By Alison@Creekside
Do we fill it in nicely to show our solidarity with StatsCan and their important data-gathering, currently under siege by the Cons, or do we fill it in using really big crayons and attached pictures of cluster bomb victims to protest its having been farmed out once again to war profiteer and surveillance/espionage experts Lockheed Martin?
Back during the 2006 census, some of us worried that Homeland Security would wind up with access to our census data via the US Patriot Act. StatsCan was at great pains to alleviate those fears: LM would not get the actual data because LM were only supplying the software; the actual data would remain with StatsCan.
Lockheed Martin: “We never forget who we’re working for.”
Well of course not. $35.7B in US government contracts alone out of $42.7B worldwide in 2008 is a whole lot of not forgetting.
ML accounts for one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon, amounting to a “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States.
Besides there’s the US government network to maintain: $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009.
NYTimes, secondary source:
“Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and director of the national spy satellite agency.
Lockheed Martin is now positioned to profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to intervention, and from occupation to interrogation.”
Including spying on Quakers and anti-war activists and recruiting interrogators for Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan for the Department of Defense.
Of Lockheed Martin’s 57 Federal Contractor Misconduct violations listed at the Project on Government Oversight, nearly a third involve court dispositions and fines for “Government Contract Fraud.”
Say, how are our F-35s coming along?
Four months after the 2006 census, Lockheed Martin President of the Americas and Co-Chair of the SPP’s North American Competitiveness Council Ron Covais explained to Luiza Ch. Savage how the Security and Prosperity Partnership would be implemented — in incremental changes by each country’s executive, bureaucrats and other regulators outside government.
“We’ve decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes because we won’t get anywhere.”
It may not be entirely rational to fuck with the census form on the grounds that LM profits by it, but sometimes protests are not particularly rational — they are just one of the only means available to us to register our disgust with the creeping militarization inherent in our incremental deep integration with the US.
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