So You Think You Can Swindle?

Very depressing Rolling Stone article about how the War in Iraq is being outsourced to rich friends of politicians and their own corporations. These "contractors" charge outrageous prices (which we taxpayers foot the bill for) and do largely nothing, and in fact threaten the lives of anyone over there who could cry foul. ("What? You don't like what we're doing? We'll stop paying for your security.") There's also the possibility that these contractors have supplied money and arms to the enemy in exchange for not being killed. Meanwhile, our government insists the surge of troop levels is working (by cooking the books and redefining terms) and that all this lovely money, er, freedom-spreading should continue.

[But] what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.

We don't have a truly free market or a Democracy once the government regulating it becomes just another business player, using its military might and media control to reap monetary benefits paid for by brainwashed taxpayers. What's really infuriating is that the Democrats do not seem capable or interested in Impeaching the whole mess of cronies along with Bush, whose crimes are against the American taxpayer, U.S. and other countries' troops, the Constitution, and the World at large.