Maybe a Trial Lawyer Could Do Some Good

From Juan Cole:

One of the scandals that has been reported but hasn’t really broken yet is the way in which Halliburton gained contracts to provide services to US troops in an emergency but has been unable actually to provide those services. The summer of 2003 was hell on the troops because they had no quonset huts or air conditioning. Their shaving cream cans were exploding in the desert. Why didn’t the army just build them quonset huts? Because that task had been contracted out to civilians. And why didn’t civilians do the job? Because civilians cannot be ordered into a war zone, and Halliburton and KBR often simply could not put enough civilian personnel into the field to do the jobs contracted for in a timely manner. Who suffered? The US troops. Why? Because the Bush administration gave a soldier’s job to wealthy civilian corporations unequipped to handle it. Edwards is well placed to make hay with this sort of thing if he is canny about it.

Two points of note here. First, subcontracting military work out to civilian corporations is disastrously bad policy. There’s a reason that states don’t try to privatize their military organizations; the inducements of the market economy work within a system in which everyone feels relatively secure from physical violence. The international system is not such a place.

Second, and more importantly, never forget that the Republican Party is not in favor of free markets. It could care less about free markets. It is now and has since the 1870s been the party of big business. It favors connected firms with taxpayer money and legal breaks even when those firms cannot perform their tasks efficiently or at all. The Democratic Party also serves big business, but it has other constituencies as well. Just as Clinton was a more reliable defender of free trade than any Republican, Edwards will be a more reliable defender of the public interest against big business than Dick Cheney.