Krugman: Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys

[phantom power]

Last week a judge threw out a jury's $10 million verdict against Custer Battles, a private contractor that was hired, among other things, to provide security at Baghdad's airport. Custer Battles has become a symbol of the mix of cronyism, corruption and sheer amateurishness that doomed the Iraq adventure - and the judge didn't challenge the jury's finding that the company engaged in blatant fraud.

But he ruled that the civil fraud suit against the company lacked a legal basis, because as far as he could tell, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, wasn't "an instrumentality of the U.S. government." It wasn't created by an act of Congress; it wasn't a branch of the State Department or any other established agency.

So what was it? Any premodern monarch would have recognized the arrangement: in effect, the authority was a personal fief run by a viceroy answering only to the ruler. And since the fief operated outside all the usual rules of government, the viceroy was free to hire a staff of political loyalists lacking any relevant qualifications for their jobs, and to hand out duffel bags filled with $100 bills to contractors with the right connections.

Tax farmers, mercenaries and viceroys: why does the Bush administration want to run a modern superpower as if it were a 16th-century monarchy? Maybe people who've spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can't grasp the idea of governing well. Or maybe it's cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

But the price is enormous. This administration has thrown away centuries of lessons about how to make government work. No wonder it has failed at everything except fearmongering.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082406O.shtml

[ThomCat]

1. That judge is either a pinhead or a hack.

The provisional authority was appointed by our government, funded by our government, and took orders from our government, so how the hell were they not "an instrumentality of the U.S. government?"

This is just one more decision designed to immunize corporations from responsibility. Why is it that only corporations ever have immunity from lawsuits?
x(

[Kagemusha]

2. Guess to him it was the interim Iraqi govt, and gave itself immunity

so since it had the sovereign immunity of Iraq, and gave itself Iraqi legal immunity, there's nothing any American can do about it.

Sickening, but airtight.

[ThomCat]

3. Except, that under international law

it was an occupying force, not a government. So the only way that judge could use that reasoning (if he did) is if he disregarded the Geneva Conventions, which we signed.