Build a Frontier and You Get Cowboys


From HuffPo

Yesterday we talked about the Blackwater scandal, setting it in the larger context of what Naomi calls the new economy of the Disaster Capitalism Complex. We also talked about cowboys, frontiers and the perennial power of John Wayne. Here's the rest of that discussion:

Cusack: So apart from getting obscenely rich, what are these private security and other contractor companies doing with this tsunami of public money that is being thrown at them?

Klein: Well, unlike the government, which has allowed the public infrastructure to erode so that we now have collapsing bridges and levees, these guys are making serious and sturdy capital investments. They're planning for the future, building infrastructure -- in Blackwater's case, paramilitary infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the company has used the steady stream of contracts during the Bush years to build up a private army of twenty thousand on-call mercenary soldiers and a massive military base in North Carolina worth between $40 and $50 million. They have armored vehicles, helicopter gunships, manmade lakes, a Boeing 767, a Zeppelin.

Cusack: Like the Hindenburg -- Eric Prince has a lot of toys. The Zeppelin -- that one had to be the fulfillment of a boyhood dream.

Klein: You hear people complain about how Hezbollah is a "state-within-a-state" in Lebanon -- what about Blackwater in the USA? And that's just one company of hundreds, and a relatively small player compared to Lockheed and GE and Booz Allen. But once again, we can't keep being surprised by this shadow world -- it is an inevitable consequence of Rumsfeld's vision of an outsourced and contracted-out state. A right-wing journal in the U.S. called Blackwater "al Qaeda for the good guys" and it's a striking analogy.

There's much more at the link.  Emphasis above is mine.

Our constitution does not allow for a shadow government, nor should we tolerate treasonous, anti-American factions in our midst.  The constitution strictly forbids the amassing of private armies -- we have a military for that very purpose.  Congress should immediately nationalize Blackwater et al, and members of these illegal private militias should be conscripted to fill the shortfall in military recruiting.

They wanna play soldier?  I say, let them be soldiers -- in the legitmate and constitutionally-provided military.

Privateering outlaws with guns and obscene pay, proselytizing cultists in the military... This is the madness the neoKKKons have wrought.  Lady Liberty has doused her torch, turned away and hung her head in shame at what treasonous profiteers and subversive cultists have turned our nation into.

I suspect that Ben Franklin and Ike have rolled over in their graves, mumbling "I told you so."