Saturday, January 06, 2007

A Law Whose Time Has Come

Sen. Pat Leahy has introduced the War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007. It makes is a crime to materially overvaluing any good or service for war, relief, or reconstruction. It provides for 20 years in prison and $1 million or twice the amount of illegal gross profit. It will remove the safe harbor that profiteers have used in Iraq that their illegal conduct is a crime against Iraq, not the United States.

A few examples:
from Truthout
Center for Media and Democracy
Center for Corporate Policy
In These Times

Seeing the Forest predicted this is a certain Bush veto. His Kleptocracy will expect nothing less.

Addition: Trying to write this between football games I forgot to give art credit to the Propaganda Remix Project, Micah Wright's brilliant rethinking of old propaganda posters for modern times.

3 comments:

PoliShifter said...

Another great find. How am I missing this stuff...?

I guess I'm not as "with it" as I thought.

Georg Felis said...

Another true believer that thinks that proper legislation will help stomp out this Capitalistic fad once and for all. *sigh*

Capitalist Reality check. Have an ice storm. Have $100 chain saws suddenly sell for $500. Count the number of trucks pulling into Wal-mart carrying chainsaws.

Socialist Reality check. Same ice storm, same chainsaws. Request that FEMA send chainsaws. Fill out paperwork. See the request work thru channels. Get chainsaw in July, made in China for lowest bid. Does not work nearly as well as the $500 chainsaw you bought off the back of a pickup truck when you really needed it.

Just because they go to Congress, does not make them intelligent.

knighterrant said...

Thanks for the visit. War profiteering has a long, inglorious, history in the United States. Harry Truman called it "treason." Lincoln sacked his first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, because he was issuing no-bid contracts for shoddy products that were killing Union soldiers.