Cash

The thoroughly indispensable Knight-Ridder is reporting that the Defense Department has added a new partner to the project to impoverish America: the middle-man (or person).

In thousands of purchases of food service equipment
items, Knight Ridder found massive mark-ups. The case of a special 7-foot
refrigerator-freezer for airplanes illustrates the problem.

MGR Equipment Co. of Inwood, N.Y., which makes the
unit, charged DLA $17,267 in 2003 for each one. That's the price that MGR
President Gerald Ross said he charges everyone.

In September 2004, prime vendor Lankford Sysco Food
Services Inc. sold the government nine MGR refrigerators for $32,642.50 apiece -
a markup of 89 percent. The government paid $138,445 extra, when all prices were
adjusted for inflation into 2005 dollars.

The mark-ups upset Charles Jones, president of
Commercial Marketing Co., a Columbia, S.C., vendor cut out of the prime vendor
program. He sells kitchen equipment, but because of the prime vendor program,
his sales are limited to just a few bases.

"What value is this prime vendor program adding?
Zero," Jones said. "We think it's a crooked deal."

Another government agency, the General Services
Administration, has its own purchasing system that the military can use. And
it's cheaper.

Jones and Eagle Marketing of Houston, a vendor not in
the prime system, compared the DLA's prime vendor prices with how much the GSA
pays for the same food service equipment. The DLA's prime vendor prices were 39
percent higher.

This is what has become of conservative ideology. Their whole 'rule of the market' worldview has been exposed time and again: they don't believe in small government. They don't believe in managing costs. They don't believe I much of anything, really. They just want to take as much wealth from the government as they can before they get shut down.

They're the kids loose in the candy store, stuffing their pockets with all the chocolate they can before the owner gets back. And the conservatives plan is the same as the kids' plan: bolt out the door, and the one who gets caught burns for the rest. If the GAO or anybody else starts making a case against the war profiteer who overcharged for the refrigerators by 89%, the rest of them will have fair warning to shred their documents and send their cash to Switzerland.

I'm old enough to remember back when Congress used to exercise its oversight responsibility. Yes, committees used to grill department bureaucrats about blowing 20% of their money on politically connected confidence tricksters. Hell, I can remember when the Pentagon tried to save money instead of padding defense contractors retirement income.

It's an odd age of reality when liberals are the fiscally sound people and conservatives are blowing money out the door.

Yes, there really used to be a country where patriotic civil servants and military leaders wanted only to protect and serve the nation, regardless of who gets rich doing it.