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19, 2003
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Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
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Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
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May
17 / 18, 2003
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Condy Rice's Yipping Tirades
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American Mourning
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Uncle Sam is YOU!
Alan Maas
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Elaine
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Sharon
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Ramzy Baroud
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Hamod
A Nation of Fear
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Baghdad Pays the Price
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May
15, 2003
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May
14, 2003
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May
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Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
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May 21,
2003
Language Barrier:
How "Blood
Money" Becomes "Business Opportunities"
By CHRIS FLOYD
"How best to govern the
state? First rectify the language."
Confucius.
Last week we learned that the Bush Administration
lied about the extent of Halliburton Corporation's involvement
in the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Bush officials initially
claimed that Halliburton--the oil and defense services conglomerate
once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who still receives
an estimated $1 million annually from the company in "deferred
compensation"--had been awarded a relatively small contract
to repair Iraqi oilfields.
But in fact, as the Washington Post reports,
Halliburton is now pumping and distributing Iraq's vast oil reserves--a
privilege potentially worth billions of dollars. The Bush camp
freely admits that this was part of Halliburton's no-bid, open-ended
contract all along; they deliberately "failed to mention
it" in their first official notices. It was not publicly
disclosed until a congressman read the fine print of the contract
and began making enquires.
To recap: a firm which pays the Vice
President of the United States a million dollars a year has now
taken over operation of Iraq's oil wealth. There have been times
in American history when such an arrangement would have been
called by its true name: "corruption." But these are
not such times.
Similar pranks are being played by members
of the Defense Policy Board, a highly influential group of outside
"experts" handpicked by Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld
to proffer "strategic advice" on military matters.
They function largely as an echo chamber for the aggressive views
of Rumsfeld and his acolytes in government, consistently pressing
for the most extreme measures, including the relentless expansion
of the "war on terrorism" at home and abroad.
Last week, the Center for Public Integrity
revealed that nine of the board's members are "embedded,"
as we now say, with arms merchants and military contractors.
These DPB-connected firms have been awarded more than $76 billion
in government contracts over the last two years. DFB members
such as Richard Perle and ex-CIA director James Woolsey have
openly parlayed their Pentagon service--which includes classified
briefings from top government officials--into lucrative investments
in new "security" and "defense" enterprises
whose profits depend directly on the continuation of the present
cycle of war and terrorism.
This activity--now known as "entrepreneurship"--was
also once called by a different name: "war profiteering."
In ages past, this was considered a heinous crime, worthy of
punishment by death and eternal damnation thereafter. But these
are not such times.
Indeed, the Bush Administration revealed
last week that it intends to "embed" such activity
throughout American life. Gordon England, deputy secretary of
Homeland Security, told the nation's top business leaders that
"security measures will, over time, likely become embedded
in the fabric of our society," the conservative National
Journal reports, approvingly. This suffusion of surveillance,
secrecy and control into every aspect of existence "will
make some businesses more desirable than others in terms of investors
and employees and insurance," England said. The government,
he says, will impose little or no regulation on these for-profit
curtailments of liberty, while providing taxpayer-backed "economic
incentives" to make the nascent security industries more
appealing.
This policy dovetails nicely with DPB
players such as Woolsey, whose private equity firm, Paladin Capital,
set up shop a few weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Woolsey and Paladin told investors that the instantaneous murder
of 3,000 innocent people on American soil was a "business
opportunity" which "offers substantial promise for
homeland security investment," the Guardian reports. Paladin
has raised almost $300 million in speculative capital for its
security and defense ventures so far.
In another time, in another America,
such "business opportunities" would've been given a
more accurate name: "blood money."
But this is not such a time, and such
an America no longer exists. Today, in the new America, leaders
are paid millions by corporations who are then given the fruits
of aggressive wars launched by those same leaders. In the new
America, a feckless multimillionaire takes control of a democracy
despite losing the popular vote and proclaims, without shame
or subterfuge, that he has the right not only to arrest and detain
indefinitely any citizen of that democracy--indeed, any citizen
of the world--without any legal charges, but also to have them
murdered by his secret services, on his sole authority, outside
all judicial review or restraint. Men have already been killed
by this order, as the president himself boasted in a national
address last January; men--and children--have already been imprisoned
(or "disappeared," as they say in other tinhorn military
dictatorships) under this dread edict. Yet this arouses no concern
among the public--whose lives and liberty are now forfeit to
the ruler's whim--no outcry in the media, no resistance from
the opposition party. It's as if no one knows how to describe
this extraordinary situation--although in ages past, its name
would be glaringly clear: "tyranny."
Examples like these are now legion; they
metastasize like an aggressive cancer of the blood, sending outcroppings
of pestilent mutation to the farthest reaches of the body. But
it seems we have no words left to convey the full measure of
the extremist agenda now engulfing America. We can no longer
call things by their right names. Our shopworn language, clappped
out by the virulent cliches of advertising, propaganda, professional
jargon and, yes, journalism, has become too degraded to describe
our political reality--a reality which has itself become degraded,
even hallucinatory, to an almost unfathomable, almost unbearable
degree.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
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"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
Ross
Vachon
Dennis Miller's New Gig: the Last
Refuge of Goofy?
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
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