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Outsourcing.

What a nasty word, eh? We hear it all the time. Folks in various industries are "restructured" because of it.

A recent study by the New York Times revealed that the number of government contracting gigs has increased, while open competition between bidders has not. Most of these gigs are for operations in Iraq. Interestingly enough, spending by top contracting firms on lobbying and campaign donations has increased.

While the Times can't say it, I can: sounds like some hot, yet clandestine political pillow-talk going on up on the Hill. This type of behavior looks bad because it's easily interpreted as a case of interest groups directing policy. Also consider the long-reaching effects of outsourcing by the U.S. government when the contractors aren't held to the same level of accountability that public officials are, and compound this understanding with the lack of transparency within these privately-held companies.

It could be argued that the current administration has partnered with groups that will insulate Bush et al from any type of legal or punitive actions. I'm thinking of how the U.S. has farmed out torturing of detainees to countries like Egypt and Syria.

Top this off with the $2.9 trillion (that's: 2,900,000,000,000 dollars) budget the Bush administration submitted to Congress (the Pentagon's portion is $624.6 billion, which is up from last time), and wonder how long it will take to us to learn that the military-industrial complex is not the best way, moral or economical, to sustain one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world.

Interestingly, the budget includes only $50 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009, which is the last year funding is expressly provided. Is this the first sign of when we could expect to see a full-scale extraction from the region?