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 WolfOne rated 13 months ago - "The Great Iraq Swindle -
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury"
A brilliant article about shameless war profiteering, corruption and incompetency. Everyone should read this (especially the last page). Everyone, except for maybe the few remain...
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23 Reviews
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- CastorQuinn rated 6 months ago
- Obviously you don't want to inform your political opinions with content from a heavily commercial music magazine, but sweet baby Jebus if this isn't a damned fine piece of writing. It's not a good article, full of bias, unsupported comments and polemic, but it's a damned fine piece of writing. Any kids out there looking at opinion pieces and feature articles as a genre for the HSC: This is well worth a look for the sheer weight and expert use of techniques in the article."What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy."And of course the scariest part is that it's all true. It's a particular slant on what the truth really is, but it's still fundamentally a very interesting version of what actually happened.
- alice44 rated 13 months ago
- A disturbing article that strongly argues that the War in Iraq is about making profits for a lot of Bush loyalists. From the page: Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
-- you've got a "cost-plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot.
- bull22delta rated 13 months ago
- You can support the troops and still be against the war. This is only the monetary side of the waste we have had to endure from a crooked administration. If only all this money could bring back the wasted life's.
- dubthach rated 13 months ago
- "How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq."
- GalloiseBlonde rated 13 months ago
- From the page: "Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ÂHussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up."
- saltwatermatt rated 10 months ago
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Five pages worth reading. Corruption, dishonesty and gravy train amongst millitary and civilian contractors associated with USA involvement in Iraq.
Here is a snippet from the end:
According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success?
- moookid rated 13 months ago
- Another good example of how all is not quite what it seems with America's war for 'freedom'.
- eddieguy rated 13 months ago
- "But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors."
- KingBoy rated 13 months ago
- 'If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success?'
Matt Taibbi on the logical endpoint of privatizing government: corruption, theft, amorality, greed and bullshit in unimaginable quantities. The fallout in Iraq - and the U.S. - from this rampant war-profiteering will be prolonged, bitter and far-reaching. Make time to read this, and keep an eye on your cortisol levels...
- WolfOne rated 13 months ago
- "The Great Iraq Swindle -
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury"
A brilliant article about shameless war profiteering, corruption and incompetency. Everyone should read this (especially the last page). Everyone, except for maybe the few remaining Bush supporters left out there...it'll only upset them.
From the article:
...the system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."
The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.
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