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dxAce · August 31st 07, 11:55 AM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

wrote:

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S.
Treasury

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.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air
Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for
overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of
$8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming
such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to
the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of
2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a
private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on
Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been
promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn
Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace,
garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end
neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved
on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th,
2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-
sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a
contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design
and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to
house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72
million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of
the great engineering cluster****s of all time, a practically useless
pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are
literally caked in **** and ****, a result of subpar plumbing in the
upper floors.

You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in
the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of
the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine
and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the
urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling
tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the
ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report
helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the
outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fias*co, a few members on the House
Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company
decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air
Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting
operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in
from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the
committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland
congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72
million on a pile of ****.

You blink. **** if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all
it would be" is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of
a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and
offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your
company's compensation. Touchy subject -- 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. But before this
milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give
these millions back, you've got to cut him off. "So you won't
voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling, "and say, given
what has happened in this project . . . "

"No, sir, I will not," you snap.

". . . 'We will return the profits.' . . ."

"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home,
take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the
little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your
president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485
million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of
Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now *assessed
at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.

"Yeah, I don't know what I expected him to say," Van Hollen says now
about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back.
"It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for
everything."

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 **** things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies
and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that
this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not
just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for
Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to
deliver every Christmas card. And why not? 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 bureauc*racy. This is the triumphant
culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a
preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit*
eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into
one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men
and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can
blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on
foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it
lasted.

Story continued at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...t_iraq_swindle

Doesn't CanaDuh rip off ITS citizens everyday?

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