The astonishing rise of Blackwater has been, in my opinion, one of the most frightening developments of the Bush administration. They rose from relative obscurity to being an enormous private army for hire after 9/11 - George Bush's private army paid for by the public, sometimes at a rate of over $100,000 per man as we saw when they were hired to police New Orleans. If we allow the free government of free Iraq to exercise a bit of freedom, the men in black may be back home for Christmas. What about your son or daughter, or father or cousin?
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Naomi Klein wrote an interesting book on the privatization of everything, including war. I didn't necessarily agree with everything she said, but it was a thought-provoking discussion today when she discussed the book -
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/17/1411235
It does seem like even the government has been privatized and we're headed back to the days when kings and their close buddies owned everything. Armies, prisons highways, police, highways - all the things we associate with government and public accountability are owned by the dukes and earls and princes.
I agree that nothing ever seems to change until problems get to the catastrophe level although catastrophic events can be natural or artificial. And then it sometimes looks like things don't change at all and that includes our behavior.
We're returning to feudalism. Pretty soon, the corporations will become the equivalent of feudal estates and each person will either be a serf or a lord.
And still we keep voting for them - because they look presidential or we like their slogans or they seem like a good drinking buddy.
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