Guest blogged by Chris Floyd
INTRODUCTION {by Winter Patriot}: It is indeed an great honor to introduce one of my favorite journalists. Regular readers of the Brad Blog will remember Chris Floyd for “The Big Fix”, his stunning piece on the 2004 ‘election’ which was published by The Moscow Times, as reported here.
But that was then; this is now. The following contribution from Chris Floyd is a BRAD BLOGATHON EXCLUSIVE. In his words, it’s:
(A guest post in honor and support of BradBlog from American journalist Chris Floyd, columnist for The Moscow Times and perpetrator of the blog “Empire Burlesque”)
The Dream Of Unlimited Swag: The Klepto-Plutocracy at War
Between October 2003 and July 2004, almost $9 billion went missing from the accounts of the Iraqi “interim government.” Despite investigations by Congress, the Pentagon, the General Accountability Office, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, no one knows exactly where the money went.
But from the evidence gathered by the official bodies named above, it’s evident that part of the money went to faction leaders in the U.S.-backed interim government: money they used to enrich themselves, pay off cronies, bribe American officials — and fund the deadly sectarian militias that are even now threatening to drive the country into civil war. It’s equally evident that some of the money went straight into the coffers of Bush-favored American contractors and to fund innumerable off-the-books military and intelligence operations.
It’s also likely that at least some of this vast tub of illicit swag made its way into the back-alleys of Bush’s re-election campaign, funding various political “black ops” on the home front: bankrolling the “independent” attack dogs that battened on John Kerry, funding the multitudinous voting scams run by Bush operatives, and providing a general slush fund to draw upon as needed.
This kind of money laundering is standard practice in American politics, of course, and Republicans in particular are past masters of this dark art. I have some small personal experience with such operations. In 1992, I was a founding member of a start-up company trying to put together educational software for the then-emerging market. (In this case, multi-media critical editions of Shakespeare plays.) Looking for money to stay afloat while the programmers hammered out what was then a unique cross-platform system, we met with a series of venture capitalists — a most enlightening experience for anyone interested in how the world really works, and what really matters to those who run the world.
In one meeting, one go-getting VC (clad in a fine gray suit, not black pajamas) waxed lyrical about his many contacts and connections in the national power structure — controlled then, as now, by the Bush clan. Of particular interest was one tidbit he tossed out — more as an aside, a simple fact, nothing special. He told how he’d been involved with a Republican operation to funnel secret money to the Bush campaign through various fronts in Luxembourg. As I recall, some of it was foreign money, some of it was American cash being laundered to skirt legal restrictions on campaign financing. Millions were pouring in through this secret conduit, he said — then moved on to other matters he found more interesting than this common, run-of-the-mill practice.
Our system is run by Big Money for Big Money — in order to make more money. That’s it. That’s all of it. That’s the reality behind the fierce sideshows of “culture war” and ideological combat that consume so much of our attention. Now, it’s true that these latter concerns are important, because the repression they can spawn has a very real impact on the lives of millions of people. And it’s also true that we may be reaching a point in America where the manipulators of these sideshows — the Big Money elite, epitomized by the Bush clan — could lose control of their creations, with extremely dire consequences.
But despite all its ideological/religious trappings — its evangelical foot soldiers, its neo-con outriders, etc. — what ultimately drives the Bush Regime, and its war machine, is the lust for unlimited swag. The sack of Iraq has been the greatest act of looting and rapine in history, in terms of the sheer scale of the money involved. The $9 billion that went walking in those crucial months before the election is just a drop in the surging flood of blood money pouring out of Iraq into the pockets of the Bush gang and its allies and acolytes.
An excellent overview of the klepto-plutocracy’s operation in Iraq can be found in the current edition of the London Review of Books. In Where Has All The Money Gone? Ed Harriman commits the increasingly rare act of journalism – actually examining the reports of the auditors and talking to actual people involved on the ground in Iraq. It’s highly detailed, dispassionate but devastating in the cold, hard truth it lays out. You need to read all of it, but here are a few choice excerpts (plucked randomly, not sequentially):
“An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package.”
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“The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.”
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The GAO report of July 2004 found that in the first nine months of the occupation, KBR [Halliburton] was allowed a free hand in Iraq: a free hand, for example, to bill the Pentagon without worrying about spending limits or management oversight or paperwork. Millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment disappeared. KBR charged $73 million for motor caravans to house the 101st Airborne Division, twice as much as the army said it would cost to build barracks itself; KBR charged $88 million for three million meals for US troops that were never served… One of KBR’s contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq’s central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn’t carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn’t even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside. For fear of ambush, KBR drivers were told not to slow down. ‘The truck in front of the one I was riding ran a car with an Iraqi family of four off the road,’ a KBR employee told Waxman’s committee. ‘My driver said that was normal.'”
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“‘In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds . . . American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended’ was the principal finding of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The answer was a big rethink – a strategic spending review. The $18.4 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund that Congress had voted to rebuild Iraq, and which Bremer had left largely untouched and possibly never intended to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad.”
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“In January this year, the SIGIR issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8 billion – the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and few of the ministries had budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American ‘advisers’ looked on. ‘CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,’ the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8206 guards, but only 602 could be accounted for. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8 billion went to pay for private militias and into private pockets.”
Read it and weep – but know that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the same system of klepto-plutocracy is also operating in the Homeland, albeit in a slightly less naked fashion.
{Winter Patriot again} Savor the bitter irony: Blogathon fundraising totals are growing very slowly, still miles away from our very modest targets; and meanwhile we’re “wrapping up” the blogathon with a piece about corruption worth billions. It’s a good thing we like irony around here.
We are, of course, very grateful to Chris Floyd for his contribution to our event; unfortunately we’ve held the blogathon at a time when he was too busy to take part in any live blogging. Chris may find time for a look at this thread, though, and he is known to enjoy a lively discussion; so please leave comments and questions if the urge strikes you, and we’ll see what happens…
For some people America has always been about money and nothing else.
Strangely, many Americans don’t realize the extremes to which those people will go to get more money. It’s like living in the sea and not realizing there are sharks or whales around.
What’s a little political graft between friends: a few billion here and there.
On September 10, 2001, Don Rumsfeld told reporters that 2.3 trillion in military transactions could not be accounted for.
This story, along with the fact that Gore got more votes in Florida was lost in the shuffle in the events of the following day.
read this!
Right on, Chris.
I think it was 1966, there was much talk from government about how we were definitely not going to escalate the war in Vietnam. I was riding a cab in Missouri somewhere. I asked the cabbie what folks did for a living around there. He said, not much lately, but things were looking up now, since a local manufacturing plant just got a multi-billion dollar government contract for small arms! So much for truth in government (remember Rusk?)
Later, Ramparts had an article about LBJ. They described how he may have remained a teacher, but his wife had connections, who saw his potential as a politician. It chronicled the whole story of his rise to the presidency, with campaigns heavily funded by these connections: Brown and Root construction company in Houston. Guess who escalated the war? LBJ. Guess who made billions building the airbases and ports in Nam? Brown and Root. What became of them? They are the BR in KBR [Halliburton] mentioned in the blog above.
Back then, they stole our taxes using the Democrats, now they do it using the Republicans. They really don’t care where the swag comes from. Such true words Chris wrote above: "Our system is run by Big Money for Big Money — in order to make more money. That’s it. That’s all of it. That’s the reality behind the fierce sideshows of "culture war" and ideological combat that consume so much of our attention." Ain’t nothing so profitable as war – for those who profit from it. The International War Business is the ultimate war crime. How to stop that? Maybe a first step would be to ignore the sideshows and follow the money to the perpetrators of war.
Slightly off topic, but since this is an open blog I can report that The New York Times, which has steadfastly avoided mentioning two stolen elections and has protected George W. Bush at every turn, has finally become a responsible paper again…for one day, at least.
Today’s front-page, right-column story is about Karl Rove’s "difficulties" regarding Valerie Plame. The press conference at which reporters hung Scottie-boy McClellan on the petard of his own earlier statements was fully described. The article was fair and balanced…the only bad news being that the 1982 law making it a crime to out a C.I.A. operative was narrowly drawn, and several lawyers were quoting as saying Rove won’t be indicted.
But at a minimum, what he did should result in his firing, by Bush’s own standard. Scottie-boy’s statement was unambiguous, that "anyone who participated would be fired." And the White House is now left with parsing words…"Rove didn’t say Valerie Plame, he said ‘Wilson’s wife,’ " as if there’s any difference. How many women was Wilson married to at the time?
If Rove is fired (don’t hold your breath, folks) then he could blow the cover off everything…two stolen elections, the 9/11 coverup, WMD, when the invasion of Iraq was decided on, etc. etc. etc.
Having covered this on page one, the Times is now committed to following the story to the end.
Randi Rhodes said it best,"Pass a law that nobody makes money off of war." About a year and a half ago, I saw a hearing late at night chaired by Chris Shay, subject pentagon graft. The pentagon was selling supplies, including new flak jackets for pennies on the dollar on e bay. New equipment to set up a bio terroism lab to anybody who was willing to make up a fake name , fake company and fake credit card. A sting was done by the govt. office that checks out spending. forgot the name. I’ve never forgotten that show. Came on about 3 am.
Most excellent – tnx
Chris Floyd! One of my heroes (insofar as I HAVE heroes)!! Great, honest stuff…
We spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined–why? Are we preparing for war with mars?
The "Vision for 2020" document starts with this mission statement: "US Space Command—dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment"–not the homeland, but American investments abroad. It projects that "The globalization of the world economy…will continue with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’" a situation which requires "Full Spectrum Dominance" meaning military control on land, on the sea, and in the air, and in space. This is global domination, folks. The PNAC regime is a bunch of cackling lunatics.
read this
Chris, I’d like readers also to know about your important essay on the charges made by Dr. Burton Lee III, GHWB’s former private physician, about torture as policy.
Thanks to all for these insightful comments. River is right on the "money": the key to figuring out what’s being done in our name around the world — and what’s to come — is indeed to follow the money. To paraphrase Shakespeare, money, like murder, has no tongue, but it will speak with most miraculous organ.
I’m very limited in this regard myself, with no real background or expertise in finance, accounting, budgets, etc, (although I did once work in the belly of the military-industrial beast, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — where they built the guts of the first A-bomb — so I have some small experience with the Byzantine ways of government budgeting and that golden revolving door between public service and private profit).
But that’s why people like, say, Greg Palast are so invaluable; he IS a financial expert, he does know how to decipher the Matrix-like codes and numbers under which the powers-that-be bury their smoking guns. It’s not as glamorous as waxing rhetorical on high matters of state, on the "great questions" of history and society — which I do most of the time — but it is, in the end, far more effective, I think. "Where thy treasure is, there shall thy heart be also." (Forgive the mangling of the Scriptural reference, but it’s late here and I don’t want to dig out my Bible for the direct quote.)
The bottom line of budgets always gives the lie to the prevailing pieties of the day. I’ve always noticed this, from my first days as a reporter on small-town papers, in the dawn of the Reagan era. Every single politician — hell, every single citizen — would fervently declare that "nothing is more important than the children," "we must do everything for our community’s children" — then proceed to vote down tax increases for education, proceed to nitpick school budgets to death, leaving the "precious children" in crumbling, overcrowded ratholes.
And now the basic infrastructure of our national society is slowly turning into a crumbling, overcrowded rathole — even while our leaders reach new heights of sugary rhetoric about love for the "Homeland." This while endless tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks give rein to a level of unbridled plutocracy not seen since the Gilded Age.
And of course, while they sing hymns of peace and democracy, they spend — and spend — and spend — for war, for occupation, for the empire of 700+ bases that now girdle the earth. As PetGoat points out, the "Vision for 2020" document spells out in bald, bold detail where their heart is, and thus where OUR treasure is going to be: projecting "Full Spectrum Dominance" to safeguard "US investments."
What we are seeing is the absolute ascendancy of the investor class, represented most fully by the Bush Family and its cohorts. As Kevin Phillips (among many others) has pointed out, when empires and leading nations become dominated by elite investors, that is the moment they begin an inevitable decline.
For the ethos of Investment seeks only to maximize profit – and it follows that profit whereever it can find it, whereever it provides the greatest return for the least amount of risk and effort. If easy profit can be found outside the local community, the state, the nation, the Investors will cease plowing back profits and revenue into their home territory and cash in elsewhere. Why pay good wages and pensions, why subject yourself to regulations for the common good, when you can put your money in cheap labor and unregulated operations overseas?
And so the Investment elite begin to gut domestic assets – factories, businesses, shops, farms, communities – in favor of higher returns and less hassle elsewhere. It happened to the Dutch – once the world’s greatest commercial empire; it happened to the British; and it’s happening to America now, at a dizzying rate.
This is what "globalization" is all about: absolute freedom for the investment elite, fetters and decay for everyone else. Because of the ascendancy of the investment elite, America is rapidly declining as an economic power. And because the elite’s ethos of "Profit Uber Alles," they cannot make the necessary structural changes to revive the American economy; they’re just not going to do the hard work required, they’re not about to put their wads of cash back into the tire plant in Kalamazoo when they can gorge on even higher profits from child labor in Peshwar or sweatshops in Shanghai.
Instead, they are relying on raw military power – violence and the threat of violence ("full spectrum dominance") – to maintain American economic dominance – and the political dominance that follows. That’s why there must be endless war and rumors of war, that’s why the empire of bases must keep expanding into ever-new "arcs of instability," that’s why the "war on terror" must never end. It’s the only way the Investment elite can preserve their ethos of easy money and America’s global dominance at the same time.
In fact, the "war on terror" is the perfect instrument for "full spectrum dominance," because its policies of aggression, violence, torture and bloodshed are guaranteed to produce more terrorists – and thus more "justification" for more war, more military spending, more bases, more expansion – and more powers for the state and its rulers. It’s a perpetual-motion machine, a win-win situation for the elite.
So keep following the money. Keep pointing out this bloody trail whenever and however you can. Be that small grit of dissident sand in the great perpetual-motion machine. Even a small handful could disrupt the gears. I don’t know if we could ever bring the machine to a complete halt – to do that, we’d have to eliminate human greed, which will always find some modus operandi in any system – but by God, surely we can slow it down, gum it up, and mitigate some of its worst effects. At the very least, we can make clear that the machine doesn’t operate in our name.
And Bradblog is one of the best places to pick up grains of dissident truth and spread them through the land. Because that’s the only way truth ever finds its way out of the slag-heap of lies and myths: one grain at a time.
River #5
You hit a home run on that post!
The ‘Big Money" guys do not want munitions to languish in storage. Guns must be shot, bombs must be dropped so more must be ordered. The tonnage of bombs over Iraq was immense. As we saw bush responded with a relish and with a 20% bonus order!
LBJ saw his presidency fall apart in disgrace, thanks to the antiwar movement of those days. The bushmob presidency has long been in disgrace held together by the Mess media stuck onto the GOPhers with some kind of crazy glue, a little heat and it too will fall apart.
Wow! What a monster thread!! Thanks to all who have contributed to it … so far!
Thanks for reading my post. It would be interesting to see the numbers: just how much wealth is being made in wars now. Not just by US, but also GB, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, even peaceful Sweden. Never saw a machine gun manufactured in Somalia or Liberia, nor a land mine built in Guatemala or El Salvador.
Picture a big, bold graph: UN countries vs. their take from war machines. That would make more sense out of politics than ideologies do. The rich countries fight about Iraq invasion, but later they kiss and make up — some pie is better than none.
I like what you said, Chris: "At the very least, we can make clear that the machine doesn’t operate in our name." Honestly, I can’t make it clear to myself yet. It pains me daily that my taxes feed the beast. I have spent countless days pushing on pedals that make the wheels go round.
King George, and more importantly, his merchants, faced patriots who said "no taxation without representation" and "don’t tread on me". As one trodden-upon citizen, taxed for the rich, I do not dare stand before the bulldozer and the tank.
But we are many – there is our strength, and the hope for a peaceful world for our children.
The neoconvicts do look fragile now as never before – I agree with Cole, they will soon come unglued. But, will KBR(Halliburton) disappear, or just morph back into a feeder on Democratic troughs? If the Resident moves out of the White House, do the people get their government back? Will the representatives then represent we the people – or will they still be bent by the lobbies of the rich and powerful?
Speaking of taxes..you don’t have to pay the part that finances the war machine..about half
Yes that is correct. I liked your comment. I too belong to the same profile and this was of great help.
Patrick Loweri
http://www.checksunlimitedautomatic.com
You are right on the money with this one. Well said!
Mary Anne Martin
http://www.checksunlimitedautomatic.com