How is it done?
How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
The Great Iraq SwindlePosted Aug 23, 2007 8:51 AM
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How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.
You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
Page 1 2 3 4 5
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.
You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy.
Rolling Stone: an article that could end the war by occams hatchet
Sat Aug 25, 2007 at 01:38:52 PM PDT
I have long believed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq represented, not the signal failure of the BushCheney administration, but rather the successful realization of the right wing corporatocracy's greatest fantasy: The redirection of a huge portion of the United States treasury to the pockets of Big Business, conducted with the active support and full power of the federal government and almost completely unfettered by oversight of any kind whatsoever.
And don't let any rightwinger try to tell you that Iraq is an experiment in "pure laissez-faire capitalism"; it is far from that. Iraq is, purely and simply, the theft of billions and billions of tax dollars, aided and abetted by the criminal conspirators of the BushCheney administration at nearly every level. In contrast to pure laissez-faire capitalism, which eschews the involvement of government, the thievery in Iraq - and its concomitant Croesus-like enrichment of scores of big corporations - would not be possible without the direct and illegal participation of the BushCheney administration.
occams hatchet's diary
Sat Aug 25, 2007 at 01:38:52 PM PDT
I have long believed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq represented, not the signal failure of the BushCheney administration, but rather the successful realization of the right wing corporatocracy's greatest fantasy: The redirection of a huge portion of the United States treasury to the pockets of Big Business, conducted with the active support and full power of the federal government and almost completely unfettered by oversight of any kind whatsoever.
And don't let any rightwinger try to tell you that Iraq is an experiment in "pure laissez-faire capitalism"; it is far from that. Iraq is, purely and simply, the theft of billions and billions of tax dollars, aided and abetted by the criminal conspirators of the BushCheney administration at nearly every level. In contrast to pure laissez-faire capitalism, which eschews the involvement of government, the thievery in Iraq - and its concomitant Croesus-like enrichment of scores of big corporations - would not be possible without the direct and illegal participation of the BushCheney administration.
occams hatchet's diary
In short, Iraq is a huge profit center for Global Corporation, Inc., and George Bush and Dick Cheney are the Senior Vice Presidents of the United States Government Division of that money-making concern.
An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone does the best job I have ever seen anywhere in laying out in nauseating detail the workings of this criminal money-laundering scheme that some people have called "the Iraq War." In it, Matt Taibbi descends into - quite literally - the fecal underbelly of the world of Iraq war profiteering. Giving example after infuriating example, Taibbi relentlessly pushes the needle on his readers' Outrage Meters harder and harder against the peg, until finally one cannot read anymore without leaping up from one's chair and screaming out in sheer, visceral, well, outrage.
An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone does the best job I have ever seen anywhere in laying out in nauseating detail the workings of this criminal money-laundering scheme that some people have called "the Iraq War." In it, Matt Taibbi descends into - quite literally - the fecal underbelly of the world of Iraq war profiteering. Giving example after infuriating example, Taibbi relentlessly pushes the needle on his readers' Outrage Meters harder and harder against the peg, until finally one cannot read anymore without leaping up from one's chair and screaming out in sheer, visceral, well, outrage.
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 4:22 PM
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