'Halliburton's Army' and 'The Three Trillion Dollar War'; 2010 Election/War Issues

Free Corporations from Slavery-End Buying of Stock Shares of These Fiction ‘Individuals’

If a corporation treated legally as an individual isn’t a collective then what is? Perhaps joint partnerships should be the largest communal business form to be legally allowed to exist, such that when people partners named A+B+C+D+E spill oil they are sued and go out of business because they have financially responsibility instead of individual collective Big A is sued for spilling oil yet the owners of a have no personal financial responsibility though the stock value may or may not suffer. Well, more of this subject later. The economic future of the United States is under assault from a number of directions including Mexico, the broadcast media and corporatism.

Reading Pratap Chatterjee ‘s 2009 book “Halliburton’s Army” on those tens of thousands of people working abroad in construction projects and providing services to fulfill U.S. Government contracts pertaining to war missions often of a protracted nature, I found new information to fill out some of the details of the more general work I had recently read; the ‘The Three Trillion Dollar War’ co-authored by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics (Stiglitz), on the Iraq and Afghanistan financial swamp devastating the U.S. economy. There are many historical evolutionary business elements involved in the private business contracting for each war, too many to review here (I suggest reading each book), yet certain points exist regarding the phenomena of globalism, corporatism and corruption that may be cited or considered briefly.

The Brown and Root Corporation owned for a while by Halliburton has been involved in vast military construction projects since the Vietnam War. They were part of a consortium that built 95% of large U.S. military bases in Vietnam. Halliburton/Brown and Root was the largest contractor in the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts as well. From L.B.J. to Dick Cheney the Halliburton/KBR relationships were too cozy comprising a conflict of interest and possibly a draft toward war for the profit of private interests. My concern here is simply with the phenomena of corporatism upon U.S. employment and environmental interests rather than in recounting the history of corruption of Halliburton and Brown and Root, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, LOGCAP, the naval equivalent or so forth, Pentagon procurements or awarding of contracts etc.

Much of the employment by Halliburton/KBR contractors abroad goes to TCNs or Third Country Nationals. Even Guantanamo Bay was built by flown in Philippine workers paid 2.50 and hour and then sent back to Manila. U.S. taxpayers pay huge amounts of money to fund private contractor developments in support of military deployments abroad in areas of conflict and instead of Americans or locals getting the jobs, much of the time TCNs are hired because they are the cheapest or safest and produce the most profit for the ostensible U.S. contractor (Halliburton relocated its headquarters to Dubai).

The degree of corruption in granting military support contracts is substantial, and perhaps itself comprises a reason for war if not for assassinating Presidents who would not kick back so well to particular corporations.

These protracted war and nation rebuilding missions abroad kickback product purchases to several American food corporations as well as other suppliers, and the phenomena creates a political draft for continuity of the phenomenon.

Corporatism is something like socialism, yet it is not as fair regarding lower level distribution of wages. Corporatism in foreign war contracting may also supply start up foreign corporations that bribe contract-awarding officials with a percentage of future profits, and these foreign corporations later become influential over U.S. interests.

Large multinational corporations that influence U.S. politicians in a variety of ways conform to a phenomenon of corporatism. The poor and unemployed in the United States are lint for both major political parties as is the environment. Unfortunately simple human corruption and greed in and out of government are the heart of the problem.

With the primary broadcast media owned by powers of concentrated wealth the basic agency of propaganda is unchallenged; U.S. nationalism is degraded along with the environment.

Without a political rectification toward smaller business, ecologically renewable, free enterprise nationalism the future of the United States is that of being exploited by globalist concentrated wealth and power. The Democratic Party has lost interest in really supporting new private sector employment for the poor and those out of work for the longest time first. The Republican Party and right wing talk radio speak out against ‘big government’. When in political power some conservative politicians such as Dick Cheney acted as if they felt entitled to take out their contempt for big government by giving big contracts to corporate firms with special interests that have been friendly to their career interests in the past.

For some reason dumping huge multi-billion dollar contracts to the private sector on the public credit card is considered to be thumbing the nose at ‘big government’. Such conservatives divert investment capital abroad, create vast public debt and reduce social services to the poor in the United States.

There is another down side to this military-industrial-conservative deficit spending for protracted corrupt, inept nation rebuilding that is mostly unknown in the U.S.A.; there is a pervasive two-scale pay system for these contractors working on U.S. military projects abroad. Chatterjee writes on page 144 of ‘Halliburton’s Army’; “In fact salaries” (of TNC’) “were tied to country of origin. Thus a Bangladeshi cleaner would be paid less than a Pakistani, a Georgian truck driver more than a Fijian, and a white South African security guard would make more than an Indian for doing the very same job. The poorer the country of citizenship, the less the workers were paid, which is not unlike the caste system in India or the apartheid system in South Africa before the African National Congress came to power.” End quote.

The practice of paying Third Country Nationals far less than U.S. workers to produce profit is of course at the heart of corporate capitalism of a Spenserian kind. Americans generally know that since the end of the cold war they face more laboring challenges from abroad. Americans working abroad may not be allowed to ‘dirty work’ because it might make the TNCs more restive for higher, equal wages in the right belief that the Americans are not superior doing equal work. That could lead to a reduction in corporate profit. In the long run such practices may lead to increased popular bias globally against U.S. citizens generally.

I believe that a new era of nationalism of an ecological economic nature is the direction the United States should go. For most of my life I have just done unskilled or semi-skilled manual labor such as house repainting, and I enjoy gardening and nature and would be too happy to transition to a less wasteful national economy and world trading regime in which the transfer of natural resources over international borders is done for reasons of comparative ecological interest rather than for temporal fiduciary advantage of exploitative individuals through trans-national corporations.

Corporations are not mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence nor Constitution, and fundamentally there is no reason why they should be granted a legal fiction status as individuals of an immortal nature. They could at least be limited in size of employees to 3000, and citizens could be limited to investing in ownership of just three legal fiction individual corporations each in order to prevent legal fictions from the ownership of real American opportunities that through sheer financial and economic power exclude Americans from equal opportunity in free enterprise opportunities with other individuals in the United States of America. If corporations are even fiction individuals they should be protected from being bought and sold through stock offerings as if they were slaves anyway. Though it is a silly legal theory, the emancipation proclamation might be applied to the fiction individuals too, and corporations finally given their freedom with nobody owning them anymore.

The Democratic Party led by President Obama is continuing these foreign financial fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq that will continue as they are so long as American taxpayers allow foreign and concentrated wealth loans to be borrowed I their name and spent abroad. The opportunity costs for diverting investment capital abroad are immense. The fundamental profiteers from these foreign expenditures are corrupt cadres of corporate contractors. The profits foreign and Muslim led corporations profiting from these oil sales and wars are also huge. Already some Muslim subcontractor of the U.S. Government may have slipped in a Pakistani nuclear device for burial in the New Mexico desert—who can say? From Mississippi River trans-ocean shippers to port security and U.S. rail the Muslim wealth has increased its power in the American economy. Just one nuclear device already in the nation and ready for use whenever times are deemed appropriate could vaporize the nation’s (The United States in this case) federal capitol. A more sober nationalism would make not only the poor and unemployed of America happy as they found good jobs and housing, but reduce the non-renewable wastage factor of those that believe that capitalism fundamentally means the advantage of the most corrupt in global economic slight of hand, fraud, corruption perfidy and treachery. Humanity may be able to continue progress with such activities forming a part of the economic facts of life, yet it really isn’t helpful. The United States and the world economy too can progress better with a more advantaged localism in politics with a global awareness of the vital importance of keeping a healthy environment and humanism ashore on the Earth on the threshold of realms of absolute spirit. The human destiny of reconciliation unto realms of absolute spirit may journey beyond an infinity of galaxies or Universes, yet begins with national rationalism and lunar development while we serve as a priesthood of believers in true compassion toward all.