Former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert Burke is preparing for a new kind of retirement.  Burke was convicted of “conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery. …[and] performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the United States.”

He is the highest ranking military officer held to account for his quite understandable actions to get a “good-paying job” after retirement to supplement his approximately $18,000 a month pension.  Seriously, who can blame him?

An inability to count actual numbers, and to live frugally, seems to be a partial result of the so-called “General’s Lobotomy” that follows the award of that very first star.  I cannot verify such medical procedures exist, but I recall the phrase from my time in the Pentagon, mainly to rationalize how some very excellent O-6’s became very different people once granted flag rank.  This phenomenon is not limited to the military, by any means.  Kash Patel and Dan Bongino talked with Maria Bartiromo recently, and quickly put to bed the outlandish notion that Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.  Are they all pod people?

Burke was convicted of bribery, but his real and most widely shared conviction is a shared vision that the easiest way to become a millionaire these days is to work for the government, either through careerism or election.  In our financialized America, you need to be in on the front end to really benefit, as Charles Hugh Smith explains, and this is well known by those connected to government, in particular, government acquisition.

Bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery are wonderful crimes, low brow and high brow all at once.  Burke was a government goodfella, and it was good while it lasted.  If he gets jail time, I’m sure it will come with its own very fine dining and comfortable meeting rooms.

Seriously, Burke’s case presents a major opportunity to address the military industrial complex, and what it – and our lack of an alert and informed citizenry long before Eisenhower’s two terms – has wrought for our country.  We have no effective national defense, except the nearly 400 million guns held privately in the US, a legacy of a Second Amendment protection of a natural right most countries do not even recognize, much less honor.  The state prefers to rely on federal armies and navies, like the one Admiral Burke served in and influenced for nearly 40 years.

Burke’s crimes amount to profiteering. The government, the state, inadvertently or purposely, creates the structure, and sustains the spirit, of profiteering. To be connected to a state – whether local, state and federal – is to be well taken care of, to be “in the know” as in the example of Nancy Pelosi, et al or less grotesquely, Bob Menendez.

The great Marine Smedley Butler said “War is a Racket.” The racket is about making money from the state, influencing the state for personal profit, and it is about a business of war that destroys goods, and replaces old debts coming due with new debts that the state pushes to the far future. War is often sold as part of the Broken Window Fallacy – destruction isn’t really wasteful or criminal, it’s stimulative and creative.

Butler dedicates a section of his pamphlet to “How to Smash This Racket.” He did not say “reform it” or “closely monitor it” or do a study or create a presidential commission or department, like DOGE.  This racket is smashed by taking the profit out of war.  He writes:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Butler – like our felonious Burke – was a man who spent his adult life fighting the wars of the United States.  Unlike Burke, Smedley Butler drew the correct conclusion.  He became a bold enemy of the state, if only because he spoke his mind, and shared his assessments and remedies widely.

Which brings us to the most interesting crime of dear Admiral Burke: “concealing material facts from the United States.”  The law itself is entertaining, and describes in some detail the ways in which government departments and their employees Must. Not. Lie.  What a joke!

Burke is a proven devious, persistent and creative liar, in order to get what he wanted and felt he deserved. Concealing material facts from the “United States” means, in the vernacular if not legally, concealing them from the people who paid more than enough for a Republic but received instead an Empire in its cups, stumbling towards the cliffs of insanity.  We have a country at the brink of fiscal collapse, without a single bit of useful “defense” ensconced anywhere in the federal regime.

The company in this case was Next Jump.  It specializes in “scalable leadership coaching through practice not theory.”  You simply cannot make this stuff up.   It is a sign of deep, deep sickness in the system, not just the Pentagon.

On February 13^th of 2025, Trump 47 briefly proposed cutting the Pentagon budget in half.  That announcement had the immediate effect of “costing” Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin an estimated $6 Billion in stock valuation.  Congress and the defense lobbies had their mission, and not only did they deliver, but Trump, Janus-like, on April 8^th proposed a record-breaking $1 Trillion dollar DoD budget.  Trump said “We have things under order now.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Admiral Robert Burke is not the tip of the iceberg; he is not one bad apple.  Burke and his cohorts at Next Jump are just bite-sized chunks of the Department of Defense. He is a chip off the old block, a sample at the Pentagon Costco.  Americans are forced, under threat of arrest, fines and imprisonment, to buy overpriced, overpackaged, non-working condition “defense” in quantities we can’t use today, and can’t consume in a century.

Smedley Butler believed that if we took the profit out of war, allow those who would be fighting to decide if a war was worthwhile (the young, not the old, the poor, not the wealthy) and limited our military forces to home defense purposes – we could smash the war racket.

The first – removing profit from war – really means ending the Fed, because a state with an unlimited ability to “create” money will always attract those who want a piece of that action, who want to win big under the rules of the game.  When it’s not real money, and not your money, those allowed into the federal casino will happily gamble with national defense, as they do with every other project of the state.

Trump was on to something in February – reducing the casino payout by half would impact both those running the casino, and those betting there, overnight.  There would definitely be blood.

If we returned the power to go to war to the people – we could be in for a century or two of peace in the United States, as the youth of our country do not favor war, and have no fantasies about making their bones on a global battlefield.  Butler – who died in June 1940 – could not have imagined that the US would eventually fight nonstop around the planet without any Congressional declarations of war at all – gutting Constitutional guidance meant to assign the decision for war to the People’s representatives.

If we limited our military forces to purely defensive purposes, we could envision a DoD that actually functions as such.  Such a defense-oriented military would have never allowed 9/11, almost a quarter of a century ago, when the DoD – and the MICIMATT around it – defended no American.  It was too busy  cultivating enemies abroad, in hopes of fomenting more war, and war profits.

The Pentagon and Next Jump’s competitors congratulate themselves on rooting out a corrupting influence in their midst.  Naughty Admiral, shame, shame!  Now please go back to your previously scheduled program while we grift and plot, profit and pillage.

Trump can be certainly be proud that we have the “most” of something.  His trillion dollar military is the most expensive, most incompetent, most wasteful, and most worthless on the planet.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/05/karen-kwiatkowski/navy-admiral-corrupt-how-utterly-disturbing