At Homeland Security, contractors outnumber federal workers according to an article by Ed O’Keefe in Washington Post today.
When Advisor Ridge Discussed the establishment of the Homeland Security Department, it was immediately evident that unionization of employees was to be eschewed at all costs:
“SECRETARY MINETA: Thank you very much, Governor Ridge. For the past 40 years, ever since federal workers were allowed to unionize, the President has retained government-wide authority to exempt federal agencies from collective bargaining requirements if the agency's primary function revolves around national security work. In 1978, this position was codified into federal law, and it has worked well ever since.
And I speak from experience. I am the Cabinet officer who has had the most recent experience of building a new agency, the Transportation Security Administration, the largest undertaking of its kind since World War II. The flexibility called for in the President's request for legislation that establishes the department of homeland security was critical to our success in standing up the TSA, and I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.
“The enemy is fast and nimble, and we must be, as well. And so this proposal ensures that the President will have the tools to meet a rapidly changing threat. “
“GOVERNOR RIDGE: Again, we call on the Senate leadership to make sure that the President retains his executive discretion and prerogative as it relates to national security in this new department, and two, that they go about the business of fashioning the new department and getting -- working with this administration and with their House colleagues to get a measure to the President's desk that protects this country, so that he can sign it. “
Please note that “to exempt federal agencies from collective bargaining requirements if the agency's primary function revolves around national security work” has resulted in the return of many Federal Homeland Security workers to the level of de facto “at will” employees as their unions are busted.
The eventual result has been the systematic dismantling of Federal departments, replaced by for-profit contractors. It is no secret that these same contractors have significant financial ties to a large number of governmental officials. Check out http://www.OpenSecrets.org and prepare to be dismayed – or educated.
The sad fact is that most of these contractors are outsourcing jobs which (if really necessary) should have been assigned to Federal employees. The contracting multi-national corporations and workers – many of which are not even domiciled in the USA or citizens thereof – are sucking up trillions of dollars which our children and grandchildren must repay.
Their frontline workers – most often Third World coolies living in upscale concentration camps – displace local “unreliable” labor in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are compliant and work for a few dollars a day. American corporate overseers are given five- and six-figure incomes (no taxes) to crack the whip, and the major shareholders, officers and directors bathe in the blood-soaked profits.
WORST of all: by contracting “security” responsibilities to third parties such as Blackwater/XE, we have in effect hired hitmen to perform tasks which cannot be done by American military personnel without violation of the Constitution or Rules of Engagement under the UCMJ. These contractors have killed, maimed and tortured with impunity – under the protective umbrella of the fictional “War on Terror”.
Thus by proxy we Americans become terrorists: hiring arms-length surrogates to kill innocent civilians (“collateral damage”) to advance the economic aims of the Few, the Wealthy, the Elite.
We Americans were told that 9/11 had something to do with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, as Tony Blair has recently reiterated in remarks at the Iraq Inquiry. By repeating the same lies, Blair still expects Brits and rest of the world to somehow accept the conclusion that the 9/11 assault on the WTC and other targets by Wahadi Saudis could be avenged by an attack on a third party: Iraq.
Enter the contractors. In order to accomplish the true purposes of the War on Iraq, British and American governments have paid mercenaries to do that which an American or British soldier could not – hampered as we are by the Geneva Conventions. So, our hired guns can kill, rape and pillage – immune from all legal consequence – and the interests of multi-national profiteers is advanced.
Under a true Free Market, Iraqi citizens should be free to determine who (if anyone) helps them develop their (not ours or BP’s) vast oil and gas reserves. Their own national fate – to fight among themselves or create a true unified federal government is theirs to choose. How can we impose any form of government on a foreign land?
According to former President Bush, the War on Terror constitutes “…the hunt for an enemy that … cannot stand freedom … [and] does not believe in free speech, free religion, free dissent, does not believe in women's rights, and they have a desire to impose their ideology on much of the world.”
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