'The Pentagon is as corrupt as Banks'

Iran's Press TV, recorded live yesterday:

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in the US should also place some focus on the Pentagon, as it is as corrupt as the banks that caused the country's financial crisis, an analyst says.

Press TV has interviewed with Linh Dinh, an author from Philadelphia, to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers the opinions of two additional guests, Sara Flounders as well as Joel Kovel.

What follows is a transcript of the interview.

Press TV: More Americans are losing their homes we know; a recent Gallup poll finds that only forty-four and a half percent of Americans adults received health insurance from an employer in the third quarter of 2011.

Another recent Gallup poll report shows that twenty percent, or over sixty million of them, were not able to bring food for themselves, or their families over the past year.

Now against this backdrop, what do you think will be the future of the protester movement against the economic, social, and the political inequalities?

Dinh: Just like you are saying, many Americans are directly threatened by this collapsing economy.

The situation is so precarious that they can be fired tomorrow; they are making less money. So the occupy movement is a kind of symbolic homelessness, so these people are living so poorly, and are camping out in the hearts of American cities, to vividly demonstrate to the rest of the world, that they are just a step away from being homeless.

And what's interesting is that the actual homeless people are moving into these camps. So there's a blurring of the real homeless people and those who are for now only symbolically homeless.

But what's interesting is that, if you think about it, every homeless person is already a protester, whether he has a sign in front of him or not.

Because in a country that wastes so much money on the Pentagon, on the military, there shouldn't be that much homelessness. In every American city, in every American town you can see the homeless people.

So these tent cities will only grow as the economy collapses further.

Press TV: The Republican presidential hopefuls had a foreign policy debate the other day, and in that debate, all of them expect for Ron Paul, focused on attacking Iran, and waging another war.

With twenty percent of Americans not having enough money to buy food, why do you think there is so much talk about another war, when of course one of the major demands that has been voiced in these protest movement has been an end to the wars that the US is currently engaged in.

Dinh: Sure the government wants to attack yet another country, to distract attention from problems at home.

And I see a big problem here, you know that this movement is called the ninety-nine percent, and it is that, but there is a kind of a disagreement between the conservative Americans and the liberal Americans.

The conservative Americans are also against corruption but they support the Pentagon, they support the US military foreign policy, whereas the liberals are against corruption but against the Pentagon. So there has to be a kind of consensus reached, in that Americans have to be persuaded, to understand that US imperialism is not just bad for Iran, or Iraq or Libya or so many other countries, it's also bad for the USA.

We are not just killing other people, we are killing ourselves.

So how can you not be against corruption? Corruption is just stealing money. I mean you, how can you be for corruption? But so many Americans are still misled into supporting our military.

Because they are persuaded somehow, that a country like Iran is a threat to the USA. Whereas it's exactly the opposite, the USA is threatening Iran. Iran is not a threat to USA at all.

So I think that hopefully in the future, people can be persuaded to realize that the Pentagon is as bad as the banks, a major source of corruption.

Press TV: Speaking about this major financial and political overhaul in the United States, well one of the demands voiced by the protesters is being against what they call the military-industrial-complex for instance and the military-banking relationship.

If you were to say what is at stake now for the US, is it corporation, is it more about Wall Street, is this military-banking relationship, or is it capitalism as a whole?

Dinh: Well, basically it's corruption; it is the criminal banks which are represented by the Federal Reserve which has a power to generate money out of nothing.

And then the Pentagon, which is this major source of corruption. But anyway, I agree with Joel too, with the ecological issue, in that capitalism is predicated on growth, and I think growth is over. And the United States has to come to terms with that.

In that this country cannot grow anymore, because there are ecological limits, and that is something that most of the public are not aware of.

And there is a huge challenge of how to manage, not growth, but contraction. And that is a very difficult issue and no one is addressing it at the moment.


PM/AZ






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