Saturday, February 26, 2011

Hey Ho, The Privateers

Listen to either the mainstream or (much of the) alternative media and you will be informed that those nasty Republicans want to privatize the world! Not so for the Democrats; they supposedly represent our last line of defense against the nefarious GOP.

It MIGHT sound reasonable, but it is generally not true. The Democrats don't mind privatization as long as most people aren't aware of it.

Case in point. While liberals screamed and howled at the Bush administration for employing "private security" contractors -- mercenaries -- for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number employed during the Bush years pale in comparison to the number employed by the Obama administration.

According to Justin Elliott at Salon.com,
The number of private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan has more than tripled to about 19,000 since June 2009, according to a new congressional study...
Not only is this far more expensive to American taxpayers, but it also serves a very specific political purpose. As Elliott points out, "contractor deaths are not closely tracked and publicly disclosed in the same way that troop deaths are." Seems to be a conniving method for covering up information that would tend to anger the voting public.

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