This is a documentary from some years back about Saddam and the misuse of power and corruption behind his government. Its a bit long, about 50 minutes.

Saddam Hussein and the Saddam Family album

Reading a watchdog site called Citizens for Ethics, I found a story that should have shocked me, but, unfortunately it didn’t. You see over the course of the war in Iraq, the militry overspending issues, greedy contractor scandals, corruption and plain lies, It’s something I came to expect…. The government overpaying for shit to support contractors.

What should have shocked me here is that in this case, the crap they paid $74 million of our tax dollars for, does not even work correctly and is a military safety item.  Sadly, it’s something I guess I came to expect, government putting the interests of its contractors before human safety and the lives of soldiers.

Here is the story… To no one’s surprise anymore, when the government finds out a product is substandard… what do they do? well, they buy more quickly before anyone finds out.

From citizens for ethics

At a time when a new acronym, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), has entered the American lexicon because of injuries sustained to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times reports that not only are many combat helmets being given to our troops substandard, and not only was there a lawsuit about it, but the government actually placed an order with the same company for more helmets just days before the suit was settled.

Reports the Times:

A North Dakota manufacturer has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a suit saying it had repeatedly shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including those for the first troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twelve days before the settlement with the Justice Department was announced, the company, Sioux Manufacturing of Fort Totten, was given a new contract of up to $74 million to make more armor for helmets to replace the old ones, which were made from the late 1980s to last year.

The issue at the heart of the suit were two former employees of the company who maintained (and never were disproved) that Sioux was not weaving their Kevlar at the mandated 35 by 35 thread per square inch count, but 34 by 34, and making up the weight difference by just applying more hardened resin. I think in anyone’s book, that would be considered reason enough to never place a contract with the same company again. But, what’s worse, that extra resin makes the helmets more brittle, which doesn’t give the necessary head protection to the troops.

In the suit, it seems like everyone at the company knew what they were doing:

In the evidence in the suit were hundreds of daily inspection records showing repeated violations of the weaving standards, as well as tape recordings of six managers and employees’ admitting covering up violations.

In a conversation Mr. Kenner secretly taped, Rhea Crane, quality assurance officer, worried “if we ever had someone get killed, and they decided to investigate because they thought maybe the helmet wasn’t any good.”

“If we ever got audited,” she said, “you know what they would do to us. Shut us down and fine us big time. Probably never see another government contract.”

Oh, you think so, Mrs. “Quality Assurance Officer?” Well, lucky for you all at Sioux Manufacturing, the Bush administration is on the scene, where substandard products for the troops are awarded with MORE contracts! We’ve truly entered the Bizarro World.

Thankfully, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has taken up the case and written to Congress to investigate this matter. We at VoteVets.org fully support their call for an investigation, and we’ll be doing more in the coming days to support their efforts.

There have been many, many things wrong with how the wars have been waged. I don’t think I need to go through a litany of them. But, to me, there is no issue more tragic than how Donald “The Army You Have” Rumsfeld, and this administration have been absolutely and totally irresponsible - indeed wreckless - in how they go about protecting our troops at the most basic levels, from body armor, to Humvee armor, and now, to helmets.

I am sure everyone knows about this this video of government spending and corruption within military contracts, but just in case anyone missed it, here it is again.

This is a clip from “Iraq for Sale”. The video talks about the problem of government spending in the Iraq war. It seems that every time I open the paper I see another company “investigated” for ripping off the tawpayers. Recently, security contractors were in the news for billing for security gaurds they apparently never had.

War always brings out the “profiteers” it seems. And why not? The government is handing out billions. right?

Military over-spending and plain government overspending has always been an issue. I used to work for them. I remember a time when they wanted to have a barbaque for employees (about 100 people at that office or less). They went out and got a barbaque grill that they needed for 1 day only. The grill looked like any other you would get at the store except this one cost in excess of 50K.  Yes, the office spent 50,000.00 for a barbaque grill for a 1 hour lunch.

Seems sick? When I worked there the daily joke was what percentile everyone was in for the day… you see, the government office said that 20% of the people do 80% of the work on any given day.

Working there, I remember when voters, voted against salary increases for everyone… But no one was worried or cared because no increases just means bigger yearly bonuses. Yep, they voted against the 6% increase so the office authorized a 15% year-end bonus because bonuses were not in question and would not look like an increase on paper.

I really do wonder why anyone even has to vote for such things, in the end they get what they want anyway and throw in some extra for that F.U.

I have a friend who was in the military. He tells me that there were times when they threw expensive equipment… like brand new 100k bulldozers and stuff off planes into the ocean. Why? well, so they could say they used them and did not come back with the brand new unused equipment. If it came back, they would get less money in their budget.

The spending is SICK, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill for the bulldozers swimming in the Pacific.

I have figured this out… every single day I give $65 to the US government (split between sales tax, gas tax, property tax, income tax, etc.) as do the rest of us to fuel excessive spending…. I mean those overseas contractors do need to make a living, why have 1 mansion when my 65 daily + millions of others will contribute to 2 or 3 mansions…  maybe even in the Bahamas. Why have 1 Jaguar, when you can get a fleet? hmmm?

From Rolling Stone, the article is called the Great Iraq Swindle. Not a new article, but worth a read… The Great Iraq Swindle

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 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.

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 fias­co, 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 shit.

You blink. Fuck 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 fuck 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 bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, 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.

Find the rest of the story here

CEO’s and defense contractors got a combined 1 billion since 9-11 - Guess that industry is no longer in ruin.

For an industry that was in financial trouble some years back, they now end up on top.

I remember a few years ago, the huge lay-offs, the facility shutdowns, reports of record losses in aerospace and defense. And just when defense contractors and CEO’s thought they would have to trade the Bentley in for the cheaper Jag… thier prayers got answered and financial woes are no more. One of the core American industries bailed out by the government and they all profit.

hmmm. coincidence? well thats the question on every conspiracy theorists plate.

and with huge profits like that… why would they ever want it to end?

From Truthdig:

AP photo / Junji Kurokawa

By Robert Scheer

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. 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.”

Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first President Bush and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, were severely cutting the military budget for high-ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer-existent Soviet military.  Sure, they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.

Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. 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 bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 knives, but Bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein’s army collapsed all too suddenly. But 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.

From Rolling Stone: - the great iraq swindle - from some time back

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.