and little fat men shall ride them

The figures are in and it looks like Why We Fight, The Fog of War, and Michael Moore really were on to something. Today Boston.com reports that the pay gap between defense sector CEOs and army privates has basically skyrocketed. Derrick Z. Jackson states in the above-linked article "As soldiers have died in displaying personal patriotism, the pay gap between soldiers and defense CEOs has exploded. Before 9/11, the gap between CEOs of publicly traded companies and army privates was already a galling 190 to 1. Today, it is 308 to 1. The average army private makes $25,000 a year. The average defense CEO makes $7.7 million."

But there's more to war profiteering than just obscenely disproportionate salaries. Treason can be lucrative, sure, but it's also tough work. It's not easy to sustain a comprehensive looting and greasing machine or perpetually need to adapt and strategize as to new opportunities for plunder in order to self-maintain. While public opinion and death counts indicate that things may not being going so well over in Iraq in the event that the US does start to withdraw troops, our boys in chromium steel will need to have a Plan B, a Plan C, Plan D, and Plan E up their sleeves. There are plenty of would-be war zone cash cows that can be ripe for the milking given the right conditions to encourage escalation. Thus far the conditions have been favorable, but nothing last forever. Those pesky journalists just won't let the rumors or numbers go. Midterm election season is gearing up and it looks like there might just be a new sheriff in town come November. Not to say that the Democratic party is immune from lobbying efforts, but the Republican Congress has basically been the lapdog of the defense industry. In 2005 House Democrats unilaterally held Congressional hearings into allegations of widespread fraud and overbilling by Halliburton. The Republicans didn't think the allegations or reports that the Army discouraged would-be whistleblowers with threats of deployment into camps under fire such as Fallujah merited a full blown bipartisan Congressional investigation, and declined to participate. So far these hearings have just made a ripple, but now there's a record, the ears of voters are perked, and hopefully the findings and issues brought up in these hearings will have legs.