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The LA Times has a good story today on the human toll of defense contracting. Many contractors come home with the same problems as soldiers, but they aren't given the same recognition or care.

Unable to access local veterans' hospitals, some of the men took a class in post-traumatic stress in a small room beside the bar. Several had been diagnosed with the disorder but had been unable to get steady treatment.

Driver Robert Rowe, 46, of Ohio, was shot in the knee in August 2004 while hauling ice for KBR in a convoy near Baghdad. Army medics treated him, and he flew home with his knee oozing blood under thick bandages.

He is still battling KBR's insurer, American International Group Inc., to get workers' compensation. He lives out of his truck and friends' homes, unable to afford his old apartment.

AIG did not respond to a request for comment Sunday, but it has maintained that 90% of claims by Iraq contractors have been paid without dispute.

"I look at that flag now, and I say, 'What the hell does that represent anymore?' " said Rowe, who served in the military before going to Iraq for KBR.

George Will's column today reveals a great deal about the attitude in part driving privatization.

The City of Chicago has leased important public assets for big short-term gains, including the Chicago Skyway, a massive toll road. Will is pleased. But privatizing is a long-term loss for the city and a long-term gain for the private companies. Will ignores this fact, suggesting that the private companies that bought the skyway are heroically bearing risk.

Now, 99 years is a long time. Ninety-nine years ago the Cubs won the World Series; things change. But that is for the consortium to worry about.

The company shouldn't worry- the value of the Skyway is much higher than its $1.83 billion price tag (otherwise, why would they have bought it?). Future Chicago taxpayers and drivers do need to worry, if tolls go up and higher taxes have to replace the lost tolls. In fact, the company that bought the skyway can double tolls in the next decade, and raise them much higher after that.

Then, Will categorically justifies privatization with an abstraction.

This lesson was illustrated exactly 50 years ago by Murray Kempton, the finest practitioner of the columnist's craft, when he heard the great defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams deliver his successful closing argument for Jimmy Hoffa's acquittal. Kempton's conclusion: "To watch Williams and then to watch a Department of Justice lawyer contending with him is to understand the essential superiority of free enterprise to government ownership."

Even if that were true, which it isn't, roads have nothing in common with trial lawyers. And there is no proof that private companies can run monopolistic assets better than a government could.

When government runs them, at least they're accountable to the public. Private companies with monopolistic holdings are pretty much free to jack up prices.

Will's grand finale:

Perhaps the moral of Chicago's story is that what government can shed, it should shed.

In each instance of privatization -from selling toll roads to Halliburton contracts- private companies are plundering the public treasury- mine and your and future generation's taxdollars. Privatization must be an option of last resort.