When I first met Ben Carter by telephone in January of 2006, he was somewhat of a lone voice shouting into an empty stadium. He had been working for Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR)—a Halliburton subsidiary that had billions of dollars worth of government contracts in Iraq—as a water contamination specialist. I was working with Brave New Films on a documentary (Iraq For Sale) about war profiteering companies who used the war as a way to line their pockets with gads of tax-payer cash for such things a bag of washed laundry at $100 a pop, or $45 for a six pack of Coke.

The war had been outsourced and privatized, and the likes of KBR were not so privately robbing the country blind with cost-plus contracts. Based on this bright idea, the more a company spent, say, on that Hummer for the boss running the ice cream stand for the troops on leave in Kuwait, the more that company made. Or rather, when looked at from the public's side of the ledger, the more the taxpayer paid.

George David, CEO of United Technologies, "Obviously, military was a big bang for us in the post-September 11 period."

CEO Gerald Potthoff of Engineered Support Systems, "Obviously, we got a pop during the Iraq and Afghani thing,"

Throughout his career, the recently much maligned Sigmund Freud was interested in jokes and slips of the tongue in relation to unconscious desires. In Jokes And Their Relationship to the Unconscious, he theorized that jokes and slips allowed the ego a momentary guilt-free narcissistic escape from the demanding strictures of the conscience (super-ego), a kind of blissful and pleasurable recess from the mean teacher we don't leave home without. Such time away from self-discipline and punishment gives us strength to carry on with day-to-day business. But what if the joke or slip is not funny?