[gr8fuldaniel]

Quote by: brien And the Democrats promised to eliminate corruption in Congress

Hey, its happening. Right?



I think the biggest chunks should be removed first. Fire Blackwater USA at every f*cking level.

Jeremy Scahill Goes Inside Blackwater, the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army <snip> BuzzFlash: I think it's important to point out that this is not something that most Americans put at the top of their dance card as a concern. They may say, well, it's over in Iraq and that's a mess anyway. But, sure enough, after Hurricane Katrina, we saw Blackwater in New Orleans. Jeremy Scahill: When Hurricane Katrina hit, Blackwater started a domestic operations division of its company, and it began seeking greater contracting opportunities domestically inside of the United States. At one point, the federal government was paying Blackwater about $240,000 a day for Hurricane Katrina. The company was billing the government $950 per day, per Blackwater man deployed in the hurricane zone. They had about 600 guys stretched from Texas all the way through the Gulf region. Now Blackwater's been in negotiations with several state governments in the United States. Blackwater met recently with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about doing disaster response in California. They're opening up a new private military base in San Diego. Another one is in Mount Carroll, Illinois. They have applied for operating licenses in every coastal U.S. state. This is the expansion of a privatized army. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, speaks boldly about Blackwater being the FedEx of the national security apparatus. They're manufacturing surveillance blimps and trying to market them to the Department of Homeland Security to use to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Blackwater and its executives continue to pour money into these Christian conservative causes, conservative politicians' campaign coffers. This is really the embodiment of everything that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, when he talked about the dangers of unchecked power of the private sector, and the rise of the military-industrial complex. BuzzFlash: Let's get back to the issue that privatization comes at a high cost to the taxpayer. It's not as though someone else is paying for Blackwater. We are. This Administration has been giving inflated contractual reimbursement to companies like Blackwater at the expense of our military. As we learn in Robert Greenwald's "Iraq for Sale," a lot of GIs say they resent Blackwater and don't see why these guys are getting paid $1,000 a day. Jeremy Scahill: One of the things that has happened as a result of these mercenary forces is that there's been a real drain to the special operations community. Special operations commanders have spoken quite openly about this, saying that they're in a real crisis right now for numbers. U.S. taxpayers are spending tens of millions of dollars, in some cases, to train U.S. Navy SEALs, or Delta Force, or Army Rangers, or Green Berets. The taxpayers shoulder the financial burden of training these elite forces, and then Blackwater and other companies come around and hire them away. Then they repackage them to the federal government and say it's much cheaper to pay our guys because you don't have any of the overhead of deploying them. We'll absorb the cost of that. But they never take into account that they're essentially taking money out of the public sphere that was spent on these soldiers in the active duty military. They're taking all of that training that U.S. taxpayers have paid for, taking it away from the military, and repackaging it as a privatized entity. That is essentially a bilking of the U.S. taxpayer. The whole model of these privatized armies really is a rip-off of the American taxpayer. It's ridiculous when the industry lobbyists say they're a cheaper alternative to the bloated military. They're taking advantage of what they called the bloated military.

A private military base in California? WTF?

Thats the worst kind of profiteering.