Profiteers of the Warfare State by Justin 'la Raza' Raimondo.
Larry Ellison has an idea. The relentlessly self-promoting CEO of Oracle
Corp., a Silicon Valley software company famous for its ability to grab
government contracts, envisions post-September 11 America as a country
where everyone walks around with a "smart card." Days after the terrorist
attacks, the opportunistic Ellison was all over the media claiming that "We
need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and
embedded in the ID card."
Naturally, it would all be backed up by an Oracle database. And, of course,
he will do it for free at least until the first inevitable "upgrade."
The only way to protect ourselves from terrorists is to "ensure that all
the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single
national file," says Ellison. Oh, and we should not worry about the
government intruding where it is not supposed to, because privacy is so
pre-September 11: "Well, this privacy you're concerned about is largely an
illusion," Ellison told news anchor Hank Plante of San Francisco's KPIX-TV
shortly after September 11. "All you have to give up is your illusions, not
any of your privacy. Right now, you can go onto the Internet and get a
credit report about your neighbor and find out where your neighbor works,
how much they [sic] earn and if they [sic] had a late mortgage payment and
tons of other information."
We are all serfs now, anyway, so why not wear the slave collar and be done
with it? It is an interesting argument to make, and oddly compelling but
not to real Americans, who never were serfs and never will be.
We have been so busy worrying about Big Brother snooping, says Ellison,
that "we've made it impossible for the government to protect us." That's
right: It is our fault that the FBI obstructed its own terror investigation
and failed to detect a terrorist plot more than five years in the making.
Besides, all this anxiety about such archaic abstractions as "liberty" and
"privacy" is rather dated. "Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned
us that our liberties were at risk unless we exercised 'eternal
vigilance,'" writes Ellison in the War Street Journal but "Jefferson lived
in an age of aristocrats and monarchs."
We, on the other hand, live in a age of yuppies and demagogues, when such
old-fashioned niceties as individual liberty and the right to be left alone
have long since ceased to exist. Welcome to the new world, the world
according to Larry Ellison; and please, put on your slave bracelet it is
for your own protection.
These entrepreneurs of terror, who profit from the pandemic of spreading
fear, are a species apart, one which has adapted to the post-September 11
atmosphere quite well, thriving like maggots fattening on a corpse.
GovExec.com's "Tech Insider" page, which "looks at how business gets done
in the federal technology market," noted on February 1, 2002, that the fear
market is hot:
Players big and small in the federal technology game have their knives out
and are carving up a brand new market: homeland security. The Sept. 11
terrorist attacks have spurred the biggest push yet toward a vision of
seamless, electronically integrated government that tech firms have spent
years pitching to federal agencies. With agencies finally willing to act,
it's feeding time for companies.
At the public trough, many snouts compete for a larger share of the swill:
In the four months since the attacks, dozens of technology companies have
tried to sell themselves as the answer to the government's security
prayers. Suddenly, projects like a multi-million dollar database
integration effort for the entire federal law enforcement community,
explosive detection equipment for luggage screening at every U.S. airport
and new surveillance technologies for the domestic war on terrorism are all
possible, and they're all business.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, many Americans turned to religion for
consolation. Our governing elites, however, turned to technology or,
rather, to a faith in technology that approximates religion. Their faith,
however, may be shaken by the first major "software glitch" in the system:
They fail to recognize that software is no substitute for the kind of human
intelligence that our law-enforcement agencies so lack. If what Colleen
Rowley says is true if, indeed, top FBI officials obstructed the
pre-September 11 antiterrorism investigation then a "database integration
effort" is irrelevant.
These crony capitalists, however, are still swarming like vultures after a
fresh kill, according to GovExec.com: "Between the slew of daylong security
seminars hosted at the Washington offices of top technology contractors and
the endless stream of association- and consultant-sponsored breakfast
training sessions on how to sell to the government, corporate marketing,
sales and acquisition teams are working overtime." And, of course, Larry
Ellison's Oracle is right up there on top:
Some, like Oracle, the leading seller of database software to the
government, stepped onstage early. In the days after Sept. 11, Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison put the company that built its business on the public sector
smack in the middle of the homeland security agenda by calling for the
creation of a national identification card and offering to help build the
data system behind it. Ellison has been pushing the security mantra for
years and now appears more ready than ever to make the vision a reality.
Meanwhile, company officials remain focused on making sure the technology
to do the job will actually work.
The last brick of the World Trade Center had not even hit the ground before
Ellison was out there making his sales pitch. He is a fine example of good
old-fashioned American entrepreneurial spirit deformed beyond recognition
by the disease of military socialism.
The oracular Ellison and his fellow crony-capitalists are pushing the
concept of "E-government," which GovExec.com describes as "the long-vaunted
recipe for making government act more like a business." While it is
unlikely that any sort of software can convert an engine of coercion into
something more "user-friendly," Ellisonian "E-government" may succeed in
making business act more like government. In an era when the only
significant growth is in the size and cost of government, and the federal
bureaucracy is the only expanding market, successful entrepreneurs will
have to adapt to the new rules or perish. Instead of correcting the
inefficiencies of government, these firms will encourage and replicate them
or lose their only customer. (Ellison, himself, is a total creature of the
state. Oracle's first major customer was the CIA. In a deal that launched
the company in 1977, cofounders Ellison and Robert Miner talked the CIA
into letting them revive a lapsed $50,000 contract to build a special
database program.)
This is "capitalism" in our nightmarish age: a hideous and even repulsive
system of cronyism ruled by sleazeball CEOs and their pet politicians. For
the ultimate example of crony capitalism, check out In-Q-Tel, the CIA's
venture-capital fund. Its mission: to "identify and invest in cutting edge
information technology solutions that serve US national security
interests." Its website (www.in-q-tel.org) describes In-Q-Tel as "a hybrid
between public and private-sector business models," and it surely is that
the crony-capitalist version of the Cold War-era Congress of Cultural
Freedom. (The CCF was a CIA project through which certain neoconservative
intellectuals Irving Kristol among them became the beneficiaries of U.S.
government largesse.) Since intellectuals no longer matter that much all of
them have been bought off, anyway it is time for the entrepreneurs to have
their turn.
Chartered in February 1999, In-Q-Tel focuses on the internet and, after
September 11, began moving rapidly into "blogger" technology: the software
that allows users without programming skills to set up and run websites on
their own. In-Q-Tel's latest project is Traction Software, Inc., which
describes itself as a leader in next Generation Enterprise Weblog software,
delivering interoperable, inexpensive, rapidly-deployable, open and
easy-to-use tools for groups and teams to communicate." Of course, the
proliferation of "weblogs" or "blogs"personal online journals was already a
booming phenomenon before the terrorist attacks, but they gave rise to many
more: The whole "warblogging" phenomenon has demonstrated that they are
excellent tools for spreading rumors, smearing people, and casting the
memes of war far and wide. Now, the government wants to get in on the act
that is, if they have not been in on it all along.
But In-Q-Tel and Oracle are small fry compared to the big oil and
construction companies that stand to profit most from the "War on
Terrorism." If this war becomes increasingly focused on a strategy of
Middle Eastern conquest rather than defending American territory against
terrorist attacks, the real profiteers will reap the riches of empire.
Richard Perle and the Pentagon's Defense Policy Advisory Board have floated
a plan to seize the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, under the pretext of
"fighting terrorism." Rumor has it that, in the event of a U.S. invasion of
Iraq, the U.S. government is planning to seize the kingdom's airports and,
as the succession to the Saudi throne becomes an issue, there are even
intimations of a U.S.-led coup against Crown Prince Abdullah, whose
subservience to American and British oil giants has been judged insufficient.
A war of conquest in the Middle East would be crony capitalism in action.
The beneficiaries would be the oil companies who, denied access to the rich
oil and natural-gas fields of the region on terms they deem acceptable,
will gain untold wealth at gunpoint. It is the equivalent of a stick-up, on
an international scale.
The War on Terrorism has ushered in the apotheosis of what Murray N.
Rothbard called the "Welfare-Warfare State." Under this rubric, our crony
capitalists and their politician friends will profit, while the rest of us
are fleeced, taxed into penury in the name of "national security," and
enslaved in the name of the fight for "freedom."
In-Q-Tel head honcho Gilman Louie jets between Washington, D.C., and
Silicon Valley, meeting with lobbyists; politicians, and government
administrators. "The fun part is going into [CIA headquarters at] Langley
and talking to national security people and giving them tools to get their
jobs done," he says. Yes, some people are having fun: For Gilman Louie,
Larry Ellison, and the profiteers of the Warfare State, these dark days are
a Golden Age.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/October2002/1002Raimondo.html
