Crack addict — military contractor. Both steal to support their lifestyle. One goes to jail if they don’t die first in the gutter. The other is a patriotic hero. Go figure.
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill — after all, you’re a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that’s all it would be” is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It’s hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
A soldier is a citizen with rights, a man to be treated with honor and respect as a protector of us all; if one loses a limb, you’ve got to take care of him, in theory for his whole life. But a mercenary is just another piece of equipment you can bill to the taxpayer: If one is hurt on the job, you can just throw it away and buy another one. Today there are more civilians working for private contractors in Iraq than there are troops on the ground. The totality of the thievery in Iraq is such that even the honor of patriotic service has been stolen — we’ve replaced soldiers and heroes with disposable commodities, men we expected to give us a big bang for a buck and to never call us again.
Citizens FINE..
High wages FINE…
But WHOM makes the most, and doesnt NEED to be over there, and probably ISNT over there…The Owner, his cabinet, his upper echelon boss’s…ALL working HERE in the USA…
I still have another question.
What happened to ALL the money we have paid them in the 10 years with OUT war? For them to be PREPARED. And we ended up with Bullet proof vests, they WERENT Bullet proof.
Wish people would not emphasise using capitalised letters, but to the point, has anyone read the history of the English East India Company and wondered how, that it is being resurrected under a US flag on convenience in Iraq? Basically, it was a collection of pirates, slavers, plantation owners and English politicians who decided that India was theirs, and used mercenary soldiers and “divide and conquer” tactics to shamelessly loot India for over two hundred and fifty years. At one time they were able to administer the entire subcontinent from a four room office in London with just 20 staff. Keeping local potentates in line with loosely veiled threats of military intervention and by playing to the greed and immense corruptibility of lesser Moguls.
Sick, sick, sick…
The thought of that being true is disgusting…
meh
It’s all just a big money laundering scheme, wherein your tax dollars go to Iraq and Israel, then military goods/services are bought, with the profits then going back to the contractors who are friends of those in power. The contractors then make sure that their friends in power are re-elected. Welcome to the decline and fall of Western civilization, where America is sold off bit by bit to the forces of globalization.
“I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.”
Machiavelli “The Prince”
I think the biggest whopper lie Dick Cheney ever told was when he self-righteously claimed that he never got his wealth from the government.
Remember that smug little “gotcha” he gave to Lieberman?
LIEBERMAN: Dick Cheney must be one of the few people who think nothing has been accomplished in the last eight years. … I think if you asked most people in America today that famous question that Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off today than you were eight years ago?” Most people would say yes. I’m pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you’re better off than you were eight years ago, too.
CHENEY: I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)
Now that we know how Dick got rich of us taxpayers, I have to laugh even louder but at his bold face, shameless lies.