Blood for Profit

Let's imagine for a minute that I am the mentor of a large number of young people. They look up to me. I tell them frequently that I am there for them, that I care about them, that I will do everything in my power to help them in their lives. Then I take some of them and I tell them to stand in this particular busy intersection. I know how dangerous the intersection is and I know that some of those young people are going to get killed or badly injured. Then I go to a group of my friends and I wager on how many will die and how many will be injured. And I sit back to watch the results. Several of them die, a number are injured, and I win big money from my friends because I guessed right about the numbers.

When I am done I place more young people in harm's way, collect my winnings, make more wagers and wait for the results. The young people that were injured come to me for the help I told them I would give. I hand them a few coins and shoo them away like the pests they are. I'm making money here. Why would I give any of it up for such inconsequential creatures?

How would I be viewed by law enforcement, the public, or the world if it were known I was doing this? I imagine the police might consider that I was committing homicide even though the young people willingly trusted me and stood in the intersection. The public would call me a mass murderer. The world, at least those countries that pay lip service to the rule of law, would be appalled and would call for my arrest and trial.

Yet this is exactly what the United States is doing every day. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced massive profits for a number of American mega-corporations. All of the money for those profits came from you and me, from our tax dollars. We are paying billions so that big corporations can essentially get away with murder. Most of that murder has been by proxy. The proxy of the Iraqi people and the Taliban. But some of it has been direct murder. The Haliburton subsidiary KBR murdered upwards of 30 GIs due to shoddy workmanship on electrical wiring of a number of facilities built by this company with mega-billion dollar contracts from the US government. Our soldiers were left undergeared for the first years of the war and many died from poorly armored vehicles and lack of flack jackets. These are murders plain and simple.

Have the head murderers been brought to justice by our current government? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and all the chicken hawks of the Bush regime, who lied to us and took us into the war in Iraq under false pretenses are guilty of murder. Obama has made it clear he wants to let bygones be bygones. So murder is suddenly not a crime? These murderers need to be brought to justice. Them and all their corporate cronies who have made many billions of dollars off these wars. The blood of nearly 5000 US men and women, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are on their hands. They should be prosecuted.

Billions of our tax dollars went to pay no-bid contracts to the corporate buddies of the Bush administration. The stripping of the DoD's ability to run the everyday operations of caring for our GIs in hostile territory and privatizing it out to select corporations has left our military a shell of its former self, unable to provide even basic care to our GIs. Essentially all our military is, now, is a soldier mill, a warehouse for cannon fodder. Corporations dictate everything from what they eat to who they shoot. And the American people pay for it. Don't ever believe that anyone that takes in over 250k a year pays much of anything into that great corporate bank, the US government. It's the average middle class and the poor that pay the lion's share of taxes to keep this travesty running.

Has anything improved since the election of President Obama? If it has, I haven't seen it. We're still fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Afghani war is escalating, contrary to all the promises to get us out heard prior to the election. Guantanamo torture facility is still open. And indefinite detention of non-prosecutable prisoners is now being seriously considered. The invasion of privacy started by the Bush administration, in the form of monitoring our phone calls and email, is still in place. So far, not a stellar record for the Obama administration.

And we're still paying for it.