What Could You Do With $2 Billion?

The Halliburton corporation, already the Iraq war's poster child for "waste, fraud, and abuse", has been hit with a new double-whammy.

A report from the U.S. State Department accuses the company of "poor performance" in its $1.2 billion contract to repair Iraq's vital southern oil fields.

And a powerful California congressman is charging that Defense Department audits showing additional overcharges totaling $212 million were concealed from United Nations monitors by the George W. Bush administration.

The new over-charges bring to $2 billion, or 42 percent of the contract amounts, the grand total of questionable bills from Halliburton.

Forty-two percent! And that doesn't even account for the "legitimate" profits that Halliburton would realise without over-charging. Apart from the destruction wrought by the invasion and occupation (including the use of banned weapons -- Depleted Uranium, napalm and other chemical weapons, cluster bombs), this might be the biggest story of the war: the fucking Vice President's former company (from whom he still receives compensation) is sluicing billions -- BILLIONS -- of taxpayer dollars straight into said former company's coffers. The admixture of State and Corporate interests is the very essence of Fascism. Yet when it occurs in the baldest form imaginable, it's just barely a news item.

What you can do: Tax Resistance, people! This blogger has urged War Tax Resistance many, many times over. And he will now do so again.

Consequences? Yes, potentially. But they're miniscule compared with the certain consequences of consenting to pay one's taxes: thousands upon thousands murdered in cold blood, vast regions of the Third World irradiated (and DU is thought impossible to clean up once it has been introduced into the environment) and littered with unexploded ordnance, the militarisation of outer space, nuclear proliferation, post-traumatic time-bombs walking our streets, BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars sluiced into Dick Cheney's friends' pockets while the budget deficit spirals out of control.

So what are the potential consequences of WTR? They do not include jail time (except in extremely rare cases). They boil down to a chance that the IRS will eventually be able to, by various measures, collect the owed taxes, plus interest and penalties. There are ways of preventing this from happening, and ways of minimising the impact when it does happen.

Note, by the way, that "Tax Day" doesn't arrive once a year -- it arrives twice monthly, assuming Federal Income Taxes are withheld from one's paycheck (there are ways of preventing this from happening, too).

See more responses to common concerns regarding WTR. And then, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee can put you in touch with a WTR counselor in your area.

By taking control of our paychecks, we not only tell the warmongers/Fascists where to stick it, we also take a concrete step in withholding from them the means to conduct their madness. What could be more important?

Update, 4/25/05:

Federal agencies under the Bush administration are sweeping vast amounts of public information behind a curtain of secrecy in the name of fighting terrorism, using 50 to 60 loosely defined security designations that can be imposed by officials as low-ranking as government clerks.

No one is tracking the amount of unclassified information that is no longer accessible.

For years, a citizen who wanted to know the name and phone number of a Pentagon official could buy a copy of the Defense Department directory at a government printing office. But since 2001, the directory has been stamped ''For Official Use Only," meaning the public may not have access to such basic information about the vast military bureaucracy.

That's Taxation Without Representation, folks. Are you really going to continue to give these fuckers your money? There's a fun slogan -- "Don't vote: it only encourages them" -- a Google search for which returns 2,350 hits. But an equally appropriate slogan -- "Don't pay taxes: it only encourages them" -- doesn't return a single hit. Why so?

Update, 4/26/05: Fabulous Op-Ed from Robert Scheer in today's LA Times:

We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life. [...]

"Government is not here to do everything for everybody," admonished Missouri state Rep. Jodi Stefanick, a Republican representing suburban St. Louis. "We have to draw the line somewhere." Just not in Iraq, apparently.

Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous.

Posted by Eddie Tews at April 22, 2005 12:28 PM