The Paid Detail Unit allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye. The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

When the program was first rolled out, one insightful member of the NYPD posted the following on a forum: “… regarding the officer working for, and being paid by, some of the richest people and organizations in the City, if not the world, enforcing the mandates of the private employer, and in effect, allowing the officer to become the Praetorian Guard of the elite of the City. And now corruption is no longer a problem. Who are they kidding?”

Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail include Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses financial firms, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Read the rest at Counterpunch.

Wikileaks recently released a cable from Afghanistan revealing U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of “boy play” where young boys are dressed up in women’s clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder. Apparently this is the sort of “entertainment” funded by your tax dollars when DynCorp is in charge of security in Afghanistan.

DynCorp is a government contractor which has been providing training for Afghan security and police forces for several years. Though the company is about as transparent as a lead-coated rock, most reports claim over 95% of their budget comes from U.S. taxpayers. That’s the same budget that DynCorp used to pay for a party in Kunduz Province for some Afghan police trainees. The entertainment for the evening was bacha bazi boys, whose pimps were paid so the boys would sing and dance for the recruits and then be raped by them afterward. That’s your tax dollars at work — fighting terrorism and extremism in Afghnistan by trafficking little boys for sex with cops-in-training.

In fact, the evidence linking DynCorp to bacha bazi was so damning, Afghan Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar tried to quash the story. Upon hearing a journalist was investigating DynCorp and the U.S. government’s funding of the sex trafficking of young boys in Afghanistan, Atmar warned any publication of the story would “endanger lives,” and requested the U.S. suppress the story. Atmar admitted he had arrested eleven Afghans nationals as “facilitators” of the bacha bazi party. But he was only charging them with “purchasing a service from a child,” which is illegal under Sharia law and the civil code. And in this case “services” is not used as a euphemism for sex; so far, no one is being held accountable for the young boys whose rapes were paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.

A private security force whose biggest role is helping the U.S. government to “combat terrorism” is now patrolling the streets of a town in Montana, acting as law enforcement but accountable to nobody and operating completely outside the limitations of the U.S. constitution in a chilling throwback to the brownshirts of Nazi Germany.

The American Police Force organization is a paramilitary unit that “provides surveillance, investigative, and military services across the world,” according to its website, which shows men dressed in military fatigues carrying machine guns.

“As part of our mission, APF plays a critical role in helping the U.S. government meet vital homeland security and national defense needs. Within the last 5 years the United States has been far and away our #1 client. Technologies, programs, and services performed by APF have played a very important role in U.S. military and civilian efforts to protect our homeland and combat terrorism,” the website states.