Uncle Sugar / Chris Floyd's latest is a barnburner

[UpInArms]

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/02/27/120.html

excerpt:

William Bush is a director of Engineered Support Systems Inc., a supplier of high-tech military goods to -- well, to the highest bidder. Just last year they sold $13 million worth of advanced radar gear to upgrade communist China's fleet of fighter jets -- you know, the kind that force down U.S. spy planes with such aplomb. This is just par for the family course, however; William's brother, Prescott Jr., is head of the America- China Chamber of Commerce, while Pretzel's brother Neil is in bed with the son of former communist chieftain Jiang Zemin.

But helping arm a dictatorial regime that tyrannizes its own people, invades its neighbors and actually possesses large stockpiles of WMD is just a sideline for Uncle Bill. (Although, again, it's a family tradition -- after all, it's what Papa George did for years with his special little friend, Saddam.) Mostly, Bill's ESSI does boffo box office with nephew Georgie's Pentagon and that new family investment opportunity, the Department of Homeland Security. And this is where those phantom Iraqi WMDs -- so maniacally hyped by Junior -- come in, investigator Margie Burns reports in the Prince George's Journal.

Among its many wares for the "warfighter" (the firm follows current Pentagon usage in replacing the ancient and honorable name of "soldier" with this nerdy adolescent jargon), ESSI markets a "Chemical Biological Protected Shelter System" unit -- a mobile shed that can provide a non-contaminated area for command centers or field hospitals during a WMD attack. In the very first week of George's war, with the television generals warning every hour of impending bioterror doom hurtling toward the troops, Uncle Bill's boys raked in $19 million for a shipment of CBP units, an ESSI press release reports. This was on top of $44 million worth of the anti-WMD units ordered during Pretzel's panic-mongering before the war.

...more...

[hedda_foil]

1. War profiteering is inevitable, inescapable -- even laudable

And so it goes, on and on, the great wheel of grease. Bush's bellicose policies -- obviously based on the Scriptures: "There shall be war, and rumors of war" -- foment a never-ending cycle of blowback and revenge, of fear, instability and global militarization. (Indeed, cosmic militarization: a whole armada of new "space weapons" programs are now in preparation, Wired reports.) But this is the kind of moral chaos the Bush-Walker clan has always profited from, as Kevin Phillips shows in his devastating new history, "American Dynasty."

In revolutionary Russia, the Bush-Walkers did business with Reds and Whites; then they helped arm the Nazis and the Allies. His descendants arm China and threaten it -- as always, making money both ways. The nature of the customer doesn't matter -- king, communist, nazi, sheikh, warlord, poobah -- it all comes down to this: Are they open for business?

So did George Walker Bush attack Iraq just so his uncle could shift a little product? No. But for generations, he and his family and their silky ilk -- the higher hustlers, in search of easy money -- have used bloodshed, hatred and deceit to turn public policy, and public treasuries, into engines of private gain. War profiteering is inevitable, inescapable -- even laudable -- in the waking nightmare of corruption and death they've helped foist upon the world.

[teryang]

2. It's a great way to divert FICA revenues to defense

They attack the "impractibility" of social security and socialized medicine 24/7. But they are only attacking the benefits part. The revenues based upon regressive taxation of the working classes they love. These they divert to the defense and security contractors, owned and run by the "freemarketers" or rather the freebooting parasites in the ruling class (their families) who make their living off government contracts procured by political favoritism and bs propaganda.

[Virginian]

3. Oh, I see..

They didn't have to actually find WMDs to make money, they only had to hype them. The existence was not necessary, only the threat of their existance was necessary.

Too bad for the people having to actually fight Bushes war that his uncle's company didn't sell bullet proof vests.