Reconstruction Redux: Looters with Lawyers and Lobbyists

By Meteor Blades

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Oops! Pardon me if you were showing your kids how the Internet works and just now stumbled across The Next Hurrah. I was thinking aloud. Actually, you probably ought to consider educating them largest public works project in U.S. history.

No matter what it costs, of one thing you can be certain: a big chunk will be siphoned off through overcharges, misallocations and outright theft.

For prosecutors, the brazen assault we can expect on our wallets should be career makers. But don’t count on it. For journalists with the energy and guts to dig, it ought to be a bonanza. Even those few reporters who fit the description, however, will only be able to scratch the surface of the colossal corruption that is sure to fatten the bottom lines of some of the most unsavory corporations on the face of the planet.

You know what I’m talking about. We’ve been hearing about it almost since the levees broke. For example, this:

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a Bush ally, said the recovery effort provides conservatives with an unusual opportunity to test ideas that have been hard to sell on a national scope, including vouchers to cover education for dislocated students and tax incentives for business investment. "There are a whole host of ideas being looked at," Kyl said .

.

And this:

"Nothing can salve the wounds like money"

And this:

White House uses practices criticized in Iraq rebuilding for hurricane-related jobs.

And this:

KBR Captures Another Katrina Cleanup Contract

And this:

FEMA outsources Katrina body count to firm implicated in body-dumping scandals

And this:

In Katrina's wake, a gold rush for some

And this:
Firms with White House ties get Katrina contracts

And this:
The Reconstruction of New Oraq

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With Gulf Coast residents still wringing out their socks, searching for missing kin and wondering how they’re going to survive months or longer as jobless, homeless refugees, Cheney-Bush Cronies Inc. are in cost-plus contractors heaven. Good timing that hurricane, just when it appears most of the cream has been skimmed from rebuilding Iraq as the U.S. runs out of money for projects there.

As journalist and film-maker Ed Harriman noted about U.S. contractors in Iraq two months ago in his article in the London Review of Books Where has all the money gone?, these guys seem to have a gift for financial (and other kinds of) knavery. And they’re all opening branch offices on the Gulf Coast.

Take Fluor, for instance, which charged millions of dollars in commercial costs to its government contracts, in violation of the False Claims Act. Then there was its apartheid-era behavior.

The giant Bechtel was fined jacking up the costs of Boston’s "Big Dig." It was fined $31 million, but added $264 million to its bottom line with this rip-off. And then there was the company’s behavior in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The misconduct file on Halliburton, the company where Dick Cheney was CEO, is so jam-packed it would require a new server to cover everything. There is, of course, all that lucrative misbehavior in Iraq. As well as a little help provided to the folks in the “Axis of Evil”: Halliburton Sold Iranian Oil Company Key Nuclear Reactor Components

Already, these and other pals of the White House have their snouts ears deep in the Reconstruction trough. (All the while, naturally, ensuring that workers won’t be paid a fair wage.)

Allegedly monitoring this spending will be 30 FEMA investigators.

Pardon me, but my neighbor, who was deputy inspector general for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s subway building project, had 24 investigators checking into that $4.7-billion boondoggle, and she still couldn’t keep tabs on all the shenanigans, which included engineering companies without licenses but plenty of friends in the mayor’s office.

Whether at the Pentagon or FEMA or elsewhere, turning what ought to be junkyard watchdogs into lapdogs has been an ongoing project of the Bush Administration. One reason so much tax money “disappeared” in Iraq: the inspector general was starved for resources.

The Project on Government Oversight has been monitoring the federal contracting business since 1981. Co-director Steven Schooner had a good Op Ed about one level of potential fraud, Fiscal Waste? Priceless, in the The Los Angeles Times yesterday.

Earlier today, PoGO spokeswoman Beth Daley told me there were three reforms that Congress could enact right away: making the “task and delivery orders” that are part of all contracts publicly available; enforcing “comparison shopping” by ending no-bid contracts; and eliminating “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contracts whose open-ended nature advertises their vulnerability to crooked system gamers.

Good suggestions, as far as they go.

However, the buccaneers who The Angry Buddhist calls “opportunivores” aren’t going to be reined in by some tinkering. Preventing the upcoming rip-off would require a truly independent, heavily funded anti-corruption operation, an Eliot Ness-type team that can’t be diverted, directed or enticed away from its job. And that team, obviously, has zero chance of being put together by a Crony-dominated Congress. Some looters get the evil eye, some get a wink and a nod.

Comments

[Michael Shapiro]

Dear Meteor Blades,

I'm writing from the office of Congressman Earl Blumenauer who read your piece on reconstruction of New Orleans and was hoping to get in touch with you. Unfortunately, it has been very difficult to track down any of your contact information. I was hoping you could e-mail or call me at this office so we can get connected so to speak.

Phone: 202-225-4811 (Ask for Michael)
E-Mail: Intern1.or03@mail.house.gov

[Frankeynstain]

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