My reluctance to publish this article here has nothing whatsoever to do with language used; it has to do with - is it GLOBALLY relevant. I've been sitting on posting this since it came out, but today I thought, why not??!!

There are obviouslly some "healing" issues raised in it .. issues about GREED and allowing human misery so here goes ..
V


Editor's Note from Truthout.org: In this article below, Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, uses some off-color expletives. While our editors usually try to avoid such language, we feel Taibbi's piece is overall well-researched and an important part of the public record. Accordingly, we have made the decision to republish it here.

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The Great Iraq Swindle
By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

Thursday 23 August 2007

How Bush allowed an army of for-profit contractors to invade the US Treasury.

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.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good - four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

*snip*

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 this in its entirety at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083007C.shtml