct angle—continue to track the guerrilla press.

And—do I really have to tell you this?!—don’t trust anyone who gets behind a mass murderer.

Your mother should have told you as much. (Only the other day, my liberal father reiterated the thought to me that he did not know how anyone could exculpate, much less lionize, Honest Abe .)

Indian Savings Grace

Capitalism, Debt, Economy, Inflation, Morality

I watched Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s interview, some months back, on the Charlie Rose Show. Mr. Rose scolded Chidambaram for his countrymen’s high savings rate, mouthing the Keynesian mantra about the need for non-stop spending so as to keep demand from falling. I recall thinking how morally bankrupt was Mr. Rose’s advocacy of micro-bankruptcy, in the face of the Indian minister’s savings grace.

I have been unable to locate the transcripts for the segment (help?), but in The Hindu (a newspaper), Mr. Chidambaram is quoted as proudly talking up the thing Keynesians shun: savings.

“See, our savings rate in the worst year was 30 percent. In the best year, was 36 percent of GDP. Pick any number between 30 and 36 for incremental capital output ratio, what economists call ICOR, is about 4. Our potential growth rate is about 8 percent.”

The above excerpt is from the Charlies-Rose interview mentioned. The minister did look flabbergast at Rose’s suggestion that savings were a bad thing, explaining ever-so politely that this was a tradition in India.

Rose had smiled patronizingly, as liberals like him do about ethnic exotica.

The Latest Escapade Of IRS Dominatrix Lois Lerner

Ethics, Fascism, Government, Morality, Taxation, The State

This news item is not easy to come by on Google. It concerns IRS dominatrix “Lois Lerner’s statements in late 2010.” These demonstrate that the Internal Revenue Service was being leaned on to “do something to stop the flow of money from corporations to political campaigns.”

Lerner revealed this while speaking “to a small group at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.” (What amazes me is the network of contacts and speaking engagements these bureaucrats carve out for themselves while on the job. Corruption and conflict of interest is standard operating procedure with government. It doesn’t rate a mention in the article. Journalists and the public think it perfectly proper for public officials to grease the skids for future opportunities while in office.)

Via John Sexton @ Breitbart.com:

Newly uncovered video shows Lois Lerner discussing the political pressure that swirled around the IRS in 2010. Lerner says “everyone” was “screaming at” the IRS to stop the flood of money pouring into the 2010 elections through 501(c)(4) groups as a result of Citizens United.

Lerner spoke to a small group at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010, just two weeks before the wave election that brought the Tea Party and Republicans significant gains in Congress. During her appearance Lerner was asked about the flow of money from corporations to 501(c)(4) groups. “Everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it” Lerner replied, adding “Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it; they want the IRS to fix the problem.”

Lerner goes on to outline the fact that 501(c)(4) organizations have the right to do “an ad that says vote for Joe Blow” so long as their primary activity is social welfare. However Lerner again emphasizes the political pressure the IRS was under at the time saying, “So everybody is screaming at us right now ‘Fix it now before the election. Can’t you see how much these people are spending?'” Lerner concludes by saying she won’t know if organizations have gone too far in campaigning until she looks at their “990s next year.”

Contrary to Lerner’s statement, everyone did not object to the Citizens United decision. The pushback was clearly partisan with the most high profile opponent being President Obama himself. Days after the decision, Obama used his weekly radio address to attack the ruling saying it would “open the floodgates” to special interest advertising in elections.

MORE.