Patrick Shanahan at senate confirmation hearings for him as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Image by CSPAN (cropped image)) DetailsDMCA
The appointment of Patrick Shanahan as acting Secretary of Defense is a grotesque joke, the kind you might see in the Onion. Imagine the Onion headline:
Trump Cuts Out Middleman, Appoints Boeing Exec to Head Defense Dept to Expedite boost of Military Spending
Shanahan never served in the military. That could be a really good thing if the right non-military person was appointed. But Shanahan has spent most of his career as a player in the military industrial complex, working at Boeing from 1986 through 2017, when he was appointed by Donald Trump as Assistant Secretary of Defense.
It's almost like this appointment pierces the veil that the US military serves a purpose other than producing massive profits for companies within the military industrial complex.
At least with James Mattis we had someone who had some experience in the military, some experience of losing soldiers to death. Now we face a situation where we have a businessman running the military.
Personally, I'd like to see Secretary of Defense be someone who is known for opposing war. That's not going to happen. It will be interesting to see how the actual military responds to this appointment.
Finally, it appears that Trump has taken a strategy of avoiding getting congressional approval of appointees by dumping people, then appointing "Acting" replacements. This should be illegal. An "Acting" Department head should only be allowed to be appointed if there is a vacancy, not because the president is firing someone.
Patrick Shanahan at senate confirmation hearings for him as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Image by CSPAN (cropped image)) DetailsDMCA
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
3
3
3
