The amount of taxpayers' money going into the pockets of private contractors has simply exploded under the Bush Corporatocracy. In 2000, taxpayers paid federal contractors $207 billion dollars. Thanks to Bush's "No-Contractor-Left-Behind" policy, $400 billion of Corporate Welfare was going into contractors' pockets annually as of 2005. The situation has gotten so bad that the Government Services Administration hired, ironically,
another private contractor to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors.
More ironic still is that the agency hired for this, CACI International, was recently under investigation itself for contracting misconduct. (CACI was a contractor for interrogators at Abu Ghraib.)
Free market competition for these contracts has greatly
decreased under the Corporatist, anti-free market Bush regime. In 2001, 79% of federal contracts were open to competitive bidding. By 2005, Bush had reduced that number to 48%.
The
New York Times writes:
The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work, but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam.... And how do they "sell to uncle Sam"? Again, from the New York Times:
The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns. “We’ve created huge behemoths that are doing 90 or 95 percent of their business with the government,” said Peter W. Singer, who wrote a book on military outsourcing. “They’re not really companies, they’re quasi agencies.” Indeed, the biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, which has spent $53 million on lobbying and $6 million on donations since 2000, gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.Unlike Federal agencies, contractors are
not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Thus contractors are under no legal obligation to open their books or reveal their activities to the public. Thus they can easily embezzle money and defraud taxpayers without ever having to show where the money went.
With the takeover of Congress by the Democrats, the leadership of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform changed from its previously poor leadership under Republican Tom Davis to Democrat Henry Waxman of California.
Waxman goes on to state: "
Billions of dollars are being squandered, and the taxpayer is being taken to the cleaners." As evidence of the change to come, last year Waxman received a grade of "F" from the Contract Services Association, a government contractor lobbying group. In contrast, outgoing Republican Tom Davis received an "A" grade from the contractor lobby.
Even U.S. Comptroller General David Walker expressed some misgivings about government contractors. He acknowledges that private companies can't be expected to look out for the taxpayers'. (Especially when it cuts into their profits.)
Again, from the NYT, Walker goes on to state: "
"There's something civil servants have that the private sector doesn't, and that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good -- the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all rather than the interest of a few. Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country....""
Measured in dollars, the amount of Corporate Welfare going to contractors has doubled under Bush. And this still doesn't include his latest giveaways, such as the Medicare Prescription-Pharmaceutical Company Welfare Bill, with an annual price tag of over $70 billion.
As usual, the Bush Hypocri-ship talks out of both sides of its mouth on "smaller government," "free markets" and "entrepreneurship." Under Bush "free markets" means freedom
from competition on government contracts, and freedom from paying the market rate for labor, both by importing cheap foreign labor and exporting jobs to cheap foreign labor markets.
To Bush, "freedom" means the ability to deprive anyone of their own freedom, if it interferes with Corporate America's ability to profiteer. Under Bush we've become an unabashed Welfare State.
A
Corporate Welfare State, that is.
unlawflcombatnt
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The economy needs balance between the "means of production" & "means of consumption."