Broke: Beck turns to Blackwater founder for advice on combating Pentagon waste

The last third of Glenn Beck's new book, Broke, is devoted to his “plan” to fix our supposedly broken country. (Spoiler alert: stop spending money, implement a flat tax, and privatize everything -- all while praying.)

Beck writes:

Here's a rule of thumb: If you can Google something and find a private company to do that task, then that's probably where the responsibility for it should be. Profit motive has a funny way of making companies act efficiently. In fact, giving some tasks to companies can often run an expense item into a revenue item. [Broke, pg 308]

Beck proceeds to argue that we should consider privatizing, among other things, military arsenal production, ports, and air traffic control. After a brief, apparently irony-free section about rising health care costs -- remember folks, “profit motive has a funny way of making companies act efficiently” -- Beck announces a “War on Defense Dollars.” As Beck explains it, “we must break free of this perpetual cycle of military operations that is helping to bankrupt us.”

After announcing that he is “not an expert in this area,” Beck turns to someone with more experience: Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater (now known as “Xe.”). Beck repeats several of Prince's suggestions under the guise of Prince telling people “how to make the military more efficient.”

Leaving aside the numerous other ethical scandals Blackwater has been involved in over the years, if Prince really wanted to help combat Pentagon waste, one of his first steps would have been to propose better-regulating companies like the one he founded.

As we documented after Beck suggested in May that “private individuals” could “probably take care of things in Afghanistan better,” private contractors that are in-use in Iraq and Afghanistan have been accused of widespread waste and fraud and have been allegedly implicated in the deaths of military personnel and civilians.

A June 2009 interim report from the bipartisan Commision on Wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan found that, "[c]ontractors are doing vital work, generally to good effect, but the sheer scale of their operations and weaknesses in the federal contract management and oversight systems create plentiful opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse." The report also stated that “billions of taxpayer dollars spent on wartime contracting have been lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. ... The failures undermine U.S. policy objectives, waste taxpayer dollars, and threaten the well-being of American troops.”

Ignoring contractor abuse is nothing new for Beck. As we documented in a report last year, Beck has been too busy obsessing with ACORN over the years to find much time to worry about scandals involving defense contractors.

For more coverage of Glenn Beck's Broke, click here.