According to the Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform, private military companies (PMCs) “typically provide military combat services … as well as military training and intelligence”, while private security companies (PSCs) “provide actual security for commercial interests and/or government interests, close protection of VIPs, risk assessment and risk analyses.” Authors add, however, that “with the diversification of these companies and the massive contracts that they now command, there is huge overlap in the work they do, and it is not uncommon to find major PMCs and PSCs offering the same service.”

Although contracting companies avoid the word “mercenary”, the label fits, because military talent is recruited by them from around the world. In 2004, Gary Jackson, president of Blackwater, one of dozens of private security organizations in Iraq, candidly told the Guardian “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals.” Indeed they do, having recruited, among others, soldiers from Chile, some of whom served during the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet when 3,000 citizens were assassinated.

What portends trouble is that a private military serves whoever pays, government or private interest, foreign or domestic. With 1% of American households now owning 40% of household wealth and earning half of all capital income (according to Business Week, 2004), and with the nation’s wealth continuing this mad upward dash into the hands of a tiny minority of billionaire “haves”, a situation is emerging in which such a wealthy tier will be needing more than simply gated communities. In The Lessons of History, historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote “We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution.” The growing armies of the private security industry make “peaceable” partial redistribution ever less likely.

The northern Michigan town of Pellston recently gained attention as the site of a 700-acre “national response center” for a private security company, Sovereign Deed. In October, retired Marine brigadier general Richard Mills, Sovereign Deed’s “executive VP for strategic development” and a former deputy director of operations for the US European Command, said that the federal government has insufficient funds to protect all U.S. citizens in case of major catastrophe or terrorism, but that his company will offer protection for an initial fee of $50,000 followed by $15,000 per annum. One wonders, though, who would benefit from a service with such a stellar price tag. Also, who in contemporary America would decide what kinds of citizen demonstrations or expressed opinions would or would not constitute terrorist activity? Many Americans remember very well the COINTELPRO program directed toward U.S. citizens in the 1960s by their FBI.

Modern private militias are larger than the old body guard image by orders of magnitude and qualify as true armies. In an interview with Petoskey News, Mills described the scope of Sovereign Deed’s physical essentials as including a hangar for a fleet that would contain helicopters and aircraft similar to C-130s. Also of concern is Sovereign Deed’s claim of advance information on intelligence regarding security threats, particularly since the government has admitted that 70 percent of its intelligence budget is going to private contractors. Michigan citizens may be particularly leery of Sovereign Deed due to their familiarity with Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, which security company is reportedly planning to add fighter jets to its arsenal. Prince, from a prominent Republican family in Michigan, is a financial backer of right wing political causes. Blackwater is most emphatically not politically neutral.

The rush to privatize America, aided by massive tax cuts that drive the nation into deep debt, is advancing with virtually no coverage by a corporate-owned media dedicated to privatization. In recent days, the national debt passed nine trillion dollars, up from 5.6 trillion when Bush took office. As Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2003, the current Administration “want[s] to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need.”

As the private military industry continues its remarkable growth, there has come a particularly ominous presidential executive order on July 17, 2007 “blocking property of certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq”. Such a broad brush would certainly include anti-war protesters. And who, having witnessed recent judgments from Bush’s Department of Justice, would doubt that the understanding of “certain persons” could be easily enlarged to ensnare anyone who opposes the Administration in any of its other spheres of interest? “Blocking property” is cutting off access to one’s bank accounts, an effective way to neutralize adversaries by sending them suddenly into survival mode.

Regarding private armies, the country had a chance to see a small segment in action when, in the wake of Katrina, some 150 assault weapon-bearing Blackwater mercenaries, having been hired by the Department of Homeland Security at $950/soldier/day, deputized by Louisiana and given authority to make arrests and to use lethal force, were suddenly seen on the streets of New Orleans. While there, the company, the predations of which in Iraq have recently become an international scandal, began to contract out to property owners. Jamie Wilson, writing for the Guardian, was blunt: “Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city’s millionaires from looters.”

Because a function of private militias is “crowd control”, there is raised the uncomfortable question of who, exactly, will make up the crowds to be controlled in the growing two-tiered “ownership society” in which major decisions are being made by a super wealthy, secretive elite. In any event, this October, New York Times columnist Frank Rich reported that of the 180,000 private contractors operating in Iraq, 48,000 are believed to be security personnel. Writing for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), Christopher Kinsley declared in 2005 “There is every reason to believe the market for military services will expand.”

A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.
– Cadet Honor Code of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

Honor has not to be won; it must only be lost.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

U.S. military academies have codes of honor that encompass the principle of non-toleration “wherein failure to report an honor violation is an honor violation in itself.” The codes pertain not simply to cadets and midshipmen but are to become integral to the lifelong value systems of officers who should therefore not only refrain from direct participation in dishonorable conduct but also not tolerate such behavior within their ranks, those ranks including commanders all the way to “the Commander in Chief”. Dwight Eisenhower, Class of 1915, and 34th President of the United States, felt so strongly about West Point’s Honor System that he was moved to say that “… it occupies a position in his [a cadet’s] mind akin to the virtue of his mother or his sister.”

The oath taken by officers of the U.S. Army is straightforward: “I (name) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.” (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)

In his May 26, 2007, commencement speech at West Point, Vice President Dick Cheney, stated “On your first day of army life, each one of you raised your right hand and took an oath. And you will swear again today to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is your vow; that is the business you are in”.

Cheney’s omission of the primacy of the Constitution in the oath is of more than passing interest. Just seven weeks later, on July 17, President Bush issued an Executive Order that would freeze the assets of anyone interfering with his foreign policy — a policy now known to be based on lies and one that continues to plunge the country ever more deeply into ruin (“Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization of Efforts in Iraq” ).

This order could, and certainly would, be used to identify as “domestic enemies” U.S. citizens dissenting according to liberties guaranteed by the Constitution if the Bush Administration considered them a threat to his policies. By having their “property” blocked, citizens, no longer able to access their money, would immediately be thrown into a desperate survival situation. It would not even be necessary to round up and imprison dissenters whose sudden priority would be finding shelter and food to eat.

An American military officer’s first duty is to the U.S. Constitution, not, primarily, to the current occupant of the Oval Office whose violations of the Constitution have been reported so widely for years on virtually a daily basis, that they need not, in the interest of brevity, be ticked off here. The question is where is the honor within the upper ranks of the U.S. Military upon which the larger U.S. population depends?

Military honor that is being put into overt practice, it seems, resides largely with three West Pointers, Class of 1962, who have created a website in which they state that “America stands shamed in the eyes of the world thanks to the Bush Administration; … Lying, cheating, stealing, delivering evasive statements and quibbling not only has demeaned these deceivers and the United States of America, but has placed vast numbers of innocent people in deadly peril. We will not serve the lies.” The website is a good place to learn what the U.S. Military is supposed to be.

Walter Lippman once wrote “A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable or dangerous to do so.” America’s military officers will either line up like tin soldiers to perform unquestioningly the bidding of an Administration they know continues to lead the country toward an abyss, or they will act according to the needs of this nation as defined by the Constitution they are sworn to defend. In any event, their action or inaction will reveal the honor code to be either substantial or simply wind.

There is a new twist to the carbon offsetting policy that is particularly insidious in that it is linked with the loss of public ownership of America’s public domain. On July 25, 2007, the U.S. Forest Service announced a “Carbon Capital Fund” that would allow one to “offset” personal CO2 emissions by purchasing vouchers, the cash then being applied to tree planting in national forests. The Service has a website at which a well-intentioned citizen can determine one’s annual “carbon footprint”, which the Service reports to be, on average, 10.73 metric tons. At $6 per ton, that would indicate an annual individual “investment” in the Fund of $64.38. In other words, the U.S. Forest Service is seeking voluntary donations from citizens for “management” that for generations has been paid for by taxes. (Consider also the irony that the massive clearcutting projects of the Forest Service in recent decades has been linked to global warming).

But there is even more to this Carbon Capital Fund in that it is being done in concert with a tax-exempt organization, the National Forest Foundation (NFF). Generally, governmental bureaus funded by federal taxes do not solicit private funding as a means of support. But in 1990, the NFF was established by Congress “…to encourage, accept and administer private gifts of money and property for the benefit of the U.S. Forest Service, and to conduct activities that further the purposes and programs of the National Forest System.” In fact, NFF president Bill Possiel claims credit for the Carbon Capital Fund: “We came up with the idea because everyone is looking at what they can do in terms of climate change.” The NFF executive committee includes members from Pegasus Capital Investors, Intel Corp. and Recreational Equipment, Inc. (Chairman, Vice Chairman and Treasurer respectively).

The NFF provides a route for the transfer of funding responsibility away from the public sector. Its Matching Awards Program stipulates “NFF funds awarded through this program can be disbursed only as a match to cash contributions from a non-federal source.” Instead of funding the Forest Service directly and completely, Congress has made tax money available only if matched from the private sector. Federal funding of NFF in 2006 totaled nearly four million dollars.

Industry groups support NFF programs not only because donations are tax-deductible but also because they provide a means by which corporations and their public relations organizations can then advertise their concern for the environment. Moreover, because corporations are the truly significant players in “the private sector”, they will ultimately be the real benefactors in the privatization of public domain. Consider these excerpts from the NFF website:

“The NFF represents the Forest Service in its outreach programs to forest users. Each of these programs may be viewed as a promotional property, which offers marketing and public relations benefits to corporate partner brands;… Corporate recognition is given based on levels of cash, product and in-kind support;… NFF staff has extensive experience working with corporations and their brands in sales promotion activity tied to conservation;… Working with public relations, sales promotion and advertising agencies, the NFF assists companies to create consumer communications that differentiate them from competitors.”

This is part of a long-term strategy to privatize the public’s forests, a process implemented during the Reagan Revolution through stepwise defunding of land management agencies in the name of “trimming budgets”. The process continues to this day and has forced the U.S. Forest Service to seek funds from the private sector simply to continue on. Nor is the larger plan confined to the national forests alone but includes the federal lands generally — BLM lands, national parks and wildlife refuges as well, collectively nearly a third of the nation. At about the time the NFF was being created, corresponding foundations were established in the form of the National Park Foundation and the Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The coordinated effort to privatize federal lands has included the “Sagebrush Revolution” of the 1970s, the “Wise Use Movement” of the 80s and 90s, and the more recent “free-market environmentalism” that consists of a network of corporations and conservative foundations and think tanks intent on gaining control of what was intended to belong collectively to “We the People”. Right wing economist James Beckwith, writing for the Cato Institute in 1981 with reference to public parks, summed up the strategy bluntly in his call for “…ascending radicalism from reform through volunteerism and privatization of services to the outright abolition of public ownership and transfer of parks to private parties.”

The privatization of public domain has recently involved “competitive outsourcing” of positions formerly held by federal employees and “public-private partnerships” with corporate interests. And now there is the Carbon Capital Fund that gets the average citizen into the privatization project by exploiting the altruistic instinct to volunteer in reducing global warming. In being the first governmental entity to sell carbon offsets, the U.S. Forest Service is certainly providing a pilot project that can reveal avenues into other agencies and toward a further privatization of society.

Free market economist Beckwith was a savvy strategizer who understood that too sudden a takeover of public land would trigger citizen reaction, so he proposed that privatization be introduced by degrees, with the most “tentative step” being recruitment of volunteers and later “the contracting out of support services to private firms operating for profit.” The public, it seems, is presently like the fabled frog in gradually heated water, unaware that it is losing one of the greatest gifts it has to convey to future generations.

The “power pyramid” of military institutions and modern corporations is a perfect model for selecting types needed to fulfill group goals. If one visualizes a triangle as representing a power pyramid, the broad base in a military situation represents incoming recruits and privates. Top generals occupy the peak. Movement upward through the ranks over time depends on the success of individuals to demonstrate ability at carrying out the aim of the system, which is to win at war.

In the base of the corporate pyramid are lowly staff and new hires preparing to embark on an upward struggle through degrees of “middle management” and toward a pinnacle wherein one finds the governing board and a chief executive officer. The corporate aim is to increase profit, and any competing or interfering value is to be neutralized. As movement up through corporate ranks takes place, individuals with qualms or values that hinder profiteering are selected against.

Profiteering is so established as the primary function of the corporation that the corporate world’s foremost sage and theorist, the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, declared that any corporate management failing to function so as to maximize profit should be sued by shareholders. Friedman’s philosophy has taken such hold of society that Alan Greenspan, lately head of the Federal Reserve, was moved to say that Friedman has been able “to materially alter the direction of civilization” — a view mirrored by President George W. Bush who admitted that Friedman “has changed America and is changing the world”.

While it is no surprise that an academic standard-bearer for an entrenched power structure would be heaped with praise, it remains that Friedman, whatever his good intentions, demonstrated no appreciation for the perfection of the corporate power pyramid as a model for selecting predatory individuals, so that names such as Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, Jeffrey Skilling et al. might become as familiar to the public as the names of rock stars.

Two features of modern corporations aid in their domination of society. One is that corporations have been able to secure legal “personhood”. Although absurd on its face, a giant multinational corporation, more powerful than many countries, is a “person” in an American court of law. A citizen, such as you or I, coming up against a corporate “person” in the U.S. legal system, would walk into court and into the jaws of a multi-million dollar corporate legal division, effectively whipped at the outset.

The other feature of the corporation is immortality. You and I must die, but a corporate “person” has the potential to exist forever. It was not always so. Corporate charters were originally granted with the provision that the “public good” be served, else a corporation would lose its charter. But through a stepwise transformation over time, society has found itself in the grip of entrenched giant, multinational, immortal “persons” administered by those who, through the winnowing process within the power pyramid, have been selected on the basis of an ability to generate as much profit as possible. But how could it have been otherwise? It was all so predictable as Darwin, had he looked closely at the selective nature of the system, would have understood.

Consider for a moment how you might strategize were you to find yourself at the head of an immense, immortal “person” with growth and profit the prime concerns. Wouldn’t you work for a “free market” that, for you, would be a highway without stop signs for your interests? Would you not, given your nearly unimaginable financial resources, infiltrate government, generate “think tanks”, hire platoons of lobbyists and fund political campaigns in order to ensure laws that further your profiteering? Would you not sanctify private property, resist accountability and send tendrils to all corners of the globe? And wouldn’t you purchase networks and newspapers in order to control information distribution and keep the masses in line?

Russell Mokhiber of the Corporate Crime Reporter has been good enough to create a website listing top corporate criminals of the last decade of the 20th Century. What is so revealing is that those listed are some of our most recognizable “corporate neighbors”. There are General Electric who (yes “who”. GE, recall, is a legal “person”) brings the NBC evening news, Archer Daniels Midland who funds the Lehrer News Hour on “public” television and who was fined $100,000,000 for price fixing, and Louisiana-Pacific who fells the public’s forests with impunity. There are Pfizer, Chevron, Tyson Foods, Eastman Kodak, International Paper, ALCOA, Rockwell, Coors, Royal Caribbean and plenty more.

And what of the nature? It was never of concern for Friedman who, like his tidy theory, was as divorced from the natural world as if trapped within some plastic-encased universe. In his market-driven system, in which selection for profiteers determines leadership, it was, and remains, perfectly acceptable for hordes of life forms to be driven to extinction, for vast ancient forests to be ground into widgets, and for the planet to fry, if such is the dictate of the free market’s “invisible hand”. For that we have been set on our current perilous direction, and because the corporate power pyramid is now the model to which the world is apparently dedicated, it would seem humanity is pressing hard on the accelerator.

[T]he first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands.
– Will & Ariel Durant, 1968, The Lessons Of History

A “free market” without public oversight turns Adam Smith’s “magic hand” into a destructive fist on the natural world. Libertarianism and free market purism overlap tremendously. What distinctions exist between them, though, are immaterial when it comes to nature, for with both nature becomes reduced to mere raw material to be transformed into money. Fundamental to libertarianism is that persons or groups should be allowed to do whatever they please in a system in which private property — theirs — is deemed sacred, while free marketers are dedicated to an unrestrained competitive arrangement based solely on cash. For both, government of, by and for the people acting for “the common good” is an impediment to their conception of a “liberty” in which wider social and ecological values are subordinate.

Libertarian argument is often couched in deception. A case in point is seen in “A World Connected”, a project of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies. At their home page, visitors were recently invited to comment on an article titled “Logging: Global Development at the Expense of Natural Resources.” Citing news of illegal logging in Asia, the article’s author refers to this as a “glitch” in the free-market system because “Market incentives are strong, and neither companies nor small, developing countries have been able to overcome the economic incentives to over-log”. Quickly, though, it becomes clear that the article is an attack on public ownership itself, for public forests are at issue in this instance of illegal logging. Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is invoked in a revealing paragraph as follows:

Market failure, in this case, has to do to an economic concept known as the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons occurs when everyone has equal rights to a limited resource. This happens both with publicly owned resources, such as national forests, and unowned resources, such as fish.

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is frequently misapplied by libertarians to public ownership, as in the paragraph above in which citizen-owned “national forests” are lumped with “unowned resources, such as fish” , which can only refer to oceans which are true commons outside of territorial waters. But now, having concocted false equivalence of unowned commons with public ownership, the author goes on to write:

When a resource is commonly owned, this tendency creates an incentive to use as much of the resource as possible, before someone else takes it all. This leads to overuse of the resource and market failure. One possible solution is to create a regime of property rights. Continued profits derived from the resource will then depend upon an owner’s ability to keep the resource available and thus the owner will likely spent [sic] a larger percentage of his profits ensuring his property rights and the sustainability of the forest.

But wait. Click on property rights in the article for this definition: “Property Rights can be described as the bundle of rights … belonging to an individual or group of individuals.” Correct. And here the libertarian attack on public ownership crumbles, because a nation’s citizenry is most emphatically “a group of individuals” whose property is as sacred as that of any corporation or any of George W. Bush’s “Haves and Have Mores”. In the case of national forests, unlike that of unowned commons such as open ocean, a branch of government, of, by and for the people, in this case the U.S. Forest Service, is established to protect national forests from over-exploitation and for “the common good”.

“FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM”

Free-market economist James Beckwith, concentrating on parks, laid out libertarian goals in his 1981 article “Parks, Property Rights, and the Possibilities of the Private Law“, published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian stalwart. In it, he argued for “…ascending radicalism from reform through volunteerism and privatization of services to the outright abolition of public ownership and the transfer of parks to private parties.” The recruitment of volunteers, what he called an early “tentative step”, was to be followed by “the contracting out of support services to private firms operating for profit; … If the price of recreation is raised, less of it will be demanded by consumers, and overcrowding in the parks will be reduced; … The gate fee could cover such hard-to-charge-for-amenities as the sky, broad vistas, and fragrant flowers; … It is essential that property rights in the parks be defined, transferred, and enforced.”

Charging for the sky? He’s absolutely serious. If “customers” — who used to be citizen-owners — are unwilling to pay enough, what then? In such a scenario, Beckwith writes that lands ” … might even cease to be parks at all because recreationists might not be willing to pay enough to bid away the land from alternative purposes”. What alternative purposes? Why, whatever would generate the most cash in an unregulated “free market”. Just imagine.

Because ability to pay is no indicator of taste or of understanding the needs of nature or of natural landscapes – and because free market forces have no such concern to begin with – the floodgate is opened to the most mechanized, destructive and vulgar of activities. What has traditionally been managed for an entire citizenry, and in the best interests of the land itself, is quickly given over to “users” providing greatest profit.

Profits to be made in “industrial recreation” are astronomical. Despite a harmless façade brought by the “green-washing” arm of the advertising industry, the American Recreation Coalition (ARC) represents the free market at its most destructive to nature. ARC fronts for the interests of every snowmobile, jetski, ATV, 4-wheeler, off-roader and RV interest imaginable, whether manufacturer, dealer or user group, as well as for petroleum interests and such as Disney Corporation. Even Yellowstone, the crown jewel American parks, is not exempt, as it remains open to snowmobiles despite repeated public hearings in which citizens favored their ban.

Privatizing management in the U.S. National Park System would demolish any public interest holding at bay a total industrial takeover. But as war in Iraq claimed public attention, the Bush Administration kicked privatization into high gear, so that Bush appointees now move the privatization agenda forward. In 2003, then Interior Secretary Gale Norton, using code terms such as “public-private partnerships” and “competitive outsourcing”, announced plans to privatize 72% of U.S. Park Service positions. In the same year, Bush announced that as many as 850,000 federal positions could be outsourced to the private sector.

SELLING OFF THE PUBLIC LANDS

Terry Anderson, a senior fellow at the right wing Hoover Institution, attracted attention in 1999 with an alarming policy paper, “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands”, also published by Cato. His proposal involves giving citizens “shares” of public domain that can then be bought and sold on the open market. Poorer citizens would certainly cash out quickly, but even middle classes, saddled with health costs, mortgages, tuitions and the like, would in time see reasons to sell their shares. In the wings, corporations and the super wealthy would gather shares as they appeared on the market and ultimately own what now belongs to all citizens. According to Anderson’s analysis, the transition would take 20-40 years. Anderson became George W. Bush’s adviser on public lands issues and has advised Bush to replace governmental regulatory law with free market principles.

All of this is what libertarians and free marketers have worked toward for decades with a torrent of policy analyses, workshops, conferences, articles and books funded by a dozen or so foundations, e.g., Bradley, Scaife, Olin, JM, Lambe, Earhart, Koch, Carthage, Castle Rock. Collectively, all represent a force that, since the 1960s, has coordinated efforts to forge national policy favorable to deregulation and privatization. Joined by large corporate interests such as RJ Reynolds, Shell Oil, Pfizer, etc., the collective, with countless billions of dollars at its disposal, can outspend progressive efforts by orders of magnitude as it pictures government not as an entity of, by and for the people but as an evil, oppressive force packed with incompetent, thieving bureaucrats intent on thwarting creative enterprise.

DIVERSIFICATION

There is another fatal flaw in depictions of private ownership of everything, and of free market “magic”, as guaranteeing proper care of the natural world. Large corporations diversify, and when one line dwindles, the profit mandate requires investment elsewhere. Maximizing profit is the corporate obligation against which all other obligations pale, else, as free-market guru Milton Friedman made clear, stockholders should sue management. If the price of lumber is such that a corporation’s other investments can earn more, it’s time to “cut and run”, plowing new cash into what increases profits — cars, sneakers, whatever. Nothing personal, just business. One need only consider the millions of acres of Maine woods leveled in the 1990s by corporate owners who then sold denuded land and moved on, or at the ravaging of the last large redwood tract in California under the ownership of Charles Hurwitz.

Libertarian and free market extremisms are rooted in simplistic theory linked to a kind of religious zeal. But their theory falls apart in the real world of corporate conduct, because the privatization of everything in a regulation-free, no-holds-barred environment in which maxed-out profit is the goal, guarantees the most rapacious of behavior. As to corporate behavior, simply consider the Enron debacle, Big Tobacco’s deliberate, generations-long campaign that ruined the health of millions and the global implications of ExxonMobil’s program of many years to contradict climate scientists.

In a world privatized and deregulated, disintegration within nature and its processes is absolutely predictable. In this light, libertarian and free market purists appear as cultists required to ignore truths about the consequences of giving free rein to the acquisitive instinct and to what the Greeks called “pleonexia”, the desire for more and ever more.