Piles of trash building up in Naples have filled the air with a putrid stench and spoiled the view for tourists, but the city's waste crisis may also be killing its people...
Besides fouling the port city's image and adding to risks to the Mediterranean from from sewage and pollution, the waste is in some areas associated with higher death rates and certain types of cancer, studies have shown.
A government-appointed former police chief has been given army backup for a four-month quest to end a crisis which the Italian government declared a 'state of emergency' in 1994, but local people say years of illegal dumping is poisoning them...
Medical journal Lancet Oncology in 2004 dubbed part of the Campania region, of which Naples is the capital, "the triangle of death" because the air, soil and water are polluted by high levels of cancer-causing toxins believed to have come from waste.
Research released last year by Italy's National Research Council found that among people living closest to the least-regulated waste-disposal sites -- where trash is dumped in fields or burnt without any controls -- the mortality rate was 12 percent greater than the norm for women and 9 percent greater for men.
Fatal liver cancers were much more common -- up 29 percent for women and 19 percent for men in the most at-risk areas -- and there were huge increases in congenital malformations of the nervous and urinary systems...
Naples' failure to deal with its own household waste hit crisis point at the end of December when all refuse collection stopped as waste dumps had reached capacity, leaving people with no choice but to throw it onto the streets.
Political ineptitude, corruption and crime have conspired to stop the creation of a modern, safe disposal system. People despair of their politicians and are suspicious of government schemes -- like a new incinerator -- aimed at ending the crisis.
Like many in and around the 'triangle of death', those in Pianura say their council-run landfill was not properly managed and became a tipping site for hazardous waste.
But an even bigger source of pollution is the Camorra, the Naples mafia which runs a lucrative line in dumping and burning rubbish illegally.
More than domestic trash, the Camorra focuses on disposal of industrial waste which it brings to Campania from Italy's rich north -- one of a string of crimes against the environment earning the mafia an estimated 6 billion euros a year.
"The Camorra continues to control the cycle of industrial waste that comes from the north of Italy," said Michele Buonomo of Legambiente, a campaign group which closely monitors organised crime's assault on the environment.
"That's why practically every night in vast areas of Campania, waste arrives to be burned."
Showing posts with label corrupt contractors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corrupt contractors. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism
From Democracy Now!
NAOMI KLEIN: ...The last frontier for the privatization of the state is the privatization of those core state functions. You know, the only thing left that hasn’t already been privatized and outsourced is -- and this is pre-Bush administration -- is the army, is the police, are the fire departments. And these core state functions are really seen as the last great privatization free-for-all. It’s already entered healthcare. It’s already entered water. It’s already entered electricity, the media. So this is the last frontier.
And what we saw during the California wildfires was something really extraordinary. People have gone back to their neighborhoods now, and they see neighborhoods which have just been destroyed by the fires, but a few houses standing, and are asking questions about why some of those houses were saved. And in some cases, you can’t explain it, you know, it’s mysterious. But in some cases, it’s not mysterious. The reason why some houses were saved and others were not is because the people who lived in those saved houses pay insurance to the company AIG, and AIG offers privatized fire response. So --
AMY GOODMAN: American Insurance Group.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, exactly. And they have a special service, a sort of VIP concierge service, where they spray the homes of the wealthy in certain select zip codes -- these are people who pay around $19,000 a year in insurance premiums. And as part of this special service, they get men in fire trucks, with the red hats and the bright red fire trucks -- they look, for all intents and purposes, like real firefighters -- spraying down their homes with fire retardant. But during the California wildfires, they actually did more than that. They actually put out fires and bragged to the press that they saved houses, while the house next to it went up like a candle...
When you see these privatized disaster responses, privatized firefighting -- you have Blackwater in the midst of this, pitching themselves as privatized humanitarian response and building tent cities and saying, you know, “We can do this better than the state” -- then, you know, I think we really need to question this basic premise that we are all in this together, and that maybe this explains the slowness and the unwillingness to take real action on the most pressing issue of our time, which is climate change...
All of these new companies work on what some of them are calling a “country club model.” You pay an annual fee, or you pay a one-time lump membership payment. So there’s another company called Sovereign Deed that is even bigger than HelpJet and is offering comprehensive VIP disaster rescue. You pay $50,000 a year.
But back to HelpJet, you pay as if you're joining a country club, and then if a hurricane is coming to your part of Florida, you get an early alert and a concierge calls you, or you call the HelpJet concierge, and you tell them if you want to go to Disneyland, if you want to book in some five- star resort, and they bill it as an escape from the failures that we witnessed during Hurricane Katrina. It says, you know, escape the madness, the lines, the chaos; just have “a first-class experience.”...
...There’s a company called Sovereign Deed. It’s one of the key -- it’s connected to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy, and also a retired brigadier general back from Iraq named Richard Mills is one of the key executives in this company. And they have just announced plans to set up a kind of a privatized FEMA in Pellston, Michigan, northern Michigan, a rural part of Michigan, that happens to have a very modern regional airport. And the idea is that they’re going to be turning Pellston, Michigan into their national disaster response center -- once again, only for their members...
I think, more than that, you know, as I’ve been talking about this with people, what we’re going to hear more of is sort of blaming the victims of these natural disasters who don’t pay the higher premiums to get this special service. You're starting to hear the language of personal responsibility, much like the sort of welfare debates of, you know, “It’s up to you to protect you and your family. You can’t look to the government.” It’s very similar, actually, to the way in which people discuss healthcare, that it’s your personal responsibility. Now, it’s your personal responsibility to protect your family from terrorist attacks, from climate change...
In Peru this summer, there was an earthquake, and there was another one of these breakthroughs in disaster capitalism, where after the earthquake an American company, an American service company called Aramark, got the contract to build evacuation camps, which is something that’s traditionally done by the UN, traditionally done by NGOs. Now it’s a private contractor, a for-profit company that actually provides food for prisons, going in there and seeing disaster response as -- internationally -- as an emerging market. And these are the first evacuation camps in the world, that I know of, that come with many McDonald's outlets...
I think we need to understand this -- disasters are seen by a growing sector of the economy as an exciting new market opportunity. And so, we’re in a situation where these companies are going to be putting, or are already putting, a counter-pressure on the government, where, you know, the citizens, the people of the world, are saying, “We want action on climate change,” but these companies have a vested interest in just staying on the same disastrous course. But the two-tiering of disaster response, I think we really need to think of very urgently, because this is moving really fast...
...the fact is that we know that Blackwater doesn’t just -- isn’t a humanitarian organization. They have the mission: protect the principal, protect whoever paid them. And this is what permeates all of this privatized disaster response. It’s not “protect everyone”; it’s “protect the principal.” So if we believe in other principles, besides that you should pay to be saved, the time has come to “protect the principle.”
NAOMI KLEIN: ...The last frontier for the privatization of the state is the privatization of those core state functions. You know, the only thing left that hasn’t already been privatized and outsourced is -- and this is pre-Bush administration -- is the army, is the police, are the fire departments. And these core state functions are really seen as the last great privatization free-for-all. It’s already entered healthcare. It’s already entered water. It’s already entered electricity, the media. So this is the last frontier.
And what we saw during the California wildfires was something really extraordinary. People have gone back to their neighborhoods now, and they see neighborhoods which have just been destroyed by the fires, but a few houses standing, and are asking questions about why some of those houses were saved. And in some cases, you can’t explain it, you know, it’s mysterious. But in some cases, it’s not mysterious. The reason why some houses were saved and others were not is because the people who lived in those saved houses pay insurance to the company AIG, and AIG offers privatized fire response. So --
AMY GOODMAN: American Insurance Group.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, exactly. And they have a special service, a sort of VIP concierge service, where they spray the homes of the wealthy in certain select zip codes -- these are people who pay around $19,000 a year in insurance premiums. And as part of this special service, they get men in fire trucks, with the red hats and the bright red fire trucks -- they look, for all intents and purposes, like real firefighters -- spraying down their homes with fire retardant. But during the California wildfires, they actually did more than that. They actually put out fires and bragged to the press that they saved houses, while the house next to it went up like a candle...
When you see these privatized disaster responses, privatized firefighting -- you have Blackwater in the midst of this, pitching themselves as privatized humanitarian response and building tent cities and saying, you know, “We can do this better than the state” -- then, you know, I think we really need to question this basic premise that we are all in this together, and that maybe this explains the slowness and the unwillingness to take real action on the most pressing issue of our time, which is climate change...
All of these new companies work on what some of them are calling a “country club model.” You pay an annual fee, or you pay a one-time lump membership payment. So there’s another company called Sovereign Deed that is even bigger than HelpJet and is offering comprehensive VIP disaster rescue. You pay $50,000 a year.
But back to HelpJet, you pay as if you're joining a country club, and then if a hurricane is coming to your part of Florida, you get an early alert and a concierge calls you, or you call the HelpJet concierge, and you tell them if you want to go to Disneyland, if you want to book in some five- star resort, and they bill it as an escape from the failures that we witnessed during Hurricane Katrina. It says, you know, escape the madness, the lines, the chaos; just have “a first-class experience.”...
...There’s a company called Sovereign Deed. It’s one of the key -- it’s connected to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy, and also a retired brigadier general back from Iraq named Richard Mills is one of the key executives in this company. And they have just announced plans to set up a kind of a privatized FEMA in Pellston, Michigan, northern Michigan, a rural part of Michigan, that happens to have a very modern regional airport. And the idea is that they’re going to be turning Pellston, Michigan into their national disaster response center -- once again, only for their members...
I think, more than that, you know, as I’ve been talking about this with people, what we’re going to hear more of is sort of blaming the victims of these natural disasters who don’t pay the higher premiums to get this special service. You're starting to hear the language of personal responsibility, much like the sort of welfare debates of, you know, “It’s up to you to protect you and your family. You can’t look to the government.” It’s very similar, actually, to the way in which people discuss healthcare, that it’s your personal responsibility. Now, it’s your personal responsibility to protect your family from terrorist attacks, from climate change...
In Peru this summer, there was an earthquake, and there was another one of these breakthroughs in disaster capitalism, where after the earthquake an American company, an American service company called Aramark, got the contract to build evacuation camps, which is something that’s traditionally done by the UN, traditionally done by NGOs. Now it’s a private contractor, a for-profit company that actually provides food for prisons, going in there and seeing disaster response as -- internationally -- as an emerging market. And these are the first evacuation camps in the world, that I know of, that come with many McDonald's outlets...
I think we need to understand this -- disasters are seen by a growing sector of the economy as an exciting new market opportunity. And so, we’re in a situation where these companies are going to be putting, or are already putting, a counter-pressure on the government, where, you know, the citizens, the people of the world, are saying, “We want action on climate change,” but these companies have a vested interest in just staying on the same disastrous course. But the two-tiering of disaster response, I think we really need to think of very urgently, because this is moving really fast...
...the fact is that we know that Blackwater doesn’t just -- isn’t a humanitarian organization. They have the mission: protect the principal, protect whoever paid them. And this is what permeates all of this privatized disaster response. It’s not “protect everyone”; it’s “protect the principal.” So if we believe in other principles, besides that you should pay to be saved, the time has come to “protect the principle.”
Monday, September 03, 2007
"Windfall: How Conservatives, Contractors, and Developers Cashed In on Katrina"
By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway / from Mother Jones
(Some snips from the timeline - all dates in 2005):
September 6
The Katrina disaster becomes an enormous boon to contractors with friends in high places. One of the first to swing into action is Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which begins work repairing Gulf Coast Naval and Marine facilities under a pre-existing arrangement with the Department of Defense. Fast Forward: By the end of the year, KBR has secured contracts worth nearly $170 million. It can't have hurt that KBR had retained the services of former FEMA director (and Bush crony) Joseph Allbaugh, who had registered as a lobbyist for the company six months prior to Katrina. Allbaugh also lobbied on behalf of the Shaw Group, which is owned by the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Shaw received two $100 million no-bid contracts shortly after Katrina.
September 8
Congress approves a second White House request for Katrina relief spending, bringing the total to $62.3 billion. Members of Congress and watchdog groups immediately raise questions about the procurement process for Katrina-related contracts, including insufficient oversight and lack of competitive bidding.
By executive order, the president suspends the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay the regional prevailing wage, in areas hit by Katrina. The move is attacked by organized labor and praised by anti-government conservatives.
September 9
In a memo to all federal contracting agencies, the Department of Labor suspends affirmative action requirements on all reconstruction contracts.
Baton Rouge Republican Congressman Richard Baker is overheard telling a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
September 10
The first of several contracts from FEMA and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the recovery of bodies is awarded to Kenyon International, whose parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), a Bush campaign contributor, has previously been implicated in a high-profile scandal in Texas. The company has also been sued for illegally dumping and desecrating corpses in Florida. Fast Forward: After two months, Kenyon bills the State of Louisiana more than $6 million for collecting 535 bodies. New Orleans' numerous family-owned African American funeral homes, meanwhile, are turned down when they offer to volunteer their services after the disaster, and none receive any subcontracts from Kenyon to bury victims.
September 21
The Republican Study Committee, a group that includes Congress' most conservative members, issues its own plan for paying for Katrina recovery, which it calls "Operation Offset." The plan aims to reduce the federal budget by nearly $100 billion in 2006 alone and nearly $950 billion over 10 years—nearly five times the projected cost of hurricane reconstruction. OMB Watch, the government watchdog group, later describes the proposal as "a historical laundry list of nearly every budget cut Republicans have proposed, imagined or yearned for over the years." These include cuts to most entitlement programs that serve the poor, as well as an array of the right's favorite targets—from foreign aid and family planning for teens to the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In response to "Operation Offset," the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that nearly 40 percent of the cuts are in assistance to the nation's lowest-income residents, which would disproportionately affect African Americans, women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled—in other words, the same vulnerable groups that had suffered most from Hurricane Katrina.
In one of the first comprehensive reports on the environmental impact of the storm, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group offers a grim assessment. The affected areas are a center of the oil, gas, and chemical industries and "home to 31 hazardous waste sites and 466 industrial facilities that handle large quantities of hazardous substances." Numerous oil spills and the widespread release of toxic chemicals add to the existing public health crisis. Contributing to the disaster is a history of weak environmental regulation in the region.
October 6
After criticism from both parties during congressional hearings, FEMA's new acting director, R. David Paulison, announces that four $100 million no-bid contracts awarded for Katrina relief (including one granted to the Shaw Group) will be reopened for competitive bidding, with an eye toward hiring more small businesses and minority-owned firms. Fast Forward: A month later, the Department of Homeland Security postpones the rebidding process until February 2006. In the end, only a fraction of the work is reopened for bidding.
November 1
Governor Blanco announces plans to conduct a series of meetings on budget cuts. On the first day (November 6), she announces $500 million in cuts from the Louisiana state budget, with health care and higher education taking the biggest hits. Blanco and her supporters say the cuts reflect the expected precipitous drop in tax revenues—but critics point to the large tax breaks being offered to business and industry in the name of encouraging reconstruction.
December 1
For the first time since Katrina struck, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward are permitted to visit their homes after being given shots and masks and passing through National Guard troops that have been blocking access to certain neighborhoods. Meanwhile, residents have been locked out of public housing projects. Many dangers to health and safety are real, but policies—and plans for the city's reconstruction—seem designed to discourage the return of African Americans and especially low-income residents, wiping certain neighborhoods off the map while enriching developers and corporate contractors.
_______________
See also: "Looting Homeland Security" in Rolling Stone.
(Some snips from the timeline - all dates in 2005):
September 6
The Katrina disaster becomes an enormous boon to contractors with friends in high places. One of the first to swing into action is Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which begins work repairing Gulf Coast Naval and Marine facilities under a pre-existing arrangement with the Department of Defense. Fast Forward: By the end of the year, KBR has secured contracts worth nearly $170 million. It can't have hurt that KBR had retained the services of former FEMA director (and Bush crony) Joseph Allbaugh, who had registered as a lobbyist for the company six months prior to Katrina. Allbaugh also lobbied on behalf of the Shaw Group, which is owned by the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Shaw received two $100 million no-bid contracts shortly after Katrina.
September 8
Congress approves a second White House request for Katrina relief spending, bringing the total to $62.3 billion. Members of Congress and watchdog groups immediately raise questions about the procurement process for Katrina-related contracts, including insufficient oversight and lack of competitive bidding.
By executive order, the president suspends the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay the regional prevailing wage, in areas hit by Katrina. The move is attacked by organized labor and praised by anti-government conservatives.
September 9
In a memo to all federal contracting agencies, the Department of Labor suspends affirmative action requirements on all reconstruction contracts.
Baton Rouge Republican Congressman Richard Baker is overheard telling a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
September 10
The first of several contracts from FEMA and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the recovery of bodies is awarded to Kenyon International, whose parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), a Bush campaign contributor, has previously been implicated in a high-profile scandal in Texas. The company has also been sued for illegally dumping and desecrating corpses in Florida. Fast Forward: After two months, Kenyon bills the State of Louisiana more than $6 million for collecting 535 bodies. New Orleans' numerous family-owned African American funeral homes, meanwhile, are turned down when they offer to volunteer their services after the disaster, and none receive any subcontracts from Kenyon to bury victims.
September 21
The Republican Study Committee, a group that includes Congress' most conservative members, issues its own plan for paying for Katrina recovery, which it calls "Operation Offset." The plan aims to reduce the federal budget by nearly $100 billion in 2006 alone and nearly $950 billion over 10 years—nearly five times the projected cost of hurricane reconstruction. OMB Watch, the government watchdog group, later describes the proposal as "a historical laundry list of nearly every budget cut Republicans have proposed, imagined or yearned for over the years." These include cuts to most entitlement programs that serve the poor, as well as an array of the right's favorite targets—from foreign aid and family planning for teens to the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In response to "Operation Offset," the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that nearly 40 percent of the cuts are in assistance to the nation's lowest-income residents, which would disproportionately affect African Americans, women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled—in other words, the same vulnerable groups that had suffered most from Hurricane Katrina.
In one of the first comprehensive reports on the environmental impact of the storm, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group offers a grim assessment. The affected areas are a center of the oil, gas, and chemical industries and "home to 31 hazardous waste sites and 466 industrial facilities that handle large quantities of hazardous substances." Numerous oil spills and the widespread release of toxic chemicals add to the existing public health crisis. Contributing to the disaster is a history of weak environmental regulation in the region.
October 6
After criticism from both parties during congressional hearings, FEMA's new acting director, R. David Paulison, announces that four $100 million no-bid contracts awarded for Katrina relief (including one granted to the Shaw Group) will be reopened for competitive bidding, with an eye toward hiring more small businesses and minority-owned firms. Fast Forward: A month later, the Department of Homeland Security postpones the rebidding process until February 2006. In the end, only a fraction of the work is reopened for bidding.
November 1
Governor Blanco announces plans to conduct a series of meetings on budget cuts. On the first day (November 6), she announces $500 million in cuts from the Louisiana state budget, with health care and higher education taking the biggest hits. Blanco and her supporters say the cuts reflect the expected precipitous drop in tax revenues—but critics point to the large tax breaks being offered to business and industry in the name of encouraging reconstruction.
December 1
For the first time since Katrina struck, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward are permitted to visit their homes after being given shots and masks and passing through National Guard troops that have been blocking access to certain neighborhoods. Meanwhile, residents have been locked out of public housing projects. Many dangers to health and safety are real, but policies—and plans for the city's reconstruction—seem designed to discourage the return of African Americans and especially low-income residents, wiping certain neighborhoods off the map while enriching developers and corporate contractors.
_______________
See also: "Looting Homeland Security" in Rolling Stone.
"The Great Iraq Swindle"
These are the closing paragraphs. See the Rolling Stone article for the details...
".....The explanations that contractors offer for all the missing dollars, all the myriad ways they looted the treasury and screwed guys like Russell Skoug, rank among the most diabolical, shameless, tongue-twisting bullshit in history. Going back over the various congressional hearings and trying to decipher the corporate responses to the mountains of thefts and fuck-ups is a thrilling intellectual journey, not unlike tackling the Pharaonic hieroglyphs or the mating chatter of colobus monkeys. Standing before Congress, contractors and the officials who are supposed to monitor them say things like "As long as we have the undefinitized contract issue that we have . . . we will continue to see the same kinds of sustension rates" (translation: We can't get back any of the fucking money) and "The need for to-fitnessization was viewed as voluntary, and that was inaccurate as the general counsel to the Army observed in a June opinion" (translation: The contractor wasn't aware that he was required to keep costs down) and "If we don't know where we're trying to go and don't have measures, then we won't know how much longer it's going to take us to get there" (translation: There never was a plan in place, other than to let contractors rip off every dollar they could).
According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.
_____________________
In related news see:
Meet the "Whack Iran" Lobby
Exiles peddling back-channel intelligence, upstart advocacy groups pressing for regime change, administration hawks intent on remaking the Middle East—the scene in Washington is looking eerily familiar as the Iran standoff grows more tense. Instead of Ahmad Chalabi, we have the likes of Iran-Contra arms-dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. A new Iran directorate inside the Pentagon features some of the same people who brought you the Iraq intel-cherrypicking operation at the Office of Special Plans. Whether calling for outright regime change or pushing “democracy promotion” initiatives to undermine the Iranian government, an expanding cast of characters has emerged to promote confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. What follows is an abridged list of the individuals and organizations agitating to bring down the mullahs.
Names, affiliations and activities:
Abram Shulsky
Elizabeth Cheney
David Wurmser
Elliott Abrams
Michael Ledeen
Manucher Ghorbanifar
Committee on the Present Danger
Iran Policy Committee
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
(profiles at link)
".....The explanations that contractors offer for all the missing dollars, all the myriad ways they looted the treasury and screwed guys like Russell Skoug, rank among the most diabolical, shameless, tongue-twisting bullshit in history. Going back over the various congressional hearings and trying to decipher the corporate responses to the mountains of thefts and fuck-ups is a thrilling intellectual journey, not unlike tackling the Pharaonic hieroglyphs or the mating chatter of colobus monkeys. Standing before Congress, contractors and the officials who are supposed to monitor them say things like "As long as we have the undefinitized contract issue that we have . . . we will continue to see the same kinds of sustension rates" (translation: We can't get back any of the fucking money) and "The need for to-fitnessization was viewed as voluntary, and that was inaccurate as the general counsel to the Army observed in a June opinion" (translation: The contractor wasn't aware that he was required to keep costs down) and "If we don't know where we're trying to go and don't have measures, then we won't know how much longer it's going to take us to get there" (translation: There never was a plan in place, other than to let contractors rip off every dollar they could).
According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.
_____________________
In related news see:
Meet the "Whack Iran" Lobby
Exiles peddling back-channel intelligence, upstart advocacy groups pressing for regime change, administration hawks intent on remaking the Middle East—the scene in Washington is looking eerily familiar as the Iran standoff grows more tense. Instead of Ahmad Chalabi, we have the likes of Iran-Contra arms-dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. A new Iran directorate inside the Pentagon features some of the same people who brought you the Iraq intel-cherrypicking operation at the Office of Special Plans. Whether calling for outright regime change or pushing “democracy promotion” initiatives to undermine the Iranian government, an expanding cast of characters has emerged to promote confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. What follows is an abridged list of the individuals and organizations agitating to bring down the mullahs.
Names, affiliations and activities:
Abram Shulsky
Elizabeth Cheney
David Wurmser
Elliott Abrams
Michael Ledeen
Manucher Ghorbanifar
Committee on the Present Danger
Iran Policy Committee
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
(profiles at link)
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