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.

UPDATED: Bravo Britain (Neocons For Total War)

Barack Obama, Britain, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

BBC News fails to lead its Internet page with the magnificent news that Parliament, for once, has executed the will of the people, and that the UK will be staying out of Syria.

Instead, the left-liberal interventionist at BBC News (people of Samantha Power’s ilk) have buried the item in an article about “I, Obama” (America’s imperial president), and his administration’s various ahistoric, idiotic pronouncements.

The lead in question reads: “US led by ‘best interests’ on Syria.”

BBC News makes only veiled allusions to the “unexpected outcome in the parliament,” to “British MPs [ruling] out London’s involvement in any US-led strikes against Syria,” and to “British members of [parliament’s rejection] of the principle of military action against Damascus in a 285-272 vote.”

UPDATE (8/30): TOTAL WAR.

“The BBC footage is grisly; the British media have been far more invested in the Syrian civil war than their U.S. colleagues,” confirms Mark Steyn.

This week, David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer recess to permit the people’s representatives to express their support for the impending attack. Instead, for the first time since the British defeat at Yorktown in 1782, the House of Commons voted to deny Her Majesty’s Government the use of force. Under the Obama “reset,” even the Coalition of the Willing is unwilling. “It’s clear to me that the British Parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action,” said the prime minister. So the Brits are out, and, if he goes at all, Obama will be waging war without even Austin Powers’s Union Jack fig leaf.

Steyn here advances the staid neoconservative tack (in dazzling style, as always). When neocons lose an argument for war, they just regroup and renew their efforts.

“What the British people are sick of, quite reasonably enough,” claims Steyn, “is ineffectual warmongering.”

Yeah, give us total, all-out war and we’ll march in goose step with Chuck Krauthammer.

Actually, re-reading “An Accidental War,” I can’t quite tell what Steyn advocates (all in dazzling style, of course).

UPDATE II: Dropped Into The Black Hole Of Disinformation

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Media, Objectivism, Race, Racism, Reason

“Dropped Into The Black Hole Of Disinformation” is the latest column, now on WND. Some excerpts:

“There is no clear motive for why the murder happened,” a CNN reporter chanted robotically, in what has been for as long as I can remember SOP (standard operating procedure) in major media. Whenever a black murders a white—which is four times more often than the reverse—the salient features of the crime disappear into a black hole of disinformation.

By salient features I mean, in the main, information pertaining to the skin color of the perpetrator and victim, and the extraordinary brutality with which the villain typically goes about exterminating his victim.

Overkill is the word I’m looking for.

Observe the face of hate (Curtis Lavelle Vance’s) and the object of Vance’s hatred, news anchor Anne Pressly, of blessed memory. Then read the details of Vance’s assault on Pressly. Pressly’s pale, pretty face Vance pounded to an unrecognizable pulp. The killer aimed, very plainly, to annihilate her.

All too often submerged as well is the exquisite vulnerability of victims of unrecognized racial hatred.

Of this particular stark element, however, it was impossible to strip the murder of baby Antonio Santiago. …

… Trust the police in the evergreen and always pinko state to finesse the murder of a white veteran [Delbert Belton, 88, from Spokane, in Wash] by blacks with assurances that it was “a random attack.” Robbery was the sole motive in Belton’s murder.

These assurances were offered up by Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub. Not that anyone in the pinko state and beyond paused to ask, but why, if the beating of Belton was motivated by greed or need only, did the perpetrators proceed to pulverize grandpa’s face with “big heavy flashlights”?

Elementary, my dear Watson.

The boys in blue from the pink state may not be there to defend you when your turn comes, but they can be trusted to ennoble your killers.

The old man, explained the stupid Straub, “fought back against his attackers, and that may have contributed to the severity of the beating his received.”

Do you get Straub’s drift? Unless they state otherwise, goons of color harbor only the purest of motives when gunning for honky.

Since he was being interviewed by national media, Straub quickly expressed his commitment not to protecting Spokane residents from such killers, but to “institu[ting] a mentoring program” for the likes of Delbert Belton’s killers.

Mark Griffiths, another genius from the Spokane Police, seconded that “there was no indication that [the 88-year-old WWII veteran] would have known these people prior to the assault.” Ergo, the motive was robbery.

In non sequitur land, strangers do not harbor hate, and criminals do not multitask—in other words, never do they rob people while simultaneously acting out their darkest desires. (And, by logical extension, the Nazis, who killed millions of strangers, could not have been motivated both by hate and greed.)

Au contraire. “These people” – the barbarians who blattered the veteran who’d survived the Battle of Okinawa – knew quite a bit about Belton … by the color of his skin.

As did Mona Yvette Nelson “know” Jonathan Paul Foster was The One she would kidnap, torture and torch. Nelson “knew” Foster from … his fair, white skin and red hair. …

… Read the complete column. “Dropped Into The Black Hole Of Disinformation” is now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: THE LOVE JUST KEEPS FLOWING. “‘Kick [the white [expletive] in the head. Kick her head in the concrete.’”

UPDATE II (8/30): Sometimes it’s nice to hear…

—–Original Message—–
From: Don
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2013 9:33 PM
Subject: [Fwd: Dropped Into The Black Hole Of Disinformation By ilana mercer]

Ilana, you are a national treasure. I have forwarded this to my contacts, as I almost always do. It is quite a coincidence that I had only hours ago sent you the fictional “letter” from the little boy who was shot in the face (murdered) because he and his mother were white.

Don

Dreaming Of The Dreams Of Our Founding Fathers

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, Race

Who thronged to hear black America’s president speak today, at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall? See for yourself. A sea of people from which the majority is almost entirely absent. At least as evinced from this picture:

As to MLK, he has a day; our founding father don’t. Even MLK’s speeches have their own dedicated commemorative days in the nation’s calender.

I’ve heard just about enough about MLK. And at least one lady would have agreed with me wholeheartedly: “the nation’s most engaging first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.”

On the day “marking the exact time that Martin Luther King spoke on 28 August 1963,” I too “have a dream.” It is that the dreams of our Founding Fathers be restored—and certainly not stigmatized and criminalized, as they have been by the traitors and haters that festoon our governments (Dem and Republican).

So I’ll excuse myself from the charade to dream of the dreams of America’s Founding Fathers.