Here we see the latest example of how integrated the military-industrial-financial complex is at the nerve center of the Empire. This US war criminal, instead of facing a war crimes trial, is being rewarded with an important job with a leading financial institution. Never mind that his actions created millions of Iraqi refugees and many deaths in the illegal invasion of Iraq. This is a continuing lesson to other generals: follow the diktats of the capitalist class directorate and you will be rewarded regardless if they consist of war crimes.
Odierno rose to become U.S. Army chief of staff in 2011, and in that role was a consistent public critic of plans by the Obama administration to draw down troop levels from their post-9/11 peaks. He has also been a steadfast defender of the original decision to invade Iraq, stating earlier this year that Saddam “was moving toward terrorism and I believe if he continued to have problems, we don’t know what he might have done in terms of being part of the problem with terrorism.”Meanwhile, "back at the ranch" where mostly ordinary citizens hang out, a few liberals who serve the capitalist class are getting upset that we are losing all our civil liberties which they thought were guaranteed by that piece of paper called the Constitution. Such people, like John Whitehead, are alarmed about the fascist direction in which the country is heading. In the following quote his use of "we" seems very ambiguous. Is he shaming ordinary people by declaring that "we" are at fault for this, or is he shaming the ruling class that he has served so faithfully?
Odierno is far from being the only top military official to retire and take on a high-level position with a private sector firm.
...not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.Or maybe he wants to divert our attention away from the class nature of our society by suggesting that we all live in an egalitarian society in which we all participate equally in creating the conditions of our society.
In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.
