That Time the U.S. Military Played a War Game Against "Iran" — and Lost

The Russian navy test-fires a Moskit P-270 antiship cruise missile in February of 2015. The P-270 Moskit is a Russian supersonic ramjet powered cruise missile (source). To view full-size, click here.

by Thomas Neuburger

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
     –Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at AEI

Iran is not Iraq.
     –Lawrence Wilkerson

Call it the Kobayashi Maru in reverse.

In the fictional Star Trek universe, Captain Kirk, as a cadet, was able to win an unwinnable war game simulation. In command of a starship that received a distress call from a damaged and failing ship in the Neutral Zone, the choices facing the cadet are stark — attempt a dangerous rescue and risk galaxy-wide war with the Klingons, or do nothing and watch as the ship and all lives aboard are lost. Unbeknownst to the cadets who took the test, the simulator was programmed to make sure any rescue attempt ended in their destruction.

The training officers who ran the simulation later explained that its purpose was not for the cadets to win or lose, but to put them in an impossible situation and observe their character through their reaction. Kirk's reaction was to try to win. On the third try, he defeated the game by secretly reprogramming the simulator.

In the Kobayashi Maru story, the "system" stacks the cards against the "hero" — here, the cadet — and one of the cadets unstacks them.

But what if the story happens in reverse? What if the cadet defeats an unbiased simulation, causing the system — here, the training staff — to reprogram the simulator, adding bias that prevents a win on the next try?

In 2002, the U. S. military ran a war game (including live action and simulations) in which the enemy was very much like Iran. The goal of the "U.S. side" was to issue "Iran" an ultimatum, let the enemy respond, then defeat it.

The U.S. side failed — the officer commanding the "Iranian side" won the simulation, sinking an aircraft carrier and 10 cruisers in the process. So the game was suspended, the rules rewritten to forbid tactics that worked, and the simulation restarted. Needless to say, the U.S. side was successful the second time around, and the commander of the "Iranian" forces quit the game in disgust.

In Star Trek terms, he'd been "Kobayashi Maru"-ed — the game had been reprogrammed to force his defeat.

Can the U.S. Military Defeat Iran?

This is the U.S. military that John Bolton and Mike Pompeo want to take to war against the real Iran, a military that refused to learn from its own war game because the outcome produced the wrong answer, an American loss. (You can read how big a loss below.)

Can this U.S. military be successful against Iran in a real encounter? Or will the world watch as a bunch of very good Russian missiles sink an aircraft carrier in under an hour?

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, agrees with the second assessment: "I think aircraft carriers are anything but an instrument of national power except against countries like Panama or someone who really can’t shoot back very well because aircraft carriers are extraordinarily vulnerable and we’re going to find that out when one of them with 5,000 hands and $14 billion worth of taxpayer money is sunk in less than 30 minutes, whenever we get engaged in something real."

For an example of how vulnerable U.S. warships are to these new-generation missiles, watch the video at the top. These missiles can also be launched from land (modified trucks), underwater, and the air. 

Millennium Challenge 2002

Here's the full story of the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game courtesy of Wikipedia (emphasis added):

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002. The exercise, which ran from July 24 to August 15 and cost $250 million, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and an unknown adversary in the Middle East, "Red", with many lines of evidence pointing at Iran being the Red side.

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

At this point, the exercise was suspended ... After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory....

So much for the best bloated military money can buy. Wilkerson may be right. In a real fight that may be all it proves to be — a swollen, badly run excuse to extract masses of government cash for its patrons and clients, and not much good at fighting a country large enough to resist being thrown against a wall, like Iran.

In the same interview quoted above, Wilkerson added, "The military just hooks up, like it’s hooking up to an intravenous I.V. system and the money just pours out— slush fund money, appropriated money, and everything else. This [war talk] is all about money and it’s all about keeping the complex alive..." The war talk Wilkerson was referring to was about China, but no matter; the point is the same.

If Pompeo and Bolton talk Trump into launching an attack against Iran, a nation four times the size of Iraq, do you like his odds? I don't.

Even so, the military loss would not be the worst of the outcomes. More than 20% of world oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day. A disruption there would be catastrophic — first, for everyone in the region, which would explode in violence; and later for much or most of the rest of the world, including, perhaps, the shopping malls of America.
  

Alan Grayson-- Still Kicking The War Profiteers' Asses

Long before he stood up on the floor of the House and defined the Republican health care plan as Don't Get Sick! And if you do get sick, die quickly, and, in fact, long before he bucked the Democratic and the Republican Establishments to win a House seat from Orlando, Florida, some people had gotten to know Alan Grayson through a compelling feature in Vanity Fair about how he, a successful but little-known crusading attorney, took on Halliburton, KBR and other powerful Iraq war profiteers... and beat them.

“In my mind, one of the basic reasons, maybe even the basic reason, why the war has gone badly is war profiteering,” says Grayson. “You could say that the only people who have benefited from the invasion of Iraq are al-Qaeda, Iran, and Halliburton. America has spent so much money that we literally could have hired every single adult Iraqi and it would have cost less than what it has cost to conduct this war through U.S. military forces and contractors.”

In Grayson’s view, a nightmare combination of jacked-up bids, waste, kickbacks, and inflated subcontracts means that as much as half the value of every contract he has seen “ends up being fraudulent in one way or another.” He adds, “Cumulatively, the amount that’s been spent on contractors in the four-plus years of the war is now over $100 billion. Pick any number between 10 percent and 50 percent-- I don’t think you can seriously argue that the scale of the fraud is less than 10 percent. Either way, you’re talking cumulatively about something between $10 and $50 billion.”

Indeed, in February, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform got the news from Pentagon auditors that contractors in Iraq had claimed at least $10 billion-- three times more than previous official estimates—in expenditures that were either unreasonably high or unsupported by proper documentation. Of this amount, $2.7 billion had been billed to the government by KBR.

...In the early years of his career, Alan Grayson spent most of his time representing military contractors. “It was the most heavily regulated business in existence anywhere in the world, and the result of that was that it was clean,” he says. “There was a tremendous bureaucracy that existed to make sure that contractors stuck to the rules, and also to punish those who did not stick to the rules very severely.” In one famous case, he recalls, a uniform manufacturer that had made hundreds of thousands of military garments was investigated because he asked his workers to sew one dress as a gift for his daughter.

Today, such stringency is unthinkable. “What has happened is a systematic dismantling of the protections that kept the system honest,” says Grayson. Between 1991 and 2005, the size of the staff responsible for managing and auditing Pentagon contracts was cut in half. “What we have seen in recent years is an explosion in contracting, while at the same point in time we have seen a contraction of those engaged in oversight of contracting matters,” says Comptroller General David M. Walker, the head of the G.A.O. This, he says, serves “to exacerbate the systemic problems that have existed for years.”

...There are a few encouraging signs that a day of reckoning is drawing near. Committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on contracting in Iraq, and several plan to hold more. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has introduced a War Profiteering Prevention Act, which would make it much easier to investigate corrupt contractors and call them to account. And in August, the news that tens of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces had vanished or been stolen prompted the Pentagon to announce that its inspector general, Claude M. Kicklighter, would lead an 18-person team to investigate “contracting practices” in Iraq.

In the more distant future, a Democratic administration might open up the vaults and expose the American public to the scale of what has been looted. “What we have seen up to now is the worst of the worst in terms of a deliberate cover-up,” Grayson says. But if and when it comes to an end, he thinks it’s entirely possible that Congress will appoint a special prosecutor-- one whose targets might one day reach “an extremely high level.”

But, obviously not this Democratic administration and certainly not this Republican-controlled Congress. The single biggest tragedy of the 2010 midterms was how the DCCC completely abandoned Grayson and spent tens of millions of dollars defending worthless Blue Dogs almost all of whom lost their seats anyway. Grayson was one of only 5 progressives to lose in the midst of dozens of Blue Dogs and their conservative brethren. Many of the war profiteers he had pursued helped underwrite the Republican efforts against his reelection. Now they may be sorry they did.

Since leaving Congress in January, Grayson has been fighting war profiteers again-- as a private attorney. And last month he scored-- for the American taxpayers who have been cheated out of billions of dollars by Cheney, Bush, the Republican war establishment and their corrupt cronies. When the Commission on Wartime Contracting released its final report last week they reported that between $31 billion and $62 billion of the tax money spent on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted. It also said that between $10 billion and $19 billion of what contractors billed and received was fraudulent. $360 million of our tax dollars went straight to the Taliban! "Wow," wrote Grayson. "Who could have imagined that? Well... me."

When I saw that the Bush Administration was doing nothing about fraud in Iraq, I revived a law going back to the Civil War that allowed whistleblowers to bring lawsuits in the name of the U.S. Government. I filed case after case, which were promptly greeted by the Bush Administration with gag orders-- gag orders that they kept in place for years. They didn’t want any more bad news coming out of Iraq.

So I went on CNN, spoke to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and told America whatever I could say without violating those gag orders. And when the Bush Administration finally let one case out from under those gag orders-- and declined to prosecute it-- I took that case to trial, and won a $14 million judgment. It was the third-largest judgment for whistleblowers in the 143-year history of that law.

Those contractors built bases without hooking up the plumbing. A general testified that when he went there, he felt like throwing up.

The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page article that I was “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” The national organization Taxpayers Against Fraud named me “Lawyer of the Year.” And people started to think, “what is going on over there?”

In Congress, I spoke out against the wars, [see video above] and I voted against the wars. I wrote and introduced The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353. My bill pointed out that you could:

1. Require the Pentagon to fund the wars from its own budget of over $500 billion, not supplemental appropriations;

2. Take all the money that would save and eliminate taxes on everyone’s first $35,000 of income, $70,000 for married couples; and

3. Still have over $10 billion a year left over, to cut the federal deficit.

OpenCongress’s unscientific poll showed 91% in favor of HR 5353.

After I left Congress in January, I took up the work against contractor fraud in Iraq again. And I won an $8.7 million settlement from DynCorp and the Sandi Group.The defendants paid our attorney’s fees last Friday.

Here’s some simple arithmetic. We’ve budgeted $159.3 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, through next month. (The true cost is much more, but let’s leave that aside.)  That’s: $159,300,000,000.00.

You could take all that money and create 5,310,000 jobs here in America paying $30,000 a year, rebuilding our bridges, our roads, our schools, instead of the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would immediately lower the unemployment rate from 9 percent to 5.5 percent, and get money flowing in our communities again.

Now, that’s a job program. I’ll put that up against whatever President Obama proposes next week.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed more than 8,000 Americans, and who-knows-how-many Iraqis and Afghans. War has destroyed our economy, just as the war in Afghanistan destroyed the Soviet economy. According to the calculations of Nobel Prize-winner Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone has cost us around 8% of our $50 trillion national net worth, all of the wealth that America built up over two centuries. Over $13,000 for every single American, young and old.

We’ve taken our inheritance, and dumped it into a wood chipper.

My father served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He told me once that one of the most common questions that men of his generation heard was, “what did you do in the war?” Maybe our children will ask us, “what did you do against the war?”

That’s a question I can answer.

WE HAVE TO GET GRAYSON BACK INTO CONGRESS. Blue American has endorsed him and you can contribute here if you'd like to help. I left the country and lived abroad during the Vietnam War, not to avoid the draft-- my lottery number was high enough so that I had no worries about that-- but to avoid financing it by paying any U.S. taxes. When I visited Vietnam recently and met men and women my own age, I wanted to apologize for not having done more to stop what my country did to theirs and to them and their families. Alan Grayson can very very proud of what he's done in fighting against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Like I said, we HAVE to get him back into Congress!

We don't believe in economic stimulus at home, but apparently it's OK to do it for the Taliban

With all that taxpayer moolah we're shoving directly and indirectly into Taliban piggybanks, can't we at least try to persuade them to "Buy American"? Or is this what's meant by "globalism"?

by Ken

And the, uh, good news, is that we managed to transfer this particular $360 million to the Taliban without having to give more than a modest amount of it directly. Most of it just sort of wound up in their hands.

Maybe it's because I had just read a review by Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books of a new translation by John Ashbery of the prose poems of Rimbaud (the review, which also covers a new translation by Karl Kirchwey of Verlaine's Poems Under Saturn; only a digest is available free online, but if you're interested let me know and I'll see that you're taken care of), but I can't help feeling that what the folks at The American Prospect have achieved in today's "Balance Sheet" report, "A Stimulus for the Taliban," qualifies as some sort of prose poem. After telling us about AP's report ("$360M lost to insurgents, criminals in Afghanistan") "that the U.S. military, after going through hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts, estimates that $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of the Taliban," The Balance Sheet, um, explains:

In a confusing process described as "reverse money laundering," money moves from the United States to companies hired for transportation, construction, power projects and similar jobs who turn out to have ties to criminal networks. Only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban; the bulk of the money was lost to profiteering, bribery and extortion by criminals and power brokers.

Say what?

I don't know about you, but I'm sure breathing easier knowing that "only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban." After all, aren't those "criminals and power brokers" who extracted "the bulk of the money" via "profiteering, bribery and extortion" merely enacting an Afghan version of the Republican plan for turning the U.S. economy around? Isn't this pretty much what cesspools of corruption like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have in mind when they talk about "job creation"? Of course the only decent-paying jobs are for the profiteers, bribers, and extorters, but it's often true that a certain number of grunt-level jobs trickle down to the yawping masses.

As we've pointed out frequently, at least the huge sums that vanish down DoD ratholes normally provide a certain amount of economic stimulus, one of the few kinds apparently still permissible in the Teabagging Era -- it's what we call "military Keynesianism," and the Fiscal Prudes of the Right don't at all like to talk about it. However, at least that money tends to be shoveled into our own economy, whereas this particular $360M seems to have vanished into assorted Afghan ratholes. Criminal Afghan ratholes. And of course the Taliban.

The DoD is on the case, however. The Balance Sheet further reports:

The Department of Defense announced Monday that they would reduce subcontracting, and thus the number of connections to the criminal network. Additionally, U.S. authorities in Afghanistan are screening contractors more carefully, and are more aggressively barring companies that violate contract terms or are involved in illicit behavior. They hope this kind of scrutiny will prevent more money from getting to the pockets of the very people the U.S. is supposed to be fighting.

The Balance Sheet also includes -- in its "The Experts" side panel -- a quote from a piece by Karen DeYoung in yesterday's Washington Post (this is the correct link: "U.S. military awards contracts in Afghanistan to get money away from insurgents"):

U.S. commanders have argued that outsourcing the transport and security frees up the U.S. warfighters to handle more important missions. The only alternative, said a senior congressional staff member speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss information not yet released, is "to reduce the [U.S.] footprint in Afghanistan."

Policymakers and the public need to understand, he said, that "the cost of doing business is that we have to pay, effectively, our enemy for the right to be there."

Since that's clearly crazytalk, the business about reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan, I guess we just have to go on paying our enemy for the right to be there. Which segues right into the other "expert" quote offered by The Balance Sheet, from the AP report linked above (here's another correct link):

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., former chairman of the House oversight panel that investigated the wayward payments, said that the U.S. must stop the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the enemy. "When war becomes good business for the insurgents, it is all the more difficult to convince them to lay down their arms," Tierney said.

One might add, though, that a good part of the problem from a budgetary standpoint -- meaning in particular from a debt and deficit standpoint -- is that war is such excellent business for our own domestic profiteers, bribers, and extorters. And it actually produces a decent number of decent-paying jobs. But like I said, our friends the Fiscal Prudes never like to talk about military Keynesianism. So just forget I said anything.

Say, how 'bout that weather?


Of course weather talk is apt to lead to climate-change talk, and we're not supposed to talk about that either. So just never mind.

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Corrupt Military Contracting-- Still The Crime Of The Century

"KBR is a sociopathic organization that turns lies into profit. It deserves a corporate death penalty."
-Congressman Alan Grayson

More than most members of Congress, Grayson knows exactly what KBR is and what they do and why they've earned such a harsh judgment from investigators who have looked into them. Before Grayson was elected to Congress to represent a central Florida district centered in Orlando, he was busy suing war profiteers. His successes are legendary, as documented in a Vanity Fair feature, "The People vs. The Profiteers," from 2007 that starts like this:

Americans working in Iraq for Halliburton spin-off KBR have been outraged by the massive fraud they saw there. Dozens are suing the giant military contractor, on the taxpayers’ behalf. Whose side is the Justice Department on?

On first meeting him, one might not suspect Alan Grayson of being a crusader against government-contractor fraud... Grayson spends most of his days and many of his evenings on a lonely legal campaign to redress colossal frauds against American taxpayers by private contractors operating in Iraq. He calls it “the crime of the century.”

His obvious adversaries are the contracting corporations themselves-- especially Halliburton, the giant oil-services conglomerate where Vice President Dick Cheney spent the latter half of the 1990s as C.E.O., and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, now known simply as KBR. But he says his efforts to take on those organizations have earned him another enemy: the United States Department of Justice.

Over the past 16 years, Grayson has litigated dozens of cases of contractor fraud. In many of these, he has found the Justice Department to be an ally in exposing wrongdoing. But in cases that involve the Iraq war, the D.O.J. has taken extraordinary steps to stand in his way. Behind its machinations, he believes, is a scandal of epic proportions-- one that may come to haunt the legacy of the Bush administration long after it is gone.

That time is now, as the NY Times reported today. Yes, Bush and his depraved regime are gone-- but so are untold billions of taxpayer dollars-- and they didn't just vanish into thin air. The connection between the Bush Family and KBR, a spin-off of the Houston-based Dubai-based Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney, will be judged by historians as one of the actual causes of the Iraq War, the same way historians credit munitions manufacturers with having contributed to what came to be known as World War I. Halliburton and KBR are at the bottom of an effort by modern day robber barons to build generational wealth by massively ripping off the American public. The War Tapes, the first documentary of the Iraq War produced by U.S. soldiers who fought in it, mentions, for example, how Halliburton charged American taxpayers, with the Bush Regime's encouragement, $28 each for the disposable picnic plates given to the soldiers in the mess hall that their meals are served on. The slop they served on the plates cost more. And in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday, Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Susan Collins (R-ME), respectively the chair and ranking member of the contracting oversight subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee want to know why the Pentagon has collected the $100 million in known, admitted overcharges and why the same monopolistic practices that saw KBR and rake in $31.3 billion under its partners in the Bush Regime.

To the irritation of KBR’s critics, the Army has generally upheld the bills the company has submitted to the military, even when the Pentagon’s own auditors have questioned the amounts. But the argument that the Army was overcharged appears to be more clear-cut in the cases of several former KBR officials convicted of accepting bribes and kickbacks.

In those cases, the Army asked KBR to perform a certain task under the Logcap contract, like buying living trailers or building a dining facility, and the KBR officials found subcontractors in the region to carry out the actual work. The officials took bribes to steer the work toward subcontractors who were not the low bidders, or simply inflated the worth of the contracts once they had been awarded.

In the contracts handled by just one of those officials, Stephen Lowell Seamans, who pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy in March 2006, Pentagon auditors quickly found potential excess profits by a Kuwaiti subcontractor of $49.8 million, or 76 percent, “as a result of Mr. Seamans’s fraudulent activities,” the senators wrote.

Of $306 million in tainted contracts, at least $100 million of the charges appeared to be unjustified, wrote the senators.

And people who have looked into war profiteering in Iraq unanimously agree that that's just small change compared to what was actually ripped off. Today the Wartime Contracting Commission is meeting in Washington. At a February meeting Senator McCaskill, didn't shock anyone when she referred to the contracting in Iraq as "a massive failure. We have failed our military, and we have failed the American people." Government agencies report:

• A lack of oversight has led to widespread abuse among contractors who have bilked the government out of millions of dollars.

• There is no accurate count of contractor personnel in the war theater, just as there is no uniform system to track workers killed or injured.

• Private contractors' legal status is different from that of U.S. government employees; military leaders have less authority over contractors than over military or civilian subordinates.

• Criminal cases and civil lawsuits involving contractors, which are not tracked by U.S. agencies, routinely raise political and jurisdictional questions.

Crooked contractors and the Bush Regimistas who enabled them and took their bribes better hope this doesn't wind up going over to the House. Let's face it; Collins may even be complicit and McCaskill... what's she going to do? Send a tweet? If this gets taken up by the House, where members like Grayson, as well as former military officers like Joe Sestak, Patrick Murphy and Eric Massa-- not to mention Armed Services Committee member Carol Shea Porter-- know what this is all about and don't mind upsetting some apple carts to get to the bottom of it, the "crime of the century" prediction is going to play out on cable TV. “Some folks," said Eric Massa (D-NY), an Annapolis grad and former officer on the USS New Jersey, "might think that $100 million of missing money is not a lot, I'm not one of them. During the past eight years we did not hold contractors accountable, but that's going to change. I join with Senators Collins and McCaskill in calling for responsibility and accountability in ensuring our tax dollars are used properly. I will not stay silent when the American taxpayer is being ripped off and that is exactly what we're talking about.”

Retired admiral Joe Sestak (D-PA) is the highest ranking military officer to have ever served in the House. Like Carol Shea-Porter and Eric Massa, he serves on the House Armed Services Committee. He may or may not run for the Senate next year. But whatever he does, it doesn't bode well for the criminal contractors who have been ripping off the taxpayers. This morning he told us that "There is probably no more important issue than to correct what has been a failure of accountability in government for some time. I learned in the military that leaders are not only responsible for their actions, but are accountable for them. The failure to ensure accountability for overpayments to KBR and other companies does nothing except reinforce the viewpoint that our government fails to provide accountable leadership.”

The BBC made a short film about the scandal which, predictably, got more play in Europe than in the U.S. If you haven't seen it already, please take a look:

You Can Win A Free WAR, INC DVD-- And Support The Election Of What The GOP Calls "The Most Liberal Candidate In America"

The first time I saw John Cusack's brilliant film, War, Inc., I immediately thought it would be a powerful statement for Democratic candidates to use in their campaigns. A none-too-subtle, albeit uproariously funny, exposé on the corporatization of war-- the ultimate in war profiteering-- my hope was that candidates would see it as a tool to engage in a discussion of the tragedy of Iraq. I asked John if Blue America could offer a screening to any of our candidates and he was as enthusiastic as I was. Most of the candidates I approached liked the idea but thought it would work best if John came along. John has been filming in China and he wasn't available to shuttle between congressional districts but the candidate who showed the most enthusiasm, predictably, was the one who has spent years and years fighting war profiteering in real life, Florida's Alan Grayson.

Alan would have loved to have put Cusack's celebrity to work for him as well as anyone, but he immediately understood the value of War, Inc as a powerful organizing tool. He took the screener, rented a movie theater in Orlando's Fashion Square Mall and held two standing room only "teach-ins"-- basically opportunities to see the otherwise unreleased movie followed by discussions of the war and of the corporatization of government functions. Cusack on Meet the Bloggers last week:



This morning Alan explained why War, Inc is such an important movie and why he was so happy to use it in his campaign:

A political campaign is all about mobilizing the support of people who feel the same way that you do. You can do it with a speech, a symbol, a policy statement, an ad, and now... a movie.
 
Because I've fought war profiteers for years now, I recognize that the war effort in Iraq has been mangled by corrupt government contractors who care only about making a buck. I can say that to people myself, but John Cusack has done something better than that-- he has shown it to people, in his movie War, Inc. It is the "Catch 22" of the 21st Century, showing how thoroughly perverted war becomes when it is "privatized."
 
John graciously allowed us to show this film in a movie theatre in Orlando, as part of our race for Congress. And it was a major event. Certainly, no one in Central Florida had ever had a campaign event like this before. It was promoted and reviewed by our daily newspaper, and in other media.  We packed the house. We raised money for the campaign. And most importantly, we brought together and mobilized people who are, shall we say, not too happy about the war in Iraq, and want to do something about it.
 
Political campaigns are constantly changing. Howard Dean introduced political campaigning to the Internet. Barack Obama showed how to fund a national campaign through small donations, without PAC money. And now John Cusack has shown how a film, a creative work of art, can be a means of recruitment, fundraising, solidarity, entertainment and learning in a campaign. Thank you, John.

Last week the movie was released as a DVD and DownWithTyranny has a dozen to give away to the first 12 donors who make a contribution of at least $30 to Alan Grayson's campaign at the Blue America ActBlue page.

Alan Grayson (D-FL): Three Days Before Primary Day

Thirteen 2006 challengers endorsed by Blue America now sit in Congress-- Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD), John Tester (D-MT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), plus Reps. Arcuri (D-NY), Bruce Braley (D-IA), Carney, Donna Edwards (D-MD), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), John Hall (D-NY), Paul Hodes (D-NH), Jerry McNerney (D-CA), Patrick Murphy (D-PA), and Joe Sestak (D-PA)-- and 4 others from 2006 had close calls and are poised to win in November: Vic Wulsin (D-OH), Larry Kissell (D-NC), Charlie Brown (D-CA) and Eric Massa (D-NY). Not one of these was a "sure thing" or even an easy race. We leave the easy races for others. Blue America does the hard ones. Our first pick of 2008 was Alan Grayson and this Tuesday he faces recently "converted" Republican Mike Smith and an establishment hack and wealthy clownish shill from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, Charlie Stuart, in the Democratic primary. After a very tough race Alan looks like the prohibitive favorite to win Tuesday and go into the general election campaign against incumbent rubber stamp Ric Keller with a full head of steam. I see Alan as one of the Blue America success stories. If you've missed our earlier chats with Alan, I want to recommend you read the Vanity Fair feature about his efforts fighting Iraq war profiteers or go over and watch some of the TV shows he's been on talking about these efforts.

Above is a clip of Alan's brand new TV ad which he just started running on Orlando television. It's powerful and to the point. I think you'll like the ending.

Today Alan is joining us in the comments section of Firedoglake at 2pm, EST for another chat. The other day I asked him to help me understand the whole concept of "change" in a political context.

Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination by being the candidate of change. Now John McCain says that he’s the candidate of change, and we bite our lips and try not to laugh out loud. But since the promise of change crosses the whole political spectrum, we’d better start thinking-- what will change... and how?

What will change are our priorities. Specifically, we will concentrate on meeting human needs, our needs. Health is a human need. Education is a human need. Public safety is a human need. Affordable transportation is a human need.

Here are some things that are not human needs: Making sure that you can own a gun. Preventing two people of the same gender from uniting. Insisting that other people speak English. Instigating unnecessary wars. When our priorities change, these issues take a back seat.

I, for one, would like to live in a place where the hungry are fed, the homeless are sheltered, the children are educated, and the sick are healed. That’s what we’ve been told, for around 3000 years, that a just society tries to accomplish.  Only recently has anyone suggested that a just society is one where everyone is packing heat.

And when that change occurs, the economy will improve dramatically. Why? Because meeting human needs keeps money in the country. If the bridge that fell down in Minneapolis-- which is still down-- were rebuilt, then the construction worker who rebuilds that bridge will make money. He will use that money to pay his rent, and his landlord will make money. The landlord will go to dinner in a restaurant in Minneapolis, and the waiter will make money. The waiter will get his hair cut, and the barber will make money. Meeting human needs means putting more money in the hands of Americans. And spending it on the war in Iraq means it’s gone, forever.

The U.S. trade deficit is $2 million a minute. Under the Bush Administration, money has gushed out of this country. No wonder gas is $4 a gallon, the cost of living is rising, unemployment is up, and the housing market is down. It’s the worst case of economic mismanagement in American history.

And that will change. Because people with a conscience are coming together, and saying “we need to take care of each other.” People with a conscience are taking power in America. And people are letting their conscience guide them.

We're changing. And that’s real change.

I have no doubt Alan is going to win on Tuesday. After that he faces a well-financed incumbent with nearly a million dollars on hand-- a well-financed incumbent who has been faithfully serving the special interests who have given him millions of dollars and have every intention of shelling out whatever they have to to keep him in office. But Orlando is a very changed district and Ric Keller has never been up against a candidate like Alan Grayson. This could be one of Blue America's most important achievements. Take a look at the clip up top again. In case you've forgotten, our Blue America page is here

Whose Vision-- Cusack's Or Bush's? The Privatization Of War

Pallets of cash

John Cusack's movie about a future fictitious occupation of a fictitious country, Turaqistan, is premised on the privatization of... well, pretty much everything. In the film a Cheney-like CEO of a Halliburton-like company, Tamerlane, is conducting its own foreign policy-- and war and reconstruction. This morning's NY Times features a story by James Risen on a shocking milestone in Bush's implementation of Cusack's dystopic vision: "The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003."

That's a lot of taxpayer dollars being spent-- with virtually no supervision or controls on private firms to run the war. In fact one dollar in five is going to private contractors, a great many of whom are contributors to Bush's career and to Republican Party politicians. There are now more contractors in Iraq than there are U.S. troops. And if you recall that little incident of the bridge in Fallujah in which 4 of the hated Blackwater mercenaries were burned alive, you are probably aware that many of the contractors are intensely hated by the Iraqis, who don't like being occupied by disrespectful and very violent foreigners.

The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield.

...Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.

In addition, the dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts. When the war began, for example, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney before he was vice president, became the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq. After years of criticism and scrutiny for its role in Iraq, Halliburton sold the unit, which is still the largest defense contractor in the war, and has 40,000 employees in Iraq.

“This is the first war that the United States has fought where so many of the people and resources involved aren’t of the military, but from contractors,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School and a member of an independent commission created by Congress to study contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is unprecedented,” he added. “It was considered an all-out imperative by the administration to keep troop levels low, particularly in the beginning of the war, and one way that was done was to shift money and manpower to contractors. But that has exposed the military to greater risks from contractor waste and abuse.”

Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”

Peter W. Singer, a defense contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, said the biggest problem was that the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq, almost no thought had been given to an overall strategy to determine which jobs and functions should be handled by the government, and which could be turned over to private companies without damaging the military effort.

“These new numbers point to the overall question-- when do you cross the line in terms of turning over too much of the public mission of defense to private firms,” Mr. Singer said. “There are some things that are appropriate for private companies to do, but others things that are not. But we don’t seem to have had a strategy for determining which was appropriate and which wasn’t. We have just handed over functions to contractors in a very haphazard way.”

One of my favorite scenes in Turaqistan was at the Tamerlane trade show where an executive explains how Tamerlane precision bombs had blown off the limbs of a bunch of women who were subsequently outfitted with Tamerline prosthetic limbs and taught to dance and we now part of a dance troupe helping to advertise Tamerlane products. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wants to hold hearings like the Truman Commission which looked into, among other things, war profiteering-- familiar territory for the Bush Family.

Once the Bush Regime is shut down in January there's no one we're going to need in Congress more than Alan Grayson, who's running for Congress in Orlando. Alan has been the most successful tracker and prosecutor of war profiteers in the country. He's featured in this BBC documentary. Take a look and you'll see why Blue America is so enthusiastic about him. Please watch it-- and then consider making a donation to his campaign at his Blue America ActBlue page.




UPDATE: HILLARY DEMANDS REFORM

Following release of a Congressional Budget Office report today showing the massive expenditures and an over-reliance on private contractors in Iraq under the Bush Administration and the revelation of a report by the Small Business Administration Inspector General showing Blackwater was awarded millions of dollars in federal contracts designated for small businesses, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today called on Congress to act on her legislation to reform the contracting system and put in place needed accountability measures and urged the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to launch an investigation into the impact of Blackwater's violation.

Her statement: "This administration's failure to hold contractors accountable is outrageous. More and more government responsibilities are being passed along to private companies at huge cost to American taxpayers, and at the same time, more and more reports emerge of fraud, waste and abuse in the contracting process. This pattern must be brought to an end, which is why I have introduced legislation to bring critically needed reform to the government contracting process and why I'm calling for an investigation to get to the bottom of this latest abuse of taxpayer resources."

When you look at those losers like Kaine and Bayh that the Obama campaign has floated to the media and then you compare them to Hillary... gee, you really have to wonder how he can possibly not pick her!

Alan Grayson TV Ad Looks Like A Game Changer

Alan Grayson is the Blue America-endorsed candidate running against garden variety rubber stamp Republican Ric Keller in an Orlando district that has been turning blue. Early balloting started this week for Florida's primary election and Alan has been the only candidate with a TV ad up-- and what a TV ad! If every Democratic candidate had an ad this powerful to run, we wouldn't be talking about 12-20 House seats; we'd be talking about 30-50. Of course, not every candidate has a story as compelling as Alan's. Take a look at the ad:



If you'd like to see Alan keep this running, please consider donating to his campaign at the Blue America ActBlue page. As you just saw, he knows how to make effective use of the donations that come in.

Stoller has more-- much more.

HOW BUSH REGIME AND ITS ALLIES ROBBED US BLIND-- THE GREATEST HEIST IN HISTORY

Well, the Bush Regime robbed us blind in many ways. The destruction of the federal regulatory system has basically given Bush Family allies license to steal-- everything. We had a chance to stop them after Enron. But we didn't and now we have a mortgage crisis, an energy crisis and an inflationary cycle that is rapidly derailing the economy. But that isn't what we're here to discuss today. Today we're here to talk about war profiteers and $23 billion missing "in Iraq." Before you watch it, I want to point out that the lawyer in the blue shirt is Alan Grayson, the Blue America-endorsed running against Republican rubber stamp Ric Keller in Orlando. I want to urge you to watch this and if you get the idea to donate to Alan's campaign after you see it... here's the place.

UPDATE: THE VIDEO HAS BEEN REMOVED... BUT

There's a gag order on the BBC investigators and I don't know if that's why the video has been removed from the internet. It can only be viewed in England now.

We found another video, although just the part that has the Alan Grayson parts. I'll try to get the full film back. Meanwhile, this one is worth looking at:

Some Our Of Elected Officials Want To End The War And Some Don't

Desire for more war deeply rooted in his damaged psyche

If Congress could vote on a nice easy, simple question like "Do you like the war or not?" there would probably be only a dozen lunatic fringe warmongers like Inhofe, McCain, Cornyn, Lieberman, DeMint and those two kooks from Wyoming who would vote "Yes." Everyone else would vote no-- and wouldn't that feel nifty? But feel good votes are not what the American public is looking for. People want to see an end to the occupation of an unjustifiable war they know they were tricked into backing, a war that is benefitting no one but Iran, jihadist recruiters and Bush campaign contributors. And what they see instead is that the entire GOP and far too many Democrats are not willing to vote "No" on the only way they can stop the war-- by stopping the hundreds of billions of dollars to the Bush Regime. Every time "an emergency supplemental" comes up Blue Dogs and Republicans start repeating their little Karl Rove mantra about taking the bullets away from the troops.

On May 22 senators has an opportunity to vote against the war in a meaningful way, Twenty-six Democrats-- and only one petrified Republican-- availed themselves of that opportunity. The whole list is here but I just want to mention the senators who are up for re-election:

Dick Durbin (D-IL) voted to end the war
Tom Harkin (D-IA) voted to end the war
John Kerry (D-MA) voted to end the war
Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) voted to end the war
Jack Reed (D-RI) voted to end the war
Gordon Smith (R-OR) voted to end the war

Lamar Alexander (R-TN) voted to stay the course and continue the war
John Barrasso (R-WY) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Max Baucus (DLC-MT) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Joe Biden (DLC-DE) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Thad Cochran (R-MS) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Norm Coleman (R-MN) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Susan Collins (R-ME) voted to stay the course and continue the war
John Cornyn (R-TX) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Mike Enzi (R-WY) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) voted to stay the course and continue the war
James Inhofe (R-OK) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Tim Johnson (D-SD) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Mary Landrieu (DLC-LA) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Carl Levin (D-MI) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Miss McConnell (R-KY) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Mark Pryor (DL-AK) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Pat Roberts (R-KS) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Jay Rockefeller (DLC-WV) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Jeff Sessions (R-AL) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Ted Stevens (R-AK) voted to stay the course and continue the war
John Sununu (R-NH) voted to stay the course and continue the war
Roger Wicker (R-MS) voted to stay the course and continue the war

I've bolded the names of the senators who have talked out of both sides of their mouths on the Iraq War and who either purposely try to deceive people into thinking they are moderates and independents or who appear to be making decisions based on political career calculations not on what they believe. Obama and McCain were campaigning and didn't vote. Hillary voted to end the war.

Try to remember when you vote in November.

SUSAN COLLINS ATTACKS... WGME

After Portland's CBS affiliate exposed Susan Collin's dereliction of duty, her supporters have deamnded that the station retract their story. The station just updated the story and they don't seem to be following the Collins-Bush-McCain script:

"Neither Seantor Collins nor Representative Allen dispute the key facts we tried to establish-- that waste fraud and abuse did occur in Iraq and that a lack of oversight was a factor."

Well since the oversight was the duty of two venal Bush rubber stamps, Collins and her buddy Joe Lieberman, it's clear who should be held accountable. If you missed part one of this story, it's here. This is the second installment. More to come, I'm sure.



And if you would like to contribute the ending the miserable and shameful acreer of Bush Dog Susan Collins, you can do it at Tom Allen's ActBlue page.

SUSAN COLLINS DIDN'T DO HER JOB FOR THE PAST 7 YEARS BUT SHE WANTS MAINE TO SEND HER BACK TO THE SENATE

This has been a bad week for Susan Collins. Usually careful to try to mimic Maine's far more popular Olympia Snowe, Collins was the was the only member of the Maine congressional delegation (2 Democrats, 2 Republicans) to stick with Bush and oppose the farm bill-- something that isn't going to endear her to northern Maine's agricultural communities. Even with her practicing her Bush rubber stamp routine-- as one of the 15 senators opposing the bill-- it passed both the House and Senate with veto-proof majorities.

That may hurt her re-election bid a bit, but probably not as much as the steady stream of information tying her to the big gas and oil companies and the catastrophic increases in the cost of heating oil and gasoline (a 145% increase since the Bush-Cheney-Collins Economic Miracle commenced in 2000). The Maine Democratic Party is making the case that Collins has been a pawn of the Big Energy corporations. She's sucked up nearly $300,000 in campaign contributions from Big Energy. And what did they get for their money?

• Susan Collins joined Republicans to kill an amendment that set a national goal to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil by 2025 [Vote 140, 6/16/05]. The bill merely set goals for reducing dependence on foreign oil rather than implementing a hard requirement, yet Susan Collins still voted against the amendment.

• Susan Collins voted twice for the disastrous 2005 Cheney Energy Bill that gave $14 billion to Big Oil during times of record profits [Vote 212, 7/29/05; Vote 213, 7/29/05]. The final version of the bill failed to reduce our nation's dependence on oil or provide relief to consumers, and added billions of dollars in irresponsible subsidies for coal, oil and nuclear power. The League of Conservation Voters called the Energy bill the "most anti-environment bill signed into law in recent memory." [LCV Scorecard 2005, www.lcv.org

• Susan Collins and Senate Republicans voted against an effort to curb the record-making profits of Big Oil while Mainers were struggling to pay for fuel. Susan Collins even opposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies that redirected the funds to struggling American consumers. In 2005, Susan Collins voted against an amendment that would impose a temporary windfall profit tax on crude oil and rebate the tax collected back to the American consumer. [S2020, Vote 331, 11/17/05; Vote 341, 11/17/05]

• Susan Collins rejected efforts to invest in renewable energy technologies. In 2001, Susan Collins and Senate Republicans rejected an amendment to establish tax credits for investments in renewable energy technologies [Vote 125, 5/21/01]. Collins voted against these incentives even as our country must increase our energy efficiency to be less dependent on foreign oil.

• Susan Collins voted for the Energy Bill that did not have conservation Measures for Higher Mileage Vehicles. In July 2005, according to the Portland Press Herald, "But the bill also didn't call for conservation measures such as higher mileage for light trucks such as sport-utility vehicles and minivans. So the only limit on motoring those gas guzzlers onto the open road will be the costliness of the pit stops. ...The Senate voted 74-26, with Snowe and Collins, both Republicans, in favor."  [Portland Press Herald, 7/31/05]

And then there's the little investigative report on WGME, Portland's CBS affiliate. This should be the issue that helps Mainers understand the disastrous results of Collins throwing her lot in with a bad crowd. Take a look:



Blue America has endorsed Rep. Tom Allen, the progressive Democrat running for the Senate seat in November. So far 644 of us have contributed over $15,000 to Tom's campaign. If you'd like to see Barack Obama work with a Senate that won't be obstructing his every move, please consider making a donation to Tom's campaign

WHAT ABOUT THE "BETTER" IN "MORE AND BETTER DEMOCRATS?"

Today in the FDL discussion of the victory in Mississippi yesterday, people were wondering about the progressive commitment not just to "more Democrats" but to "more and better Democrats." One might ask, better than what, of course, but one thing liberals know we want are more Democrats like Donna Edwards, genuine and energized progressive leaders. Can reactionary Republicans (basically all of them) and reactionary Democrats be held accountable for the Iraq catastrophe and for the de-funding and the disabling of the federal regulatory agencies?

I was happy to see far right Republicans lose in deep red districts in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. It is demoralizing and panicking Republicans; great. When grassroots progressives help beat reactionary Republicans, the Democratic Insider Establishment is as happy as we are. When I mentioned Al Wynn to Rahm Emanuel at a chance encounter in a bar a few weeks ago, I thought he was either going to lunge at me or have a heart attack. When Democratic reactionaries fall, you might notice rage in Beltway eyes. Democratic primaries are crucial for holding bad Democrats accountable and for electing better Democrats. Blue America is working hard to help trade in Bush rubber stamps Leonard Boswell (IA) and John Barrow (GA) for Ed Fallon and Regina Thomas. Another one of our favorite candidates this year, Leslie Byrne (VA-11), also has a primary coming up, but not against an incumbent. It's a primary pitting a proven progressive against a stealthy and reactionary puppet of war profiteers.

Long before Republican Tom Davis read the writing on the wall and announced he would not run for re-election, Virginia's 11th district was at the top of every Democrat's wish list. With Northern Virginia trending blue over the last two cycles, it's perfect for a red-to-blue turnover. But first we've got to make sure we don't elect another Blue Dog/DLC-type "corporate Democrat."

Fortunately, we have a great candidate in the field. Leslie Byrne has been a strong, progressive voice for decades in the state legislature, in Congress and as our nation's consumer advocate. She opposed the war in Iraq from the start, will fight to make health care more affordable and more accessible, and has always supported a woman's right to choose. Please check out her live blog session at FDL from last March.

As the Washington Post has pointed out, Leslie's opponent, Gerry Connolly, basically a Zell Miller/Joe Lieberman type Democrat, is trying to trick voters into thinking he's suddenly a progressive, just the way Lieberman persuaded Connecticut voters in 2006 that he had seen the light and had suddenly become anti-war. Let's go over why Connolly is such a terrible choice for grassroots and progressive Democrats.

First off, Connolly's record conforms to the worst stereotypes of the corporate Democrat and threatens to cost the party a long-awaited takeover. Connolly has been mired in questions about his employment with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), one of the worst of the major defense contractors, his cozy relationship with business developers and his general affinity for what most of us would call pay to play politics.

Connolly's most egregious offenses against the progressive agenda are only recently coming to light, largely due to his own hypocrisy on the Iraq war. Connolly, who was a proud "moderate" until the moment he declared for the House, has taken to touting his anti-war credentials by claiming that he's "been against the Iraq war from the beginning" and that he plans to "hold CEOs criminally accountable for wasting tax payer's dollars."

So, why is this a problem? Well, it's an issue because Connolly's employer, SAIC, is one of the most secretive defense contractors in the world. Think about that: Connolly works for a war profiteering company that not only cheer-led for Bush's unjustifiable invasion but that makes much of its money by cheating taxpayers.

The War Profiteering Act that Connolly "claims" to support could devastate SAIC. If convicted under the terms of that act, the company could have to pay up to one million dollars in fines after forfeiting all property gained through the terms of the contract. Company officials involved in fraudulent behavior could have faced 20 years in federal prison. So we've got a congressional candidate claiming that he would vote for a law that could land his co-workers in jail for two decades and devastate his employer's profit margin-- and his stock options.

Gerry Connolly has never commented on any of this. Never uttered a word, never explained to the voters in his district how his public statements can possibly be reconciled with his private employment.

He's never explained how he reconciles his claims that he "opposed to the war from the very beginning" when he was simultaneously employed by a company playing a major role disingenuously convincing Americans that Iraq posed a real threat.

Yep, that's right folks, Gerry Connolly is running for Congress claiming that he plans to "hold CEOs accountable for wasting tax payers dollars" all while working for a company that made the case for the Bush Regime to attack Iraq and that has been accused of cheating taxpayers out of millions of dollars related to defense contracts.

Doesn't even pass the laugh test, does it? It sort of begs the question: Why would SAIC continue to employ someone who claims to support legislation that would have devastating effects to the company? Makes you wonder if maybe SAIC doesn't really believe Connolly plans to follow through, doesn't it?

Well, why shouldn't he be? He has a record of taking money from companies and then doing their bidding. He's already influenced local building projects as the board of supervisors chairman for local real estate developers. Why would one believe he wouldn't continue this influence for the war profiteers?

Right after Connolly was hired at SAIC, he pushed the Board of Supervisors to build a new Metro stop right by their property, raising its value by millions. Connolly talked about how important the new stop would be for SAIC. He didn't disclose the fact that he was now one of their employees.

When the real estate developer WestGroup wanted to build luxury town homes in his district without doing much for the neighborhood, Connolly voted for their proposal. He didn't think it was important to mention that he had been a consultant for WestGroup, making at least $10,000 after he went to them for work.

When Lerner Enterprises wanted to build a residential and office complex in Fairfax County, they wrote Connolly a series of checks for just under the amount at which they would have to publicly disclose. Gerry Connolly got their project approved.

Bad enough that he's trying to convince people that he wants to punish the company that pays his bills. But Gerry Connolly has spent years giving big developers everything they want if they were willing to fill his campaign coffers. Now that he's running for Congress, pay to play is suddenly the root of all evil instead of a fundraising strategy.

Yet, surprise, surprise, the mainstream media's not calling him on it. I suppose it would have taken some really hard-hitting, deep-digging investigative journalism to uncover all this, maybe even a Deep Throat from inside his campaign. Or they could have googled SAIC, Gerry Connolly, like I just did. He's gotten a pass from everyone so far, and he's hoping that it will last right up until Election Day.

Gerry Connolly: "Progressive change (unless it hurts my corporate backers)!" Now there's a bumper sticker I want on my car.

With only 27 days until VA-11's June 10th Democratic Primary, we can help send Leslie to Washington and give her a chance to clean up the mess made by the GOP and the corporate Democrats in power. I know she has the experience, the passion, and the courage to stand up and speak out on the important issues. Please stop by our Blue America ActBlue page and make a contribution of whatever you can afford. The netroots have a great opportunity to make a difference in this race. I hope you will join us.

A LITTLE CONFLICT OF INTEREST MAYBE? OR WHY WE'RE STILL MIRED IN IRAQ

Bipartisan

Most Americans think the occupation of Iraq should have ended and many are frustrated that Congress hasn't done enough to rein in Bush. Soon they will vote more hundreds of billions of our taxes to maintain the occupation. Many people think there is probably a powerful enough connection between Bush, his family, their retainers and cronies and some of the defense contractors to make this a very profitable venture for the Regime, even if it is coming out rather catastrophically for the country, not to mention the American families who are losing loved ones. But what about Congress? Yesterday the Associated Press reported that 151 members of Congress hold investments worth $78.7 million to $195.5 million in companies that receive defence contracts worth at least $5 million. These investments earned them anywhere between $15.8 million and $62 million between 2004 and 2006. More Republicans than Democrats have investments in these companies but the Democrats have more money invested in them.

Members of the U.S. Congress have as much as $196 million (U.S.) collectively invested in companies doing business with the U.S. defence department, earning millions since the onset of the Iraq war, according to a new study by a non-partisan research group.

The review of legislators' 2006 financial disclosure statements, by the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, suggests that members' holdings could pose a conflict of interest as they decide the fate of Iraq war spending. Several members earning money from these contractors have plum committee or leadership assignments, including Democratic Senator John Kerry, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman and House Republican whip Roy Blunt.

Dianne Feinstein's husband is a long time war profiteer and she has always greased the way for the family business. It's part of the reason I can proudly say that I have never voted for her in one election, not for San Francisco Board of Supervisors, not for Mayor and not for Senate. I usually bite the bullet and go for the lesser of two evils, but in Feinstein's case... not a chance.

I don't know if Russ Feingold (D-WI) owns any stocks in Military-Industrial complex companies, but if he does, he sure doesn't let it stand in the way of doing the right thing. This evening he issued a strong statement taking his own party leaders to task for backing Bush Regime policies in Iraq.

“I am deeply disappointed with the letter sent by Democratic leaders to the President regarding Iraq. Rather than calling on the President to redeploy our troops from Iraq, it endorses a plan put forward by General Petraeus that could entail leaving tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely. This would be dangerous for our troops, further the perception that we are occupying Iraq, provoke instability in the country and the region, and keep us from focusing on the global al Qaeda threat. 
 
“Contrary to what the letter suggests, we should not be waiting around for a ‘political accommodation which will allow us to reduce U.S. troop levels substantially.’ We must redeploy our troops to break the paralysis that now grips U.S. strategy in the region.”

STOP COMPLAININ'-- THERE ARE PLENTY OF FOLKS GETTING RICH(ER) IN BUSH'S AMERICA

Yesterday we met, briefly, a 22 year old hustler in Miami who the Bush Regime felt should be showered with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts to supply the military with ammunition all over the world, including to front-line troops in Afghanistan. His "company," AEY is now being investigated by the FBI for fraud. Much of the ammunition was obsolete or so deteriorated as to be worse than useless. Republicans call this privatization and the miracle of a free and unregulated market. It isn't unrelated to the Bear Stearns crisis or the mortgage crisis or to the wreckage of an economy 7 years of Bush/Republican misrule is leaving the country.

This morning's CongressDaily features a story by George Wilson called "War Pays," which details how the Bush war economy has been geared towards a few very well-off companies and their executives, many of whom are major donors to Republican Party activities. This is also the major theme in John Cusack's incredible new film, War, Inc, which takes Bush's privatization policies to it's logical-- and catastrophic-- conclusion. [See the movie.]

If the economy isn't quite working as well for you and your family as you'd like it to-- and 46% of Americans say their own household financial situation is getting worse (as opposed to 7% who say it's getting better)-- consider yourself fortunate that you're not one of the 28 million Americans forced into the Food Stamps program by the miracle of Bush economics, the highest number ever since the program was started in the 1960s.

Now, if you're a defense contractor (like so many cronies of this regime, starting with the vice president)... happy days are here again. "Bush's war in Iraq," the article begins, "has been good for defense contractors."

The Pentagon's own figures, along with published stock prices, document that firms like Halliburton and Humana Inc., which provide the military with services rather than weapons, have done especially well during the five years of the Iraq war.

Among the big questions the next Congress and president will have to answer is whether this subcontracting out to private firms of everything from G.I. meals to construction to protecting the American ambassador to Iraq has gotten so out of control that new laws must be passed.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman tells horror stories about Halliburton contracting in arguing that the gouging of taxpayers must be stopped.

The Pentagon issues annual reports-- which Congress and the mainstream press largely ignore -- telling who in the military industrial complex is getting how many of the taxpayers' defense dollars.

Unfortunately, the reports lag far behind the awarding of contracts but do show authoritatively that the defense business under Bush became like an oasis of prosperity in the midst of what has now become a harsh economic desert for much of the rest of America.

Warnings the Pentagon numbers shout out to lawmakers and the next administration include these:

*The biggest bucks are going to contractors whose super weapons are soaring above predicted costs and have little to do with winning battles against terrorists who specialize in asymmetric warfare. Terrorists blow up American armor with bombs dug into roadways and kill soldiers and allied civilians with belts of explosives hidden under their clothing. They don't use planes, tanks or warships...
     
*The Defense and State departments are turning over so much of their traditional work to private contractors that the tail threatens to wag the dog with controversy.
     
Congressional protests against no-bid contracts awarded to Halliburton, which Vice President Cheney headed before he became Bush's running mate in 2000, and Iraqi charges of murderous conduct by the State Department's hired guns supplied by Blackwater USA are two examples of this.
     
*Healthcare costs for military people are skyrocketing and will remain high long after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end, as veterans receive physical and mental care at government facilities...

The cost of caring for military people long after the shooting stops is a major reason behind Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz' recent prediction to the Joint Economic Committee that the Iraq war will end up costing in excess of $3 trillion.

Lockhead Martin scooped up the most dough from the Pentagon in 2006-- over $26 billion. A couple years like that and they'll be in fat city. Their stock has soared and the recent downturn in the market hasn't hurt them at all. Halliburton was the 6th biggest recipient of Pentagon largess, up drastically since Cheney-- whose still receives gigantic compensation from the company-- started running the show (in Washington). I'm not saying Lockhead Martin and Halliburton are as sleazy as AEY-- just that, in terms of war profiteers, way, way slicker and more successful.

GIANT BUSH REGIME TAXPAYER RIP-OFF UNCOVERED?

A couple weeks ago Peter Welch (D-VT) went ballistic when he caught the Bush Regime in its latest blatant attempt to transfer billions of dollars in taxpayer money to its corrupt campaign contributors and financiers. Since then, Welch and Henry Waxman have been on the move via the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The short version is that the Regime surreptitiously inserted a loophole into plans to protect taxpayers from avaricious contractors like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater, who are raking in billions as war profiteers.

The Committee wants to get to the bottom of the skullduggery and has informed the Regime that if they don't have the relevant documents by April 4 they will issue a subpoena. They want to know exactly why the loophole was slipped into the plans. "The controversial loophole has irked Democrats and Republicans alike. But it has the support of a trade association that lobbies on behalf of giant global government contractors, including Blackwater USA, KBR Inc., Boeing Co., CACI International Inc. and Lockheed Martin."

Even a proven Bush shill like Attorney General Mukasey says he can't understand why this was done and he has objected. In a letter to Secretary of Defense Gates and a gaggle of Regime operatives and hacks, Waxman and his colleagues say they are "concerned about a proposed change to federal contracting rules that would exempt overseas contracts from a requirement that the contractor detect and prevent fraud and report it to the government."

At a time when the United States is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting extensive redevelopment programs in both countries, and employing the services of an unprecedented number of private contractors, preventing fraud by contractors overseas should be a high priority. Instead, the exemption for contracts to be performed overseas appears to have been inserted in the rule late in the process and against the wishes of the Department of Justice, which raises serious questions as to why and how such a policy was developed.

On May 23, 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that the Federal Acquisition Regulation be amended to “require contractors to establish and maintain internal controls to detect and prevent fraud in their contracts, and that they notify contracting officers without delay whenever they become aware of a contract overpayment or fraud, rather than wait for its discovery by the government.” DOJ believed such a rule was necessary because few government contractors voluntarily disclose suspected instances of fraud. DOJ proposed specific changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

Welch represents Vermont, a frugal state where concern for government waste and fraud is palpable. He didn't mince any words. "Who snuck this in at the eleventh hour and why? No contractor should be given a free ride to defraud taxpayers, at home or abroad." Anyone remember Lurita Doan over at the GSA? She wasn't fired for her breach of government ethics last summer and DWT sources inside an investigatory agency are telling us to expect another set of damaging revelations that could drive Bush's job approval ratings into the single digits, courtesy of Ms. Doan.

The potential proportions of this scandal are causing mainstream conservatives to serve notice on the Bush Regime inner circle that they're on their own on this one.

The Justice Department and the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction have asked the exemption be eliminated before the rule becomes law. Additionally, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has threatened to block the loophole in the federal budget if the administration does not do away with it.

OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy has repeatedly declined to comment on the loophole or how it was added to the overall fraud crackdown.

The House inquiry is looking at whether the exemption was added at the request of private firms, or their lobbyists, to escape having to report abuse in U.S. contracts performed abroad.

Meanwhile, as Crooks & Liars points out, the vaunted and much hyped "success" of the Bush-McCain "surge" is a fraud-- and a collapsing fraud at that. Whether venal like Fox or lazy like CNN, the media doesn't want to do the kind of investigative reporting that makes journalism worthwhile, at least not when it comes to the Iraq War.

IS BUSH STARTING TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT WAR PROFITEERING?

Well, perhaps... but not the way one would expect the nation's chief law enforcement official to. Sure, the Bush Regime is trying to convince concerned voters they are cracking down on rampant war profiteering by their biggest supporters-- without damaging said supporters (of course). So they found some chumps to charge and now they're ballyhooing what awesome war profiteer fighters they are. It's a farce and I called Blue America's expert in this area, Alan Grayson, and asked him to explain what's going on. Keep in mind that Alan is running for Congress in Orlando against one of Bush's most pathetic and consistent rubber stamps, Ric Keller. If you'd like to see a real war profiteer fighter in Washington next year, please consider contributing to Alan's campaign here. His report:

The Bush Administration, having learned nothing, continues to operate as if the appearance of doing its job were just as good as-- maybe better than-- actually doing its job. Case in point: recently touting to the Chicago Tribune that a handful of unfortunate souls, around eight or so in five years, have been indicted for work that they did while employed by KBR and Halliburton in Iraq. And this is supposed to give the appearance that the Bush Administration actually has taken a stab at upholding the laws against war profiteering in Iraq. "Heck of a job, DOJ."

But something is wrong with this picture. These folks have been indicted for their roles in submitting bloated bills to the Army and the taxpayer, but KBR and Halliburton never had to give any of that money back. And KBR and Halliburton themselves have escaped all punishment, not only for the overbilling, but also for establishing and perpetuating a crooked system in which such criminals flourished.

The Chicago Tribune's report was front-page news. You know what really would be front-page news? If Dick Cheney's old company ever was held accountable for even a penny of the waste and fraud that they've perpetrated on the troops, and the taxpayers.