Blackwater, Afghanistan, and killing people for money

Several weeks ago former Blackwater founder Erik Prince proposed privatizing the entire Afghanistan War in what can only be described as Blackwater 2.0.

The United States should hire a mercenary army to “fix” Afghanistan, a country where we’ve been at war since 2001, spending billions along the way. The big idea here is that they could extricate U.S. soldiers from this quagmire, and somehow solve it.
Not surprisingly, the private-military industry is behind this proposal. Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private military company Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, each see a role for themselves in this future. Their proposal was offered at the request of Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Besides Bannon and Kushner, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant for national-security affairs, endorsed the idea.
Since then, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher announced his strong support for the idea.

Rep. Rohrabacher called this “exactly the right approach,” and told TheDC that Prince’s plan is being considered seriously within the White House.
...“A big problem of course is that the military hates anybody that is not under their command going into a combat area and involving themselves in combat activities,” Rohrabacher, a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said.

Oh, so that's the problem.
I thought the problem was that we are in an unwinnable war, and that historically mercenaries usually make things worse.

"Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people - and people of other nations - for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.”
― Suzy Kassem

Prince's proposal involves a 5,000 man mercenary army, and an enormous private air force of 100 aircraft, including fixed-wing jets, attack helicopters and drones.

The neocolonial echoes of Prince's venture are unmistakable, and he doesn't shy away from them. In a column published earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Prince peddled his vision of mercenary companies on the front lines with an American "viceroy" in Kabul calling the shots. He gestured to the history of Britain's East India Co. in South Asia as a useful precedent, much to the bewilderment of others aware of the company's history of looting, slaughter and exploitation.
Prince renewed his attempts at historical analogy on Tuesday, casting the company as a cost-effective, low-footprint model: "When the East India Company operated for 200-plus years, they deployed with that model," he told MSNBC. "One mentor to 20 local troops."

Prince, aware of how sensitive the White House and Congress is to media influence, has gone on the news show circuit, and it appears to be working.

Trump is said to have been receiving advisement from Prince in the shadows but is now openly contemplating Prince’s proposal despite pushback from Secretary of Defense James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, according to USA Today.

“That’s how you tell a merc is dead; he just stops collecting paychecks.”
― Mercedes Lackey, By the Sword

There's a lot to unpack here. So let's start with Prince's claim of a "cost-effective, low-footprint model".

What Prince is outlining is an autonomous force that could operate without accountability either from voters, via their elected representatives, or from the prying concerns of human-rights officials in the government. On Tuesday, Prince added, “This approach would cost less than 20 percent of the $48 billion being spent in Afghanistan this year. Trump was hired to remake our government. There is no greater need for a restructuring than in Afghanistan.”

I don't believe that this is what Trump voters had in mind.
Nevertheless, let's look at the available facts.

In 2009, for example, the Congressional Budget Office found that in wartime, private security costs about the same as the U.S. military.

Next let's examine the performance of Blackwater mercs.
Their shameful, trigger-happy record in Iraq is well-known.

What isn't as well-known is performance of Prince's R2 mercenaries (a company he formed after leaving Blackwater) in Yemen was so bad that they were fired by UAE, and replaced by DynCorp mercs.
Prince then contracted out to "defeat the pirates terrorising the shipping lanes off the Somali coast." Things didn't go well in Somalia either.

"And its fate makes the story of the pirate hunters for hire a case study in the inherent dangers in the outsourced wars in Somalia, where the United States and other countries have relied on proxy forces and armed private contractors to battle pirates and, increasingly, Islamic militants."

So why should we expect something better from Prince this time?

Finally, let's look at Prince's "cost-effective, low-footprint model" - the British East India Company.

The Honourable East India Company (HEIC) was created by royal charter on December 31, 1600, and was given a monopoly on all trade with India. By 1670 King Charles II had granted the HEIC the rights to mint money, employ an army, make war, form alliances, autonomous territorial acquisition, and administer justice in those areas.

 The state of Bengal in India was conquered by a corporate mercenary army led by Robert Clive in 1757. The multinational corporation continued to dominate the huge nation until 1858, when it came under direct British rule.

 At the time, Bengal was one of the richest nations on Earth.

The company then loaded the contents of the Bengal treasury onto a fleet of 100 boats and sent them downriver to its base in Calcutta.
In one stroke, Robert Clive, who had engineered the victory, netted 2.5 million pounds for the company and 234,000 pounds for himself.

 So what did the British East India Company do first? It raised land taxes five-fold - from 10% to 50% of the value of the agricultural production.

 All the policies were designed to increase the share price of the company. Company employees were returning to Britain with enormous fortunes.

 The most sensible business strategy therefore would be to opt for maximum profit realisation as quickly, as efficiently and as ruthlessly as possible. And so it was that wherever it was possible the planting of cash crops such as indigo and cotton were made compulsory. Likewise, because the raised tax had to be collected in cash and at the point of a bayonet if necessary the hoarding of rice was forbidden, and so with little option this was sold on and a thriving grain market came into being which was of course eventually monopolised by the company.

 What were the effects on the state of Bengal? A famine that killed 10 million people - about a third of the population. It was one of the worst, most concentrated famines in human history. It nearly resulted in the extermination of the ancient Bengal culture.
 Widespread famine began to appear as early as late 1769, but the Company ignored it because it wasn't effecting profits.

 A result of the massive famine was a depopulation and abandonment of agricultural land that returned to the jungle. Because so many children died, the population of Bengal kept decreasing for decades to come. Highwaymen and bandits sprung up and got so bad that Bengal eventually had to be put under martial law. Tax revenue decreased by 14% the following year. In response the company raised the land tax in 1771 to 60%. A logical move when you consider they needed to replace the revenue from millions of people who died.
The resulting depopulation and destabilization of Bengal cut revenue and increased administrative costs for the British East India Company. Their greed and mismanagement not only resulted in millions of people starving, but turned an incredibly profitable company into a money-losing one.

And so in 1772, the British East India Company appealed to the British taxpayers for a bailout.

This provoked a wider credit crisis, forcing the company’s directors to beg the government for a bailout in the summer of 1772. The East India Company’s centrality to Britain’s commercial and imperial ambitions meant that it was the original “too big to fail” corporation.

Normally that would be where the story ends. However, there is a twist.

The bailout resulted in the Regulating Act of 1773. The British government was acknowledged as the sovereign of India and the Company submitted to oversight and regulation, even though it continued to run things in Bengal.

  In exchange the British East India Company got greater autonomy in its trade with the American colonies. Specifically this was called the Tea Act of 1773.

 You might remember the Tea Act as the cause of the Boston Tea Party.

 13 Geo III c. 44, long title An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licenses to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.

The act allowed the Company to sell tea to the colonies directly without having to pay a royal tax on it. This would undermine the tea smugglers such as John Hancock. In response to the Tea Act the price of tea in Boston actually dropped.

Still reeling from the Hutchinson letters, Bostonians suspected the removal of the Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British parliament to squash American freedom. Samuel Adams, wealthy smugglers, and others who had profited from the smuggled tea called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandon their positions; consignees who hesitated were terrorized through attacks on their warehouses and even their homes.

 So you see, Bostonians weren't angry about any taxes being imposed on them. They were angry about a huge corporation using its powerful lobby in the halls of government to crush the small businessman via corporate welfare in the form of tax loopholes.

  Why that sounds downright leftist to me. Does it to you?

  The outraged Bostonians circulated a pamphlet called The Alarm which reminded people of the company's recent record in Bengal.

 Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men.... Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

So in a very ironic way, Erik Prince and Donald Trump are bringing us all the way back to pre-Revolutionary America.
Except our government is now the British.

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The Aspie Corner's picture

They just wanna see a few black and brown people die, willing dupes that they are. And I'm sure many of them would become mercs just to kill a few themselves.

Meanwhile, instead of actually opposing this shit, the Democrats will APPEASE them. It's what Obama and his ilk did, anyway.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Wink's picture

@The Aspie Corner

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

detroitmechworks's picture

And I wish it was an exaggeration, but this was exactly the plot of a game that came out on Election day 2014...

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKYHuhg0l3I]

Yep, what we really need is authoritarians to take over and solve the problems with lots of firepower. That ALWAYS works.

Fucking idiot is drinking his own koolaid.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

@detroitmechworks

Except our government is now the British.

...and instead of importing tea from India, we're importing opium from Afghanistan.

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detroitmechworks's picture

@gjohnsit note the huge uptick in deaths from opiates...

And yet, El Trumpo Grande and his Drug Exacerbation Agency are going after pot.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9SJ0p_hGK4]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit

...and instead of importing tea from India, we're importing opium from Afghanistan.

They have higher goals which make them higher amounts of money at an even higher cost to others. What could possibly be better?

Edited because for the third time today, I've mixed bold and blockquotes. The fact that it's taking me 5 hours to get two cups of coffee down probably doesn't help me wake up...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit @gjohnsit

...and instead of importing tea from India, we're importing opium from Afghanistan.

They have higher goals which make them higher amounts of money at an even higher cost to others. What could possibly be better?

Edit: odd, it failed to post and simply stopped trying, so I tried again to discover that the unposted comment still sitting there actually had gone through, posted - and stopped without taking me to the page?

Re-edited: reason above.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Cecil Rhodes was a man responsible for untold, unending devastation and violence. An architect of South African apartheid, he explicitly believed in the existence of an Anglo-Saxon master race – an ideology that drove him to not only steal approximately one million miles of South African land, but to facilitate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of black South Africans.

“The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise."
Cecil Rhodes

His establishment of a paramilitary private army, the British South Africa Company’s Police (BSACP) resulted in the systematic murder of approximately 60,000 people; his amendment of the Masters and Servants Act (1890) reintroduced conditions of torture for black labourers; his infamous racist “land grabs” set up a system in which the unlawful and illegitimate acquisition of land through armed force was routine.

Let's hope he is not as successful.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

Mark from Queens's picture

@Not Henry Kissinger

I had decided with the confidence of a teenager who’d read a little French philosophy, that there was only one really serious philosophical question: complicity. For a brief while, intense and priggish as only a weedy teenager can be, I thought I could get through life with clean hands. No meat, no logos, and fossil fuels only for the greater good. But the first time I had a real chance not to be complicit with evil, I found I had a staggering gift for casuistry. I walked into the vast modernist convention center in New Delhi, my oversize jacket and tie already a concession to the Man, armed with answers to a question I was sure the Rhodes Scholarship committee would ask: And what, young man, are your feelings about taking blood money?

Other people had been there before me. Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version (1997) has a character who, having just won a Rhodes Scholarship, announces that its benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, “was a vicious imperialist and his scholarship fund would be more honourably used making restitution to the blacks he exploited.” Such a thin line between showing integrity and just showing off.

I’d been through my options. Maybe I could claim the scholarship with a clean conscience as restitution for colonialism: when the hand that feeds you is the one that starved you in the first place, it’s only ration­al to sup well, then bite hard. But a casual skim of the family annals yielded only several generations of high-caste collaborators who went out of their way to welcome their new British overlords. Then there was the honest answer, from the dustman Mr. Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: “Have you no morals, man?” “Can’t afford them, Governor.” Hardly the thing for someone aspiring, as Rhodes himself grandly put it, to “fight the world’s fight.” That left the Marxist answer: that the obsession with integrity is a fallacy of bourgeois morality; no reason a hypocrite can’t be the agent of history; the revolutionary vanguard can’t live off righteousness alone. So unsatisfying to the teenage moralist.

When the steely-eyed biochemist and former athlete, evidently the bad cop of the committee, turned to me with an “and finally” look, I thought the question was imminent. “What sports do you play?” No help from Marx on this one. “None competitively, sir.” “All sport, young man, is competitive. You thrash me, or I thrash you. Thank you; we will be in touch.”

Afterward, when they’d made their decisions, the biochemist sat me down with the air of someone overruled by a majority, someone used to monologuing without interruption. “I know your kind. Poetry, philosophy, pacifism. Lose their heads at Oxford and get sent down, or worse, return with a second-class degree, and not even a rowing blue to make up for it. Do me a favor. Keep off the opium. Get a First. Anything less will be a waste of the Founder’s money. Do you promise?”...

I loathe that little fiendish, beady-eyd, faux Christian, militarist, bastard Erik DeVos Prince.

One of the most sickening parts of concentrated wealth is the use of all that blood-soaked money to emblazon their murderous names on institutions that become renowned. History is just littered with examples.

"Philanthropy" in this sense, most all of the time really, is a fraud. Mark Twain lampooned this conscience bribery in "A Humane Word From Satan."

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

@Mark from Queens

He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it. He has beguiled England into buying Charter waste paper for Bank of England notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty. He has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half.

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

- Following the Equator

And really enjoyed the Krishna piece.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

Wink's picture

would require an objective, wouldn't it? And, far as I recall the U.S. hasn't even stated one, except the vague and unending "War on Terra."
And, this is a Lot like "Privatized Prisons," or privatized anything by the RW. Use the people's taxes for a For-Profit enterprise. A two-fer for the RW. Steal from the public treasury. Use that money to make more money. Kill another workers union. Run the jails the way God intended (slave labor).

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Centaurea's picture

Prince peddled his vision of mercenary companies on the front lines with an American "viceroy" in Kabul calling the shots.

The "roy" in the word "viceroy" means "king".

A viceroy is to the king as a vice-president is to the president.

Could he be any more obvious? They're not even trying to hide their agenda anymore. I'm not sure whether it's due to ignorance or arrogance. Come to think of it, probably both. Their saving grace (from our perspective) is their utter incompetence.

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"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi

"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone

Meteor Man's picture

Hat tip to Digby. Story at Truthout:

Why did everyone stop asking Sebastian Gorka about Nazis?

Notably, no one was sure what exactly Gorka’s role in the White House was. At any rate, a lot of people wanted him to stop doing it, because Gorka had been linked to a Nazi-allied group in Hungary, and he was advising the president of the United States.

Not exactly a Nazi. A letter from Congress to Trump:

As members of the U.S. Congress who care deeply about fighting anti-Semitism at home and abroad, we urge you to immediately dismiss senior White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka,” a group of 55 Congresspeople wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump. “Based on recent revelations about Mr. Gorka’s public support for and membership in several anti-Semitic and racist groups in Hungary, he is clearly unfit to serve in any position of responsibility in your administration.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Gorka’s firing, along with a number of Jewish groups.

Gorka has denied that he is a sworn member of the group, known as Vitézi Rend, but the group itself disputes that denial. Gorka wore a Vitézi Rend medal to Trump’s inaugural ball and his ties to the group reportedly stretch back decades.

Much more here:

https://thinkprogress.org/why-did-everyone-stop-asking-sebastian-gorka-a...

And a link in the Truthout article to an April 24th Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/sebastian-gorka-leaves-student-p...

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Wink's picture

@Meteor Man
Nazi in Trump's admin. Well, maybe one of a few in the admin., but Trump is surrounded by Nazis.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

k9disc's picture

shit is really taking me back there: Corporate Mercantalism.

This shit we have ain't capitalism and it ain't free markets. The corporate on corporate love fest that is our media driven reality is a mercantilist propaganda apparatus.

I cribbed this from the wikipedia page on mercantilism, as I have had this idea so many times and struggle to wrap my head around it. This time I just tried to swap "corporate" for "nation", and I think it helped me make sense of it a bit, and it kind of makes sense... I think.

Here it is:

Corporate Mercantilism was a type of international economic policy designed to maximize the trade of corporations and especially to maximize profits.

It was dominant in modernized parts of the West from the late 20th to the mid 21st centuries. It promoted corporate deregulation of an international economy for the purpose of augmenting corporate power at the expense of rival corporate powers.

With the establishment of overseas colonies by oil companies in the mid-20th century, corporate mercantile theory gained a new and wider significance, in which its aim and ideal became both supranational and imperialistic.

Corporate mercantilism functioned as the economic counterpart of the older version of political power: republicanism, parliamentarianism, and other self governing sovereign national systems.

Corporate  Mercantilism includes a corporate economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves via increasing rates of profit through a positive balance-of-trade, especially of finished goods that someone else made.

Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated neocolonial expansion. Indeed, with the establishment of overseas colonies by Western corporate powers mid-late 20th and early 21st centuries, corporate mercantile theory gained a new and wider significance, in which its aim and ideal became both supranational and imperialistic.

Corporate Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time. A lack of taxation, regulation, or tariffs on money and privileged corporate goods and costs combined with high personal taxation and fees for individuals and unprivileged goods and services are an almost universal feature of corporate mercantilist policy.

Corporate Mercantilism in its simplest form is profitism, yet mercantilist writers have emphasized the circulation of money and reject hoarding.

Their emphasis on monetary churn accords with current ideas regarding the money supply, such as the stimulative effect of a flexible labor markets, perpetual war, mandatory market participation, and rampant privatization have since been rendered human concerns irrelevant.

...

Mature corporate mercantilist theory recommends selective high tariffs for "infant" industries and the promotion of the mutual growth of countries through national industrial privatization.

Where the ellipsis are? That's our future if we're lucky:

In time, the heavy emphasis on money was supplanted by ecological policy, accompanied by a shift in focus from the capacity to carry on wars to promoting general prosperity.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

@k9disc I also think your dogs might contribute to your optimism.
At least for me, I've found it harder to be pessimistic when there was a dog in the family.
When local joy is a given, life is buffered and optimism can grow.
Thanks for the reminder.

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Meteor Man's picture

There must be a host of legal problems with this insane plot. I went looking and discovered that the Afghan government has to agree, and they are very hostile to the proposal.

In addition to military opposition, there is a DOD legal regulation against this role for private contractors:

Prince’s proposal may be in violation of the U.S. Defense Department’s legal framework on the use of military contractors and other international agreements.

According to Department of Defense Instruction 1100.22 (Enclosure 4, Paragraph 1.), the use of combat power against enemy forces or hostile actors is inherently in the purview of the U.S. government and is the actions of a sovereign power not deemed appropriate for military contractors.

http://www.navytimes.com/flashpoints/2017/08/06/erik-princes-private-air...

We shall see.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Song of the lark's picture

Theocracy. You know all those red states in the middle of the country and the south.

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riverlover's picture

@Song of the lark But for many, it's probably the state of confusion that many of us deal with. Uncertain times.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

dervish's picture

Dump him off in Kabul with 5000 mercs and pull the US troops out. In no time flat he'll either have drained all his resources by giving out bribes, or he'll be dead. Either way, I'm good with it.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

TheOtherMaven's picture

@dervish
The history of the Grand Catalan Company should be instructive. Roger De Flor wound up assassinated, but the Company ravaged the Byzantine Empire in retaliation and remained a major power player in the Balkans for most of the 14th century.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven

On 30 April 1305, he was slain along with 300 cavalry and 1,000 infantry by the Alans, another group of foreign mercenaries at the service of the Emperor. Roger had been in Adrianopolis (modern Edirne) attending a banquet offered by Emperor Michael.
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granting Prince his coveted License to Kill could possibly improve US prospects in Afghanistan. Prince probably wants to muscle in on the Pentagon's procurement racket, but I doubt he has any "bold new ideas" to speak of. Trump may be nibbling at the bait, but he hasn't swallowed it yet, and I doubt that he will.

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native

@native @native

The new military drug lord given US PTB licence to kill and to supply opium from ravaged Afghanistan?

Edit: makes not that much of a change from the US-supported terrorists in various countries...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

...So in a very ironic way, Erik Prince and Donald Trump are bringing us all the way back to pre-Revolutionary America.
Except our government is now the British.

History always repeats itself, when we fail to learn from it.

However, Americans have already freed themselves once and I strongly suspect that they could do it again, if they only knew enough to do so in time.

As the more enlightened of America's Founders foresaw, making it clear that America belongs to her people, not to whomever may happen to be in public office at any time or 'to the government' - existing to administer public business in the public's interest, not to 'rule over them' as in the rejected monarchal system of Britain.

And that Americans have the right to throw out their own corrupt and self-serving governments. Just not anyone else's chosen government/elected officials in their own country.

Edited because of hitting the wrong symbol for the 2nd time this morning and this time block-quoting where I wanted to bold, to balance having done the reverse earlier, lol. This even having started on that 2nd cup of coffee...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Not to mention, there's NO PROFIT in winning a war. There's only profit in continuing a war for time and all eternity, year after year, decade after decade, claiming it's un-winnable but that it must be continued and expanded upon. Which is, of course, exactly what our corporate war industry has been doing, including contracting with monstrous mercenary armies who never win, as gjohnsit has so well established.

And if our corporate media get behind this atrocity, they will deserve eternal fire, the vengeance of the American people, the wrath of the working taxpayer. Electing Donald Trump was a token warning shot. But if this media goes mercenary, the American people will find a way to undo them.

The only profitability of war is in its failure, it's addictive quality, which creates a need for itself. The American military, in trying to win in Syria/Iraq, is a threat to perpetual war. Hence the product proposal of a private military that can fail and fail and fail forever.

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