The General Accounting Office says they don’t have enough manpower to audit the Iraq reconstruction contracts. So much money has been spent, and so much of it has vaporized, that there isn’t staff enough to follow it.
I ask you, imagine the white-collar power to abscond with that loot!
Granted it takes less effort to bury a needle in a haystack than it takes to find it, but we are not talking about needles. If so much money missing, let’s look for contractors with accountancy muscle enough to have hauled it off. Like a polar bear gone missing at the zoo, at first it’s inexplicable, but we know it would take a pretty conspicuous baby stroller.
If you don’t have the accountants to trace billions of diverted funds, hire them from the contractors who have them. Lots of accountants were needed to devise, execute and cover-up the heist. Where are they?
When David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, with mirrors it’s said, he didn’t do it alone. You and I could say we didn’t have the staff to go out there in the grass and find his un-magical cohorts. But Mr. Copperfield has the staff. Their resumes probably laud their skills for mirror holding.
Corruption is pretty much endemic to the capitalist mode of production, love, and war. After all, its upper strata of advocates talk constantly about the supposed ‘virtue of selfishness’. And even more than talk about that, they act upon it, too!
It is only amongst a very few capitalist countries (ex..Scandinavian ones) that have taken major socialized measures that have been able to scrub out somewhat, the curse of constant corruption amongst those in power. Elsewhere in the capitalist world, like from the US to Mexico to Nigeria, well watch out!
The two world trade towers of US corruption are, the insurance driven medical system and the Pentagon. But let’s face it, corruption runs throughout the American world of US government contracts (Katrina for just one blatant example), ‘education’, legal and policing systems, zoning laws and ‘development’, etc. and so on. We are swimming in a sea of corruption in the US.
Without all the corruption in place, we could probably pretty much get by on work weeks of 5-10 hours and be without all the contamination of our environment we now are being blanketed with. But with the corruption endemic to ‘free enterprise’, most of us will all perhaps soon be working 80-100 hours a week, and the net result will be no planet left to inhabit!
Capitalism is corrupt, unfair, unfree, and dangerous to our health. Cronyism is its life blood. And cronies ‘abscond with that loot!’, as Eric just put it.
Capitalism gives most of us no real incentive to work, beyond just obtaining survival for ourselves and family. Certainly our paid work is not allowed to help produce a better world. Our work becomes hateful drudgery forced on us by others welding whips.
Maybe they employ the same accounting firm as DumFox news….