[Peace-discuss] SAIC and all that…

[David Green]

Bartlett and Steele reportedly eloquently in the 80s and 90s for the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the dismantling of our manufacturing economy by neoliberal policies. What remains is the military-industrial complex. We could not "protect" manufacturing jobs, but we do protect this sort of "brainpower."

"Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com> wrote:  From Vanity Fair, FYI. --mkb

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow

Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the 
government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body 
shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last 
year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the 
Iraq war.
by DONALD L. BARLETT and JAMES B. STEELE
March 2007


The McLean, Virginia, offices of Science Applications International 
Corporation, a "stealth company" with 9,000 government contracts, 
many of which involve secret intelligence work. Photograph by Coral 
von Zumwalt.
O
ne of the great staples of the modern Washington movie is the dark 
and ruthless corporation whose power extends into every cranny around 
the globe, whose technological expertise is without peer, whose 
secrets are unfathomable, whose riches defy calculation, and whose 
network of allies, in and out of government, is held together by webs 
of money, ambition, and fear. You've seen this movie a dozen times. 
Men in black coats step from limousines on wintry days and refer 
guardedly to unspeakable things. Surveillance cameras and 
eavesdropping devices are everywhere. Data scrolls across the movie 
screen in digital fonts. Computer keyboards clack softly. Seemingly 
honorable people at the summit of power—Cabinet secretaries, war 
heroes, presidents—turn out to be pathetic pawns of forces greater 
than anyone can imagine. And at the pinnacle of this dark and 
ruthless corporation is a relentless and well-tailored titan— 
omniscient, ironic, merciless—played by someone like Christopher 
Walken or Jon Voight.
To be sure, there isn't really such a corporation: the Omnivore 
Group, as it might be called. But if there were such a company—and, 
mind you, there isn't—it might look a lot like the largest 
government contractor you've never heard of: a company known simply 
by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications 
International Corporation), initials that are always spoken letter by 
letter rather than formed into a pronounceable acronym. SAIC 
maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is 
in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a 
full-fledged government agency—in fact, it is larger than the 
departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development 
combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office—a gleaming 
corporate box like any other—lies in northern Virginia, not far from 
the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. 
(More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC 
has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other 
private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or 
scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 
9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them 
are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more 
than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which 
come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 
fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to 
reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the 
financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention— 
profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, 
the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 
percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" 
is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the 
future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one 
and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of 
the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President 
Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.
It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate 
decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by 
paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get 
some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone 
in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 
percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe 
directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In 
Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they 
supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that 
government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside 
the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it 
involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The 
Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, 
not of men, but what we've got instead is a government of body shops.
T
he unhappy business practices of the past few years in Iraq—cost 
overruns, incompetence, and corruption on a pharaonic scale—have 
made the American public keenly aware of the activities of mega- 
contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel. Although SAIC takes on 
government projects such as those pursued by contractors like these, 
it does not belong in exactly the same category. Halliburton and 
Bechtel supply the government's brawn. They pour concrete, roll out 
concertina wire, build infrastructure. They call on bullnecked men to 
provide protection.
In contrast, SAIC is a body shop in the brain business. It sells 
human beings who have a particular expertise—expertise about 
weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer 
systems, about "information dominance" and "information warfare." If 
the C.I.A. needs an outside expert to quietly check whether its 
employees are using their computers for personal business, it calls 
on SAIC. If the Immigration and Naturalization Service needs new 
record-keeping software, it calls on SAIC. Indeed, SAIC is willing to 
provide expertise about almost anything at all, if there happens to 
be a government contract out there to pay for it—as there almost 
always is. Whether SAIC actually possesses all the expertise that it 
sells is another story.
What everyone agrees on is this: No Washington contractor pursues 
government money with more ingenuity and perseverance than SAIC. No 
contractor seems to exploit conflicts of interest in Washington with 
more zeal. And no contractor cloaks its operations in greater 
secrecy. SAIC almost never touts its activities in public, preferring 
to stay well below the radar. An SAIC executive once gave a press 
interview and referred to the enterprise as a "stealth company," a 
characterization that is accurate and that has stuck. "Nobody knows 
who they are," says Glenn Grossenbacher, a Texas lawyer who has 
battled SAIC in court on a whistle-blowing case. "Everybody knows 
Northrop Grumman and G.E., but if you went out on the street and 
asked who the top 10 [defense] contractors are, I can guarantee you 
that SAIC would not be one of them."
Which is all the more remarkable in light of two developments. The 
first is a mounting collection of government audits and lawsuits 
brought by former employees for a variety of reasons, some of them 
personal and some coming under federal whistle-blower statutes. In a 
response to written queries, SAIC characterized itself as a "highly 
ethical company and responsible government contractor, committed to 
doing the right thing." But a review by Vanity Fair of thousands of 
pages of documents, including corporate e-mail messages, offers 
disturbing revelations about the company's inner workings, its 
culture, and its leadership._______________________________________________
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