Caitlin Johnstone thinks it would be more honest for Biden to appoint the CEOs and boards of corporations to cabinet posts, rather than their lobbyists.
VP Joe Biden with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey, and U.S. Forces – Iraq, Commander, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III in Iraq, Nov. 29, 2011. (Staff Sgt. Caleb Barrieau/Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Joe Biden has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.
As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the U.S. war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career.
As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for U.S. troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan.
He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
Austin is also a member of the board of directors for the war profiteering corporation Raytheon, where he went immediately after his military career. Raytheon spends millions of dollars a year actively lobbying the U.S. government to advance policies which are beneficial to the multibillion-dollar arms manufacturing giant, which of course means lobbying for military expansionism and interventionism. The previous Secretary of Defense Mark Esper also worked for Raytheon, working for years as one of the top corporate lobbyists in DC under the position “Vice President for Government Relations“.
And you know what? I say why not.
Seriously, why not? Why shouldn’t the head of the U.S. murder machine come from a corporation which has made billions of dollars facilitating war crimes in Yemen? Why shouldn’t the most depraved and bloodthirsty regime on this planet have its depravity and bloodshed advanced by a professional war profiteer? The mass military slaughter of the U.S. and its allies has only ever been about power and profit, so why not be honest about it?
Hell, why stop there? Why not make Raytheon itself the Secretary of Defense? Didn’t the Supreme Court rule that corporations are people anyway? Make Raytheon the Secretary of Defense, make Boeing Secretary of State, make Goldman Sachs the Secretary Treasurer, make ExxonMobil the head of the EPA, make Amazon the CIA Director and Google the Director of National Intelligence. Then you’d have a completely honest face on the head of the U.S. empire.
The person Biden has reportedly picked to lead the Department of Defense is on the board of Raytheon, a key supplier of bombs to the U.S.-Saudi war in Yemen that has lobbied aggressively in opposition to curbs on arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition. https://t.co/vAVTwIRp8S pic.twitter.com/IfmCiEpTRr
— Sarah Lazare (@sarahlazare) December 8, 2020
It’s absolutely insane that our world is being dominated by war profiteers who actively push for more violence and bloodshed because they make money selling the weapons used to perpetrate it.
It’s no less evil than if plutocrats were cruising the world murdering people and selling their skins for money; the same number of people would be killed for the same profit incentive, yet people who would recoil in horror at that idea pay no mind to the fact that functionally the same thing is happening with corporate powers like Raytheon.
The only difference between the U.S. war machine and a band of armed crooks murdering people for money is that the U.S. war machine does it at a far greater scale. As long as that’s going on there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Hopefully people start looking past the smiley faced mask of the empire and begin opening their eyes to the blood-spattered face beneath it.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article was re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Ms. Johnstone pungent, penetrating hyperbolic prose is refreshing. Her why not say the hell with it plea is persuasive although I suspect she is one who never abandons hope. She makes her point and until we find a way to take the ability to buy politicians out of the equation, things don’t look so good. And the new breed of multi-billionaires doing the fixing is more scary than the old style rich. Continuing to allow them to play with our future is alarming.
Excellent summary of our current situation.
Oh Dear!! Another Chest Beater for the American Merchants of Death. Biden or Trump what`s the difference ?
Caitlyn in the best…..so honest. She is correct in her thinking. Now that the Supreme Court gave Corporations the status of persons in the Citizen United ruling, we should do what they say. We should just swear in all corporations under the bible and give them the status as Secretaries/Directors of all the Cabinet positions. Oh wait….I forgot…..they are already doing that. Gee…..this is now getting complicated…..how can an entire corporation fit into the Oval Office??????????? We might as well stick with the present system…..they are doing this anyway so why change?????????
Isn’t this blatant corruption? Corruption? Third world, eastern European, Russian type corruption, right out in the open? How can we allow lobbying for war profiteers? How can we allow a general, a dirty general at that, to fill a civilian post? He’s black, so it’s all OK…Whew! Thank God (Mars, I guess) we got Biden in! Otherwise, we’d be in big trouble!
You’re right, John. Remember General “Goody Two-Shoes” Colin Powell who lied about WMD for a pretext to invade Iraq, a nation which did us no harm, and a “crime of aggression” which were used against some of the Nazis we didn’t like, after the Second World War. Powell, if I remember correctly, was a Lt. Colonel sent to investigate the My Lai massacre of unarmed women, children and old men, which he covered up, but was a darling of the limousine liberals during the Bush Jr. Crime Family’s regime. “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Caitlin Johnstone, you rock! Always right to the point, and another good expose about the so-called “lesser of two evils” nonsense,
Yup, it is indeed blatant corruption.
But legalized, ain’t it? If even a small portion of the obscene corruption (obscene, barbaric and atrocious given from where the $$$$ come) in DC were revealed in an African country, our oh so bloody (literally) politicos would pointing their fingers, sending in the UN Human Rights folks or so on…Our hypocrisy knows absolutely no bounds. And apparently neither does our total merging of Mammon and Moloch worshiping, no matter how many people we kill, cultures we destroy in order to fatten bank accounts, feed our insatiable (apparently) sense of superiority (!!!)…