(Are you Right Wingnuts SURE you wanna keep up with the game of "Gotcha ACORN"? - promoted by boadicea)
Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told Salon's Glenn Greenwald,
The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Halliburton each day during the war in Iraq,"
Representative Grayson picked up on the legislative overreach in the rushed legislation and pointed out that in the extraordinary attempts to de-fund ACORN, Congress passed a law that may de-fund many unintended contractors. He asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.
Wouldn't it be amazing if a hundred years from now historians wrote about the ACORN scandal and how the resulting panic had the unintended consequences of dismantling the military industrial complex?
(Dear Conservative Hacks: File this under "be careful what you wish for". - promoted by boadicea)
Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately -- but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.
The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense.
When one goes to alternative sources for news and information on the evil doing Internets, one is likely to discover a whole host of information that will routinely never make it to the local, national evening news or cable TV.
The posts below, for example, are certainly fit to print and air but somehow, because of the powers that be in the corporate owned media, much of it has been fed through the buzz saws and the shredders of the gatekeepers who control particular messages and agendas.
Thanks to the interactive Internets and You Tube, bloggers can disclose news that is largely unnoticed or ignored in the mainstream.
Halliburton/KBR Rewarded for Deaths of U.S. Troops.
According to an article written by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation magazine, Kellogg Brown and Root received bonuses for work that had in fact killed American troops.
Thanks to shoddy work done on the cheap, no doubt. According to a separate report, Houston based KBR is also hiding its money in an off shore tax haven to avoid paying its fair share of U.S. taxes.
What a fine, stand up firm.
Diarist Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos wrote an expose about KBR's appalling faulty electrical work in Iraq.
"It was horrible -- some of the worst electrical work I've ever seen," said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that "with the buildings the way they are, we're playing Russian roulette.
(If your wallet feels unaccountably lighter-here's one reason why. - promoted by boadicea)
According to a piece written in The Huffington Post U.S. military contractors in Iraq have charged the American taxpayers $85. billion for services rendered.
It should come as no surprise to any informed person that these outsourced services are not any less costly than those that could have been provided by the U.S. military.
Worse, these military contractors are responsible for the accidental deaths and shootings of more than a few of our U.S. military.
Are the hired contractors typically incompetent Republican heckofajob brownies or are they simply outright criminals?
It is hard to tell the difference between ineptitude and crime under W. rule.
One must understand the ideology that drives the Republican Party's quest to wage war and, at the same time, enable contractors who are given a free ride to rob our nation's piggy bank.
Fresh from it's announcement that it was moving it's corporate offices to the Middle East, Halliburton warned stockholders that the company would miss it's quarterly profit numbers. Why? Because North American drilling has been tapped out.
I wonder how much those political contributions kept Halliburton's executives out of jail for over billing the Army. The relocation of it's CEO and their corporate headquarters from Houston to the Middle East was symbolic IMHO of the company's arrogance which gladly takes money from the American taxpayer (in Iraq & subsidies) but dumps the United States when there's better money elsewhere.
Speaking of which, you know Iraq is going bad when even Halliburton is trying to dump KBR, a major government contractor in Iraq. Halliburton will dump all KBR shares before summer.
Come to think of it both Bush (with his Paraguay ranch) and Cheney seem to be making preparations to get the heck out of the US once they're out of office. Hmm, wonder why.
Here's the statement though that got me.
[Halliburton's] concerns stem from signs that the North American market has more drilling rigs than needed to meet demand, said Bill Herbert, an industry analyst.
Wait a second. The supply is more than demand. Doesn't that mean my gas bill and the price of gas should be going down?!? Something just does not makes sense here - but then it never does with these guys.
