Everybody thought it was a big deal last spring when President Bush announced his "surge" of 20,000 troops in Iraq, which brings the total number to 160,000, four years after the invasion.
Meanwhile, with little public or Congressional scrutiny, the president has been eagerly shelling out billions to maintain an even larger private armed force in Iraq.
According to the journalist Jeremy Scahill -- without whose dogged reports in The Nation and on Democracy Now the story would be virtually unknown -- U.S. taxpayers are now supporting a private-security force of 180,000 in Iraq. That's larger than our formal military presence.
By contrast, in the 1991 Gulf War, "the ratio of troops to private soldiers was about 60 to 1," Scahill writes on Counterpunch.
Scahill reports that neither journalists nor elected officials have been able to ascertain exactly how much Bush is lavishing on this massive rent-a-cop force, which operates with much more impunity in Iraq than the formal army.
Some in Congress claim that the figure might be as high as 40 cents per dollar spent on the war.
Given that we're burning through $2 billion per week in Iraq, that means that a few secretive private-security firms -- a "coalition of the billing," to quote Scahill -- are shaking us down for some $800 million every week, or a cool $42 billion per year.
The opportunity costs of this boondoggle are monumental. I'm sure we can all think of more productive ways to spend $42 billion than to send a bunch of armed, little-supervised henchmen into a foreign country.
Here's mine: $42 billion represents about six times the annual budget for our dismal school lunch program.

http://destroyamway.blogspot.com/2008/01/another-amwayblackwater-family.html
Excerpt:

Sunday, January 20, 2008


Another Amway/Blackwater Family Tradition: Sponging off the US Government

Eric Prince Dick Devos os amwaya/quixtar/alticor
I have previously noted that brothers-in-law, Rich DeVos of Amway and Erik Prince, who runs Blackwater USA, have a penchant for high mark-ups of their products and services as well as a dislike for paying their taxes.

Another DeVos/Prince family tradition is living off of the largess provided by the government. It's no secret that being a recipient of corporate welfare is good work if you can find it. Quick aside: David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), recently appeared on Bill Moyer's Journal.

It's well known that Prince makes a lot of his money from no-bid government contracts. What about DeVos and Amway? As the late Molly Ivins reported in 1997, being one of the top contributors to the GOP is not all give and no take: in fact, Amway was able to enjoy a $283 million tax break passed by the then-Republican Congress. More recently, DeVos and his wife received a windfall from the government for land they own. Although they rail against big government, DeVos and Prince like the government big enough for them to enrich billionaires--namely themselves.
Posted by Scoobie Davis at 12:29 PM