| The Bush administration is using military contractors to funnel taxpayers money into Republican party coffers. |
| The occupation of Iraq has created a financial bonanza for military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater. Those companies make billions from billing the government (i.e. US taxpayers) for services. They in turn donate a substantial portion of that money to the Republican party as well as individual Republican candidates. They also hire lobbyists that donate heavily and pander to Republican lawmakers.
An independent panel ... appointed in August by Army Secretary Pete Geren, levels a stinging indictment of how the Army oversees $4 billion a year in contracts for food, water, shelter and other supplies to sustain United States forces in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. The panel also blames senior Army leaders for not responding more swiftly to the problems, despite warning signs like severe shortages of contracting officers in the field. “The Iraq-Kuwait-Afghanistan contracting problems have created a crisis,” the report states. Senior Army officials say the report’s “blunt, candid” language, as one put it, underscores the seriousness of the problem at a time when the Pentagon is increasingly reliant on contractors to wash laundry, prepare meals, stand sentry, provide armed security and do myriad other jobs. ... [C]hanges, the officials say, are long in coming, and if they had been put in place immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, they could have curbed much of the corruption that has surfaced since then. Source: "Panel Faults Army’s Wartime Contracting" By ERIC SCHMITT - NY Times - November 1, 2007 [Blackwater's] chief Washington lobbyist is Paul Behrends, who worked at the now-defunct Alexander Strategy Group, a Republican firm with close ties to the jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Mr. Behrends, who now works at C & M Capitolink, a Washington lobbying firm, declined to discuss his work for Blackwater, which has paid his company $300,000 since last year. [Blackwater] mounted an impressive publicity campaign ... The central message in all of the interviews was that [if] Blackwater ... lost its $1.2 billion contract with the State Department it would find other ways to make money. Source: "Blackwater Mounts a Defense With Top Washington Talent" By JOHN M. BRODER and JAMES RISEN - NY Times - November 1, 2007 What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems. Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put in August: "Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon’s had doubled." The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9/11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history. the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy. Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so-called war on terror, a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from high-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand. As Columbia professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: "With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings, or naval fleets—the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. ... It does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces." That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in Bush’s 2008 budget requests. Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of mujahedeen terrorists, once our "freedom fighters" in that earlier Afghan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War. "The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget," writes Lawrence J. Korb, "surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense. ... And, much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower." Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of "war on terror" hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11; they should give bin Laden his cut. Source: "Cashing In on Terror" By Robert Scheer - Truthdig - October 30, 2007 |
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