Eric Alterman: Think Again: The Blackwater Scandal or The More Things Don’t Change...

[babylonsister]

Think Again: The Blackwater Scandal or The More Things Don’t Change...

By Eric Alterman, George Zornick

October 25, 2007


It's become obvious to almost everyone paying attention that the operations of the Blackwater Corporation, among other private contractors, constitute yet another Bush administration scandal of significant proportions. The companies are reaping hitherto unimaginable profits while operating with a virtual—and sometimes literal—license to kill.

The oddest aspect of these operations is that they are, in most cases, fully within the law. Blackwater’s friends in the administration, the State Department and Pentagon set it up that way, and in doing so set up a system with next to no oversight. Then again, to put all the onus on these contractors themselves is in many ways to miss the point. Blackwater is merely an extreme version of the way our system operates. And while there has been some exceptional journalism looking into their operations of late, this central point is being missed. We have a defense sector in the United States that is out of control. And it’s been that way nearly from the start.

Until Franklin Roosevelt began preparing the country to enter into World War II, the United States did not have a significant defense sector. In early 1941, the government had already issued $10 billion in private defense contracts, before America even entered the war. On a muddy plot of land outside Washington, the Pentagon was being constructed and would stand as the largest office building in the world. As the stream of dollars flowing to defense contracts swelled into a torrent, an obscure senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman began hearing complaints from his constituents about rampant profiteering in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood in his home state of Missouri.

Truman embarked on a 10,000 mile car trip to investigate the building of Fort Leonard Wood and several other army camps across the country. He returned to Washington astonished. "It was the same everywhere, he found," writes Truman biographer David McCullough. "Millions of dollars were being squandered. Had there been such mismanagement of federal help for the poor and unemployed a few years earlier, he thought, the outcry would have been overwhelming. As it was, no one seemed to care or to be saying anything."

On Monday, February 10, 1941, Truman took the Senate floor and forever entered the spotlight of history by proposing the establishment of a Senate committee to investigate how defense contracts were awarded. The Truman Commission, formally titled the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was formed a month later. Over the course of its investigations—which resulted in 50 reports, 400 hearings, and 1,798 witnesses—the Truman Committee would be credited with saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

The committee began by investigating the construction of Army camps. It found that the contracts awarded to developers provided a legal incentive for graft—they were "cost-plus" contracts, meaning the contractor was reimbursed for the costs of construction, plus a percentage of the profits—an obvious incentive to drive up the profits of the project. The Truman Commission found one architect who increased his income by 1000 percent through a defense contract, and one army camp in Texas rose from a cost projection of $480,000 to $2.54 million.

more...

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/10/ta_blackwater.html

[tanyev]

1. The big boys know that you can't make nearly as much money from healthcare

and education as you can from war-mongering.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.