What functions of We the People have been contracted out without our knowledge?

Please forgive me for my limited ability to express myself as well as the majority of you more educated, expressive DU'ers who have allowed me to expand my mind to look and research more closely the issues that affect one and all.

Having retired from government service as a program analyst on military medical care and US Army battlefield equipment, ie., HUMVEES/Jeeps, now being used as first-line battlefield equipment, I am having a difficult time comprehending the contracting out to private industry the US Military functions and the inability or lack of to enforce the requirements of a private industry contract.

Our local paper, The Arizona Daily Star, Southern Arizona, recently wrote that an Australian firm has been given the contract to lease homes to our US Airforce military personnel. Homes built and paid for by WE THE PEOPLE, on a US Military Installation, Davis Monthan, Air Force Base, Tucson, Arizona. To be turned over to an Australian firm???

I also heard via one of the Air America programs that 76% of our intelligence gatherings are being performed by private contractors???

Is our very government of WE THE PEOPLE being outsourced to unknown foreign agencies while we are kept in the dark like fungal mushrooms.......When will WE THE PEOPLE wake-up and demand that our employees /REPS, work for us and not their own self-interests.

Our military functioned extremely well when they could rely on comrade military personnel ie., supply military personnel, medical military personnel, etc., etc., to protect their backs rather than contractors whose only goal was $$$$$$ profit for the corporation, ie., Halliburton/Dick Cheney, KBR, etc., etc.

says that they have to justify not being privatized and outsourced.
Private companies are submitting proposals that say they will do the job cheaper.
She works in human resources and recently had to attend a conference because a huge defense contractor is taking over the personnel files.

In my opinion this is the destruction of government. It does not save money; it keeps their work out of public view; it rewards friends and political allies; businesses are now currying favor with politicians in order to get contracts.

Our government has become a machine of corruption.

...Thomas Jefferson founded the US Government Printing Office, which Bush "privatized" very early on. As is always the case with Bushco, efficiency and economy was the excuse. But as far as anyone knows, the office was operating very well -- publishing all kinds of government documents so that WE could have information about what OUR government is doing. Not so much any more.

Everything is secrecy with Bushc. Secrecy, lies, and corruption.
:argh:

Hekate

corporations, and are run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

The very counting of our votes is no longer under public control. When these corporations have been asked to produce their "trade secret" code, to help determine what happened--for instance, in the FL-13 Congressional election in 2006, in which the machines ate 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas (--a Repig 'won,' of course, by some 300 votes)--the corporations have REFUSED, and have claimed that their sacred private property right to the "trade secret" code in the voting machines trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted. A Florida judge agreed with the corporation (ES&S)--that the voters' rights are nothing compared to private corporation rights, although a California judge has now (just in the last few days) ruled that the medical marijuana initiative in Berkeley must be re-voted, and the Alameda County officials will be sanctioned for allowing Diebold corp to destroy the data from that election (it was a 2004 election--so, what's really going on in that case may be a cover up of fraudulent code that affected the presidential election).

Now imagine these disputes reaching the fascist-stacked Supreme Court. The sacred private property rights of corporations and their power over our elections will be written in stone.

This is the ultimate privatization--the privatization of our election system. And, considering that voting is the basis of our democracy, our democracy has essentially been destroyed by these private "trade secret" voting systems. We no longer have the power to stop them from privatizing everything else, including all the contracting for the US military. We no longer have the power to reform our political system. We no longer can elect sufficient numbers of people who represent our interests to make any difference on important issues.

The private contracting in the military makes me sick. It is utterly disgusting. It is a horrendously bad policy. But the private "trade secret" vote counting controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations has made our country sick unto death. It has struck at the heart of our democracy--our ability to change things.

is just another corrupt corporation.

private corportations, who will neither do decent upkeep nor improve them. It is a wholesale transfer of the public sector to private hands, of taxpayer dollars to the already wealthy, often in other countries. This is Chile in the 1970s, this is the IMF policy with regard to 3rd world nations, and this is now the fate of the US. There are people who believe that the current administration was put in place to gut and destroy the United States, and I believe that. (I also believe that this process was begun long before this administration.)

the United States. Their obvious Nazification measures may be something of a red herring--certainly highly dangerous, but not the main point of what's going on, which is to bleed us dry, and destroy our power as a sovereign people to control, curtail and stop criminal corporate behavior. The Nazis, for all their horrors, were building something--a mighty war machine. What are the Bushites building? Nothing! They are outsourcing all the jobs and manufacturing capability, wrecking one federal agency after another, including the U.S. military, permitting infrastructure to decay (--as opposed to what the Nazis did, rebuilt and upgraded infrastructure to support war goals), destroying emergency preparedness, looting the federal treasury to an unbelievable degree (a $10 trillion deficit!), with many hidden lootings that aren't even counted (such as borrowing against the Social Security fund and government pensions), and on and on and on--they are a wrecking crew, with goals of massive looting and chaos. And this simply doesn't fit the Nazi mold. It is something different. They also have utterly failed in their propaganda campaigns (unlike the Nazis). They can't Nazify the American people. Their goals are different and unique to our circumstances--a huge and very culturally diverse country with strong democratic traditions. Rule by "trade secret" code in the voting machines. Rule by impoverishment and the slow but sure breakdown of civic structures; loss of our ability to regain control of our government; disempowerment, demoralization, disarray, and, above all, disenfranchisement.

These goals of chaos, disarray and impoverishment attend goals of the privatization of everything--including our election system!---so that, if we regain some democratic control, it will be decades before we can restore order, and reclaim our "commons"--and we may never be able to. We may be permanently crippled by the Bush Junta, with corporations that have removed themselves to foreign venues, and other countries (Saudi Arabia, China), owning us, and a crippled legal system that cannot deal with it! Halliburton (made fat with massive looting of our treasury under Bush/Cheney) now headquartered in Dubai; American Lines (big tankers--subsidized during WW II, now grown humongous, one of the biggest ocean polluters and wreckers of economies with "free trade", now headquartered in Singapore), etc. We find this phenomenon now throughout our economic system: corporations made fat, and grown into monsters, by sucking at the U.S. taxpayer tit, and by utilizing our commonly built and paid for infrastructure (roads, hospitals, emergency services, educational facilities, legal system, banking system) and our loyal and productive work force, and then turning treasonous.

I think it's very important to accurately assess your enemy's goals. I think you--or the people you are referring to--have nailed it. It is therefore MUCH MORE IMPORTANT to fight and change the "trade secret" corporate control over our elections than, say, to directly fight against the Iraq War, or the Patriot Act. Those fights are important for public education purposes, but we cannot and will not win them until we have restored transparent vote counting--vote counting that everyone can see and understand--back in the public venue, and out from under corporate control. The preservation of "the commons" in our election system must be our first priority. It is the coup de grace of corporate control and privatization. It is not everything that is wrong, but it is a crucial power issue that we can still win, and it is essential to all other reform.