Evil Residing in the Bushes

“Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made to torch the truck."
“In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat fuel."

Matt Taibbi’s column,The Great Iraq Swindle, in the August Rolling Stone magazine makes it clear how evil the Bush Administration really is. Even the more cynical can’t comprehend the deliberate use of American troops to further the greediness of Bush and his friends.
It’s become increasingly clear Bush has no empathy or compassion for the young men and women he has carelessly sent off to war. It’s clear the use of “patriotism” is really only a ruse to dupe young troops to believe their cause is just and for the ideal of democracy. The truth is wars started by George Bush and his cronies are about greed and capitalism at its very worst
Of course war profiteering is nothing new because ultimately war is not about national security or honor. Modern war has always been about economics. Smedley Butler categorized the profits of major corporations before and after WWI in his blistering treatise “War is a Racket”. Friends of the President such as Du Pont (the earlier form of KBR and Halliburton) had huge profits once war was started.
Dwight Eisenhower warned the “military-industrial complex” would exert a dangerous influence on the politics of this nation. While he seemed genuinely concerned of this danger, he still yielded to the British greed in deposing the elected Iranian government with the Shah of Iran when the legal government demanded equal compensation for the oil being stolen by British oil companies. The recent documentary “Why We Fight” does a great job in describing the takeover of the American government by special interests such as Halliburton and KBR.
What we don’t see on mainstream television or in the mainstream media is the total disregard our chicken-hawk President and cabinet have for the troops and the honest over-seers of government contracts and policy. Bush can tell the residents of New Orleans, "We're still paying attention. We understand.” two years after Katrina but his administration’s inaction and neglect along with the profiteering of companies tells the displaced and decimated the real truth about Mr. Bush.
The same companies plundering the treasury in Iraq have descended on the Gulf region to pick at the bodies and bones of the citizens devastated by Katrina. They unabashedly do nothing but reap profits while more than half the city of New Orleans lies in ruin and a large majority of the displaced have yet to return to their city. It’s no mistake or accident most of the displaced who haven’t returned are poor and people of color.
The very idea Bush and his cronies care about troops is refuted time and again by the actions of those given contracts in Iraq and places such as New Orleans. Another example of the patriotic caring of KBR is detailed by Taibbi in his article when he reports their efforts to provide a recreation center for troops in the Fallujah area.
“…for all the money KBR charged taxpayers for the rec center, it didn't provide much in the way of services to the soldiers engaged in the heaviest fighting of the war. When Warren ordered a karaoke machine, the company gave her a cardboard box stuffed with jumbled-up electronic components. "We had to borrow laptops from the troops to set up a music night," says Warren, who had a son serving in Fallujah at the time. "These boys needed R&R more than anything, but the company wouldn't spend a dime."
It’s become clear the only patriotism to be found in our Presidency is rewarding the incompetent and corrupt friends given sweetheart deals in a time young men and women were being asked to sacrifice their lives for reasons of noble purpose. The only nobility to be found has been young troops coming back to expose the lies and betrayal of the Bush empire.
Taibbi’s article (The Great Iraq Swindle) expose the Bushes for their betrayal and the traitors they are. How else can we explain a government that so callously allows war to happen as a means to profit? How can we avoid the word traitor when we understand the manipulations of a President and his cabinet to start a war, continue a war and profit so hugely from the war? This is pure evil by men and women claiming to be moral and religious but acting with such total disregard for life.
Taibbi’s words should cause outrage but the only media printing his story is a magazine focused on music of our time. Only the rock and roll crowd is brave enough to tell the truth.
“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.”

“According to the most reliable ¬estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. 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.”
Read the Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi in Edition 1034 (Aug 22, 07).