What’s behind the price of a soldier’s gear?

Author: Bud Deraps

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 11/01/07 14:36

As our wars drag on with no end in sight, new technology is enabling more of our wounded troops to survive, and naturally, survival comes with added cost.

From World War II to the present, the cost of outfitting a soldier went from $170 to $17,000. It’s expected to reach $28,000-$60,000 in this decade. Every life is indeed precious, regardless of the price, but let us look at what’s behind the price.

Ever since President Eisenhower coined the term “military industrial complex,” most of us are aware of the huge profits war can provide for the weapon makers. How many of you are aware of the “prison industrial complex” (PIC)? Do you know the two complexes have now joined together to share in the rich profit bonanza?

The PIC, one of the fastest growing industries in the nation, is a network of public and private prisons, military personnel, politicians, business contacts, prison guard unions, contractors, subcontractors and suppliers, all making huge profits. And what makes all this profit possible?

First is the huge increase in private prisons. In the mid-1990s there were only five in the country. There are now over 100, with 62,000 inmates. In the next 10 years, they expect to hold up to 360,000. Once they build them, they cannot make good profit unless they fill them, so laws are being passed to imprison more people on lesser charges. Over 70 percent of inmates are there for minor, nonviolent drug-related offenses and the most minor infractions can result in long sentences.

Our 2 million-plus prisoners represent one-fourth of all prisoners in the world, a half million more than in China which has five times our population.

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal PIC produces 100 percent of our military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, shirts, pants, tents, bags and canteens.

Thirty-seven states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations, allowing them to operate in state prisons. Just a few on a large list are IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell, Compaq, Intel and Target. Between 1980 and 1994, PIC profits went from $392 million to $1.31 billion.

In privately run prisons, workers receive a little as 17 cents an hour for a maximum of 6 hours a day ($20 a month). The highest paid are in Tennessee, where they are paid 50 cents an hour in the most skilled positions. In federal prisons, they can earn $1.25 an hour for an 8-hour day.

They are told they are being paid to learn skills for if and when they are released.

It is reported that some sweatshops in Mexico have closed down and moved across the border into prisons where they can benefit from not only slave wages, but no health or unemployment insurance, vacation time, sick leave, overtime pay, or strikes to settle. Some companies are even returning from China and Southeast Asia to prisons here where they can save not only on labor, but transportation costs as well. A deal they cannot refuse!

Organized labor is starting to get very upset and vocal as prison labor becomes more welcomed by industry and more oppressive to all workers.

I am convinced our European competitors would never stoop to this level.

Bud Deraps is a retiree in St. Louis, Mo.

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Fantastic! A marriage of the Prison Industrial Complex and the Military Industrial Complex. This is the beginning of a utopia for the ultra right. Private military companies and private prisons can lobby to get higher sentences for minor offenses, so they'll have more cheap labor (read: slave labor) in their prisons. Military equipment becomes cheaper, so the cost of war is cheaper, and we'll just keep on invading countries based on the endless "War On Terror" so the transnationals can steal more resources for more massive profit.

I fear that someday the only options for a job will be: prison guard, soldier, or inmate. To stop that from becoming a reality, we must fight against the ultra right and the transnationals that are destroying our planet. The only way to defeat these thieves is to end capitalism and bring power back into the hands of the people through socialism.

Blackwater and privatization

Author: PWW/NM Editorial Board

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 09/20/07 13:27

The impact of the privatization of U.S. military forces bubbled to the surface, again, when the Iraqi government announced it was revoking Blackwater USA’s operating license following an incident where eight Iraqi citizens were killed. Of course, Iraq is under heavy pressure from the U.S. occupiers to back off.

On the heels of those headlines, allegations have surfaced that Blackwater smuggled weapons into Iraq.

Congressional investigations into corruption and other outlaw activity by Blackwater and other private contractors are under way.

The question is not who are these guys, although Blackwater’s mercenary profile is the poster child for all the private security corporations that sprang up in the wake of 9/11. The question is how did they get to Iraq and Afghanistan? And should the U.S. military be privatized?

Privatization is not cheap. Blackwater’s contract with the State Department is reported to be $800 million for its “services” in Iraq. Its contract to ferry U.S. troops to Afghanistan is $38.4 million for one year.

When the federal government privatizes any agency — from the post office to the military — it is selling control. It is dispensing with accountability and oversight. Privatization does not just give opportunities for corruption — in fact, it’s embedded in its DNA. Perhaps a better description is giving a license to steal. “Performance” is not the driving force in privatization. It’s not even in the back seat. The driver is corporate cronyism and profits.

Private corporations feeding at the taxpayer-supported Pentagon trough is not new (remember those $100 hammers under Reagan? And can you say “military-industrial complex”?). But this administration has raised it to a new level with no-bid contracts and private contractors doing a host of things that troops used to do. According to the Brookings Institution, half the current Defense Department budget is going to no-bid contractors. “They are taking the taxpayers for many billions of dollars,” one of the institution’s scholars told the World.

Congress needs to not only challenge the privatization of public functions, including defense, but also closely scrutinize the military budget and cut the corporate-profit fat!

The truth about Blackwater

Author: Daniel Morales

From PWW: http://www.pww.org/article/view/11814/

Book review
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, 2007
Hardcover, 452 pp., $26.95

On the surface, Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater” is a reflection of the visage of military privatization and its grounding in the Bush administration. Below the surface is the well-documented panoply of mechanisms and methods used to maintain class rule through disaster capitalism and government by surprise.

Hatched in a nest built by billionaire industrialists and nurtured by conservative religion, U.S. finance capital has raised the “world’s most powerful mercenary army.” By so doing, big business has sold out its commitment to community is pursuing its passion for military, political and religious domination.

The massive military privatization by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney opened the door to large, privately held stockpiles of weapons. Reaction to Bill Clinton’s tax policies stoked a fire among the ultra-right. Contacts from the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush allowed the Blackwater company to develop a rational framework for its rise to power and avoid the pitfalls of “militias” in that period.

As if having learned from Jules Acher’s 1973 book “The Plot to Seize the White House,” the dictatorship of capital’s military arm lay in the weeds until the White House was seized by the scion of none other than Prescott Bush, a notorious fascist sympathizer.

The subtext to this first book by Scahill, an investigative journalist, is about power and wealth being consolidated in the hands of the capitalist class. Government privatization and outsourcing, no-bid, cost-plus contracts and voluntary standards are portrayed as being corrosive to the notion of public accountability for private enterprise.

The author goes deep in revealing the character and personages behind the business practices, cronyism, theft and violence of the current Bush regime. In doing so, he illuminates the bottom feeders in our so-called war on terror.

With Blackwater having been deployed in Iraq (where its “shoot first, ask questions later” policy is coming under heightened scrutiny) and in post-Katrina New Orleans, and with the company suggesting a “humanitarian” mission to Darfur and proposing a facility along the Mexican border, this book will send a chill up the spine of those who thinks about the future of democratic peoples and their movements.