The War on Your Wallet

We've all heard about how privatization of government responsibilities will provide greater efficiency, and we've seen some of the results of this philosophy. You know, like the $100. loads of laundry done by Halliburton for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. What I find most fascinating about this philosophy is its core assumption. What I find most egregious about the implementation of this philosophy is the blatantly corrupt fashion in which it is administered.

The core assumption of privatizing government responsibilities is that government is too inefficient to handle just about anything you want to name. Education, health care, corrections, even war will be more efficient when managed by for-profit entities. What's fascinating about this assumption is how easy it is to dismantle even in the absence of any specialized information or elevated reasoning capacity. Let's take it step-by-step:

First, our government is saying, we can't (or won't) require sufficient accountability to ensure efficiency in the administration of those responsibilities that make government necessary.

Second, we are being told (and this one really freaks me out), that by creating, or hiring a third-party, for-profit entity between the consumer (taxpayer) and the task at hand (war, education, etc.) the profits required by said third-party won't increase the final cost of providing the service in question.

Third, we are somehow supposed to believe and rely on the suggestion that said third-party will place efficient, meaningful, and cost-effective service to the taxpayer as high on their priority list as they place the profitability of their enterprise. Bear in mind that businesses of all descriptions exist to fill a need and the ultimate responsibility (by law) of corporations is to protect the interests of their shareholders. Does it not follow that a corporation involved in multi-million dollar war contracts has a vested interest in perpetuating the need for their services? How does ending the war, or even fighting it efficiently fit into this for-profit scenario? It doesn't, as the proliferation of scandals surrounding the implementation of privatized war clearly illustrate.

Probably the most publicized example of an incestuous relationship between a highly placed Washington insider and a corporation taking war contracts is that of Dick Cheney and Halliburton, but this example is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only are war contracts routinely awarded to corporations, often without competitive bidding thanks to insider connections, but the same unethical methods of obtaining these contracts seems to repeat over and over in the absence of reasonable oversight. All that is required to get a grasp of the immensity of this plundering of public funds is to type "army contract scandals" or any variation of same into Google, and a lifetime of reading will appear on the search results. However, two specific cases, just months apart, shed light on one of the most egregious ways insiders line their pockets, and shoddy oversight allows the same scheme to work again and again. Both of the following include highly placed government employees moving from the public to the private sector in order to profit from their government experience, and, most importantly, from the connections established while supposedly serving the public.

US: Head of firm paid to track Iraq spending investigated, by Matt Kelley, USA Today
September 21st, 2007

"Robert Raggio quit his $97,000-per-year government job as a financial manager for the Iraq reconstruction effort in September 2005."
"Before he quit his government position, Raggio wrote the requirements for the federal contract at the same time he negotiated to obtain it for RMI, according to the documents."

QinetiQ Goes Kinetic: Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contracts From Spy Office He Set Up, by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch January 15th, 2008

"A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America -- and was once reprimanded by the U.S. Congress for spying on antiwar activists -- has just awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a company that employs one of Donald Rumsfeld's former aides. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract."
"And with Cambone in the driver's seat in northern Virginia, QinetiQ is set to build on its already thriving business to become one of the premier suppliers of technology to the 'intelligence enterprise' that Cambone built."

This next example illustrates the extent of the problem privatizing war presents, and the justification for issuing expensive contracts to oversee the contractors.

Iraq War Contract Scandal Widens
Associated Press | November 24, 2007

"The U.S. military and prosecutors have launched 83 criminal investigations into alleged contract fraud, including a total of $15 million in bribes."

So, first we pay for the cost of the war in Iraq and the wider war on terror, then we pay profits to the companies providing services and material, then we absorb the cost of the illegal activities these companies engage in, and finally, we pay for the cost of investigating and adjudicating their misdeeds. Someone, please explain to me how this equals "efficiency?"
Or, is this more about government abdicating responsibility, avoiding accountability, building fortunes for insiders, and turning our government into yet another middle-man between the public and the public services that create the need for government in the first place?

Washington needs a new mind-set, one that represents the trust placed in our elected officials. This new mind-set will only come around when we stop re-electing "more of the same." Until then, the war on your wallet will continue unabated.