DAVE LINDORFF, - Nation of Change
Stephan: We are beginning to see the rise of contractor militias operating in the U.S., as this report makes clear. It is an extension of the same thinking that privatized large segments of the Iraq War. The growing relationship between the company that was formerly Blackwater and Monsanto is another example. This is an extraordinarily dangerous trend.
Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.
I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)
I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that ‘If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.
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BILL MOYERS and MICHAEL WINSHIP, Editor-in-Chief and Senior Fellow - Salon/ Moyers & Company
Stephan: Here is more proof of the demise of the American democracy, and the vassal status of the Congress as the non-geographical corporate states become the dominate powers of the age.
If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range - an icy 15 percent by last count - all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need.
Traditionally, political scientists have taught their students that there are two schools of thought about how a legislator should get the job done. One is to vote yay or nay on a bill by following the will of his or her constituency, doing what they say they want. The other is to represent them as that legislator sees fit, acting in the best interest of the voters - whether they like it or not.
But our current Congress - as cranky and inert as an obnoxious old uncle who refuses to move from his easy chair - never went to either of those schools. Its members rarely have the voter in mind at all, unless, of course, that voter’s a cash-laden heavy hitter with the clout to keep an incumbent on the leash and comfortably in office.
How else to […]
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GEORGE MONBIOT, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Others are beginning to recognize the great geopolitical shift that I have been writing about for almost 15 years -- the rise of the non-geographical corporate states Here is an example.
In other ages, states sought to seize as much power as they could. Today, the self-hating state renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare their role redundant and illegitimate. They launch furious assaults on their own branches, seeking wherever possible to lop them off.
This self-mutilation is a response to the fact that power has shifted. States now operate at the behest of others. Deregulation, privatisation, the shrinking of the scope, scale and spending of the state: these are now seen as the only legitimate policies. The corporations and billionaires to whom governments defer will have it no other way.
Just as taxation tends to redistribute wealth, regulation tends to redistribute power. A democratic state controls and contains powerful interests on behalf of the powerless. This is why billionaires and corporations hate regulation, and – through their newspapers, thinktanks and astroturf campaigns – mobilise people against it. State power is tyranny, state power is freedom.
But the interchangeable middle managers who call themselves ministers cannot wholly dismiss the wishes of the electorate. They must show that they are doing something to protect what people value. They resolve the contradiction between the demands of the electorate and the demands of big business by […]
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