Titanic Post

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Rolling Stone Issue 1034

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

Read more >>

Printed in “Republicans for Environmental Protection”

By John R. E. Bliese, Ph.D.

We can’t afford any more environmental protection, because it will hurt the economy.

How many times have you heard that line? Probably every time any new standards were proposed to clean up our air or water and protect our health. And every time we try to preserve some rare plant or animal we have pushed to the brink of extinction, it’s “owls (or whatever) versus jobs.”

These arguments are the most common ones we face in trying to protect the earth. Politicians spout them freely, and so do business groups and radio talk show entertainers. There is only one problem with these assertions: They are simply not true!

There have been dozens of well-designed studies by economists who have tested these claims, and the results are clear: environmental protection normally has no negative impact on the economy overall, and sometimes it has a positive effect.

What I want to do here is summarize a few of the more notable studies, to show that there is good quality ammunition for us to use when anti-environmentalists trot out those tired old claims. (more…)

AMORALITY: A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency . . . Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than an animal.

~ John Ralston Saul, “The Doubter’s Companion.”

Lifted from the Progressive Review

EDWARD HELMORE, GUARDIAN - An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq’s alleged biological weapons programs and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as ‘crazy’ by his intelligence handlers and a ‘congenital liar’ by his friends.

The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball’s credibility, his claims were included in the administration’s case for war without caveat.

According to the report, the failure of US spy agencies to scrutinize his claims are the ‘primary reason’ that they ‘fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq’s [biological weapons] programs.’. . .

The Americans never had direct access to Curveball - he was controlled by the German intelligence services who passed his reports on to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy agency. Between January 2000 and September 2001, Curveball offered 100 reports, among them the claims of mobile biological weapons labs that were central in the US evidence of an illicit weapons program, but subsequently turned out to be trucks equipped with machinery to make helium for weather balloons.

The commission concluded that Curveball’s information was worse than none at all. ‘Worse than having no human sources, ‘it said,’is being seduced by a human source who is telling lies.’