You couldn't make this stuff up: thanks to Harold Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and the power of "earmarks," the Army has bought $6.5 million worth of "leakproof" drip pans "to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters,"
reports the
New York Times. Those pans were purchased from a company called Phoenix Products, whose owners, coincidentally, are contributors to the congressman's political committee (and other Republican causes). Oh, and according to the
Times, "the company has paid at least $600,000 since 2005 to a Washington lobbying firm, Martin Fisher Thompson & Associates, to represent its interests on federal contracting issues." Anyway,
do the math and you end up with a $17,000 Army drip pan -- and there's one tiny catch: another company sells a comparable drip pan for about $2,500.
Is anybody shocked? This, after all, is the world of the U.S. military, which has been right up there with the 1% this last decade when it comes to garnering and squandering riches. It's been ever more flush, while the taxpayers whose dollars it's been raking in have done ever less well. And symbolic as those drip pans may be, they aren't even a drip in the bucket of Pentagon expenses when you start looking at the big-ticket items.
Comment: Israel's assassination of Yasser Arafat and the creation of Hamas to supplant the PLO is beginning to make sense now:
Hamas is a Creation of Mossad
What is it about Sunnis that they keep betraying their Arab brethren to align themselves with US and Israeli interests? First Lebanon, then Iraq, now Syria and Palestine... it appears that the Western powers did their homework and realised that Sunnis were most susceptible to being used as pawns to foment the fake 'Clash of Civilizations'. Perhaps there are greater concentrations of Right-Wing Authoritarians in Sunni populations?