Security for Sale: The Department of Homeland Security has a section on its Web site labeled “Open for Business.” It certainly is
Source: Sarah Posner. American Prospect, 01.18.06
...... Some of the country’s largest government contractors, already fat on Pentagon pork, have retained well-connected lobbyists to win their slice of the DHS budget. Lobbyists who double as Bush Rangers and Pioneers, raising hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars, now represent some of the biggest DHS contractors. These lobbyists and their clients -- through both individual donations and those of their political action committees -- have poured still more hundreds of thousands into the campaigns and PACs of powerful Republican members of Congress who control DHS appropriations and oversight. In the age of terror and natural catastrophe, knowing the right people is still the right way to get rich. ....... Another eager client signed up by former Ridge staffers at Blank Rome was the Homeland Security Corporation (HSC), a company started in 2001 by a Tennessee businessman named Doctor R. Crants. The politically connected Crants had once headed the country’s largest privatized prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which he established in 1983 with a former chair of the Tennessee Republican Party and modeled on the Frist family’s Hospital Corporation of America, creating an industry based on incarceration-for-profit. ..... Today CCA, HSC, and CCA’s closest competitor in the private prison industry, Wackenhut -- brandishing lobbyists, political connections, and lavish contributions -- have all won DHS contracts to train and supply security guards and screeners and to build, manage, and maintain detention facilities.