What ARE the GOP Interests?

Under GOP Rule, Conflicts are a Dime a Dozen

Over the past six years, the list of conflicting GOP and Public interests has grown long, indeed. A tiny, sampling:

Voting, Media, Oil, More Oil, Energy Policy, Avian Flu Vaccine, Hospitals and Health Care, Government Contracts, Contract Accounting, The Supreme Court, and this list goes on and on...

This week, Alternet's Sarah Anderson focuses of Blatantly Boasting War Profiteers:

"Obviously, we got a pop during the Iraq and Afghani thing," CEO Gerald Potthoff of Engineered Support Systems International candidly if indelicately told an investment publication last year. A big pop indeed. A series of war-related contracts for logistical services, some awarded on a no-bid basis, drove company earnings to record levels and set up executives for a lucrative sale of the company to another defense contractor, DRS Technologies, earlier this year. Among the beneficiaries of that sale: President George W. Bush's uncle, William H. T. Bush, an ESSI director, who cleared $2.7 million in cash and stock. Known to the president as "Uncle Bucky," he claims he had nothing to do with the company's landing lucrative defense contracts.

In last night's"Rumsfeld is a fascist" commentary, Keith Olbermann begged the question, What really are the GOP's interests?

From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have – inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

Anderson, for her part, dared to question the billing name on the record of purchase for the emperor's new clothes, still not having seen the receipt: "Why should we let our tax dollars subsidize war profiteering?"

Early this year James Cavuoto, editor and publisher of Neurotech Business Report, warned colleagues about the dangers of conflict of interest delivered by the GOP Department of Defense:

However, we must avoid the danger that the potential profit that the defense economy stands to deliver to our industry will suck us into passive acceptance of the civilian mismanagement that has misused and maltreated the precious resource represented by our military personnel. The fact that we do business with the government does not relieve us of our sacred responsibility in a democracy to hold our elected officials accountable for the policies they have pursued. Moreover, the fact we cherish and admire our returning servicepeople does not mean that we cannot question the wisdom of the war in Iraq or the moral fiber of the Washington elite who started it.

Rumsfeld, his militarization of disaster relief, health care, and all the rest, should take note.