Treason of the Intellectuals - Hedges

[David Guyatt]

Precisely.

[Magda Hassan]

I've also been very disappointed in the professional and accreditiation bodies that seem to allow their members to get away with appalling behaviour. Like all the scientists, doctors and psychologists who write the torture guidelines and implement and oversee it. They all should be disbarred from practice in any shape or form.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Privatization of operations which *belong* to the people has many benefits to the private sector and none to the people. It is sold as a cost saving measure. But this is extremely deceptive as the costs to the people are never lower with the introduction of PROFIT into the process.

Profit is the raison d'etre for corporations which receive outsource contracts or those who operate in the private sector. The MIC is beholden to the high profit margin defense industry and the entire procurement process has been a conveyor belt directly the people's money to the corporate sector much of it in no bid bloated contracts.

And look at the cosy relationship between the MIC and the pentagon... as they decide what weapons systems are needed. Needed is quite the concept. Why do we need star wars? Or a nuke submarine fleet? Or massive floating battle groups? Or smaller figter planes costs $250 million or more a copy?

The MIC has provided hundreds of thousands of jobs to American workers and is a cancer on the economy killing it and diverting all productivity for useful goods and services into dead end weapons of destruction and war.

The *defense* sector and the national security sectors probably consume half the budget of the US. Who even knows precisely... But the spending is nothing short of obscene. War is a racket and capitalists are laughing all the way to the bank.

[Magda Hassan]

The *defense* sector and the national security sectors probably consume half the budget of the US. Who even knows precisely... But the spending is nothing short of obscene. War is a racket and capitalists are laughing all the way to the bank.

War is a business model now.

[David Guyatt]

Privatization of operations which *belong* to the people has many benefits to the private sector and none to the people. It is sold as a cost saving measure. But this is extremely deceptive as the costs to the people are never lower with the introduction of PROFIT into the process.

I couldn't agree with you more Jeffrey. The argument for privatisation has been to nullify unions (many I suppose deservedly so because any entity that becomes 'too powerful' is by my definition, 'too much'), but the underlying reason has been to redirect tax dollars into private hands. Members of the government and the civil service who have aided and abetted this process then, thereafter, slot into handsomely paid private sector jobs, a la Tony Blair (Blair claims to need £15 million a year just to break-even - poor thing).

[Jan Klimkowski]

Chris Hedges emailed the following statement to PEN and it is reprinted here with his permission:
I will not be participating as a speaker in the PEN World Voices Festival in May. I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center. This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend. I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel's relentless championing of preemptive warwhich under international law is illegalas a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.

Goddamn it! We've got one of them.

Mimus polyglottos