TW3 - glug, glug, glug

First off, thanks to those of you who sent sweet notes about the loss of Widget; I truly appreciate your kindness. When I put Meeschka down this spring, I was very upset based on the caregiver relationship we’d had; I was much more emotional about her. With Widge, it feels that an essential portion of myself has disappeared, an occulting of some bright point within me. I’ve had that feeling before, it’s the ‘major loss’ thing; it shows up not in my emotions, but my energy field. Just points up how the ‘characters’ in our lives are there for important reasons and how seemingly small loss, like a pet, can be so much larger than logic would define. As I’m often reminded, there is no “greater than/lesser than.” It’s all the dance, and shapes us for higher purpose.

That Was The Week That Was … pretty much forgettable, at this late date. Funny how quickly it’s all moving now; if you’re a soap opera buff, you must be in hog heaven with the politics and news of the day. But beware — there’s a new psychiatric malady called the “Truman Show Syndrome” after the Jim Carey movie; it’s a deluded state in which you think your life is a reality show with millions of watchers.

Criminy — how’d we get in this remarkable state of confusion!?

Here are some thoughts, as your bonus reads: it took eight years of George Bush to drive a stake through the heart of Ronald Reagan — and we’re standing in the ruins he left behind, wiser but at one hell of a price. Long years of deregulation and privatization have drowned us in this bathtub … call 911!

This whole nation has stood by, like Andrea Yates’ ignorant and religiously-deluded husband, programmed by decades of mind-control that it is preferable to just ‘buck up’ rather than get reality-therapy and take some necessary action. Too late now — the kids are gone; and so are the safety nets and protections that kept us from disaster.

The bonus material is diverse — a full tub covers all exposed areas. Energy and health care is highlighted, as is Blackwater’s morphing into one of its other hydra-heads; do note the connection between Amway and Blackwater in the included link — so much for environmentally friendly.

Moyers [PBS] covered Jane Mayer’s material, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals” last night. In that vein, you’ll find a review in the reads for the new book by Thomas Frank, of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” fame; looks just excellent. If you’re inclined to buy a hardcover, it would be good to support BuzzFlash — all the sites are struggling, right now.

Be sure to open the Wall Street Journal link — it has good timelines. The last link gives us new information on the Bushie coup … and that’s why I support the books that are coming out now detailing the mayhem; the facts have to be reviewed in sequence to believe them!

“For profit” has turned into a curse; we pay Iraqi’s not to fight one another, we pay insurance companies to raise prices and ignore us, we buy gas with money borrowed and sent to those who do not wish us well and we put millions into the pockets of CEO’s as a reward for screwing us. Does any of that make one nickel’s worth of sense?

Capitalism cannot go predatory and sustain itself — we either get a grip on this or end up on the Nancy Grace show as victims … and then we really ARE reality TV.

Have a good weekend.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
July 22, 2008

Barack Obama began his week-long foreign tour in
Afghanistan, where he met with President Hamid Karzai, and
continued on to Iraq. There, he flew in a helicopter to
the Green Zone with General David Petraeus. Before he left
the United States, he was asked what he would say to
foreign leaders. “I’m more interested in listening,” Obama
replied, “than doing a lot of talking.” John McCain went
to a Yankees game and took a drive in a golf cart with
former President George H. W. Bush. Senator Joe Lieberman
argued that the success of the “surge” policy made the
Iraq visit possible. “If Barack Obama’s policy on Iraq had
been implemented,” he said, “Barack Obama couldn’t go to
Iraq today.” Lieberman also said that, if asked, he would
speak for McCain at the Republican National Convention,
and Hillary Clinton unveiled a new hairdo with the part
shifted to the right. A White House employee accidentally
emailed hundreds of reporters a news item headlined “Iraqi
PM backs Obama troop exit plan”; the story detailed how
Prime Minister Nouri Maliki had said in an interview that
the Obama proposal to withdraw troops from Iraq in sixteen
months was “the right timeframe.” President George W. Bush
announced that he would now agree to a withdrawal inside
“a general time horizon,” rescinded a 1990 ban on offshore
drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf that had been
imposed by his father, and tried to give a little Kentucky
girl named Emily, who had played in the White House T-ball
game, a presidential baseball. The child ran away crying.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced that the 2010 census will
not count the estimated 780,000 same-sex marriages that
will have by then taken place in California and
Massachusetts, and Kay Ryan was named poet laureate of the
United States. “I might take it upon myself,” she said,
“to prevent all bad poetry from being published.” Congress
passed a bill that named the portion of U.S. Route 20A
that leads to the Buffalo Bills stadium “Timothy
J. Russert Highway,” and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch
announced that his ballad “Headed Home,” written in
tribute to his longtime friend Senator Edward Kennedy, who
has a malignant tumor in his brain, will be performed at
the Democratic National Convention. “The words ‘headed
home,’” said Hatch, “mean he is headed home to the
Senate.” Dozens of revelers at the Aquamarine Open Air
Festival near Moscow were left partially blind after a
laser light show burned their retinas, and members of
Finland’s Theater Totti debuted the world’s first opera
for the deaf. Performers conveyed the mood and tone of the
nineteenth-century opera “The Hunt of King Charles” using
sign language and body language, facial expressions, and
two musicians. “I was afraid it would be a pitiful
imitation of opera by the hearing,” said Kaisa Alanne, the
director of the Finnish Association of the Deaf, “but, oh,
how wrong I was! It is as if a new form of art was born.”

A tanker truck on its way to Sugar Land, Texas,
overturned, spilling onto the highway more than 5,000
gallons of what a city spokeswoman described as “healthy,
all-natural molasses,” and after hundreds of formulations,
scientists at Argentina’s Center for Research and
Development in Food Cytotechnology arrived at a prototype
for a juicy, lean hamburger patty by removing the beef fat
and replacing it with a combination of soybean byproducts
and seafood oils. InBev, the Belgian beer company that
makes Stella Artois, completed its purchase of
Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion. “We were betrayed,” said
American brewery employee Dave Liszewski. “The good Lord
was sold out for 30 pieces of silver. We were sold out for
$70 a share.” Potential First Lady Cindy Hensley McCain,
chair of the massive Anheuser-Busch distributor Hensley &
Co., said that she became a licensed pilot because “in
Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small
private plane.” A toad in Australia ate a three-foot-long
snake, Pope Benedict XVI spoke to a crowd of more than
400,000 people about the evils of materialism, and
“Easterbunny,” a red, methane-covered dwarf planet
orbiting the sun beyond Neptune, was designated as the
third plutoid in our solar system and rechristened
“Makemake.”

– Claire Gutierrez
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/07/WeeklyReview2008-07-22

bonus

UNRAVELING REAGAN
Amid Turmoil, U.S. Turns Away From Decades of Deregulation
BOB DAVIS, DAMIAN PALETTA and REBECCA SMITH, Wall Street Journal
July 25, 2008; Page A1

The Death of Reaganomics
E.J. Dionne, Truthdig
Thursday 10 July 2008

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He notes that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a looser set of banking rules, “we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation.” This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early ’80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What’s becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

What’s striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.

“You have to have the person who’s writing the risk bearing the risk,” he says. “That means a whole host of regulations. There’s no way around that.”

While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn’t one of them. But he is highly critical of “the process that produces inequality.”

“I don’t like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars,” Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. “A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me.” He argues that “the preservation of the capitalist system” requires finding new ways of “linking compensation to performance.”

Frank takes a similar view, arguing that CEOs “benefit substantially if the risks they take pay off” but “pay no penalty” if their risks lead to losses or even catastrophe - another sign that capitalism, in its current form, isn’t living by its own rules.

Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization “is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital.” Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. “If you’re dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can’t, you have the advantage.”

“Free trade has increased wealth, but it’s been monopolized by a very small number of people,” Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of “the most vulnerable people in the country.”

In the presidential campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. “Reality has broken in,” says Frank. And none too soon. ++

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Hardcover)
by Thomas Frank, Author of What’s The Matter with Kansas
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
Released on August 5th, Order Now

One of our favorite political books of the last few years is “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” by Thomas Frank.

You can read out 2-part 2004 BuzzFlash interview with Thomas Frank here.

With a fierce, lacerating style — that also has room for empathy — Frank got to the core of the oddity of working class stiffs voting against their own economic and community interests. Using his home state of Kansas as the basis for his sociological/political analysis, Frank wrote a reflective, insightful, often droll tome about the phenomena of people who vote against their own interests.

There is a lot of detailed portraiture of such abandoned and confused citizens in his book, but he blames the Democrats as much as the Republicans, because the Democrats have largely abandoned the issue of class and economic justice, not to mention the growing disparity between the rich and middle class — what’s left of it — in the United States.

Now, he is coming out with a new book that dissects the devastation of the right wing coup that has reached its apotheosis in the Cheney/Bush administration, after beginning its executive branch and congressional trajectory with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Coming from Frank, it should be a scintillating read.

Advance preview from the Chicago Tribune:

Thomas Frank is a brainy, droll Kansas native who has his doubts about capitalism and conservative populism, and can infuriate bothDemocrats and Republicans. In the August Harper’s, he torches the latter with “The Wrecking Crew.”

The journalist/historian with a PhD from the University of Chicago argues that Republicans have betrayed virtually all their principles during the Bush years, personified by the unequivocally outrageous bribery and fraud masterminded by conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Frank contends that put conservatives in charge of government and they inherently behave differently: “Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been through; it has been a professional job.”

Frank details the roots of what he deems a total betrayal of ideas and suggests that a John McCain election victory will only cement “Industry Conservatism” made up of “lobbyists and other angry, righteous profiteers.” Ouch.

– James Warren for the Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher, Metropolitan Books:

From the author of the landmark bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a jaw-dropping investigation of the decades of deliberate—and lucrative—conservative misrule

In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the blundering and corrupt Washington those politicians have given us.

Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters—the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship practiced so outrageously by figures such as Jack Abramoff.

It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.

Stamped with Thomas Frank’s audacity, analytic brilliance, and wit, The Wrecking Crew is his most revelatory work yet—and his most important.

About the Author:

Thomas Frank is the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and One Market Under God. The founding editor of The Baffler and a contributing editor at Harper’s, Frank has received a Lannan award and been a guest columnist for The New York Times. He lives, of course, in Washington, D.C. ++

Some Reality, Please
New York Times Editorial
July 25, 2008

If the Senate could summon some wisdom, it would interrupt its mud wrestling over partisan placebos for the gas crisis long enough to debate something real: emergency help for the nation’s poorest families who face skyrocketing home heating costs this winter.

The Democratic leadership is wisely aiming for a procedural vote in the next day or two that would free up time to debate a badly needed measure to double the existing Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program to $5.1 billion. With 50 co-sponsors, including 12 Republicans, the measure is a must-pass priority if Congress is to have any credibility in facing the energy crisis with something more than the hot air of campaign rhetoric.

Utility analysts warn that the price of heating oil could double this winter in the hardest-hit regions, while natural-gas costs could shoot up 50 percent. This can only mean a deepening crisis for the poorest Americans — the disabled and retired on fixed incomes and impoverished families with children.

Close to six million households were helped last year, but the demand is growing as costs rise and more Americans slip deeper into poverty. Accordingly, the average grant has dropped nationally from $349 to $305. This meets only a fraction of true need and leaves recipients in greater danger of utility cutoffs as they scrimp even more than they have already on food and medicine.

Lawmakers should be mindful that the emergency measure is entitled the Warm in Winter and Cool in Summer Act — a notice that the need extends well beyond frigid northeastern winters. The poor in Arizona can turn to the program this summer to deal with dangerous stretches in the 110 degree range and electricity cutoffs.

What is called for is one of the nation’s scarcest resources — bipartisanship in the Capitol. The energy crisis is a confounding challenge. But helping the poorest Americans right now with basic survival should be the first priority, even if they are not visible on the nightly news every night, griping at the gas pump. ++

Where McCain’s Change Is Bigger Than Obama’s
Bill Scher, HuffPo
July 8, 2008

As Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama both plan to engage each other on the economy this week, this presents an opportunity for reporters and voters to focus on one of the biggest contrasts between them: health care. As Paul Krugman observes, “[health insurnace] premiums surged again after 2000, imposing huge new burdens on business. It’s a good bet that this played an important role in weak job creation.” Fixing our patchwork health insurance system would go a long way to getting our economy back on track.

In most areas of the campaign, Obama offers a change from the policies of the past eight years, and McCain offers a continuation.

But on health care, both offer change. In fact, McCain will change health care for more people than Obama.

All those people potentially affected will have determine if they want the kind of change McCain is offering.

How would McCain’s plan change health care for more people? Because he wants to strip the underpinning of how the vast majority of people get their health insurance, through their employers. (Just under 60% of Americans get insurance from employers, down from when President Bush entered office as fewer businesses offered coverage and the number of uninsured Americans rose.)

Presently, you don’t pay income taxes on the health benefits you get from your employer. McCain would end that policy, which would not only impose a new tax mainly on middle-class families, but also end a strong incentive for employers to offer health benefits at all, and move us all towards a “consumer-driven” health market.

Putting aside the merits of the plan for the moment, it is politically relevant that McCain’s strategy directly impacts the vast majority of people who have health insurance — many of whom are content with what they have, even though the number of uninsured and underinsured Americans is rising.

In contrast, Obama’s plan would create a public insurance option and set new standards for private insurance options so they will be, in his words, “at least as generous as the new public plan and meet the same standards for quality and efficiency.” But anyone happy with their health insurance could simply keep it and would find their plan untouched.

Obama’s change is more targeted, aiming to help the uninsured and underinsured without unnerving the happily insured.

McCain’s change is total, a frontal attack on the entire system as it stands, trying to convince all Americans that they will be happier if most everyone is moved into a new market where you buy insurance out of pocket.

Because Obama’s plan involves an active role for our government — both in creating a public insurance option and serving as a “watchdog” on private plans — most Beltway pundits would argue that Obama is taking the bigger political risk.

But nearly two-thirds of Americans believe “the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.”

There’s hasn’t been much polling about the specifics of McCain’s plan. But as a general rule, the notion of losing something you currently like is always a troubling prospect.

It will take a particularly powerful argument from McCain to overcome that political hurdle, and convince those voters that his brand of health care change is the right change for them. ++

Waiting Doom
How hospitals are killing E.R. patients.
Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines, Slate
Thursday, July 24, 2008, at 6:54 AM ET

Last month, Esmin Green, a 49-year-old mother of six, tumbled off her chair and onto the floor of the Kings County psychiatric E.R. waiting room in New York City. Members of the hospital staff saw her lying there but did nothing for about an hour. When Green was finally brought into the E.R., she was dead. An autopsy revealed that she died from a pulmonary embolism, which occurs when a blood clot forms in the leg, breaks off, and travels to one or both lungs. This can also kill long-haul airplane passengers who sit in one spot for hours: The blood sits stagnant in their legs for so long that it clots. You could say that Green, too, had been on a plane ride of sorts. She’d waited for a psychiatric-unit bed to open up for more than 24 hours, roughly the same time as a trip from New York to Tanzania.

The surveillance video of Green collapsing and lying untended, as hospital staff at Kings County fail to respond to her collapse, is inexcusable by any stretch. And so Nancy Grace, for one, focused on the negligence. But what’s largely missing from this story is the likely cause of Green’s pulmonary embolism. The answer lies in a far more systematic and widespread danger in hospital care: E.R. waits. Why was Green sitting and waiting while blood pooled in her legs? Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can be hazardous to your health, hospitals have incentives to keep their E.R. patients waiting. As a result, there has been an explosion in E.R. wait times over the past few years, even for those who are the sickest.

A major cause for E.R. crowding is the hospital practice of boarding inpatients in emergency departments. This happens when patients who come to the E.R. need to be admitted overnight. If there are no inpatient beds in the hospital (or no extra inpatient nurses on duty that day) then the patient stays in the E.R. long past the completion of the initial emergency work. This is what happened to Green, and it has become widespread and common. The problem is that boarding shifts E.R. resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. While E.R. patients wait for inpatient beds, new patients wait longer to see a doctor. As more new patients come, the waits grow. And an E.R. filled with boarding patients and a full waiting room is an unhappy E.R.: The atmosphere is at once static and chaotic. If you or a loved one has waited for hours in an E.R., you know what we mean. The environment can be unsafe and even deadly. A recent study found that critically ill patients who board for more than six hours in the E.R. are 4 percent more likely to die.

What hospital would promote such a practice? Potentially, those that profit more from boarding, particularly in poorer communities with high numbers of uninsured and Medicaid patients. Imagine you run a hospital. There are two competing sources for inpatient beds. The first source is patients who come in through direct and transfer admissions. They are more likely to come with private insurance and need procedural care, both of which maximize profits. The second source is E.R. patients, who are more likely to be uninsured or have pittance-paying Medicaid and less likely to need high-margin procedures. Do the math: If you fill your hospital with the direct and transfer admissions and maroon the E.R. patients for long periods, you make more money.

In effect, then, E.R. boarding allows hospitals to insulate themselves from the burgeoning needs of the poor. E.R.s are safety nets: By law, we who work in them see any and all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. But as more E.R. beds are devoted to boarders, the E.R. has less space for new patients, which keeps a lid on the number of un- and underinsured. So unless you are having a heart attack and can jump the line, your emergency—though it may still be serious—may wait for so long that you give up and go home. Bad for you, good for the hospital’s bottom line. E.R. boarding also tamps down nursing costs, again not to your benefit. Hospitals generally maintain strict patient-to-nurse ratios for inpatients.

But many hospitals don’t apply the same rules to the E.R. because they can’t control the number of patients who come in that way. Sometimes the nursing ratio in the E.R. can be as high as 8-to-1. That’s unacceptable in inpatient units, but just stack ‘em in the E.R. hallways and suddenly it’s OK.

What about the staff upstairs, who take care of the admitted patients once they leave the E.R.? Their incentives are misaligned, too. Put yourself in an inpatient nurse’s shoes. You are overworked, and your current patients need attention. You get a call from the E.R., saying that a patient like Green is ready to come upstairs. The bed is clean and ready. But you have 20 more things to do before your shift ends in two hours, and you won’t get paid an extra cent if you accept Green to the empty bed. Can’t she wait just a bit more in the E.R.? When the next nurse comes on fresh, you tell yourself, she can admit the new patient. You won’t get in trouble for stalling because no one really measures how long patients stay in the E.R.. So you tell the E.R. nurse that the bed isn’t ready yet. This practice of “bed-hiding” is more common than you think.

What can be done about all this? We think the answer is that hospitals should have to disclose and take responsibility for how long E.R. patients—that is, you—wait for beds. But, not surprisingly, hospitals have lobbied hard to not be held accountable for E.R. crowding and boarding. If they won’t measure and eliminate E.R. boarding on their own, then the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which pays many hospital patients’ bills, or the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, should take this on.

And let’s also hold congressional hearings on E.R. boarding. In England, the National Health System now has a rule that 98 percent of patients have to spend less than four hours in the E.R.. Apparently, the son of a member of parliament spent too long in an E.R., we’ve heard. Esmin Green wasn’t well-connected. But her death should serve as a similar prompt to fix the problem of endless waiting.

Meanwhile, if you have to go the E.R., you can vote with your feet. When you are really sick, of course, go to the closest E.R. or call an ambulance. But if you can wait long enough to choose, go to the E.R. where they don’t make patients wait or board for long periods.

Yes, we know—since hospitals don’t publicize E.R. waits or boarding, you’ll have to go by word of mouth. If, despite your efforts, you or your grandmother is forced to lie in the E.R. all night, complain directly to the hospital administrators who actually have the power to fix the problem. But don’t count on any major changes. As long as hospitals profit more from boarding and aren’t forced to admit to doing it, your trip to the E.R. will be as long as a flight to Africa—but without the in-flight movie and far more risky. ++

Blackwater Getting Out Of Security Business
MATT APUZZO and MIKE BAKER, HuffPo
July 21, 2008

MOYOCK, N.C. — Blackwater Worldwide said Monday that it planned a shift away from the security contracting business that earned it millions of dollars and made it a flash point in the debate over the use of security contractors in war zones.

“The experience we’ve had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk,” company founder and CEO Erik Prince told The Associated Press during a daylong visit to the company’s North Carolina compound.

Blackwater executives say they have unfairly become a symbol for all contractors in Iraq and thus the company is a target for those opposed to the war. It will continue guarding U.S. officials in Iraq but its future will be focused on training, aviation and logistics.

“Security was not part of the master plan, ever,” company president Gary Jackson said.

The company has made hundreds of millions of dollars defending U.S. diplomats in Iraq, one of several government contracts that earned Blackwater more than $1 billion since 2001.

The company has been under intense scrutiny since September when its security contractors opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection while responding to a car bombing. Seventeen Iraqis were killed, prompting congressional hearings and an FBI investigation.

In 2005 and 2006, security jobs, including protecting diplomats and helping secure New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, represented more than 50 percent of the company’s business.

In the past year, Jackson said, the name Blackwater has become synonymous with security contractors. “It’s been like Coca-Cola,” he said. “Blackwater: Security contractors.”

The security business is down to about 30 percent of Blackwater revenue now and Jackson said it will go much lower.

“If I could get it down to 2 percent or 1 percent, I would go there,” he said, adding that the media have falsely portrayed much about that aspect of the company. “If you could get it right, we might stay in the business.”

The Justice Department is expected to decide soon whether to bring charges against a handful of contractors involved in the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. The company itself is not a target of the investigation and has pledged its cooperation with the probe.

Company executives would not say whether they expect their contractors to face charges but said an indictment likely wouldn’t affect the core business model.

“Indictment of any of the folks who were in Nisoor Square wouldn’t be grounds for disbarrment (from government contracts),” Andrew Howell, the company’s general counsel, said.

Blackwater’s 7,000-acre compound offers unparalleled training facilities that attract swarms of U.S. military, federal law enforcement and local officials each year.

The company also has expanded its aviation division, which provides airplane and helicopter maintenance and also drops supplies into hard-to-reach military bases. A 6,000-foot runway is under construction and a large map in the company’s hanger shows units based across the world, from Africa to the Middle East to Australia.

“Our focus is away from security work. We’re just not bidding on it,” Jackson said.

The State Department extended Blackwater’s contract to provide embassy security this year. Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy said Monday he has not been notified by Blackwater that it intends to reduce or eliminate security work.

“They have a contract with us through the next nine or ten months,” Kennedy said. “They have not indicated to us that they are attempting to get out of our current contract.”

That decision reflects not only the difficult year Blackwater has had but also the fact that there’s likely not as much growth opportunity.

The growth in Blackwater’s aviation and international training sectors could also buffer the company against other changes in military policy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking into why the military uses private contractors for combat and security training.

“In my mind, the fundamental question that remains unanswered is this: Why have we come to rely on private contractors to provide combat or combat-related security training for our forces?” Gates wrote in a July 10 memo to the Pentagon’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen.

“Further, are we comfortable with this practice, and do we fully understand the implications in terms of quality, responsiveness and sustainability?”

The memo was released Monday to The Associated Press by the office of Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. Webb raised concerns about the role of private contractors and specifically Blackwater, which opened a new counterterrorism training center in San Diego last month over the opposition of city officials.

Webb had been blocking Senate consideration of four civilian Defense Department nominees while waiting for answers. On Monday, Webb told Gates he was lifting his opposition to the nominees. ++

Bush Authoritarianism: Blackwater+Amway=GOP, Part 4
DHinMI, Daily Kos
Mon Oct 29, 2007

Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
Tim Shorrock, Salon
Jul. 23, 2008

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Add comment July 26th, 2008