For people interested in the Boeing story about diplomats acting as salesmen

[EFerrari]

I saw the author of "Prophets of War" talk about how Lockheed became the biggest defense contractor last night and the unbelievable corruption that ensued with the full complicity of our government.

"In "Prophets of War," William Hartung presents the history of the largest military contractor in U.S. history, Lockheed Martin. Mr. Hartung argues that with 25 billion dollars annually in Defense Department contracts, Lockheed Martin's reach into American life is extensive and largely unknown, including creation of satellites used to spy on the phone calls of American citizens. He discusses the company's size, scope and influence with Pierre Sprey, father of the A-10 and F-16 military aircraft."

The bit that stands out for me is the author saying approximately, the financial sector learned everything it knows about gaming our money from the defense industry. But there are other aspects that are unreal, too, like Lockheed trying to get service contracts in just about every area of American life.

Its about an hour, with searchable transcript.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Hartu

[MineralMan]

1. Not much for anyone to get that excited about with regard to

Boeing. It's our only manufacturer of large commercial aircraft. Our trade missions at our embassies are tasked with increasing US exports, and aircraft are one of the major ones. They're just doing their job.

I notice you switched topics quickly from Boeing to Lockheed Martin. It's not the commercial aircraft that are a problem, really. Military stuff is another issue, but selling airliners and cargo planes to other countries is just good business, and keeps a lot of people working.

There's nothing really to complain about in this one.

[EFerrari]

2. The State Department is courting foreign governments behind closed doors

for private vendors with our tax money. What could possibly go wrong. :)

[MineralMan]

3. Surely you do not believe that our embassies do not engage in

diplomacy regarding trade? Please tell me that you don't.

As long as embassies have existed, one of their primary missions is to promote trade with their nation. It's what they're there for. If it's a U.S. Embassy, then it's promoting products of our capitalistic nation, meaning trade with private companies.

As for the closed doors, most trade negotiations are done in private meetings. Nothing would get done otherwise.

Increasing US imports into the country in which the embassy is located is a major part of the embassy's job.

[EFerrari]

4. Diplomacy isn't the issue, corruption is.

With the result we saw on 9/11, the Defense Department now mostly defends contractors, the nation not so much.

But thank you for explaining the purpose of American embassies to me, MineralMan. You are a good advocate. :)

[MineralMan]

5. My pleasure, as always.

[EFerrari]

6. I've been going through my grandfather's papers from his term

as the Minister of Defense in El Salvador to figure out which of them go to that government and which stay here. The material on the American embassy is interesting because it dovetails with the rise of the MIC here in post-war American. Lots of "diplomacy", all right.

[truedelphi]

9. Do either Wikileaks or John Young's

Group have a history section?

In any event, make use of a copy machine and scanner. No reason not to let a lot of people in on "the know."

[EFerrari]

18. I don't know who John Young is. n/t

[truedelphi]

20. From time to time I had read news releases attributed to John Young -

But today this political video put it all together:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=539901&mesg_id=539901

[OregonBlue]

11. The State Department courting anyone for our UNION businesses, especially those who employ 150,000

workers, is exactly what we want them to be doing. Haven't you complained endlessly about outsourcing? Aren't you opposed to those free-trade agreements? So now, why are you opposed to our government working to get business for our manufacturers? Guess there is no winning with you.

[EFerrari]

12. It would be interesting to find out how much those 150k jobs actually cost us.

:)

[OregonBlue]

13. I doubt those 150,000 Union workers care and neither do their families.

So our government agreed to trick out a plane for a sheik. So what? As long as those 150,000 UNION workers get to keep their jobs I could care less. To assume that we are the only ones doing this is naive. Wonder what the Airbus people offered? Where is the wikileak on that?

[EFerrari]

15. You seem to be shouting at things I haven't said.

Considering all the "grease" in this process, it might be worth pointing out that UNION families could spend the money better than BRIBED domestic or foreign officials, or subsidized multinationals who get no bid contracts while UNION families have to fight for every cent they are paid.

Why don't you watch the video and shout at me after that? :)

[PufPuf23]

7. Thanks kr

[truedelphi]

8. K & R for this bit on Lockheed, and for the

C Span link as well.

[JDPriestly]

10. The video is amazing in that it reports on the corruption of the 20th century

some of it anyway. The video is well worth watching.

Why did we decide to fight in Korea? How did we get into that war? The video tells you.

It's a primer on bribery and corruption. An eye-opener.

Send a link to all your right-wing friends. They will love it.

[EFerrari]

14. We grew up in Silicon Valley when Lockheed was the biggest employer

(iirc) in the early 60s. The cannery in Sunnvale gave way to Moffet Field and NASA and HP, IBM, etc. It was a little like Stepford, everyone in the new developments had a flat topped dad who left at the same time every morning to work on the moon program's paint or something. :)

[stevenleser]

16. Every embassy and consulate of every country in the world does this...

Call a consulate or embassy of any country and tell them you are interested in starting a business in that country. Watch how much time and effort they expend in trying to help you.

[EFerrari]

17. Did you see the video? It's a good conversation. n/t

[xchrom]

19. Recommend

[Octafish]

21. Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone -- Your MIC at Woik

Thank you, EFerrari. Hartung is a Truth Teller, an expert on The Carlyle Group, who asked: "How much are you making on the war, Daddy?"

Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

The Carlyle Group: Crony Capitalism without Borders

excerpted from the book

How Much Are You Making On The War Daddy?

A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration

by William D. Hartung
Nation Books, 2003, paper

EXCERPT...

p27

The revolving door between the government and weapons contractors isn't new, but it has reached new heights (monetarily) and depths (ethically), in recent years. Cheney's relationship with Halliburton is a perfect case study of all that is wrong with the relationship between our democratic form of government and the corporations that finance our elections and feed at the government trough on a daily basis.

p29

Halliburton's biggest "cash cow" during his tenure was definitely in the area of military support services, and the company's ability to earn so much in this area was directly tied to a decision Cheney had made back when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. It was under Cheney's watch that the decision was made to privatize not only specific services in support of U.S. troops overseas-such as food services, or doing the laundry, or repairing vehicles-but to privatize the actual planning process that went into providing logistics for U.S. troops when they had to be sent into an inhospitable foreign hot spot on short notice.

In 1992, near the end of Cheney's tenure as defense secretary, Halliburton won a contract from the U.S. Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), which P.W. Singer has described as a deal to "work with the military in planning the logistical side of contingency operations." Singer notes that "it was the first time the U.S. military had ever contracted such global planning to a private organization." In a pattern that would mark both Halliburton's and Cheney's business paths, the firm got the LOGCAP contract after conducting a top secret $3.9 million report for the Pentagon on how private companies could essentially provide the bulk of the logistics involved in major U.S. contingency deployments, from transportation and base-building to cooking the food and doing the laundry. The initial study contract called for a plan for how a private company could bear the bulk of the logistical burden for deploying 20,000 troops to 5 separate bases overseas within a 1 80-day period. Later in the year, Halliburton got a $5 million follow-on study contract to outline how a private firm might supply logistics for a series of more specific contingencies. By the end of the year, Halliburton had been selected to receive a five-year contract to be the U.S. Army's "on call" private logistics arm.

The work started almost immediately. Halliburton was called upon to provide support services for U.S. forces deployed to Somalia as part of "Operation Restore Hope," an operation that began at the end of the Bush administration and carried over into the first Clinton term. As Singer notes, "Brown and Root employees arrived in Mogadishu just 24 hours after the first U.S. troops arrived and stayed until the final withdrawal in March 1995, when its employees left with the last U.S. marines." The company did everything from hiring local women to hand wash Army laundry to importing "a mortician to clean up the bodies of killed UN peacekeepers before shipping them out of the country." Singer notes that for a good portion of its time in country, Halliburton was "the largest employer in Somalia, with some 2,500 local employees."

The Somalia operation led to additional, more limited work on behalf of smaller U.S. deployments to Rwanda and Haiti. But the big payoff came in the Balkans, where Halliburton's Brown and Root Services unit started out supplying logistical support for Operation Deny Flight, the United Nations-mandated no-fly zone in Bosnia, and ended up building and operating bases and refugee camps in Croatia, Bosnia, and, most lucratively of all, in KOSOVO. The firm's Balkan adventures started during the same year that Cheney took over as CEO of the company, and accounted for a good deal of the company's growth on the military side of its operations during his five-year tenure at the head of the firm.

The Army contract to provide logistical support for 20,000 U.S. troops deployed as part of the NATO IFOR forces in Bosnia came in at a cool $546 million, and it resulted in Halliburton doing work on behalf of U.S. and allied forces in Hungary, Bosnia, and Croatia. Just as it seemed that Halliburton had struck pure gold, there was a setback in 1997 when the company lost in its bid to renew its overall LOGCAP contract with the Army to a competitor, DynCorp, who had underbid them for the next round of work. But the sting was taken out of the loss when the Army decided to remove the BaIkans work from the larger LOGCAP contract, allowing Halliburton to go full speed ahead on its lucrative support operations there.

The Bosnia work set the stage for an even bigger role for Halliburton in Kosovo, where the company was involved in everything from building make-shift refugee quarters to building two major Army bases from scratch. The company's contract for its first year in Kosovo alone ballooned from the base level fee of $180 million to $1 billion. During its first three months in Kosovo alone, Singer reports that the company did the following: "built 192 barracks . . . thirteen helipads, two aviation-maintenance facilities, twelve mess-kitchen dining facilities, two large base dining facilities, and 37 temporary bathing facilities," even as it was delivering over I million meals, providing more than 55 million gallons of water, supplying over 383,000 gallons of diesel fuel, collecting over 89,000 cubic meters of trash, and loading and off-loading over 4,200 containers with needed supplies.

Halliburton's growth under Cheney's leadership is nothing compared to what it has done since he became vice president. In 2001, it won back the Army's LOGCAP contract, just in time to cash in on the logistical bonanza involved in providing facilities and provisions for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, and all the other far-flung outposts of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The company is also in charge of making the cages used to house Taliban members and terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A late August 2003 analysis in the Washington Post estimated that Halliburton had raked in $1.7 billion in military contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond since the start of the Bush administration.

The company's biggest prize-which it was awarded on a no-bid basis by the Army Corps of Engineers after Halliburton officials had helped the Defense Department write the specs for the contract-was an open-ended, two year contract worth up to $7 billion for putting out oil fires and repairing oil infrastructure in Iraq.

It was only after dogged questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman that it was revealed that the no-bid Halliburton contract was not merely for putting out oil fires, but for rebuilding and operating Iraq's extensive oil infrastructure.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/CarlyleGroup_HMOWD%3F.html

Gosh, Eeza. With such examples, how could -- or in the case of many these days: why would -- anyone ever conceive of an economy not based on war?