Navy Admiral Corrupt? How Utterly Disturbing!
Former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert Burke is preparing for a new kind of retirement. Burke was convicted of “conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery. …[and] performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the United States.”
He is the highest ranking military officer held to account for his quite understandable actions to get a “good-paying job” after retirement to supplement his approximately $18,000 a month pension. Seriously, who can blame him?
An inability to count actual numbers, and to live frugally, seems to be a partial result of the so-called “General’s Lobotomy” that follows the award of that very first star. I cannot verify such medical procedures exist, but I recall the phrase from my time in the Pentagon, mainly to rationalize how some very excellent O-6’s became very different people once granted flag rank. This phenomenon is not limited to the military, by any means. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino talked with Maria Bartiromo recently, and quickly put to bed the outlandish notion that Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself. Are they all pod people?
Burke was convicted of bribery, but his real and most widely shared conviction is a shared vision that the easiest way to become a millionaire these days is to work for the government, either through careerism or election. In our financialized America, you need to be in on the front end to really benefit, as Charles Hugh Smith explains, and this is well known by those connected to government, in particular, government acquisition.
Bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery are wonderful crimes, low brow and high brow all at once. Burke was a government goodfella, and it was good while it lasted. If he gets jail time, I’m sure it will come with its own very fine dining and comfortable meeting rooms.
Seriously, Burke’s case presents a major opportunity to address the military industrial complex, and what it – and our lack of an alert and informed citizenry long before Eisenhower’s two terms – has wrought for our country. We have no effective national defense, except the nearly 400 million guns held privately in the US, a legacy of a Second Amendment protection of a natural right most countries do not even recognize, much less honor. The state prefers to rely on federal armies and navies, like the one Admiral Burke served in and influenced for nearly 40 years.
Burke’s crimes amount to profiteering. The government, the state, inadvertently or purposely, creates the structure, and sustains the spirit, of profiteering. To be connected to a
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