The Great Iraq Swindle - Rolling Stone Magazine

[SPN]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.


The Great Iraq Swindle
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury
--From Issue 1034

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering cluster****************************** of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in sh.it and pi.ss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

.....

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 sh.it.

You blink. Fu.ck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.

.....

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.

.....

There isn't a brazen, two-bit, purse-snatching money caper you can think of that didn't happen at least 10,000 times with your tax dollars in Iraq. At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he'd have agents go to the various stashes -- a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch -- withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."

Read it and weep - and remember how Colmog and other pollyPDs constantly refuse to discuss the way that PD policies caused the CER to have to artificially raise electricity prices in Ireland to "encourage competition" because, as we all know, "privatisation" will solve all the world's problems.

This article tells you all you need to know about the practical application of PD policies.

[strauss]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.

This is in the PD section because of foaming-at-the-mouth left-wing hatred from trolls like you. Get a ************************************g grip.

[FakeViking]

This is in the PD section because of foaming-at-the-mouth left-wing hatred from trolls like you. Get a ************************************g grip.

Strauss, you could actualy engage in the argument instead of just insulting the poster. Do you deny the get-rich-quick aspect of the PD's? The daft privatisations that have taken place? Selling our infrastructure to asset strippers like happened with Eircom, resulting in a complete lack of broadband availability? Hawking Aer Lingus for a song and now bellyaching when they make a commercial decision regarding Shannon?

Maybe you should be the one to get a grip!

[saratoga]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.

A complete economic illiterate.

Since privatisation involves *selling* government owned assets, it actually makes money for the taxpayer. Secondly, since many state-owned firms are heavily subsidised, inefficient, and way overstaffed, selling them saves the taxpayer money. Thatcher made some enemies in her time, but she also played a big role in pulling Britain out of the welfare state mire of the 1970s. Sadly for you, the Thatcherite 'wingnuts' you fantasise about run the world, and will be running it for a long long time. Get used to it.

[Binx]

Maybe we could co-locate this thread in PDs and Foreign Affairs given the breadth of the discussion.

[Akrasia]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.

A complete economic illiterate.

Since privatisation involves *selling* government owned assets, it actually makes money for the taxpayer. Secondly, since many state-owned firms are heavily subsidised, inefficient, and way overstaffed, selling them saves the taxpayer money. Thatcher made some enemies in her time, but she also played a big role in pulling Britain out of the welfare state mire of the 1970s. Sadly for you, the Thatcherite 'wingnuts' you fantasise about run the world, and will be running it for a long long time. Get used to it.

I don't think I have seen a thread in which you contributed in where you didn't call someone 'economically illiterate'

You might well know the formulae and the definitions of economic theory, but you are totally blind to the real effects of privatisation.

First of all you really don't seem to understand one simple concept. Sometimes states run corporations at a loss intentionally and this is not always a bad thing. You seem to think that economic efficiency is the single most important thing out there and if we can get that right, everything else will all fall into place. The problem is that economics consistently ignore the social effects of economic activity. By dismantling the 'welfare state' (that was painstakingly built up over centuries of workers struggle) all you are doing is leaping into the global race to the bottom and creating the conditions for the tiny elite minority to steal a bigger and bigger proportion of the wealth for themselves, all financed by unsustainable personal debt mountains in the worlds most extreme pyramid scheme which is about to all come crashing down.

[Pax]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.

This is in the PD section because of foaming-at-the-mouth left-wing hatred from trolls like you. Get a ************************************g grip.

Ah come off it straus. P.ie is packed to the gills with what could be called PD trolls or right-wing libertarians or whatever term you want to use. I mean we've even had a US Ron Paul influx recently! Most either fail to engage in debate at all (cough) or repeat the same points ad nauseum on other threads despite plain-as-day evidence to the contrary.

Play the ball. Address those points honestly, the ESB was raised what about that? Or the neoliberal shock therapy economic plans currently unfolding/exploding in Iraq which were laid out prior to 911 in document from the Pentagon and State Department? Or public health care provision? Or public private partnerships? etc

But of course when someone challenges this it's "foaming-at-the-mouth left-wing hatred"....I dunno

[saratoga]

This is in the PD section because this is a classic example of what happens when the WingNuts get into power, implement their Thatcherite ideology, and "privatise" every possible thing that can be made to provide profit opportunities using taxpayers' money.

A complete economic illiterate.

Since privatisation involves *selling* government owned assets, it actually makes money for the taxpayer. Secondly, since many state-owned firms are heavily subsidised, inefficient, and way overstaffed, selling them saves the taxpayer money. Thatcher made some enemies in her time, but she also played a big role in pulling Britain out of the welfare state mire of the 1970s. Sadly for you, the Thatcherite 'wingnuts' you fantasise about run the world, and will be running it for a long long time. Get used to it.

I don't think I have seen a thread in which you contributed in where you didn't call someone 'economically illiterate'

You might well know the formulae and the definitions of economic theory, but you are totally blind to the real effects of privatisation.

First of all you really don't seem to understand one simple concept. Sometimes states run corporations at a loss intentionally and this is not always a bad thing. You seem to think that economic efficiency is the single most important thing out there and if we can get that right, everything else will all fall into place. The problem is that economics consistently ignore the social effects of economic activity. By dismantling the 'welfare state' (that was painstakingly built up over centuries of workers struggle) all you are doing is leaping into the global race to the bottom and creating the conditions for the tiny elite minority to steal a bigger and bigger proportion of the wealth for themselves, all financed by unsustainable personal debt mountains in the worlds most extreme pyramid scheme which is about to all come crashing down.

For the record, this is the first time I've used the term 'economic illiterate' on this site. And boy is it appropriate.

Secondly, I fully understand that sometimes states run corporations at a loss intentionally and that this isn't always a bad thing. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the point at hand. I was refuting an assertion that privatisation provides private enterprise with the opportunity to make a profit using taxpayers money. Even when privatisation isn't advisable, this still isn't true.

Third, I never said that I place economic efficiency above all else, or that everything else will fall into place if we achieve it. I simply am pointing out that when private profit-sector enterprise provides a better, cheaper service or product than a government-owned corporation does, it should be privatised. Otherwise, it's simply a waste of taxpayers money. The Southern Hotel Group is one such example.

I'm in favour of having a welfare state, if you had bothered to ask. In fact, if you knew anything about it, you'd know it wasn't built up over 'centuries' but originated only in the last century and a half.

To correct your ignorance, economics doesn't 'consistently ignore' the social effects of economic activity. Economics is about how the scarce resources of mankind can be used to satisfy the needs and wants of mankind. You need to read an economics book, cos wherever you have gotten your views on the subject, you've been misinformed.

[scotusone]

what is happening in iraq is old fashioned pillage . a small group of connected cronies aided by corrupt government and culpable negligence are screwing both the people of iraq and the american tax payer .with a breathtaking arrogant disregard for the most basic tenets of control of public spending or contract awards they are enriching themselves and will continue to do so until this administration ceases to hold office

[SPN]

I see one of the Mods can't read English!

This thread is about highlighting an extreme example of the Rape & Pillage policies championed by the PDs by showing how they are intended to operate in practice.

Tom Parlon's career path from an advocate of social welfare for wealthy farmers, to PD Minister, to advocate for the Construction Billionaires Club shows a clear correlation to the career paths of some of those in the Rolling Stone story.

It is a PD thread, not a Foreign Affairs thread!

Muppet!