Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A. | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A. | TomDispatch

I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America’s distant war zones to write a piece I called “It’s a $cam.”  It was, for me, an eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American “nation-building” and “reconstruction” in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Mind you, I still remembered some of what had been reported at the time like the “urine-soaked” police academy built in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer dollars.  But it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me -- one damning report after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of building or rebuilding anything whatsoever.  There were all those poorly constructed or unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for the new national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly “standing up” in both countries.  There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools, training centers, and “roads to nowhere.”  There were those local militaries and police forces whose ranks were heavily populated by “ghost soldiers.”  There was that shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost $25 million and no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of fiascoes and disasters that never seemed to end.

Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that far exceeded the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money.  What made revisiting this spectacle so stunning wasn’t just the inability of the U.S. military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.  It was the country I -- and I was hardly alone in this -- had grown up thinking of as the globe's master builder.  In the 1950s and early 1960s, my childhood years, it seemed as if there was nothing Americans couldn’t build successfully from an unparalleled highway system to rockets that were moonward bound.

Half a century later, it’s clear that, at least in our war zones, there’s nothing we’ve been capable of building right, no matter the dollars available.  And that, as TomDispatch regularRebecca Gordon suggests today in an eye-opening piece, is just the beginning of our new American reality. Tom

Home, Sweet Kleptocracy 
Kabul in America 
By Rebecca Gordon

A top government official with energy industry holdings huddles in secret with oil company executives to work out the details of a potentially lucrative “national energy policy.” Later, that same official steers billions of government dollars to his former oil-field services company. Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely trading government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens live in fear of venal police forces that suck them dry by charging feesfor services, throwing them in jail when they can’t pay arbitrary fines orselling their court “debts” to private companies. Sometimes the police just take people’s life savings leaving them with no recourse whatsoever. Sometimes they steal and deal drugs on the side. Meanwhile, the country’s infrastructure crumbles. Bridges collapse, or take a quarter-century to fix after a natural disaster, or (despite millions spent) turn out not to be fixed at all. Many citizens regard their government at all levels with a weary combination of cynicism and contempt. Fundamentalist groups respond by calling for a return to religious values and the imposition of religious law.

What country is this? Could it be Nigeria or some other kleptocraticdeveloping state? Or post-invasion Afghanistan where Ahmed Wali Karzai, CIA asset and brother of the U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai, made many millions on the opium trade (which the U.S. was ostensibly trying to suppress), while his brother Mahmoud raked in millions more from the fraud-ridden Bank of Kabul? Or could it be Mexico, where the actions of both the government and drug cartels have created perhaps the world’s first narco-terrorist state?

Cont.....