Blackwater, BlackRock, Blackstone...it's one big club (of the rich), and you ain't in it, as George Carlin summed up.* Last I recall, after a series of slaughters by its death squads around the world, Blackwater was in need of PR damage control and did the old name game change to Xe Services and then, after what I suppose was probably a predictable replay of mercenary murder, was renamed again to Academi, after Plato's academy (perhaps the Prince of Lies and Darkness (black water from blood) is also a helluva phony champion of a republic for truth and justice). Whatever name these thugs and goons go by, they certainly represent the outsourcing and expansion of militarism to private enterprise for greater secrecy, unaccountability, and of course profit, which really took off after 9/11 with the war on (of) terror. (See in particular Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013).)
*For example, Prince's sister Betsy DeVos, wife of Amway CEO Dick DeVos, has been a leader of school privatization for profit, having served in the great genius tRump's first term as secretary of education, in a department now being dismantled as part of the DOGE show against big government his second term, only to increase centralized bureaucratic control among five different agencies pushing their agenda on captive kids (TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education/https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/02/investigative-reports/trumped-2025-school-choice-corporatization-social-impact-finance-and-the-dismantling-of-the-department-of-education/).
Blackwater, BlackRock, Blackstone...it's one big club (of the rich), and you ain't in it, as George Carlin summed up.* Last I recall, after a series of slaughters by its death squads around the world, Blackwater was in need of PR damage control and did the old name game change to Xe Services and then, after what I suppose was probably a predictable replay of mercenary murder, was renamed again to Academi, after Plato's academy (perhaps the Prince of Lies and Darkness (black water from blood) is also a helluva phony champion of a republic for truth and justice). Whatever name these thugs and goons go by, they certainly represent the outsourcing and expansion of militarism to private enterprise for greater secrecy, unaccountability, and of course profit, which really took off after 9/11 with the war on (of) terror. (See in particular Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013).)
*For example, Prince's sister Betsy DeVos, wife of Amway CEO Dick DeVos, has been a leader of school privatization for profit, having served in the great genius tRump's first term as secretary of education, in a department now being dismantled as part of the DOGE show against big government his second term, only to increase centralized bureaucratic control among five different agencies pushing their agenda on captive kids (TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education/https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/02/investigative-reports/trumped-2025-school-choice-corporatization-social-impact-finance-and-the-dismantling-of-the-department-of-education/).