US Media Story: Whores, Pimps & Clients

Boiling Frogs
Sibel Edmonds

‘Lockheed Martin Goes to Bat for’ …Who?

Yesterday Justin Elliott at Salon reported on an international media-lobbying intrigue involving Bahrain, a Lockheed Martin executive and the Washington Times:

A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an op-ed defending the nation’s embattled regime in the Washington Times — but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime’s lobbyists to its readers. Hence, they did not know that the pro-Bahrain opinion column they were reading was published at the behest of … Bahrain, an oil-rich kingdom of 1.2 million people that has been rocked by popular protests since early 2011.
The episode is a glimpse into the usually hidden world of how Washington’s op-ed pages, which are prized real estate for those with interests before the U.S. government, are shaped. It also shows how Lockheed gave an assist to a major client — Bahrain has bought hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the company over the years —as it faces widespread criticism for human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters.

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The story is worth reading. Just remember this is an itsy bitsy tiny little case; only one example of many more similar cases occurring regularly. Hello? Think about our Congress and over 400 lobby-able crooks in it. Think about our government providing perks and access to ‘select’ reporters for being good pet boys. Think about dime-a-dozen plentiful retired generals linking their MIC bosses to the mighty purchaser Pentagon…on a daily basis hundreds of prostitution transactions like the one with the Washington Times. Come to think of it, one major difference between the examples I’m providing and prostitution in the true sense of the term is that usually the American public is at the center of services and transactions provided. That is, the services and products offered are their hard-earned dollars, their liberties, their security, their gullibly misplaced trust…

Let’s take Salon’s exposé on the Washington Times. The paper and the reporter appear to be the prostitutes. Now, figuring out the pimp(s) and distinguishing it from the client is a bit more difficult. You see, at first glance it looks like Bahrain is the client, and the Lockheed Martin Executive is the pimp, right? But if you really look at it you’ll see Lockheed Martin as the ultimate beneficiary: too much publicity on our Bahraini puppet regime may bring a few sanctions, and those sanctions may include an arms embargo, and then Lockheed Martin may lose a few hundred million dollars (peanuts of course, but hey…).

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