Mathew Maavak — Evidently, Trump had either miscalculated or misrepresented the extent and nature of America’s greatest existential threat. Instead of draining the swamp, the White House is now floundering in a toxic ocean of privatized intelligence.
A sampling of figures cited by a series of Washington Post reports was truly staggering:
• By 2010, there were already 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence across 10,000 locations in the United States.
• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances with nearly 500,000 of them being private security contractors.
• By 2013, about 5.1 million people — or more than 1.5 percent of the US population — were holding security clearances, spurring an industry in background checks worth $5.9 billion alone.
US national security is now a commodity sold on the borderless bazaar. Even the king troll, replete with bogus credentials, now fancies himself as a player in international affairs and wouldn’t hesitate to confect cockamamie intelligence via the most ludicrous plots. The taxpayer-funded pork barrel is never empty. A 2013 New York Times report estimated that 70% of US intelligence budget – worth $56 billion a year – went to the private intelligence sector. Presumably, private spooks and trolls now make up the bulk of the overall services sector in the United States.
With billions in budget and millions in freeloading agitprop specialists, this scam can only be sustained if investigative reports such as the one conducted by the Washington Post simply ceased – which it did by September 2010. This was the pivotal moment when the US mainstream media lost all semblances to sanity and objectivity, reflecting the quality and diktats of the US intelligence community that likely kept panoptic tabs on every journalist in the country. The Russian bogeyman was reinvented and Pussy Riot soon became the international crisis du jour.
With their livelihoods at stake, mercenaries now scour the length and breadth of the country as well as every interstice of cyberspace to dig out politically incorrect remarks or jests made five, 10, 20 and 30 years ago to remove America’s best and brightest from critically important positions in the land. If nothing is found, something damning can be made up and repeated via a thoroughly compromised media. Private intelligence cannot thrive without the dumbing-down of America. The symptoms are there for all to see: Pussy Riot is now a recommended study at Harvard University.
The tacit goal here is to macerate America’s next generation scholars, thinkers, and technocrats. How does one “Make America Great Again” under these circumstances?
US private security companies also outsource intelligence analysis and “information management” tasks to those far and wide. Call centres, reeling from the effects of a slowing global economy, can be converted into troll centres.
No White House initiative, appointment or policy can therefore be executed under a protracted imbroglio of senseless Twitter wars, mass-mediated stupefaction and gridlocking protests. The proliferation of fake news, disinformation campaigns and red herrings – ironically encouraged by the likes of the Washington Post – is symptomatic of a waning superpower that is increasingly rudderless, clueless and imploding from within. The Russians can take the blame – as usual!
The US has not only outsourced its intelligence to the private sector, it has sold its national soul in the process. Nothing embodies this better than the billions contributed by an assortment of foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation in return for taxpayer-funded foreign policy favours and arms sales worth $165 billion.
Along with arms, comes the need for private sector mercenaries and technicians as well as treasonous native politicians and academics who can be greased into the multi-trillion dollar machinery. And bad guys – most prominently jihadis – to keep Manichean racket going!
Draining the swamp in Washington will not neuter the West’s pan-global military-industrial-media complex. Any disruption to this global racket will induce a permanently mutinous state in Washington – as is the situation right now. This problem cannot be quelled through political means. Unless Trump relents, US mercenaries will approach the highest bidder in order to disrupt, deny and degrade the day-to-day functions of the US government.
Trump simply cannot sack the higher echelons of his labyrinthine intelligence machinery either as it had long outsourced many critical tasks to the private sector. Putting millions of private security parasites out of work will probably lead to civil war. The only way out seems to be martial law.
As Dredd might say: “It’s judgement time, America!”
Mathew Maavak is a writer and geopolitical observer residing in Malaysia.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
