"Privatization" after 55 Years
President Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning us about the Military/Industrial Complex, in
1959. After 55 years, we have a tragic mass killing, by gun, of employees of the United States Navy at the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C. What's the connection? Dr. Janis Orlowski spoke to the nation about an "evil" that we must all come together to fix. http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/er-chief-after-navy-yard-shooting-theres-so
We learned that the shooter was a defense contractor, who was "cleared" for access to the Naval facility by other defense contractors. We were made aware, weeks before, that another defense contractor fled the country with state secrets; and is now in Russia (given asylum there), where he continues to "leak" those secrets. The same contractor cleared both Snowden (the leaker) and Alexis (the shooter)! The link to all of this is a practice, warned against by President Eisenhower in the late 1950s, that has grown, on steroids, so to speak, since. PRIVATIZATION, or contractor performance of tasks, formerly performed by government personnel (both military and civilian) in our Defense Department; is the practice responsible for much of what has unfolded. Gun violence, the immediate focus, also can be related to what has happened within our military services since 1959.
Other things that have occurred as this practice grew, include the transfer of security tasks to private corporations, who were employed to work side-by-side (at much greater pay for the same task) with active duty military members. Ten years after Eisenhower's warning, I was assigned a "special duty" to conduct a study to ward off "privatization" pressures from Congress to get rid of our Commissary. The study results stopped a move to force military service members to pay higher prices in the public marketplace. At that time, military members were deliberately paid much lower wages for the skills they possessed; than wages paid commercially for those skills. Most members were drafted into the military. Nixon ended the Draft in 1973. The resulting "All-Volunteer" military members have been forced to assume ever-increasing burdens to defend our nation
The growth in the Defense Budget since 1959 (normalized for inflation) will undoubtedly show that the Defense Department has grown beyond all controls, and is not only too big to manage, but cannot account for a sizeable portion of the funds they receive. Presidents Johnson and Nixon had a lot to do with setting the course that lead to what we have today. Congress has been known to "force" "privatization" on the Defense Department.
We have to wonder if the recent epidemic of rape within the military, and similar issues, are also connected to the transition of critical tasks from personnel who are commissioned and take an oath to support and defend our Constitution, to random, poorly "vetted" contractors.
Our new Defense Chief reports that he is investigating these issues.
Stay Vigilant! Can we listen to Eisenhower; at long last??
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