This will surprise you: According to USA Today, the Pentagon's pool of retired generals and admirals for use as "mentors," i.e., paid advisers, has dried up. There were 355 of these guys on the gravy train in 2010. Today there are 4. During the gravy days, the Pentagon was paying these "advisers" as much as $330 an hour. They worked as contractors for the services so normal ethics rules didn't apply. Sweet, huh? And almost to a man they were employed by giant defense contractors, whose products were sometimes involved in the projects the mentors were advising on.
After USA Today exposed the story in 2009, the secretary of defense capped the "mentors' pay, requiring public financial disclosures and hiring them as government employees, which required them to abide by federal ethics laws."
So guess what? The fat cat retired top brass quit. They said they didn't want to disclose their finances publicly. They also didn't want limits on working for private firms,* and of course there were numerous complaints that a cap of $179,000 a year and $86.10 per hour for their services was too low.
So how surprised are you? God, things are rotten in our state of Denmark!
*Which are invariably defense contractors, who invariably got cozy with the generals and admirals while they were still on active duty. The revolving door between the military and defense contractors is an ongoing, screaming scandal, but nobody cares.
2 comments:
The Media frequently speaks of corruption in China and its detrimental effects.
The corruption here is just as thorough and pervasive. Our morality is the idiot's belief of Exceptionalism, not honesty nor honor, and we have discovered that by wrapping ourselves in the flag or some pathetic ideology we are able to indulge in our corruption with impunity from any conscience.
Corruption on the trillion dollar level speaks more clearly than any protestations of love for one's country.
I see it has dawned on you that everything, and I do mean everything, from government to business to religion to education is tainted, scarred, stinking with corruption? There is perhaps nothing more disgusting than our habitual assumption of moral superiority over every single other culture on Earth. What idiots we are!
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