One of the most frightening things about Bush is that he and his don’t see a difference between the corporate and the public. While we aren’t paying much attention, companies like Halliburton and Blackwater are becoming privatized armies, beholden to no quaint notions like loyalty to country. Bush and Co. have repeatedly employed the private sector to do what it couldn’t legally accomplish. Keep in mind, for instance, that your personal information is a sellable commodity in the business world, though the government’s gathering it would be considered in an entirely different light. Keep in mind, too, that any time you call a large corporation, you’re informed that your call "may be monitored or recorded." ("May be?" who are we kidding?)
All of this to say I find this development terrifying:
"What could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most profitable and enduring enterprises is one of the company’s most secretive initiatives–a move into the world of privatized intelligence services. In April 2006, Prince quietly began building Total Intelligence Solutions, which boasts that it ‘brings CIA-style’ services to the open market for Fortune 500 companies."
And then there’s this quotation:
"’Total Intel brings the…skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room,’ [Blackwater’s vice chair Cofer] Black said when the company launched."
What about their business degrees exactly qualifies these Florsheim strongmen to be in charge of a para-CIA? Management 301, Extraordinary Rendition in Accounts Receivable?
This particular privatization of what should be governmental strikes me as akin to the Romans saying, "Let’s just let a few of those barbarians in."
How long till this private CIA is given the task of disappearing people like the real CIA? Torture? What laws apply to multinational corporations, exactly? What drives corporations except, at bottom, greed for larger profits? What will these private intelligence agencies be willing to do? What if you take a perfectly legal action that threatens to upend an industry which employs this private CIA? Are we to believe they’ll never misuse this resource?
This is not a pleasant vision of the future.
