corporate cancer

by Samuel Sukaton

Published: May 5, 2008

Irresponsible. That’s what I have to call the Bush administration. Not incompetent - I’m sure there are plenty of capable people working in our government. However, the administration has sold our legitimacy to private bidders.

We’ve been hearing a lot about private contractors handling business for the federal government. What we’re not hearing is that their behavior is immoral and that the nature of their work undermines what America is.

There’s been plenty of evidence of amoral behavior: raping employees (and covering it up), providing dirty (as in, get-you-sick dirty) water for our troops, and now bad wiring (electrocuting soldiers in the shower).

Meanwhile, private military contractors (read: mercenaries) shoot up steroids, shoot up Iraqis indiscriminately and ignore regulation by the Department of State, Department of Justice and the military.

And people who dissent get shut down, whether by demotion or by arrest.

Max Weber writes, in Politics as a Vocation, that a state “is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

Thanks to us, Iraqis don’t have that in their own country. Thanks to Blackwater, Halliburton and KBR, we don’t either.

We can’t even keep our own men from being electrocuted in the shower, protect our own women from sexual assault or keep our own fighting men and women clean, let alone protect the Iraqi people from each other and the predators in the militias.

And yet, the US government trusts KBR with rebuilding in Louisiana and Blackwater with security.

Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR and their ilk have one overriding loyalty: profit. That’s what businesses aim for and that motive has its place. That place is not contributing to national security, not rebuilding after disasters, not usurping the rights and responsibilities of government.

Loyalty to the Almighty Dollar in people entrusted with the “general welfare” subverts civil society. We’ve seen that in Iraq and if we aren’t careful, we’ll see that at home.

I like the way FDR said it:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group.

While our government might not end up being run out of a boardroom, the profit motive has stripped away civic duty and replaced it with open greed. The men that run, enable or turn a blind eye to these corporations are not Americans, but traitors subverting the Constitution and a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

—

(email this article or post to social network)

—