The Washington Post recently hosted an online chat featuring John Cusack talking about his latest movie, War, Inc. Perhaps "chat" isn't quite the right word for Cusack's intelligent, thoughtful and passionate discourse about the issue of war privatization and profiteering. During the discussion, Cusack offers this:
"Wars, occupations, disaster relief -- these are the new markets. To the neoconservatives, the state is the final Colonial frontier. Now they have taken that ideology to foreign policy and the making and exploitation of war. We have about 180,000 contractors versus 140,000 troops in Iraq, so when countries like Britain or Poland pull out of Iraq, they leave a vacuum that is replaced by mercenary soldiers, often from the same countries. Sometimes they are the same guys who switch from wearing a flag to a corporate logo."One participant brought up Eisenhower's prescient warning, which he made almost 50 years during the era of the space race:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities."Cusack proved to lucid and literate--albeit not an expert typist! No matter...You should definitely check out the chat--and I think I might be making plans to check out War, Inc. next week...
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