If you need SEVERAL such facilities built at once, Halliburton is gonna be the outfit to get it done
Maybe so. For that, we could likely blame a lax FTC that had little oversight on mergers and acquisitions during the Clinton years with no change in sight under the Republicans. If there was any real oversight on the spending (unless whistleblowers force it) then it might be acceptable. But oversignt on out tax dollars is virtually absent, whether you're talking about Haliburton Iraq, or Katrina response or what exactly happend to all the money spent on the Department of Homeland Security.
what would you have the government do, collect all the trillions it does in the form of taxes and use the money to simply grow bigger?
... my pragmatic solution is keep paying my taxes and in turn take as much work from the cities, counties, state and feds as they are willing to give me. it's a reciprocating economy the more the fed spends the more there is in the marketplace to go around and it does begin with uncle sugar, believe it.
that's what these guys don't understand, also haliburton sub contracts alot of their work and when they do your money is in the bank within thirty days as opposed to waiting 45-90 days for the gubment. haliburton does a great job at what they do. some of you guys are hung up on what they get for the excellent services they provide as if it were your money being spent.
Wait a minute -- it IS my money being spent. The fact that others benefit from this waste beyond Haliburton's top shareholders doesn't make me feel better about wasting MY money. I could care less that others milk the system.
As a previous user of some of Haliburton and KBRs services they are a primo govt contractor. Very few company's in the world could do, let alone manage, what they do.
But we don't have much coice in the matter, do we? And just what do those primo services cost. At least $8 billion has been misspent in Iraq, and one can imagine that for each dollar exposed by a whistleblower there is more waiting to be found, perhaps a lot more, just like the huge waste that came out of Katrina. For example:
Marie deYoung, a former Army chaplain who worked for Halliburton, was so upset by attacks on the company she e-mailed the CEO in December with a strategy on how to fight the "political slurs." But today, after five months inside Halliburton's operation in Kuwait, deYoung has radically changed her opinion. "It’s just a gravy train," she said.
DeYoung audited accounts for Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR. She claims there was no effort to hold down costs because all costs were passed on directly to taxpayers. She repeatedly complained to superiors of waste and fraud. The company's response, according to deYoung was: "We can be as dumb and stupid as we want in the first year of a war, nobody’s going to care."
DeYoung produced documents detailing alleged waste even on routine services: $50,000 a month for soda, at $45 a case; $1 million a month to clean clothes — or $100 for each 15-pound bag of laundry.
"That money could have been used to take care of soldiers," she said.
[edit: Soldiers apparently need a better lobby in Washington...]
DeYoung also claims people were paid to do nothing. Mike West says he was one of them. Paid $82,000 a year to be a labor foreman in Iraq, West claims he never had any laborers to supervise. "They said just log 12 hours a day and walk around and look busy," he said. "OK, so we did."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5333896/
Wow, that sound a lot like how “no bid” Chicago works under Daley
The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root Services routinely marked all information it gave to the government as proprietary, whether it actually was or not. The government promises not to disclose proprietary data so a company’s most valuable information is not divulged to its competitors.
By marking all information proprietary — including such normally releasable data as labor rates — the company abused federal regulations, the report says.
In effect, Kellogg, Brown & Root turned the regulations “into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15446508/
Perhaps another company could deliver those primo services far more efficiently than Halibutron and its subsidiaries. Again, there is a reason only one company can really deliver these services today, and why Microsoft has 95 percent marketshare, and why Major oil is now 3 companies instead of seven and why defense contracts go to two companies instead of 4 or more for bidding. Some of it is driven by global competition, but a lot is driven by lax oversight and an attitude in Washington that
Oligopolies and monopolies are good things (largely drive by the subnset of Americans that they are really, really good for).
As Laz noted, policing the borders is a lot easier if you reduce 75 percent of the problem though eliminating the desire to cross. You can then use cost effective technologies and efficient manpower for the rest, and perhaps spend some of that money on the Ports where there is a critical, but solvable need. Ultimately, if you don't catch the terrorists before they near a boder due to intel -- well, our huge physical borders make it unlikely that you will catch a "smart" group of terrorists at all fence or no fence or even huge massive fence.
Charon
