Antiwar.com Blog

How bad is the corruption in the American System of mercantilist warfare and nation building?

Former DIA/CIA counter-terrorism officer Philip Giraldi reports in the September 12th issue of The American Conservative:

“A Homeland Security Customs Enforcement Department top-secret audit of contracting in Iraq is beginning to reveal a level of corruption and fraud that is crippling both reconstruction and self defense efforts. Water and electricity supplies are at lower levels than one year ago, while the lines at gas stations have become longer. A weapons procurement of more than $5 billion for the Ministries of Defense and Interior under interim Prime Minister Iayd Allawi has reportedly completely disappeared, while a $300 million purchase of 24 military helicopters from Poland bought obsolete aircraft, many of which had already been stripped for parts. Work has never started on hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure-improvement contracts given to military cronies. Several deputy ministers who balked at signing multimillion-dollar fictitious contracts have been fired and replaced by more amenable appointees. Meanwhile, the disproportionate number of Kurds in the Defense Ministry is diverting funds and equipment to peshmerga militia units preparing to seize Kirkuk. On the other side of the Green Zone, the Interior ministry’s police commandos provide cover for anti-Sunni hit teams from the Iranian-supported Badr Brigade and from rogue Shi’ite radical Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army. The Potemkin-villiage Baghdad government is increasingly irrelevant to the future of Iraq.”

How might you have spent the money the state took from you in order that they might kill all those people and make so many criminals rich?

More on the helicopters here.

"In government, the scum rises to the top." – Friedrich Hayek

“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” – G WMD Bush, September 2, 2005

Brown resigns.

I hadn’t looked at a copy of Mad magazine for over twenty years when, earlier this year, I came across this profound slam of Bush and his callous attitude toward dead American soldiers. After numerous technical difficulties, I now present it to those who (like me) are not regular readers of Mad magazine. Click picture for larger image.

Today on Scott Horton’s Weekend Interview Show (6-8 Eastern), Scott will be talking with Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and hardcore opponent of the warfare state, and then with Rick Blum of OpentheGovernment.org.

Listen live.

In a well-written account by two communist San Francisco EMS workers on their survival of Hurricane Katrina and Earthquake Government, one realizes something very ironic. In the wake of compounding disasters, ordinary people spontaneously kept a whole city fed, clothed, watered, and in some instances, even powered. At every turn, these civilizational functions were halted by slobbering subhumans with big guns, unlimited funds, and a license to kill — collectively known as the State.

The ironic part is that even these megastatists from one of the most state-ridden cities in the US experienced that the State was their enemy, and that people, even those of comparatively meager means, can provide for themselves and many others, with beneficial effects overlapping and covering even babies, elderly and sick, even in a horrendous catastrophe.

Anyone want to mock the “invisible hand” now?

I’m watching the City Attorney of New Orleans talking specifically about evacuating the city. She just said something to the effect that “At this time there have been no forced evacuations. Force is not being used.”

Well, then who was that frail old lady who was calmly talking to a bunch of cops in her kitchen when the fattest one of them hurled himself on top of her, crushing her into the corner between the wall and the floor, knocking kitchen items all over the place, and then dragging her, crying, out of her own home? Was she just over the border in Metairie? Huh? Her street was completely dry. Were they just trying to drag out somebody white to dispell the racial bias myth?

Thousands are dying because the government is a gaggle of morons and incompetents. They each have ONE job to do, and they’re too stupid to do them even halfway correctly. And then they have the balls to lie about something recorded and broadcast across the world the day before. It even makes an anarchist flinch.