"Those seeking to pinpoint the date that propelled the private military firm Blackwater into its prominent (and disastrous) position in the U.S. military apparatus might look toward Sept. 11, 2001. Al Clark, one of the companys co-founders, once remarked, Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today. And two weeks after 9/11, Erik Prince, the companys other co-founder and current CEO, told Bill OReilly that, after four years in the business, I was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security. The phone is ringing off the hook now.
However, in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein suggests that we should turn the calendar back one day and read the speech that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon staffers on Sept. 10, 2001. The day before 19 hijackers flew passenger flights into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld darkly warned of a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America.
With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Who was this dastardly adversary? [T]he Pentagon bureaucracy.
Declaring an all-out campaign to shift the Pentagons resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to the tooth, Rumsfeld told his staff to scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing. He mentioned healthcare, housing and custodial work, and said that, outside of warfighting, we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.
As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the implementation of that plan has been wildly successful, with at least 180,000 private contractors currently employed in Iraq, outnumbering U.S. troops by 20,000, even after the surge. (In the first Gulf war, the soldier-to-contractor ratio was 60:1.) But the results have been disastrous, from the deplorable conditions at the recently privatized Walter Reed military hospital, to the contaminated food and fecal-soiled bathing water that Halliburton provided to U.S. troops, to the gung-ho Blackwater contractors who prefer to shoot Iraqi hearts rather than win them.
This outsourcing of the militarys core services is in keeping with the Bush administrations philosophy of government. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that weve seen the same dynamic at work in the IRS, with the agency outsourcing debt collection of back taxes to private companies, which then receive a share of the return for their work.
But to lay the blame solely at the feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests. After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and Colombia.
In fact, in late September, as the most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the government wont solve, or that government alone cant solve.
That might be true, but only because weve undergone 30 years of a political ideology that has robbed government of needed revenues, derided regulation that might impinge on corporate profits and sneered at the idea that a public spirit could be preferable to private motives. Rather than rely on the charity of those who have so handsomely profited, its time we alter the perverse arrangement."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3354/
