Health Care Horror Show

After eight years in a Bush coma, Congress is busy "working" again and proving it doesn't work. The health care debate is a classic of evasions, non-sequiturs, empty rhetoric and lobbyist lies to patch together reform that will look like a Frankenstein monster with a Dr. Strangelove deception at the heart.

Despite public support for a government insurance plan, House and Senate members are going through contortions to craft something to look like one but guaranteed to fail.

Even Tom Daschle, the President's derailed first choice for health czar, has had an opinion transplant. Last year, he wrote a book arguing that a single-payer health care system would be fair, effective and save billions of dollars. Now he has joined has-been Republicans Bob Dole and Howard Baker to oppose a federal insurance plan.

"We've come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue," Daschle now says.

This recalls the classic response of a general in "Dr. Strangelove" who, being asked how a system designed to avoid nuclear devastation has allowed a failure that is about to blow up the world, "Well, I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

The military metaphor seems apt in the circumstances. As a nation, we don't outsource wartime safety of citizens to private contractors (with the exception of Blackwater, which proves the point). Why then has saving lives in peacetime become a for-profit enterprise that clearly isn't working for individuals and is endangering the whole economy to boot?

Is socialized medicine any more of a threat to the American way of life than a socialized Armed Forces?

Dark Days for Blackwater

Everybody's favorite rent-a-goon service is going out of business in Iraq even before our troops leave.

After bad publicity and audits by the FBI and Homeland Security, Blackwater International's security business is down to about 30 percent of its revenue from a high of more than 50 percent and headed lower.

"If I could get it down to 2 percent or 1 percent, I would go there," the company president said this week, blaming the media for the decline and scolding them, "If you could get it right, we might stay in the business."

Score one for the journalism that exposed, among other abuses, the deadly hail of Blackwater gunfire that left 17 Iraqis dead and prompted the Baghdad government to revoke its license.

But shedding tears for the Bush Administration's favorite privatized murderers may be premature, according to Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater's Boswell, who points out that it is slithering into new areas of work, including spying, undercover operations against terrorists and drug dealers as well as "wrapping up work on its own armored vehicle, the Grizzly, as well as its Polar Airship 400, a surveillance blimp Blackwater wants to market to the Department of Homeland security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border."

Lou Dobbs will be thrilled.

Nobody Loves Blackwater But Bush

The Iraqis don't want them, the FBI calls them murderers and American homeowners are trying to move them out of their backyard. Only the Bush Administration keeps giving Blackwater love--and contracts.

In the latest misadventures of Mercenaries-R-Us, it took an order from a federal judge last week to force San Diego's mayor to let Blackwater open its new training facility after 200 residents led by a congressman protested “a black mark on American democracy.”

Since gunning down 17 Iraqis last September, Blackwater has reportedly signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for “protective services” in Iraq and Afghanistan and been awarded millions more in contracts from the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

All this comes months after the FBI found that at least 14 of the Baghdad shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for Iraq security contractors, and the Justice Department is investigating charges that Blackwater employees sold US arms on the black market that ended up in the hands of terrorists.

Nonetheless, in April, the State Department renewed Blackwater's contract to provide security, a move Prime Minister al-Maliki adviser Sami al-Askari called "bad news...because they have committed acts of aggression, killed Iraqis, and this has not been resolved yet positively for families of victims."

Blackwater is so deeply entrenched that even Barack Obama has not "ruled out" their continued involvement in Iraq. Starting with hefty contributions to Bush's campaigns by its founder, the company has privatized the war with $1 billion of mayhem--and counting.

Buying Lives: Army Ups the Ante

In the past three weeks, more than 6,000 U. S. Army captains have accepted payments of $25,000 to $35,000 to serve three more years.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved the incentives last month as a temporary measure to retain “a generation of junior and mid-level officers and NCOs who have been tested in battle like none other in decades."

The money is paltry compared to the billions involved in fighting the war in Iraq, but it sheds light on the human costs of our continuing presence there.

"In the Army there has never been anything like this in memory," said Col. Paul Aswell, director of officer policy for Army personnel. "The bonuses are...a measure of payback to the family. They get this windfall to ease some of the pain of service in this environment."

The Washington Post reports a Brigadier General’s comment: "For a young family, these captains have known nothing but war and nonstop deployments. No amount of money can compensate me for missing...my daughter's first play.”

No taxpayer will begrudge this “windfall” for those who pay the real price for prolonging a pointless war, but anyone with financial qualms might want to compare an Army captain’s salary of up to $60,000 a year with the $445,000 it takes to keep a Blackwater guard there.

Honorable service is much cheaper to buy than the efforts of those who besmirch the nation’s reputation by killing innocent civilians.

Building in Baghdad

The new American embassy in Iraq is a perfect metaphor for our experience there. It’s unfinished, behind schedule, unsafe to occupy, more expensive than expected and, from the start, beset by bungling and possible corruption.

Symbolically, the 21 buildings were intended to move American diplomats from Saddam Hussein’s former palace to a compound secure from bomb, mortar and rocket attacks where they could live and work in relative safety.

But the project has been mismanaged to the point that the more than half-a-billion-dollar budget has ballooned by another $192 million and two key structures will not be finished before 2009.

Now, as with everything else in Iraq, Congress is trying to find out what went wrong. The myriad of questions include:

*Why the Washington official overseeing the project has been barred from Iraq by Ambassador Ryan Crocker,

*Why formaldehyde fumes in a facility built to house embassy guards by a Kuwaiti contractor and a faulty electrical system installed by a former Halliburton subsidiary have made it unsafe to open,

*Why offices to house Gen. David Petraeus and his staff are now being reconfigured to safeguard classified material at an additional cost of $14.7 million.

Like nation-building in Iraq, construction of the largest U.S. embassy in the world is not going well. State Department officials, with their Blackwater security guards, are going to be spending an unpredictable amount of time, money and human lives trying to get it right.

Phony Soldiers With Real Bullets

As Washington debates the humongous issue of Rush Limbaugh’s outburst about unpatriotic “phony soldiers,” there is news today about murderous drive-by shootings in Iraq by quasi-soldiers.

The New York Times cites a report by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: “Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded.”

In what is now becoming familiar asymmetry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday was asking Limbaugh’s bosses for an apology as the House Committee was preparing to grill State Department and Blackwater officials about the behavior of bodyguards whose mission is supposed to be defensive--195 shootings from 2005 until early September, a rate of 1.4 a week, incidents in which 163 times they fired first.

Blackwater is emerging as one more piece of the disheartening picture of Wild West chaos in Iraq, with millions of American dollars disappearing and civilian profiteers free to treat locals as targets in a turkey shoot.

Among those testifying today will be Blackwater’s owner and founder Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and intern in Bush I's White House, who has contributed $200,000 to the Republican National Committee since 1998.

According to the House report, his company has dismissed 122 employees in the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, insubordination and failure to report incidents or lying about them.

Congressman will be asking about what they have been doing in our name while the Senate keeps America safe by trying to get Rush Limbaugh fired.