CS Disclaimer: This article is a mixture of facts and opinions. Anything that is represented as a fact is a fact to the best of my knowledge. Anything that is represented as opinion is my opinion (which I am entitled to). I assert that nothing in this article has been fabricated by me, I have no investments, long or short, in any of the companies reported on and no motivation for writing this article other than wanting to see corporations begin to put the best interests of people before profits.

The Cost of War

    How many billions of dollars will we spend on killing people before we finally assert that we have had enough? The new war in Iraq will cost us anywhere from 100 billion to 2 trillion dollars and what are we supposed to be getting out of it? Those of us in the United States have all been the targets of a multi-year propaganda campaign that has preyed on our fears and assured us that a war on Iraq will make our children safe. Now that Baghdad is burning and Iraqi citizens are dying I do not feel any safer. In fact, I feel like someone has just forcefully taken my fist and used it to punch the little guy in the face, and now I don't know if the little guy has run off to get his big brother or to try to buy a gun or what's going to happen next.

    One has to sit back and ask themselves why. Actually one doesn't have to, and way to many people are opting out of asking themselves why. But I ask myself why on a daily basis and one of the answers I keep coming back to is Defense Contractors. Here it is in black n white what we paid the top 10 defense contractors last year:

Rank 2002 2001 Company Name Awards 2002 2001 1 1 LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION $17,000,000,000 $14,700,000,000 2 2 BOEING COMPANY, THE $16,600,000,000 $13,300,000,000 3 5 NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION $8,700,000,000 $5,200,000,000 4 4 RAYTHEON COMPANY $7,000,000,000 $5,600,000,000 5 6 GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION $7,000,000,000 $4,900,000,000 6 7 UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION $3,600,000,000 $3,800,000,000 7 9 SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORP. $2,100,000,000 $1,700,000,000 8 8 TRW INCORPORATED $2,000,000,000 $1,900,000,000 9 12 HEALTH NET, INC. $1,700,000,000 $900,000,000 10 26 L-3 COMMUNICATIONS HOLDINGS, INC $1,700,000,000 $500,000,000

and there are hundreds more, that is just the top ten.

    Politicians pay a lot of lip service to how important education is to them and they make campaign promises about leaving no child behind, but when it comes time to draft and approve a budget all of these contractors get more and more money while our public education system slides into shambles. Just imagine if we took the median defense contractor from that top ten list and put that 7 billion dollars into researching and developing better ways to educate our children instead of ways to blow up cities.

    Having just completed a war in Afghanistan that we clearly lack the money to pay for we are now starting a second war and threatening to start additional wars based on some of the most mind boggling illogic in human history. We are going to ignore the will of the United Nations and wage a war against Iraq because Saddam Hussein has been ignoring the will of the United Nations. And we are going to rain down cruise missiles and depleted uranium weapons throughout Iraq because we must not allow Saddam Hussein to threaten the Iraqi people.

    No, none of that makes any sense. When people say this is a war for oil, that makes sense. But it is much more than that. It is a war for Defense Contractors BEFORE it will be a war for oil, and it will be a war for cheap labor and corporate access well after it has been a war for oil. But I guess this all sort of stands to reason. After we've exported all of our manufacturing jobs to countries with low wage scales and no workers rights and we can't find enough service economy jobs to fill the void we'll make up the difference when we all have jobs making weapons to keep all those other countries that manufacture the products that fill our shopping malls from complaining about mistreatment. "Third world" countries have been shown to be able to sit and work quietly and not complain once they are made to understand that there are 3,000 Americans in a factory in Kansas somewhere making a cruise missile just for them.

    The remainder of this article serves as a tour around what I feel are some of the seedier issues that need to be brought to light from the dark corners of the corporate sectors of our defense industry.

The Carlyle Group

    There is a lot of noise going on about the Carlyle group. Speculation about what it is that they actually do and who is actually in the Carlyle Group and how much influence do they really have over what. There is a lot of confusion, speculation, disinformation and smoke-screening going on. In my own personal view the Carlyle Group wished to do their thing as anonymously as possible but when people started to notice who was in the Carlyle Group red flags went up and people started looking into what they were doing and since that is so hard to find out with any exactitude, independent journalists have been doing their level best to uncover whatever can be uncovered about them.

    What we do know about the Carlyle Group is that they are not a Defense Contractor. They are a venture capital firm. That means they are a company that gets a bunch of rich people together and they put their money together to invest in things that they think will make a profit. There are a lot of Venture Capital firms and even much larger venture capital firms but what caught people's attention about this venture capital firm was who were the people running it. The Carlyle group reads like a who's who list of right wing conservative honchos. Among the top decision makers and recent officers of the Carlyle Group we have Frank C. Carlucci Reagan and Bush[41] era Secretary of Defense, James Baker former Secretary of State, and the former president Bush[41] himself is a Carlyle advisor (as is former British prime minister John Major).

    The Carlyle group does a lot of Merger and Acquisition business (buying struggling companies and selling them after restructuring them). Though I personally feel that all of the corporate mergering going on is leading to increased monopolistic control over everything in our lives, there's nothing illegal about the vast majority of their flurry of transactions. But it is something to keep a watchful eye on. With the Carlyle Group's recent announcement to participate in the buyout of struggling French firm Vivendi's Hollywood entertainment assets the Carlyle group could soon have a huge influence over which movies get made in Hollywood. If the idea of having Defense Secretaries and war hawks decide what movies should get made appeals to you then there's no problem there.

    Consider too though that the Carlyle group profits greatly from weapons systems and defense related items. Many of their officers used to be the bosses of the people that they now go to to ask for government contracts. The Bush family and friends have been war profiteers since at least world war II. There is a great deal of speculation that the Carlyle group has set itself up to make fortunes off of keeping the world in a constant state of warfare (a la 1984) and reinvest the profits and spoils of war into shaping what the public thinks and believes. I find that scary, and I also find it highly plausible. Maybe you don't, but please, at least be aware of the possibility. At the very least the Carlyle group is partially responsible for the sustained high military budgets we see year after year and that's no surprise considering that its officers presided, directly, over some of the highest military expenditures in history (though we may set new records with these back to back wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

Private Militaries

    Okay, quick show of hands. How many of you knew that there are corporations that have their very own armies? Yep. And who knew that these corporations sub contract their armies out to the U.S. government? It's awful convenient for when there are things the official army isn't legally allowed to do or wouldn't want to be associated with.

    Corporations now have their very own armed forces and corporations now train our armed forces AND those same corporations now train foreign militaries as well. Level-3 Communications-- last year's #10 Defense Contractor--recently bought the firm MPRI(Military Professional Resources Inc.). MPRI is a corporation where, for the right price, an "emerging republic" can get help with its "democratic transition". That's code for "you pay us and we will teach you how to kill and/or suppress the leftist trouble makers in your own or a neighboring country with the finest American tactics and weaponry."

    Corporations like MPRI and Vinnell have little or no government oversight and are free to carry on the mission where the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" --Formerly School of the Americas-- leaves off now that congress has purportedly decided that it's inappropriate for the U.S. military to train foreign governments to torture and murder their own citizens.

    CEO of Vinnell's parent company, Philip A. Odeen, has formerly worked in high level positions in the National Security Council and the Defense Department. While serving as CEO he was appointed to the Defense Science Board where he was able to take a leading role in preparing a report to show the Department of Defense how much money they would save by outsourcing more and more military tasks. So if you're a former pentagon official, apparently, a good way to make money is to get hired on to a "rent-an-army" corporations and use all your connections for influence peddling to get your corporation some fat government contracts.

    Sorry children. We don't have enough money to give you an education anymore but you will get the privilege of paying for corporate wars into the foreseeable future. Maybe more corporations will begin to develop their very own armed forces and there will be jobs aplenty toting a gun back n forth in front of the Taco Bell World Headquarters as a Lance corporal for the TBMC(Taco Bell Marine Corps).

Computer Sciences Corporation

    Computer Sciences Corporation's may not show up on the top ten list yet, but what they presently lack in dollar volume they more than make up for in influence. They recently acquired DynCorp which does a little bit of everything for the U.S. military. Dyncorp is the same corporations that was brought in to help keep the peace in Bosnia and ended up in a huge scandal after it was discovered that their employees were buying and selling little girls in a sex slave black market.

    DynCorp showed themselves, on repeated occasions, to be more interested in covering up the problem than addressing it. In Bosnia, DynCorp employees all the way up to the site supervisor were involved in sexual misconduct. In fact the site supervisor, John Hirtz was caught because he filmed himself in an act of rape on a young teenage girl.

    DynCorp has also displayed a pattern of fraud where they will bill the U.S. military for poorly trained or completely unqualified workers, sabotage repair efforts to inflate the cost of their contract repair work on military aircraft, and place military personnel in direct danger due to incompetent personnel in their workforce making repairs to vital equipment. As a reward for their incompetence they are being given more and more of your tax dollars every year, AND half of that money goes not to sub-contracted military personnel, but rather their computer sciences division where this corporations is now being entrusted with critical data from all manner of governmental agencies from the State Department to the SEC(Securities and Exchange Commission) and the FAA(Federal Aviation Administration) to name but a few.

    DynCorp pilots fly missions for Plan Columbia where we drop Monsanto's herbicides on the Columbian people indifferent to the fact that it makes them seriously ill. And as the military continues to outsource and privatize, your tax dollars will be used for more and more of this. Don't let them keep using your money to do this without a fight. Study these issues. Pick one person and educate them about the defense industry. Contact your representatives and refuse to go away quietly. Find ways to get this information out.

FIND YOUR POWER!

- http://www.corporations-suck.com/reports/DefenseContractors.shtml

sources and further information:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/gunhire.html
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/163052.html
http://money.cnn.com/2003/02/05/commentary/column_hays/hays/
http://www.cfr.org/public/armstrade/MarkusenNatSec.html
http://www.capitalreps.com/NEWS%2010-04-02.htm
http://www.soaw.org/new/
http://www.ciponline.org/facts/soa.htm
http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/views/articles/singer/20020128.pdf
http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm
http://www.redherring.com/vc/2002/0111/947.html
http://www.astridmm.com/prouty/vinnell.html
http://www.vinnell.com
http://www.l-3com.com
http://www.thecarlylegroup.com

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