TimShorrock.com

Hundreds of people from far and near came to the Nevada City, California, Little League park Sunday morning to say farewell to the late, great folksinger and organizer extraordinaire, Utah Phillips.

I drove 80 miles from Truckee to pay my respects. I first heard Utah Phillips play and sing when I was living in Eugene, Oregon, during the 1970s, and was impressed by his stories about being a US Army soldier in South Korea right after the Korean War, and how that experience made him a pacifist and a radical. As someone who was also transformed politically by living in Korea and has written extensively about the U.S. role in South Korea, that meant a lot to me.

At the service today and a concert on Saturday night, the crowd was treated to moving and humorous tributes from Utah’s family and his very wide circle of friends and comrades. There were representatives from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Utah’s union, who spoke of Utah’s love and respect for the great socialist leader Eugene Debs and sang Utah’s favorite Wobblie songs, like “Dump the Bosses Off Your Back” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” Tony Roark, an IWW member from Salt Lake City, spoke of Utah’s “enthusiasm for the struggle” and quoted his favorite Utah line: “When I rise, it will be with the ranks, not from the ranks.” Mark Ross, an IWW member and close friend who’d known Utah since 1969, joked that Utah “taught me to drink whiskey and not vodka, so people would know I was drunk and not stupid.”

There were members of the Rose Tattoo, a group of musicians and racounteurs from Canada, Minnesota, Kansas City and many points in between, who sang and talked about riding the rails and Utah’s deep respect for workers, labor unions, and the common man (and woman) - and his jokes (”Never wear a hat that has more character than you”) and aphorisms (”If we all stick together, we’ll get what we need.”) At the urging of Utah’s sister, a toy rocket was fired into the sky during the “seventh inning kvetch.” Earlier, the service had opened with a ceremonial pitch from a member of the Nevada City Indians. Utah, it was said, “loved the purity of Little League” and went to nearly every game when he could.

There was a sign up on a fence: “Why are there no Republican folksingers?”  Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, who ran a great interview last week of Utah Phillips, was in the crowd for a while, taking notes on her laptop and greeting locals, who had just heard her speak a few nights before at a benefit for the local community radio station, KVMR-FM.

John McCutcheon, the folksinger, baseball fan and labor organizer, spoke about how, for Utah Phillips, music was “more than applause and a paycheck, it was about the possibility of community. He created a template for the folk music community and for America.” He also read a tribute from Ani DiFranco, who promised Utah she would “continue doing your work while you rest.” Utah, said McCutcheon, is now “singing in time with Joe Hill, Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie.”

People also spoke from the local library, the local peace center, the local cardiac rehabilitation center, the local homeless shelter, all recounting Utah’s contributions and love for humanity (”He was available to anyone who wanted to sit down and talk”…The library “was the one government institution Utah really cared about.”) There’s more here from the Nevada City Union.

Finally, Utah’s widow, Joanna Robinson, offered a moving tribute to Utah, or Bruce as he was known to family and friends. She remembered his songs of death, love and loss, and his advice to “never count anybody out…loving people as they are, and not the way they want them to be.” She was joined on stage by Utah’s two sons, Brendan and Duncan. Brendan led the crowd in one of Utah’s most beautiful songs, Hymn Song, with its haunting chorus: “I believe if I live my life again/I’d still be here with you.” Rest in peace, Utah Phillips.

Click each photo to see a larger version:

Join me on Tuesday, June 3 (3 p.m EST) for a discussion and Q&A about SPIES FOR HIRE on the Washington Post website. I’m sure there’s going to be plenty of spooks and contractors tuning in, so it should be an interesting hour.

Update: Read intelligence reporter Jeff Stein’s review of my book in the Post here.

“As investigative reporter Tim Shorrock notes in this valuable (and angry) book, contractors have long had the run of the Pentagon and CIA, working hand in hand on projects ranging from reconnaissance satellites to Predator drones. But Shorrock persuasively shows that the business has changed dramatically in recent years, beginning even before the Sept. 11 attacks set off a homeland security gold rush. Today, intelligence contracting is a $45 billion-a-year industry, he says, chewing up three quarters of the estimated $60 billion intelligence budget.”

Want to know what Richard Armitage has been doing all this time?
My latest, from Salon:

Ever since the 1950s, with the rise of America’s modern military-industrial complex, high-level U.S. officials and military men have moved between the government and private sectors. But what we have today with the intelligence business is something far more systemic: senior officials leaving their national security and counterterrorism jobs for positions where they are basically doing the same jobs they once held at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies — but for double or triple the salary, and for profit. It’s a privatization of the highest order, in which our collective memory and experience in intelligence — our crown jewels of spying, so to speak — are owned by corporate America. Yet, there is essentially no government oversight of this private sector at the heart of our intelligence empire. And the lines between public and private have become so blurred as to be nonexistent…

Shortly after leaving government in 2005, Armitage was recruited to the board of directors of ManTech International, a $1.7 billion corporation that does extensive work for the National Security Agency and other intelligence collection agencies. He’s also since advised two private equity funds with significant holdings in intelligence enterprises. Veritas Capital, where Armitage served as a senior adviser from 2005 to 2007, owns intelligence consultant McNeil Technologies Inc. and DynCorp International, an important security contractor in Iraq. For a time, Veritas also owned MZM, Inc., the CIA and defense intelligence contractor that was caught — before the Veritas acquisition — bribing former Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

In 2007, Armitage, along with several Veritas executives, moved over to DC Capital Partners, an intelligence-oriented buyout firm with some $200 million in assets. One of its first acquisitions after Armitage came on board was Omen Inc., a Maryland company that provides information technology and consulting services to the NSA. The fund has since combined Omen with two other intelligence contractors to form a new company called National Interests Security Company LLC, which has 850 employees, more than half of them holding top secret or higher security clearances.

Through his own eponymous consulting firm, Armitage has lobbied on behalf of L-3 Communications Inc., one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors, to help it sell anti-submarine surveillance systems to Taiwan. L-3, like ManTech, is also heavily involved in Iraq. (Further topping off Armitage’s investment interests in the war: He sits on the board of directors of ConocoPhillips, which is aiming to become a major player in Iraq’s energy industry through a joint venture with Russia’s Lukoil.)

Listen to my interview with The Young Turks show on Air America, broadcast live on Tuesday. These guys are full of fire and brimstone and are really engaging. A fun interview.

Listen or watch my interview with the great Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

My latest, based on reporting in March and April in Saudi Arabia, Washington, D.C., and Ashland, Oregon.

Spying on Americans without warrants, charges based on secret evidence, a small town divided by fear. Welcome to the world of Bush’s “specially designated global terrorists.”

As I reported two months ago, the Carlyle Group, the world’s largest and most powerful private equity fund, will buy the government contracting business of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors. The word went out today from Booz Allen, and is being reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

For background on both Carlyle and Booz Allen, go to my March 8 profile of both companies in CorpWatch. This is a very significant deal, and puts Carlyle - which in recent years has reduced its holdings in defense - back into the intelligence game, big time.

In 2006, Booz Allen Hamilton, a privately held company based in McLean, Virginia, had a global staff of 18,000 and annual revenues of $3.7 billion. Its work for U.S. government agencies accounts for more than 50 percent of its business. Notably Booz Allen is a key adviser and prime contractor to all of the major U.S. intelligence agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security Agency (NSA), and – as well as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and most of the Pentagon’s combatant commands. On its website, Booz Allen describes its intelligence work as part of its broader expertise in information technology. “Whether dealing with homeland security, peacekeeping operations, or the battlefield, success depend on the ability to collect, safeguard, store, distribute, fuse, and share information – on getting the right information to the right place at the right time,” it says. “Our security professionals work in partnership with clients to develop capabilities … for protecting information and networks against cyber and physical threat.”

To read on, click here.

Listen to my interview this week with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. What a delight to be on a show where the host actually reads your work! Thank you to Terry for being such a great interviewer.

Plus: I participated in a live book salon on Firedoglake on Thursday. The chat was hosted by the excellent blogger Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel. Very interesting questions, with significant input from Ambassador Joe Wilson, the husband of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Thanks for this nice review to Meteor Blades of Daily Kos.

You won’t read the words “ruling class” in Spies for Hire, and I’m sympathetic, because few writers who want to be taken seriously will unhesitatingly employ those words in public discourse these days. Not so much out of fear that Patrick Buchanan will redbait them as that many post-Cold War liberals will do so. But a slice of the ruling class is who Shorrock describes throughout his book.

Click here to read on.

My latest, in Sunday’s New York Post. Here’s the graphic (click twice to make it readable).