The replacement of one weapons industry lobbyist with another as the acting US defense secretary is just “business as usual” – and, in the US, appointing industry men to key government positions is nothing new, analysts tell RT.
Acting US defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, stepped down earlier this week, to be replaced by Mark Esper, an ex-vice president of government relations at Raytheon.
Jatras said, explaining that there was “nothing new going on” with Esper replacing Shanahan – except that it might just be a bit “more obvious” this time.
“That’s all the Pentagon is. The Pentagon is a way to spend taxpayer dollars on mainly American industries. It’s almost a laundering operation in terms of spending money,”Kwiatkowski said.
The relationship works the other way around, too, Jatras said; government employees form relationships with these companies “with the expectation” that they will eventually land a job in the industry when they leave “at salaries far, far higher than they were making on the government payroll.”
These people “often go back and forth” between the two arenas – government and private industry – in what’s dubbed the “revolving door,” Jatras said.
Esper’s appointment, however, does seem to be another instance in which US President Donald Trump has failed to deliver on his key campaign promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington DC, both analysts said.
While “nothing” he has done in the past 18 months has helped drain out the swamp creatures, Kwiatkowski said it’s not clear whether Trump has entirely given up on the pledge that was a “key battle cry” for his campaign during the 2016 election. It could be that he “has a problem in finding non-swamp dwellers that he believes can be confirmed by Congress.”
“Congress is not interested in draining the swamp – congress is the swamp.”