KBR: Being Patriotic From The Cayman Islands

The Bush Administration loves to tell us they support the troops, but of course their actions speak much differently. Instead of funding the troops and keeping them well supplied, an increasing effort is made to give more contracts to private companies like Blackwater, Halliburton and its offshoot, KBR. Kellogg, Brown and Root provides a lot of logistical support for the occupation of Iraq. George Bush and his control over the Pentagon has made us dependent on them, but do they reciprocate his warm feelings back to the American public?

Well no, of course not:

CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

The DoD simplifies the cheaper cost far too much. As the Boston Globe points out, the government (meaning all of us) loses money overall when they skip town and base their company out of the Caribbean. It isn't about saving money and cutting costs, its about corporate greed. These companies don't care about patriotism, the only flag they salute are the ones made out of cold, hard cash. You know, the military worked just fine before KBR and the rest of them ever existed, and it will again once we clean up our act.