{"id":19281,"date":"2016-03-30T12:16:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T17:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19281"},"modified":"2016-03-30T12:16:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T17:16:52","slug":"former-bush-official-just-confirmed-that-our-wars-are-for-corporate-interests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19281","title":{"rendered":"Former Bush Official Just Confirmed That Our Wars Are for Corporate Interests"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Former Bush Official Just Confirmed That Our Wars Are for Corporate Interests<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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(<\/b>ANTIMEDIA<\/b><\/a>)<\/b>\u00a0United States \u2014<\/i>\u00a0\u201cI think Smedley Butler was onto something,\u201d<\/i>Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight,\u00a0told\u00a0Salon<\/i><\/a>\u00a0in an exclusive interview.<\/div>\n
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Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States through decades of war. He later became an ardent critic of such militarism and imperialism.<\/p>\n
\u201cWar is a racket,\u201d<\/i>\u00a0Butler famously said, and Wilkerson \u2014 who has also turned critical of U.S. imperialist policy \u2014 agrees with and admires the esteemed Marine.<\/div>\n

Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state, Colin Powell, has grown tired of\u00a0\u201cthe corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Of the profiteering scheme that wars have come to embody, Wilkerson\u00a0quoted<\/a>\u00a0Butler:<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Noting Butler\u2019s brief but accurate characterization of what Eisenhower\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the military-industrial complex, Wilkerson added that today\u2019s war machine\u00a0\u201cis more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be.\u201d<\/i><\/div>\n

The willingness of such weapons and military equipment corporations to excuse the transgressions of repressive and abusive regimes in the Middle East and Asia for the sake of profit, Wilkerson asserted, stands as evidence Eisenhower underestimated the extent the to which the problem would manifest.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas Bill Clinton\u2019s expansion of NATO \u2014 after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn\u2019t go an inch further east \u2014 was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapons sales?\u201d<\/i>\u00a0Wilkerson asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou bet it was,\u201d<\/i>\u00a0he answered his own question.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former Bush Official Just Confirmed That Our Wars Are for Corporate Interests (ANTIMEDIA)\u00a0United States \u2014\u00a0\u201cI think Smedley Butler was onto something,\u201dCol. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight,\u00a0told\u00a0Salon\u00a0in an exclusive interview. Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[8350,1319,4850,5940,11494,1471,5034,3250,3520,9588,4457,524,528,553,4778,10669,5638,862,3159],"class_list":["post-19281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-anti-media","tag-armaments","tag-bill-clinton","tag-boeing","tag-claire-bernish","tag-corporatism","tag-eisenhower","tag-george-w-bush","tag-imperialism","tag-lawrence-wilkerson","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-militarism","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-nato","tag-raytheon","tag-salon","tag-smedley-butler","tag-war","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19282,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19281\/revisions\/19282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}