Shooting the Taxpayers in the Face, Again

by emptywheel

Via lotus at FDL, I see that Parsons just lost a chunk of their business in Iraq.

The Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that it had canceled a $99.1 million contract with Parsons, one of the largest companies working in Iraq, to build a prison north of Baghdad after the firm fell more than two years behind schedule, threatened to go millions of dollars over budget and essentially abandoned the construction site.

The move is another harsh rebuke for Parsons, only weeks after the corps canceled more than $300 million of the company's contracts to build and refurbish hospitals and clinics across Iraq. A federal oversight office had found that some of the clinics were little more than empty shells and that only 20 of 150 called for in the contract would be completed without new financing.

But the prison, originally scheduled to be completed this month, appears to be the largest single rebuilding project canceled for failing to achieve its goals under the $45 billion American rebuilding program for Iraq. The corps said Parsons officials had recently estimated that it could not be completed before September 2008, and would cost an additional $13.5 million. [my emphasis]

As I pointed out several weeks ago, the last time Parsons' massive profiteering was in the news, Parsons had been almost as embedded with the Bush Administration as Halliburton.

As I pointed out when I raised Parsons' appalling performance in my Dick Cheney Shooting Integrity in the Face post, Parsons is in bed with the Bush Administration, at least as much as Halliburton is.

You see, the lobbying partner of Katharine Armstrong (Dick's 100-yard witness in his shooting fiasco), Karen Johnson, has lobbied for Parsons since August 2003. Johnson is rumored to be having an affair with Karl Rove. Whether or not the rumors are true, it is clear that Rove (and Dick, presumably) counts both Armstrong and Johnson as very close friends.

Though note I said "had" been. Because it's not entirely clear whether the intimate relationship between the Texas mafia and Parsons remains intact. At least thus far, Karen Johnson hasn't filed her 2005 year-end lobbying disclosure for Parsons (she filed it in February last year). Kind of curious, that, Johnson may no longer be lobbying her friends for these crooks, and they start losing business left and right?

Well, it's a mixed bag. It sounds like Parsons may continue to hemorrhage business. But then, they've won close to $4 billion in contracts, so they've already squeezed us taxpayers for a good deal of dough.

The loss of business for Parsons in Iraq may not be over. General McCoy said a broad review of Parsons' work in Iraq had turned up problems in sector after sector. According to news releases on the Parsons Web site, the company has received contracts worth as much as $4 billion in Iraq.

Parsons' contracts with the corps called for building and refurbishing scores of police stations, border forts, fire stations, courthouses, prisons and Iraqi government buildings. "We found overruns in almost every case," General McCoy said.

Wow. The scale of this corruption is just mind-boggling. Good thing the Republicans just voted not to look further into waste and fraud in military contracting, huh?

Comments

[prostratedragon]

Let them eat Parsons? Somebody must be trying to get ready for his close-up.

[Redshift]

Really shows you what the Republican Party is all about, eh?

If any project was supposed to be the poster child for the neoconservatism, Iraq was it. Even in the cynical view, they wanted a stable, friendly government that would host permanent bases to control the Middle East (and replace the ones they abandoned to placate their friends the Saudis.) It would show all those weaklings how they were really right about a muscular foreign policy.

And even so, they undermine the whole thing by shoveling tax dollars to their corrupt cronies, revealing that looting the Treasury to line the pockets of your friends is really the only core conservative principle.

[margaret]

Why are the American people storming the gates and protesting this outrageous misuse of their tax dollars? Where is the outrage? And, why are the Republicans supporting what, with any other poltical party, would be a suicidal policy? And where are the Democrat's expressions of outrage? Really, dramatic expressions of outrage?

[Kagro X]

Gee, I wonder if they'll be able to run out the clock, while Democrats conduct their "oversight?"

Remind me to buy stock in whatever the hell Jeb's friends do for a living.

[Barbara]

I suppose we aren't likely to see Ken Starr come back to investigate this, are we. Whitewater was so much nothing compared to what this bunch of crooks has pulled off.

[LindyH]

EW: I haven't been able to get to the article about The Dark Side. I tried at home, where I have DSL or at work...where I'm on a university network.