A Corporate Imperative

Democrats are responding to the wishes of an overwhelming majority of Americans, who are demanding our troops be brought home. Bush has retaliated for not getting another 196 billion in funding for the Iraq occupation, by threatening to furlough 100,000 Army and Marine Corps civilian employees. The Pentagon has plenty of money for our troops, but most of the appropriations are going to private mercenary militias like Blackwater. There are more mercenaries in Iraq, than regular members of our armed forces.

Every time Democrats try to impose accountability on this embezzlement of our treasury, Bush claims it threatens our troops and their families. By threatening to furlough 100,000 civilian employees Bush is holding our entire military civil service for ransom.

Hundreds of billions of appropriations are not going to, and have never gone to, support our troops. Instead billions have gone directly into the pockets of war profiteers. The ranks of our troops are being decimated, by war profiteers offering them deals to leave the service. Our military can’t compete, even though taxpayer money is used to do it. Billions of dollars are spent training our armed forces, so that they can leave to work for profiteers, who sell their services back to us at a markup, of as much as 10 percent. The moral of our troops is undermined, because they are taking the same risk.

This is another form of foreign outsourcing, because many thousands of these mercenaries have been recruited from countries like South Africa and Chile. The mercenaries undermine the work of our own military by opening fire on innocent civilians and then pointing out that they can’t be prosecuted for their war crimes.

The privatization of the military is absolutely the worst possible thing for democracy and peace, because it makes endless war a corporate imperative.