“The headline is that military industrial state corporations will do anything for government contracts.”
My take is slightly different. The guys at the top of the pyramid take home six and seven figure “bonuses.” The amount of those bonuses is determined by the corporate objectives. If the objective is to get all of the available award fee, then those guys will do whatever is required to make that goal. Also, the expense of all that stuff, the outreach program, the cost of compliance with the global warming initiates, the ISO 9000 program, is all folded into the cost of the project. The company profit is a percentage of the cost of the project. What company or CEO isn’t trying to optimize the company profit? If they don’t do that, they get replaced. They aren’t maximizing shareholder value. Everyone along the line, the individual congressmen who withhold their vote until they get their set-aside, the people in the military who want THEIR project to be more expensive because it increases their rank and value to the service, and all those people in the company who make percentages all know what they’re doing, and everyone is doing it for their personal (and corporate) advantage.
This is how the system is set up to operate. No individual is particularly at fault. The system has, with some modifications for whatever the personal goals were at the time, worked like this since the Revolutionary War. Go back and look as some of the incredibly stupid contracts made during the Civil War for examples.
Yes, it’s evil. But I don’t see any way to reform it given how the system is set up to work. The reform would have to start in Congress. And how likely is that, given how every individual under the present system, gets his reward?
There is something called integrity and honor.
Those corporate executives have done.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
Their souls were bought far too cheaply.