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 Novelist and former Homeland Security Specialist Joe Randazzo from South Burlington will talk about the military industrial complex.
Click on the read more link below to read his op-ed on the issue that ran in the Burlington Free Press.
In 1954 my father, Lt. Rocco Randazzo, gave me a lesson in power politics and our war economy. He told me about American congressmen and senators who made money from war stocks. He said there were lawmakers in Washington who profited directly from World War II. He told me they were every bit as much our enemies as the Nazis he had fought. They were traitors.
In the winter of 1963, I was working at a stock brokerage house while I attended Adelphi University at night. We had just been through the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when the U.S. Navy confronted Soviet ships entering Cuban waters. I remember all the analysts preparing portfolios of stocks to buy as a result of the crisis. Three days after the confrontation stocks rose 3.35 percent. Three months later they had climbed a staggering 15 percent. Once again people found a way to make money from a national emergency. I wrote a scathing letter to the company president about perpetuating our war economy and quit to work in a music store in Manhattan.
On Nov. 8, 2007, 44 years later, a lead article appeared on MSN by Jon Markman, with the unbelievable title of "How to Profit from a Police State." According to Markman: "You don't need a Ph.D. in behavioral science to realize that a material number of household heads, faced with the loss of their homes and cars to foreclosure and repo men, will turn to theft, drugs and violence amid a sense of frustration with their deteriorating status, just as they have in past periods of economic dislocation."
He goes on to say: "In this scenario, the world of protection and corrections is likely to enter boom times just as the economy slips sideways toward a slowdown or recession. Indeed, the guard biz is probably the most counter cyclical play you can consider as an investor. Welcome, downwardly mobile yuppies, to the dawn of the Age of Nefarious. I'm not crazy about the state of affairs that has led to prisons being a growth industry, but investors need to play the hand they're dealt. Lock 'n' load."
Markman's article states that 22.2 percent of all workers in the United States are involved in the security business. He then goes on to recommend the companies who are building prisons and providing private security. He suggests that you and I invest in them.
What have we learned as a people since 1944? America spends more on its military budget than the rest of the world combined. Are we to blindly invest in companies like Blackwater and the Corrections Corp. of America, no matter what the cost to our human and moral values? If we do, we are perpetuating an economy based on death and fear. The smug Markman is a perfect example of the enemy my father spoke about when I was 10 years old. "Lock 'n' load," indeed. He should be locked up.
Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, had close ties to the Bechtel Corp., a major contractor in Iraq. Condoleeza Rice was a director of the Chevron Oil Co. before being named secretary of state. Vice President Dick Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, the major Iraq contractor. The Bush family has been partners with the Saudi oil princes for decades.
They are the darlings of Markman's article. They are making money from the Iraq war and the security business, and they are helping their friends make money. In my mind they are all guilty of treason. Right now I'm thinking about the late, heroic, Pfc. Adam Muller from Jonesville. He will not be investing his money because he invested his life. Asking members of this administration to seek peace is like asking rattlesnakes not to eat mice. Make no mistake about it, they are the enemy.
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