Your One-Stop Shop for Political Outrage

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Forget everything else. Forget the Patriot Act and its Central Scrutinizer approach to safety. Forget the EPA. Forget the system of compassionate promises backed by less than zero spending. Everything you need to know about why you should hate the current occupying power in Washington, DC, is laid out in this long blog essay by Arthur Silber from The Light of Reason. It details a long series of outrages which basically boil down to, huge amounts of government money--your tax money--being funnelled to cronies of the current regime.


The essay starts by recapping what I posted previously about the bridge in Baghdad that should cost, at most, $1 million to repair, which the US is paying a private company fifty times as much to get the job done. Then it reminds us that Haliburton has already been awarded $1.7 billion in no-bid contracts for Iraq cleanup. Working up steam, Silber then mentions that Haliburton has been paid to build military camps in Jordan--the existence of which was not revealed to the US public until after the money had already been spent. A brief detour to point out the continuing toxic flavor of rhetoric, in which just asking questions about these expenditures is branded treasonous, and then we get to the cold, diseased, mechanical heart of the matter:

The practice of delegating a vast array of logistics operations to a single contractor dates to the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and a study commissioned by Cheney, then defense secretary, on military outsourcing. The Pentagon chose Brown and Root to carry out the study and subsequently selected the company to implement its own plan. Cheney served as chief executive of Brown and Root's parent company, Halliburton, from 1995 to 2000, when he resigned to run for the vice presidency.

And then we get back to the lies. Remember the idea that the Iraqi reconstruction will be paid for with Iraq's own oil money? It's not going to be even a small fraction of what's needed:

But the cumulative effects of more than 20 years of underinvestment, mismanagement, neglect and lack of modernization due to sanctions have left Iraq's oil sector in a sorry state. Since before the war many US officials said reconstruction would be paid for by oil revenues, this is a huge problem. Iraq only earned $12.5 billion in oil exports in 2002, and its current export capacity may be down from over 2 million barrels a day in 2000 to around 800,000 - if there is no further sabotage.

Bremer said in a press interview on July 31 that it could take $50 billion to $100 billion to reconstruct Iraq, and a $1.6 billion plan to rehabilitate Iraq's oil industry was agreed to in late June.

[...]

Iraq needs $20 billion just to keep services at bare-bones levels, a UN official said recently.

Even if every drop of Iraqi oil went to repay Haliburton for the reconstruction, it would take a minimum of ten years, and that only by starving every person in Iraq to death.

Do you think that's going to happen? If not, who do you think is going to pay?

And, in a delightful coda, Silber mentions the stunning Los Angeles Times article about how the entire Weapons of Mass Destruction boondoggle was Saddam's own fabrication.


I'll let Silber have his own last word here:

One final point: I note again, as I did throughout my foreign policy series, that all these stories are interrelated. The various, intricate mechanisms of corporate statism influence, distort and corrupt this entire process at every single step -- and we now face probably more than a decade of huge wealth transfer payments being made from one group of Americans to another group of Americans: from hardworking American taxpayers to those companies with sufficient connections and pull to get the enormously lucrative contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq. The dangers of all this are tremendous: to our own economy's health, to our safety -- since our long-term presence in Iraq may well lead to a growth in terrorism, rather than its reduction, and to our own liberties and freedoms, since Bush is so fond of reminding us that we are now in an ongoing "state of emergency." But there is one aspect of this more than any other than I am truly fed up with at this point: the repeated insistence by many that Bush and his administration are noble exemplars of "true" American values -- of individualism, of free markets, of liberty.

(Thanks again to Jim Henley for the pointer. You don't have to hate the state to hate what's going on.)