from Russia Insider:

“Don’t talk to me about Moscow and Putin. We are the oligarchy clan in the world today. We are the personification of what Plato and Aristotle talked about when they said, oh, let’s let the rich people run everything. They are doing that in this country, whether it’s Sheldon Adelson funding West Bank settlements, Paul Singer doing the same thing, or George Soros pretending like he’s a philanthropist …

Don’t talk to me about China and state owned enterprises. We are a state owned country by these oligarchs and we’re killing ourselves.”

Great short speech by anti-war activist and truth-teller Col. Larry Wilkerson (Wikipedia). He made these remarks at a rewards ceremony for heroic CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, whose Kafkaesque ordeal you can read about in this excellent article on Consortium News by Ray McGovern.

Wilkerson had his dander up because after attending an anti-war meeting about Iran recently, he was visited by 2 FBI agents asking questions about the other attendees. He really raises the roof, speaking plain truth about the rot in Washington.

Highly recommended!  Full transcript follows below.

Transcript: (Machine transcribed, includes inaccuracies)

Introducer:  We have Larry Wilkerson, colonel, former colonel. And if you haven’t watched Democracy Now and a bunch of other places after the killing of Soleimani, he has been out there just like what I write on Facebook. He’s been hitting a home run on these things. Just telling the truth. Telling the truth about the situation. Thanks.

Col. Wilkerson:  Congratulations to you. (Turning to Jeffrey Sterling). And my hearty applause to you for joining this group.

I want to get a little more serious for a moment about another issue altogether. I want to tell you that the FBI came to see me because I was at your Iran gathering. Two young swashbuckling agents. I said, you don’t even look like FBI. If you don’t show me your badges, I’m going to shoot you on my doorstep!

God, what a couple of arrogant assholes!

In the middle of the conversation, we finally got around to it. – Well, you were with this woman at this Iran thing. (they said).

That’s the state we’re in now. That’s the state we’re in.

And what we have happening right now that I’ve come to codify and understand in a level of detail I never thought I would approach is because I’ve been for 15 years on a campus with some of the brightest students in the world, over 400 of them doing in case study after case study for me. So it’s not just my experience in the government for 40 years.

It’s this incredible comprehensive look at what’s happening to us right now. We are involved in a fundamental battle for our life. The battle is not as the newspapers tell you about. That’s all a bunch of bull. The battle is between what has been happening for some time in this country.

It’s between the national security state whose raison d’être is war, war, war, and the predatory capitalist state whose reason for existence is to screw you out of every penny you have in your life, any way it can do it. That’s there’s no deep state. The deep state is the meritocracy, the bureaucracy that runs the country when the goddamn politicians aren’t there or when they’re changing or when they’re idiots like we have today. The real deep state, the pernicious poisonous deep state is the oligarchs who are running this country.

Think about this for a minute. These two states are in a mortal battle right now with one another. You see it every day. You just don’t understand it. Most people don’t anyway. You have people in both camps. Exxon-Mobil sells more fossil fuel to D.O.D than anybody else on the face of the earth. If d.O.D were, a country would rank 55th in 200 right beside Portugal. Lockheed Martin is a member of the national security state, the biggest merchant of death on earth. Its sales to the national security state. But they’re killing each other in this battle. It’s a mortal battle between the two. And guess who’s in between the demos? The people your democracy are in between your democracies.

Poor people are going in dying in 19 plus years of war. Your democracy’s people are being forced out of their jobs. Wait, do you see automation and robotics and what’s coming down the road with A.I.? Then these predatory capitalists can do everything they do without you, without any of the people out there. There right now are worried sick about their jobs. Do you know that distress as analyzed by medical personnel in this country has tripled in the last 15 years? We are the most distressed country in the world.

Mental health has gone to hell. Oh, just put them in the private run prisons and they’ll die anyway. This battle is existential. We won’t even talk about the climate crisis is coming down the road at us that most people are ignoring. This battle’s existential. The national security security state is now going to spend a trillion dollars of your money to make nuclear weapons better. You know what the Pentagon thinks about nuclear weapons being better in terms of use on the battlefield? Those low yield nuclear weapons we’re going to develop are going to be used on the battlefield. Disregarding 50 years of escalatory theory and doctrine. Oh, it won’t be escalatory. The hell it won’t be escalatory. The Russians have already adopted in their written doctrine the use of nuclear weapons to blunt a NATO incursion into their sphere of influence.

This is all happening while we go about our daily lives and think things are maybe, you know, halfway decent or maybe they’re falling apart. Whatever your thoughts might be, these two states are waging this colossal battle in your country and the people in the middle and the democracy in the middle are dying.

They’re giving in to these two states. If you haven’t read Tom Muellers book, Crisis of Conscience whistle-blowing in an age of Fraud, you should read the first chapter alone.

It’ll make you ill that Johnson and Johnson and their subsidiaries were able to infect children all across this country. In ways that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, however short that is, that their subsidiaries were complicit, that they actually sat around in their offices and talked about the cost being worth it because 35 billion dollars was the profit and the costs was only these poor people dying and so forth. Then you begin to understand what I’m talking about.

You begin to understand the dimensions of the poison that is amongst us and the poison that is taking over our country and our democracy. I hesitate sometimes with my students even to call us a democracy anymore because these oligarchs are in charge.

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