The New Fascism, or Corporate Statism, American-Style

Here's the most recent installment about a subject I have discussed many times before:

Hundreds of U.S. military and government officials routinely leave their posts for jobs with private contractors who deal with the government, a process that has eroded the lines between government and the private sector, according to report released by a watchdog group on Tuesday.

"There is a revolving door between the government and large private contractors where conflict of interest is the rule, not the exception," said the report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a Washington-based group that monitors military expenditures.

"The revolving door has become such an accepted part of federal contracting in recent years that it is frequently difficult to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins," adds the report, titled"The Politics of Contracting."

The document says that the current contracting system where current and former public servants use their positions for private gain means powerful private contractors can potentially rig the system in their own favor.

The group examined the current top 20 federal government contractors from January 1997 through May 2004 and found that in fiscal year 2002, those top 20 contractors received over 40 percent of the 244 billion dollars in total contracts awarded by the federal government.

The group says that it also identified 291 instances involving 224 high-ranking government officials who moved to the private sector to serve as lobbyists, board members or executives of the contractors.

The report found that at least one-third of the former senior government employees who went to work for or served on the board of a government contractor were in official positions allowing them to influence government contracting decisions, and that accountability rules were not enough to control them.

This is the issue I have discussed at great length here, and here (and here's a post about the"outsourcing" of torture). And although the article does not mention him, one of the preeminent examples of this kind of conflict of interest is David Kay, famous WMD-hunter extraordinaire. I discussed Kay's intriguing history many months ago, here. The media never did pursue that story.

And it certainly would be nice if, one of these fine days, some of the defenders of our"new,""muscular" foreign policy of unending war and foreign occupation -- especially those defenders to be found among self-proclaimed"libertarians" and"Objectivists" -- would discuss this phenomenon, and how it influences and distorts our nation's policies in almost every respect. It also would be lovely if they devoted at least a little time to analyzing how this melding of the public and private spheres has shaped events in Iraq over the last year, and will continue to do so for decades to come. Do you think that's likely to happen any time soon?

No? Really? Nah, me neither.

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)