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Monday, August 30, 2010

Your tax dollars at work
Posted by Jill | 5:10 AM
While the teabaggers are getting ready to vote for a Senator from Alaska who believes that unemployment insurance and Social Security are unconstitutional and people delude themselves that these people are ONLY concerned about the national debt, it's funny how we've heard NOTHING from any of these teabaggers and their candidates about the billions squandered in rebuilding Iraq:
A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets.

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.

That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.

And this doesn't even include the $9 billion that mysteriously disappeared in that country during the war.

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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Your Tax Dollars At Work
Posted by Jill | 6:02 AM
Funny how we don't see the teabaggers protesting about government expenditures like this:

It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report [PDF], what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD's inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

The $4.6 million blown on this particular contract is a relatively small loss considering that in 2009 alone, the government had a blanket deal worth $5 billion with KBR (formerly known as the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root). Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract. But the inspector general's modest investigation offers new insight into just how little KBR delivers and how toothless the Pentagon is to prevent contractor waste. Moreover, the government's own auditors predict that as the military draws down its forces in Iraq, KBR will keep most of its workforce intact, enabling it to collect $190 million or more in unnecessary expenses. Much of any "peace dividend" from the war's gradual end—potentially hundreds of billions of dollars—could wind up in the hands of contractors.



You see, when military contrators with ties to the Bush Administration get money they don't deserve, that's OK. It's only when there's a chance low-income children, especially dark-of-skin children, might get health care that they get worked up into a lather.

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Monday, July 28, 2008

Gee, thanks, George
Posted by Jill | 9:05 PM
Let's see...where are we.

OK, Republicans were supposed to be the party of national security and fighting terrorism, but under George W. Bush, the U.S. was attacked, the man allegedly behind the attack, Osama Bin Laden, is still out there, the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda pretty much controls the mountains of Pakistan.

Republicans were supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility, but under George W. Bush, we now have a record deficit that he's going to leave as a lovely parting gift for the new president:

The White House has increased its estimate for next year's deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office, a report due out today shows.

The projected deficit for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 is being driven higher by the continuing economic slowdown and larger than anticipated costs of the two-year, $168 billion fiscal stimulus package passed by Congress, said two senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the report.


Yes, there's plenty of blame for Congress, including a stimulus package that stimulates nothing but oil company profits, and bridges to nowhere. But it's funny how the pouring of money into Iraq in the form of contracts for KBR so they can electrocute our soldiers and the privatization of American spying aren't even mentioned.

Why on earth is ANYONE planning to vote for this party?

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Friday, May 23, 2008

This isn't even a surprise anymore
Posted by Jill | 5:30 AM
What does still surprise me is there are still people who think we shouldn't spend money on universal health care, education, or food for poor families, but don't seem to care about this:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federalThe audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”

“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.

The new report is especially significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on anything resembling this scale.


John McCain says that the G.I. Bill which passed the Senate yesterday is too expensive. Let's see what he has to say about this. Somehow I'm not expecting him to say much about it. After all, it's the Memorial Day weekend, and he's too busy very quietly releasing his medical records as part of the Friday news dump and hoping nobody notices.

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