ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS

by Malik Isasis

















George W. Bush has ignored all but one of the Iraq Study Group’s Recommendations: Recommendation 63:

The United States should encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international
community and by international energy companies.
• The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a
commercial enterprise, in order to enhance efficiency, transparency, and accountability.
• To combat corruption, the U.S. government should urge the Iraqi government to post all oil
contracts, volumes, and prices on the Web so that Iraqis and outside observers can track
exports and export revenues.
• The United States should support the World Bank’s efforts to ensure that best practices are
used in contracting. This support involves providing Iraqi officials with contracting templates
and training them in contracting, auditing, and reviewing audits.
• The United States should provide technical assistance to the Ministry of Oil for enhancing
maintenance, improving the payments process, managing cash flows, contracting and
auditing, and updating professional training programs for management and technical
personnel.

The Independent reported on January 7, 2007”Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.”

Bush’s new budget proposal.

Just when I think George W. Bush cannot surprise me anymore with his incompetent shenanigans, he pulls something out of his retched ass, like his 2.9 trillion—that’s “T” as in Tony, trillion dollar budget proposal.
The budgetary priorities highlight Bush’s psychopathic tendencies, which over the past six years, have come in full possession of his mental and emotional faculties.

Here is a quick breakdown of the Bush Public Relations Administration’s priority: $245 billion dollars for the Iraq Occupation and the Afghanistan conflict; $500 billion for the Department of Defense; “The spending plan would cut funding for some government health care and education programs in the United States.”

”Bush’s budget would give people with incomes of more than $1 million an average tax cut of $162,000 a year by 2012, while those in the middle fifth of the income scale would get a mere $840 a year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Here’s another way of looking at the lopsided distribution of tax benefits: The top 1 percent would enjoy 31 percent of the tax cuts, the bottom 40 percent just 4 percent, the center points out.
That’s redistribution of income, from bottom to top.”

"Whatever it takes, whatever it costs...." – President Bush
The Military-Industrial Complex.

Right-wing ideologues Bush and the neocon cabal have syphoned hundreds of billions of dollars of tax payers’ money on no-bid military contracts. The Center for Public Integrity has followed the cronyism, and corruption of privatizing the military since the inception of the invasion and subsequent Occupation of Iraq.

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2003 — Of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, at least nine have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four members are registered lobbyists, one of whom represents two of the three largest defense contractors…

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2004 — Private defense contractors have been given the authority to help prepare the president's national defense budget—another job the Department of Defense has outsourced…

WASHINGTON, September 29, 2004 — The war in Iraq, with its urgent agenda of getting the job done and getting it done quickly, relied to an unprecedented degree not only on the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who are expected to fight America's wars, but on a second American army: tens of thousands of civilian contractors hired on for the duration. This new, and often dangerous, role for civilians on the battlefield has raised a host of new questions about the role of private contractors in the nation's defense…

WASHINGTON, September 29, 2004 — With scores of revolving door connections, more than $1 million in campaign contributions and clients that receive most of their contracts from the Pentagon without competition, only one defense lobbying firm can claim to give its clients "an inside track to business opportunities with the federal government."

In 2002 the top ten conglomerate military pimps were:

Lockheed Martin Corporation $17 billion
Boeing Company $16.6 billion
Northrop Grumman Corporation $8.7 billion
Raytheon Company $7 billion
General Dynamics Corporation $7 billion
United Technologies Corporation $3.6 billion
Science Applications International Corporation $2.1 billion
TRW Incorporated $2 billion
Health Net, Inc. $1.7 billion
L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc. $1.7 billion

Former President Dwight Eisenhower, foreseen the rise of arm dealers who would only profit, if there was an atmosphere of fear, insecurity and perpetual war and to that end, he said in 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Since the rise of the Military Industrial Complex at the end of World War II, the United States has been in a state of perpetual war--starting with Korea 1950-53, Indonesia, 1950-53, Guatemala 1950-53, Congo 1964, Cuba 1959-61 Vietnam 1961-73, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Lebanon 1982-83, Grenada 1983, El Salvador 1980, Libya 1986, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Iraq 1990-current. That’s 57 years and counting of non-stop warring.

It is a public relations coup for the Military Industrial Complex lobbyists to make war heroic, mythical and patriotic. The political culture has come to see peace, and diplomacy as a sign of weakness.

What incentives are there for American arms dealers to stop lobbying for bloody conflicts when the Department of Defense Budget could balloon to $645 billion dollars?








More background information:
Fortson, Danny, Murray-Watson, and Webb, Tim. “Future of Iraq: The spoils of war”The Independent. January 7, 2007
Rothschild, Matthew. “Bush’s Budget Priorities: Fund War, Provide Tax Breaks for the Rich, Deprive the Poor.” The Progressive. February 6, 2007
Voice of America.“US Senate Begins Scrutiny of Bush's Budget Proposal.” February 6, 2007
Center for Public Integrity: Fraud and Corruption investigative reports.
Ciarrocca, Michelle Hartung William. The Military-Industrial-Think Tank Complex_Corporate Think Tanks and the Doctrine of Aggressive Militarism. Multiational Monitor. Jan/Feb 2003 - VOLUME 24 - NUMBERS 1 & 2.
No Beliefs: A Poltical Satire Site

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