All In The Family

[Malignd]

<<[...] Lewis says the trend towards privatizing the
military began during the first Bush administration
when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. In 1992,
the Pentagon, under Cheney, commissioned the
Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to do a classified
study on whether it was a good idea to have private
contractors do more of the military's work. 

“Of course, they said it's a terrific idea, and over
the next eight years, Kellogg, Brown & Root and
another company got 2,700 contracts worth billions of
dollars,” says Lewis.>>

This stuff's clearly sordid, but the connection of
Brown & Root to government contracts is much older
than Cheney's involvement, going back to 1937 when
Lyndon Johnson secured for George and Herman Brown the
contract to build the Mansfield Dam and, later the
Corpus Christi Naval Base; and, later, many many more
contracts.

After 1937, The Browns bankrolled all of Johnson's
subsequent campaigns, including the famous stolen
Senate race in 1948, a virtually bottomless source of
money for Johnson.

All available in copious detail in Robert Caro's LBJ
bios Vols. I and II, The Path to Power and Means of
Ascent, which (along with Vol III, Master of the
Senate) I can't recommend highly enough. 



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