I must admit, I CAN find the humor in that, but I prefer things like this:
Posted on 03/20/2006 1:08:44 PM PST by Awgie
What this country has seen over the last two terms of GWB is the opportunity of companies aligned with GWB to make billions when a tragedy occurs ...off of taxpayers money. Big Money! Beyond comprehension.
Halliburton/Bechtel and its no bid contracts in Iraq.They have been paid billions with no oversight enforcement. Is this a correct assumption? If it is not why then are there no voices being heard in opposition? Could it be Apathy.
Katrina/ FEMA contracts. Due to a recent federal court order all FEMA contracts are to be protected by this ruling and the details must remain secret. Nice trump card for the Ultra - rich and connected!
The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of jobs performed by FEMA awarded contractors and found that in most cases the actual companies performing the work were paid normal rates. BUT that big money was paid to a tier or pyramid of companies above the companies that performed the work which increased the costs to the US taxpayers up to 1700%. These companies mostly did absolutely nothing to collect their money. Nothing other than shuffle paper work!
Examples of inflated price costing:
FEMA pays a series of companies to COVER damaged roofs with tarps a temporary measure..at $1.75 per square foot. A 1800 square foot home costs US taxpayers $3150 to have covered in a tarp.
The actual time it takes to cover a roof of this size...two hours. The costs of the tarps...is under 300 dollars. Mostly Mexicans who work for less than 6 dollars per hour perform the work. Of the roofing contractors who were interviewed with the pledge by the Post not to mention their names for fear of being fired....they all said that the cost US taxpayers are being charged would be suffient to place a PERMANENT roof on these houses!
One billion dollars so far has been paid to the Katrina involved companies.
"If this is normal', we have a serious problem in this country", said Ben Rousselle, president of Plaque-mines Parish down river form New Orleans. "The federal government ought to be embarrassed about what is happening. If local governments tried to run things this way, we'd be run out of town."
Its hard to be embarrassed when a billion dollars is lining the pockets of a select few. Those who are well connected, most with ties to Texas companies.
Florida:
The last two years have brought 7 land fall hurricanes. Governor Jeb Bush hires 2 Texan companies to perform the work of Insurance Adjustors for the Florida State Citizen's Insurance company. Theses 2 companies bill out at 500 dollars per hour for Insurance adjusting work. They have no Florida licensed insurance adjustors. So they hire independent adjustors or they have people attend a 2 day class, 4 hours per day and get them licensed. They in turn furnish a software adjusting CD. The independent adjustors then must have a lap top to run this software. The lap top is their own purchase responsibility.
Each adjustor signs a 6 month contract. Pays for all travel expenses, lodging, ect. He or she is paid a percentage of the final adjusted price on each home they view. They get paid at the conclusion of their contract. The time it takes to process the adjustment per home is less than two hours. They enter into their computer certain variables and save the file as such. All files are sent via the internet to these 2 companies each evening. These companies bill out per house adjusting typically $2000 - $3000 per home. The State pays this fee. The commission paid to the independent adjustor...typically $150 per home adjusted.
The Texan companies make a clean 1800- 2800 per house hold. The software is batched by the Texan companies and forwarded via internet for payment by the State of Florida. Basically a hands free transaction.
There have been 177,000 plus homes adjusted over the last 2 years. Approximately a $265,000,000 profit made here if you take in consideration that you allow for approximately 150 dollars per home for administration costs, which is $26,500,000 million dollars. Nice work if you can find it!
When a number of State of Florida Adjustor companies filed suite in Federal court to have access to this big money and resulting contracts. The Court refused to hear the case.
So you see its very important to have all you bases covered. Its nice to know that the last stop for justice is also covered. So you wonder why people in Congress try to prevent the Allen's of the world (GWB failed Federal Court appointee) from getting a seat on the bench!
This rip off of America is a well orchestrated thing. With billions on the line no room for error. No room for disclosure. No room for justice.
This makes the Savings and Loan scandal under Regan a walk in the park. That criminal activity costs the US taxpayers 500 billion dollars. It all was allowed to happen with the drastic funding cuts to the Federal Departments responsible for oversight by you guessed it Regan's administration. (GWB boys have this down pat.)
The lack of qualified agents and those who are still employed in turn have huge case loads. This makes it ripe for the picking.
It also helps to have select carefully appointed Federal division managers unwilling to pursue select individuals and appointed justices reluctant to hear select cases. It also is pure joy knowing if you are caught what ever fines are levied in court can be negotated on the back side and dramatically reduced or left unpaid due to no enforcement.
So the question is: Does America have the right to question or ask for accountability from this administration? Or do we allow our constitution to become a worthless piece of paper? You know it was wriiten by our founding fathers to prevent such things. Or maybe you just dont care.
"This reminds me of a Frosty Woolridge original. He wanders about firing off broadsides in the best loose cannon style so that merely parsing what he is saying/implying takes a long time."
You nailed it robo. Bucanero Bob is a major loose cannon! But he's also a great Friday morning golf partner.
...and, each word, individually, will withstand the test of the spell check.
Print out out, fold it into a paper airplane and throw it into the trash like the Dems do with military ballots.
"There is not a single "fact" presented in this screed that is sourced."
BINGO! You analyzed and imitated his style perfectly.
Hey Bob! The left wing and the democrats are primarily responsible for this situation starting with Roosevelt's New Deal where the 'central government' was assuming responsibilities that were formally handled on a local and state level, continuing thru Johnson's Great Society and into Carter's National Malaise.
Centralized government, Bob. Public schools, entitlement programs, medicare, medicaid (and universal health care if it gets rammed down our throats). All failures with enormous budgets. Thank the democrats for these wonderfully inefficient and expensive programs that the dems desperately need to hang onto in order to pacify and ensure their voter turnout.
So, Bob, when Big Government has a big job to do it looks towards Big Business to get the job done and that usually means Big Money. And yeah, somebody is gonna get rich. Somebody usually does.
But it's good to know that there are people like you, Bob that wouldn't have anything to do with that tainted money.........yeah, right.
One thing that you're overlooking Bob; plenty of small businesses will get sub-contracts from the big boys.
Regan. Don Regan? Your buddy needs some spelling lessons.
I must admit, I CAN find the humor in that, but I prefer things like this:
LOL!
You know what I like about the way you write? I could hear you saying it as I read it...and I have never even met you!
I used to get crap from an obsessive Bush hater through email a couple of times a week. My email program has a little button next to the sender's address that says "block sender". Haven't heard from him in months :D
Unless he's paying your green fees and the cart girl tab, he can't be a good enough golf partner to warrant listening to his garbage.
Ahh...the estimable Dr. Krauthammer! One of my favorites!
bookmark
Then, I heard him completely diss Nancy Pelosi on the Larry King Show (and all the other moonbats there):
FEINSTEIN: And, when Muqtada al-Sadr went to Basra and blamed the Americans for the bombing of the Golden Mosque that for me was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
HITCHENS: All moral sense has now been lost it seems to me by the fans of Moveon.org and by the people who come on your show and spout their speaker’s notes and it’s appalling to me that a Senator from the great state of California can come and say that her broad back was broken by the straw, I quote her, of Muqtada al-Sadr.
BWAAAAHAAAHAAAHAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But in fact, investigators from the General Accounting Office (GAO) found Halliburton's no-bid contracts to be legal and probably justified by the Pentagon's wartime needs.
The head of the GAO told a House watchdog committee that it had looked into no-bid contracts in Iraq, including Halliburton's, and concluded that the Pentagon and other agencies "generally complied with applicable laws and regulations governing competition" when awarding them. Comptroller General David Walker faulted the Pentagon for some add-ons to those contracts, called "task orders," that he said were not properly justified in writing prior to the award. But he also said the agencies probably would have been able to formally justify the awards given urgent wartime needs (emphasis added):
Comptroller General David Walker: Importantly, given the war in Iraq, the urgent need for reconstruction efforts, and the latitude allowed by the competition law, these task orders reasonably could have been supported by justifications for other than full and open competition.Preceding Walker's testimony was a formal GAO report to Congress stating, among other things, that the Army Corps of Engineers "properly" awarded a sole-source contract for rebuilding Iraq's oilfields (emphasis added):
GAO Report: For example, the Army Corps of Engineers properly awarded a sole-source contract for rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure to the only contractor that was determined to be in a position to provide the services within the required time frame.That contract, of course, went to Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root. So much for critics alleging that the Bush administration showed favortism to Halliburton because Vice President Cheney was once its CEO.
As journalist Byron York has reported, it's not really true that the company got its work without competitive bidding. In the 1990s, the military looked for ways to get outside help handling the logistics associated with foreign interventions. It came up with the U.S. Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP. The program is a multiyear contract for a corporation to be on call to provide whatever services might be needed quickly.
Halliburton won a competitive bidding process for LOGCAP in 2001. So it was natural to turn to it (actually, to its wholly owned subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root) for prewar planning about handling oil fires in Iraq. "To invite other contractors to compete to perform a highly classified requirement that Kellogg Brown & Root was already under a competitively awarded contract to perform would have been a wasteful duplication of effort," the Army Corps of Engineers commander has written.
Then, in February 2003, the Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton a temporary no-bid contract to implement its classified oil-fire plan. The thinking was it would be absurd to undertake the drawn-out contracting process on the verge of war. If the administration had done that and there had been catastrophic fires, it would now be considered evidence of insufficient postwar planning. And Halliburton was an obvious choice, since it put out 350 oil-well fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.
The Clinton administration made the same calculation in its own dealings with Halliburton. The company had won the LOGCAP in 1992, then lost it in 1997. The Clinton administration nonetheless awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton to continue its work in the Balkans supporting the U.S. peacekeeping mission there because it made little sense to change midstream. According to Byron York, Al Gore's reinventing-government panel even singled out Halliburton for praise for its military logistics work.
So, did Clinton and Gore involve the United States in the Balkans to benefit Halliburton? That charge makes as much sense as the one that Democrats are hurling at Bush now. Would that they directed more of their outrage at the people in Iraq who want to sabotage the country's oil infrastructure, rather than at the U.S. corporation charged with helping repair it.
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