Matt Taibbi on private contractors in Iraq

My friend Mary alerted me to this awesome but wrenching article, by my fav, Matt Taibbi of RollingStone, b/c she saw it on Dailykos, but I would have read it eventually, as my husband is a subcriber. Only read this if you're in the mood to be utterly disgusted at the waste, fraud and abuse by, no, not the government, but by those paeans of efficiency, much-lauded private industry. Below is a short excerpt.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Aug 23, 2007
RollingStone
The Great Iraq Swindle
by Matt Taibbi
[. . . ]
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy.