Our Ripped-Off Tax Dollars are Going To Cheneys Halliburton
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Guess who is Still Collecting150 million a year from Halliburton
Topic: BIG MONEY PLAYERS
Following quote taken from Jim Hightowers website:


STOP HALLIBURTON'S THIEVERY
11/1/2005

To Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey, and 17 other members of congress: Thank you!

Thank you for putting into official words the deep sense of outrage that a majority of us grassroots Americans have long held about the White House's perverse pampering of the Bushites' pet corporate criminal: Halliburton. If an ordinary American did to a 7-Eleven what Halliburton routinely does to taxpayers, that poor soul would be doing 25-to-life in state prison.

Check the federal rap sheet on this multibillion-dollar outfit: Bribery, bid-rigging, fraud, overcharging taxpayers, and even doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism. The departments of defense, justice, and treasury have had Halliburton under investigation or indictment nine times in the past five years for its despicable, shoddy, and criminal record of performance on contracts it gets from the government. Its ripoffs total hundreds of billions of our tax dollars.

Yet, instead of jail time, this scofflaw keeps getting more public money shoveled into its coffers by Bush & Company. Not only has it been blessed with more than $10 billion in contracts –often without competitive bids– since the Bush Cheney regime took power, but also, after Hurricane Katrina hit, there it was again at the federal trough, first in line to get another multimillion-dollar, no-bid contract.

Finally, though, Representatives Lee, Woolsey, and their 17 colleagues have said enough is enough. Citing chapter and verse of federal contracting rules, these members of the congressional progressive caucus have sent a formal demand that Halliburton be suspended from eligibility for any federal contracts until all of the charges against it are resolved.
(end quote)


About Time I have Ben Waiting for what seems forever to have these Cheney Scams Exposed!
As Halliburtons own ex-employeees step forward as in Feb 04 and told a US Democratic congressmen, Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, that vice-president Dick Cheney's old energy company "routinely overcharged" for work it did for the US military, in Kuwait.

Halliburton is the US military's biggest contractor in Iraq and the Pentagon's seventh biggest contractor overall. Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown and Root has a logistics contract with the US military that has so far received more than 3.7 billion in business, mostly in Iraq. It also has contracts worth nearly 4 billion to rebuild Iraq's oil industry.

"It's interesting how money follows power and potential power,". remarked Larry Makinson who did a study on this topic

According to CPI's 23 researchers who examined 2.2 million contracts worth $900 billion ..., the top 7,637 defense contractors -- those that earned more than $100 million from Pentagon contracts in a year -- contributed nearly $214 million to federal candidates, parties and leadership PACs from 1998 to 2003.

The 10 largest defense contractors contributed a total of more than $35 million from 1998 to 2003, with about two-thirds of that going to Republican candidates. The 737 defense contractors making over $100 million a year gave more than $88 million during that six-year period, combined.
"It's a tremendous return on their investment," Makinson said.

They've spent even more on hiring lobbyists to advance their interests in Washington. The top 737 defense companies spent $1.9 billion on Beltway lobbyists working Capitol Hill between 1998 and 2003.

Included in the 737 are 95 foreign corporations or companies owned by foreign governments that together earned more than $40 billion from Pentagon contracts over the six-year period.

The CPI report also highlights problems the Pentagon has in overseeing defense contracts. It has cut its procurement workforce -- contracting officers and the like -- in half since 1991, reducing numbers from about 400,000 to about 200,000, while at the same time dramatically increasing the amount of money it pays to contractors for not just weapons, but services as well. The number of contracts increased from about 13.2 million to 14.8 million, about 12 percent, over the same period. The Pentagon paid contractors $219 billion in 2003 alone, up from $129 billion in 1998. In 2003, just over half the Pentagon's budget was paid to contractors. hmmmmm?

The Pentagon inspector general highlighted problems with the control of contractors in a 2003 report. The IG said that out of 113 service contract actions reviewed with an estimated value of $17.8 billion, at least 98 had one or more problems, including inadequate competition, lack of surveillance or inadequate price reasonableness determinations, according to CPI.

Then secretary of the Army Thomas White told Congress in 2002 that he did not know how many contractors were employed by the service and called for a collection of the data. The data collection has not yet been started as far as I know.