Mercenaries and other laborers

Let's not forget about the "contractors" and other corporate laborers in Iraq. I want to call your attention to an article entitled "Hightower highlights Bush abuses". Here's an excerpt:

In fact, [Jim] Hightower asserts, there may be as many rent-a-troops in Iraq today as there are members of the U.S. military. The largest private contractor, which isn't news, is Halliburton, of course, which has seen its government contracts rise by a stunning 600 percent since Bush became president.

"In return, Halliburton has delivered gas price gouging, contaminated food and water, and a consistent pattern of overcharges," Hightower wrote. "It has been caught hiring Third World laborers to do its grunt work in Iraq, paying them as little as $5 a day, and then billing Uncle Sam more than $50 a day for each worker. In a February analysis of $10 billion in waste and overcharges by various contractors in Iraq, federal investigators found Halliburton responsible for $2.7 billion."

And like the military, those government workers get killed and maimed. No one knows for sure how many have died, but the best guess by the U.S. Department of Labor is 917 contractor deaths and 12,000 wounded in the Iraqi war.

The war, though, is just the tip of Bush's outsourcing spree. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is the government's champion when it comes to contracting with corporate America.

"Bush likes to claim that he has cut the federal bureaucracy," Hightower pointed out. "In fact, he's increased it, but most of the people working in his government wear corporate logos."

I really have no comment except to proclaim my disgust.