Defense Contractors
Diane Feinstein: Yet More No-Change Change
First Hillary Clinton got to run our foreign policy. Now Diane Feinstein gets to oversee our intelligence agencies. This is change?
December 16, 2008 | Read More
Obama Reality Check - Pentagon Waste Edition
Obama says he’ll go line-by-line to cut federal spending. He could start by killing a $65 billion Pentagon boondoggle. But he’ll have to beat back bought-off members of Congress to do it.
December 11, 2008 | Read More
Outsourcing Our Economy
A spoof column announces that we are officially outsourcing economics policy to Asia. It’s a funny idea, but disturbingly close to reality.
December 8, 2008 | Read More
Where’s Our Harry Truman?
During World War II, then Senator Truman waged a nonstop battle against defense contracting fraud and saved the country $15 billion (in 1940s dollars). In honor of Veteran’s Day, we thought we’d ask: are there any Harry Trumans in Congress fighting today’s war profiteers?
November 11, 2008 | Read More
Pigs Fly? The Pentagon Cuts A Bloated Program
Last week, something truly bizarre happened in Washington. The Department of Defense actually trimmed a wasteful military contract. But this is the Pentagon we’re talking about. Weapons systems never die. They just get re-bid. And defense contractors like Boeing are already lining up.
October 20, 2008 | Read More
Really Support the Troops - Give Them a Raise!
Our soldiers risk their lives and spend years away from their families. Yet they earn a pittance. Meanwhile, private contractors and mercenaries take home fat, taxpayer-funded salaries. This is disgraceful. No private contractor in a war zone should make more than our troops. Period.
If the Pentagon and other government agencies like the State Department insist on hiring private companies to do work that our soldiers used to do themselves, congress should pass laws mandating that our GI’s earn at least as much, or, better yet, more than the private contractors working in the same overseas area.
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #96: Low-Balling the Lives of Soldiers
In perhaps the most outrageous sham of all, the government hides the true cost of our wars by drastically low-balling the very value of our soldiers’ lives. When a private citizen dies, government actuaries usually put the “value” of his or her life at several million dollars. But when one of our GI’s dies in Iraq, his family only gets $500,000 in death benefits-a fraction of the usual amount.
In other words, according to Washington DC, the lives of our troops are worth less than the lives of civilians. That’s disgraceful. To add insult to injury, most contract workers in Iraq…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #93: The Iraq War and Wall Street
Regardless of success, our leaders were probably banking on the fact that past wars have been good for American business. Dustin Woodard, Mutual Fund Advisor on About.com, looked at the stock market during our last several conflicts.
World War II: The S&P 500 grew at an annualized rate of 12.1 percent per year.
Korean War: The S&P 500 annualized at 18.9 percent per year.
Vietnam War: The S&P 500 annualized at 3.91 percent per year.
Gulf War I: The S&P 500 annualized at 9.52 percent per year.
But today we’re seeing something funny happen with the S&P 500. Journalist Naomi Klein pointed out that a…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #92: A Planned Disaster - Downsizing the Army to Pump Up Corporate Profits
Rumsfeld and Cheney had planned for a long time to start a “revolution in military affairs.” To them, this meant massively reducing the size of America’s standing army and developing small, high-tech battalions which could be air-lifted to trouble spots to take care of business, either secretly or in the open. But as Colin Powell pointed out before he became Secretary of State, this special-forces approach was exactly the wrong way to invade a country like Iraq. Saddam Hussein, too, predicted that Iraq would absorb the invaders and they’d get picked off one by one.
But Rumsfeld went ahead and downsized…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #91: Halliburton in the Halls of Government
A I’ve discussed, before he got to be our vice president, Dick Cheney was V.P. at Halliburton. He was also CEO of the company for a while. Under Cheney, Halliburton doubled its political contributions to the sum of $1.2 million. Most of that money went to Republican politicians. Not coincidentally, the U.S. government awarded Halliburton several contracts to rebuild oil infrastructure in Iraq, without allowing other companies to bid for the jobs, as the government normally does.
These days, Halliburton remains big in the business of campaign contributions, and 93 percent of this money goes to Republicans. (The Fluor Corporation is…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
