Mike McConnell and the American Corporate State
March 30th, 2010I’ve included just a few choice excerpts from this great article. If you only click through on one story today, make this the one.
Via: Salon:
In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests, exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions. Few people have blurred the line between public office and private profit more egregiously and shamelessly than he. McConnell’s behavior is the classic never-ending “revolving door” syndrome: public officials serve private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by those same interests once they leave. He went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.
But that’s the least of what makes McConnell such a perfect symbol for the legalized corruption that dominates Washington. Tellingly, his overarching project while at Booz Allen and in public office was exactly the same: the outsourcing of America’s intelligence and surveillance functions (including domestic surveillance) to private corporations, where those activities are even more shielded than normal from all accountability and oversight and where they generate massive profit at the public expense. Prior to becoming Bush’s DNI, McConnell, while at Booz Allen, was chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors devoted to expanding the privatization of government intelligence functions.
Then, as Bush’s DNI, McConnell dramatically expanded the extent to which intelligence functions were outsourced to the same private industry that he long represented. Worse, he became the leading spokesman for demanding full immunity for lawbreaking telecoms for their participation in Bush’s illegal NSA programs — in other words, he exploited “national security” claims and his position as DNI to win the dismissal of lawsuits against the very lawbreaking industry he represented as INSA Chairman, including, almost certainly, Booz Allen itself. Having exploited his position as DNI to lavishly reward and protect the private intelligence industry, he then returns to its loving arms to receive from them lavish personal rewards of his own.
It’s vital to understand how this really works: it isn’t that people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector and back again. That implies more separation than really exists. At this point, it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it’s more like an intra-corporate re-assignment than it is changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI, he’s simply in one division of this entity and when he’s at Booz Allen, he’s in another, but it’s all serving the same entity (it’s exactly how insurance giant Wellpoint dispatched one of its Vice Presidents to Max Baucus’ office so that she could write the health care plan that the Congress eventually enacted).
In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that even McConnell, when he was nominated to be Bush’s DNI, told The New York Times that his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions. That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the Government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”
…
Aside from the general dangers of vesting government power in private corporations — this type of corporatism (control of government by corporations) was the hallmark of many of the worst tyrannies of the last century — all of this is big business beyond what can be described. The attacks of 9/11 exploded the already-huge and secret intelligence budget. Shorrock estimates that “about 50 percent of this spending goes directly to private companies” and “spending on intelligence since 2002 is much higher than the total of $33 billion the Bush administration paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large corporations for reconstruction projects in Iraq.”
…
Specifically, McConnell advocates a so-called “reeingeer[ing] of the Internet” to allow the Government and private corporations far greater capability to track what is being done over the Internet and who is doing it:
The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It’s that simple. . . . If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce — or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions — chaos would result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.
Scary! And what do we need to submit to in order to avoid these calamaties? This:
The United States must also translate our intent into capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.
The fourth comment posted under the Salon article reads:
What can be done to stop this?
The overpowering sense of nausea I get after reading this very important piece is a direct result of the powerlessness I feel to do anything about it that will have any kind of real meaning.
I can write, call, and march on my Congressman and Senator’s offices, but we all know that has virtually no impact beyond lame lip service.
If I tell my friends and family about this, half of them think I’m a conspiracy nut and the other half are too self-absorbed in their own lives to care.
I give to Glenn and groups like Wikileaks when I can, but I’m doing just as poorly financially as most average Americans and cannot give anything very meaningful monetarily.
Man, I need a pep talk…
I’d say the author’s woes sum up the situation for the bulk of western society pretty well.
Between the blind denial of those who label people expressing dissenting opinion as “conspiracy theorists” and the folks who simply can’t be bothered to even notice the lights going out one by one, we’re talking an enormous majority of “civilized” populations.
Due largely to sentiments not all that different from those expressed by the author, much like Kevin and his fairer Kiwi half, my wife (also a foreign national) and I departed the states by way of “opting out” of the stateside version of the game as best as we could financially manage under the circumstances.
There was clearly a period of what can only be described as depression and a withdrawal from many old social interactions, based primarily on my not belonging to either of the two denial-based categories above. In other words, I grok the author’s sentiments quite clearly.
Ultimately, it was regaining some small amount of autonomy and power via changing — and reducing or eliminating — expectations that we emerged from the other side of the transition with a new sense of self. An ongoing process, truth be told.
Though our larger sense of disappointment isn’t exactly gone, the displacement it creates in our daily lives eventually diminished to the point where a western existence no longer seems a futile exercise in hypocrisy at seemingly every turn.
Interestingly, it only became possible for me to divorce myself from a general sense of lingering malaise when I re-engaged my creative energies and began producing art again. The irony comes when a truth is revealed: my creative impulse had originally been crushed under the sheer weight of the commenters observations in my own life.
Getting past the futility and discovering a way to re-engage the world, essentially forgiving any and all for their relative blindness, was clearly a process — a journey — that will continue for as long as the “modern” world continues along its present trajectory.
Meanwhile, the garden and greenhouse and learning a little more every year about managing our own livestock remains a source of personal assurance, physical vitality and vigor and a sort of mental health insurance to counterbalance the sad state of affairs in the societies that surround us on all sides.
“it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity…”
Did DDE call it or what?!