Voluntary Civilian Reserve — That’s Mercenary to You

Here you go–the third in my three-part freak out on outsourcing the U.S. government to achieve a global corporate fascism and, ultimately, white Christian domination until they LEAVE ALREADY.

In the State of the Union address, Bush noted his intention to have Congress help him “design” a volunteer civilian reserve corps to ease the burden on the armed services. I can think of another way to ease their burden. Like so many of Bush’s seemingly pathetic bridges across the aisle, this turns out to be misleading–and far more dangerous than the weak words imply.

The volunteer civilian reserve corps, the mercenaries–let’s just call them Blackwater–are already an important part of the plan to outsource the military since the Republican fascist wave of the 1990s. “In fact,” says Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, “they represent the life’s work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.”

This is a revolution in military affairs.

This is only part of their outsourcing of many areas of the U.S. government.

This is fed from the same stream of money that created the Family Research Council and other right-wing subversive organizations.

This is the future Eisenhower warned about with the unchecked military-industrial complex.

Scahill has published a series of important articles on Blackwater and on the mercenary phenomenon in The Nation. With five Blackwater employees killed on a security operation in Baghdad just hours before the State of the Union address this week, maybe now is a good time to pay attention. Among the tidbits of information we should know:

• Blackwater and other “private security firms” beat FEMA to New Orleans.
• U.S. govt paid $950 per day per Blackwater guard, which came to $30 million for the Katrina bill. FEMA anticipated needing the guards for 3-5 years.
• From 2004-2006 the U.S. government paid this global private mercenary army $320 million for “diplomatic security.”
• Families say Blackwater cut corners in the interest of profits, resulting in the gruesome deaths of four Blackwater employees in Falluja in 2004. Now Blackwater has Kenneth Starr working as their counsel to tell the families nu-uh. How’s that for independent counsel?

Blackwater and the clean up their global activities imply has even shown up in fiction in CBS’s post-nuclear television show Jericho as Ravenwood, mercilessly marauding pirates trying to raid the good-hearted middle American town. The producers say they had helpful discussions with private security contractors in creating the realistic image of mercenaries for the show.

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