"I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster," President Roosevelt said at the beginning of World War II.
That was a different time, a time when the president's own party, led by Senator Harry Truman, established a committee to investigate war profiteering which, as Senator Byron Dorgan recently reminded his colleagues, saved the taxpayers $15 billion in 1940s dollars.
In the current GWOT (Global War on Taxpayers?), the business of war is intimately bound up with an epidemic of crony contracting, fraud, conflicts of interest and the crushing of government whistleblowers like Bunny Greenhouse, a top military official who was demoted this week, after confirming the suspicions of Rep. Henry Waxman and others who have assiduously documented in detail the many instances where Pentagon officials violated competition rules in favor of Halliburton.
While much of the blame for the general lack of accountability can be pinned on Bush and "Daddy Warbucks" Cheney, whose personal and familial ties to the war profiteers are legendary, the silence of fiscal conservatives in Congress who have battled the Pentagon over other contract boondoggles is nothing short of astonishing.
After all, the Truman Committee proposal (which was put out there by a bi-partisan coalition of Senators led by Dick Durbin and Larry Craig, with a similar resolution introduced by Jim Leach and John Tierney in the House) is not that far-reaching a proposal, given that the point is to protect the taxpayers, and given that it would be co-chaired by a member of the President's own party.
Many Senators have ambitions for higher office. You'd think they'd be pressuring the leadership to let them follow Truman's example.
The lack of effective oversight has meant that for the CEOs of the top defense contractors, the war has not been hell -- it's been a helluva deal: A new UFE/IPS CEO pay study reveals that total pay for the nation's big war contract CEOs rocketed upwards by 200 percent -- a huge increase compared to the 7 percent pay hike received by most big-company CEOs between 2001 and 2004.
(Keep in mind that virtually every CEO pay expert who is not paid to tell corporate board members that their man is "above average" and should be so compensated agrees that the rise in CEO pay in the last decade has been unjustified. Average CEO:Worker pay ratio now stands at 431:1.)
The take of the big war profiteers can also be contrasted with the pay received by those sacrificing their lives on the front lines: In 2004 the big defense CEOs were paid an average 23 times what military generals were paid -- almost double the 12-to-1 ratio of three years ago. (Thus it's no surprise that the revolving door between industry and government spins faster and faster.)
Look at it this way: it would take an Air Force airman 3,634 years to make the $88 million that United Technologies CEO George David made in 2004 (a pittance of which he gave to Bush/Cheney as one of their many reelection campaign "Rangers")
The biggest buck for the bang, according to the report, went to David H. Brooks, CEO of bulletproof vest maker DHB Industries, who made off with $70 million in 2004, 13,349% more than his 2001 compensation of $525,000. (That doesn't include the $186 million he made from selling off gobs of company stock before it fell -- another classic case of Enronomics.) In May, the US Marines recalled more than 5,000 DHB armored vests after questions were raised about their effectiveness. By that time, Brooks had pocketed over $250 million.
What about Halliburton CEO David Lesar you might ask? He received a 171 percent pay raise between 2003 and 2004, when the firm fed "leftover food in boxes and garbage bags" to Turkish and Filipino subcontractors working at a military camp in Iraq.
So where's the outrage in Congress?
Where are Susan Collins and John McCain and the committees responsible for defending taxpayers from Pentagon waste, fraud and abuses?
Even the libertarian Cato Institute is willing to acknowledge that because "'the vast majority of money these people make comes from taxpayer dollars," there are 'issues that need to be examined."
At least.
It tells you something about the time we live in when it sounds ridiculous to say that if someone in Congress really had guts, they'd start talking about much more far-sighted proposals like the one made by John Kenneth Galbraith during the peak of the Vietnam War, when he suggested that it was time to honestly recognize that since the big defense companies like General Dynamics and Lockheed do all but a fraction of their business with the government and rarely compete, they are really public firms and should be nationalized. (See John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized," N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 16, 1969.)
“By no known definition of private enterprise can these specialized firms or subsidiaries be classified as private corporations,” Galbraith explained.
Alas, the greatest enthusiasm for Galbraith’s proposal came from individuals associated with the defense firms who had witnessed fantastic waste and misuse of the nation’s resources, but the most resistance came from liberals in Congress.