The View from the Meadow
Observations of the Passing Scene
Political and Social Commentary by Dave Satre
Helping the Greedy …. Instead of the Needy
Iraq is turning out to be what I suspected from the beginning: one of the largest government troughs in history.
Who knows how much it has cost us so far? I remember the Congress passing a bill for $87 billion on a voice vote (no records kept). Now, they're saying they're going to need more than that for this year. And the most conservative estimates suggest it will be at least 10 years before we extricate ourselves from this mess.
Billions of dollars are changing hands under the table. Halliburton is the worst. The company didn't have the forethought (on the other hand, maybe they did) to employ translators who could speak the language in Iraq. Now, contract translators are gouging them for enormous fees, frequently as much as 10 to 50 percent of a particular contract, to negotiate with the locals. Of course, this sort of open-ended dealing is what these people want (Haliburton, et. al). It makes it easy to pocket enormous sums of money -- no records are kept.
A friend of mine, who owned an office building in Saratoga, CA, once told me how a deal went down during the Iran Contra-versy. I forget the name of the guy who was the chief negotiator for the illegal operation housed in the White House basement, but he rented an office from my friend.
While they were having lunch one day, the guy received a phone call on his cell phone. During lunch, he negotiated a deal to purchase a huge amount of oil from Iran, made a deal to sell the oil, purchased 12 oil tankers to deliver the oil (on the phone, no contracts, no signatures, no trail ....) and arranged to sell the tankers upon delivery.
The profits from the oil were supposedly used to purchase arms for the Contras, although the group of guerillas somehow never did receive the sort of equipment that money could buy. The money in these deals usually just disappears. There was no paper trail, no way to trace the exchange of money -- all of these arrangements were done by vocal agreement. The guy pocketed about 25 percent of the money made on the sale of the dozen tankers. Not bad for a one-hour lunch.
That's why the greedy and corrupt push for government funding. It’s the largest source of money in the world and the military, under the guise of secrecy, has made it extremely easy to tap into the flow. That's why they put a GW Bush in the White House. That’s why we’re in Iraq.
If we can squander that much money supporting the greedy, we can certainly afford to spend it on the needy. We could easily fund better schools, national healthcare, repair our infrastructure, house the homeless, etc. It would at least be a step in the right direction. Why continue to squander our tax money on everybody but ourselves?
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