VMC SURVEY BOARD

[roguedolphin]

Happy Holidays for the Season of Taking

http://badattitudes.com/MT/

As we enter the season of giving, let’s reflect upon the takers. Mrs. Batard sends the link:

We really thought that after five years of lies, trumped-up wars, torture, secret prisons, assaults on civil liberties. etc., etc., etc., that absolutely nothing could shock or disgust us that much anymore.
Boy, were we wrong.

That’s because before tonight, we did not know about Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks, the poster boy for the orgy of greed, cynical corruption, and abuse of decent, everyday American workers and soldiers that history will come to know as the Bush years.

You see, Brooks and his company — DHB Industries — make a lot of the bulletproof vests that our fighting men and women over in Iraq and Afghanistan have been wearing. The Pentagon bought them even though the union of mostly low-paid workers at DH’s plant in Florida; a small, muckraking paper, the Marine Corp Times; and experts from two government agencies had been warning that the vests didn’t stop 9 mm bullets. Earlier this year, the Marines finally recalled some 5,277 of the DHB vests.

Forget about the fact that scores of DHB investors are now suing the company after Brooks cashed in a whopping $186 million of his stock just days before it tanked. Or the allegations of union busting. It is for the crime — moral if not legal — of selling shoddy body armor to our troops that we’d like to see Brooks sent off to jail.

Except Brooks is not only a very free, and very rich man, but he’s now taking all that money that he’s reaped from George W. Bush’s wars, and he’s rubbing it in your face.

This weekend, Brooks spent a reported $10 million of his war profits… on a bat mitzvah. A bat mitzvah where the entertainers included Aerosmith, 50 Cent, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, and more. He even sent the public corporation’s jet to Pittsburgh to pick up Steve Tyler and Joe Perry.

Some day, this party will get a whole chapter when they write “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.” We wonder if an endangered kimodo dragon was on the menu.

Rogue