Federal contracts up 86% under Bush; Halliburton rises 600%
…Each of the Bush Administration’s three signature initiatives — Homeland Security, the Iraq war and reconstruction in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina recovery — has been linked to wasteful contract spending.
Spending is categorized in the report as highly concentrated on a few large contractors, with the five largest contractors receiving over 20 percent of contract dollars awarded in 2005. Last year, the largest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, received contracts worth more than the total combined budgets of the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Congress.
But the fastest growing contractor under the Bush Administration has been Halliburton. Federal spending on Halliburton contracts shot up an astonishing 600% between 2000 and 2005.
rawstory.com
GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton
…”What we have discovered is pretty unbelievable,” said Dorgan last week. “We have direct testimony from physicians, Army doctors and others about providing nonpotable water for shaving, brushing teeth, that is in worse condition as water than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River.
“Let me describe some of the firsthand eyewitness issues in Iraq,” Dorgan continued. “Brand new $85,000 trucks that were left on the side of the road because of a flat tire and then subsequently burned. Twenty-five tons, 50,000 pounds, of nails ordered by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the wrong size, that are laying in the sands of Iraq. Forty-two thousand meals a day charged to the taxpayers by Halliburton and only 14,000 are actually served.”
After telling the amazing tale of the KBR Halliburton subsidiary ordering hand towels for soldiers embroidered with the “KBR” logo, to allow them to double the price of the towels, Dorgan told one Halliburton whistleblower’s story of his company serving food date-stamped “expired” to American troops rather than throwing it away.
“[Halliburton was] serving food at a cafeteria in Iraq for the soldiers, and a man named Roy who was the supervisor in the food service kitchen said that the food was date-stamped ‘expired,”’ said Dorgan. “In other words, it had a date stamp, which meant the food wasn’t good anymore, and he was told by superiors that it doesn’t matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn’t matter that they had an expired date stamped — feed it to the troops.”
But apparently the support-the-troops types on the Republican side of the aisle only support them until their major contributors are caught feeding them possibly tainted food before they go into battle — at that point, I guess the love is gone.