http://www.twincities.com/ci_9371874?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com


While I would like to take some consolation that some in Congress are as disgusted as I am by the continued rape of our tax-payers by Cheney and his KBR cohorts, I hold no illusions that anything meaningful will ever be done to expose this fraudulent arrangement, other than the occasional story such as this. It simply reinforces for me what a complete lack of integrity exists in our nation's capitol, and our governing bodies.

http://www.twincities.com/ci_9371874?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com


While I would like to take some consolation that some in Congress are as disgusted as I am by the continued rape of our tax-payers by Cheney and his KBR cohorts, I hold no illusions that anything meaningful will ever be done to expose this fraudulent arrangement, other than the occasional story such as this. It simply reinforces for me what a complete lack of integrity exists in our nation's capitol, and our governing bodies.


They're not....and next on the agenda?

That's the way I feel lately. One thing I do know is that there is this huge thing that seems to be able to trump the "money"; blogging seems to have an ability to circumvent the "propaganda" that the press has become. Although it too can be used as a propagandist tool it can also be very effectively used to counteract the manipulation that the parties have upon the press.

A curious thing that I have been noticing over the past few years is in school systems, at least in my area, there has been this definate removal of the arts, sciences and other intellectual based after school activities from the school agendas. However, at the same time, there has been a large push of "corporate" sponsorship of sports based after school activities.

As of now our highschool has no student run school newspaper, discontinued it about three years ago, no chess club, no debate club, no art club, no photography club, these have all been cut from the budget as have musical programs been cut.

But at this same time the school has had a very well funded expansion of sports activities while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from businesses who now have the various school gyms named after them with our highschool gym resembling a small scale version of Madison Square Garden. The school sports uniforms even have different logos of the sponsors sewn on them. But there isn't one dime available to fund or even consider having a student run school newspaper.

So I did something about it, while it is being protested by the school board I am funding and hosting an Internet based student news paper in the same format as the Huffington Post.

Fuck'em I say, Question Authority and get this country back on track...watch your school systems, how do they spend their money? What do they cut out that is intellectually based? Are there corporate sponsors of your schools teams?

It seems to get more interesting daily.

KBR corruption is probably the best of the three forms of corruption (that I mentioned in other posts: 1)partial billing for services that are useless unless they are fully complete, 2) complete billing for crappy services that meet the letter but not the spirit of the contract, 3)overbilling for services that are way more than is strictly necessary to complete the contract) that occurs in war zones. KBR may be overbilling, but the services they provide are nothing less than out-f'ing-standing. Nothing and no one beats KBR living quarters or DFACs (dining facilities).

(including meals never served to soldiers),

I like the wording of this, as this was a result of KBR providing superior service. The DFAC in camp Prosperity is well known to be the best dining facility in the green zone, with the embassy DFAC being a close second after the one in the al-Rashid shut down. It is common practice for any DFAC to serve anyone who has a proper identification to be in a location, as they are missing a meal in their own DFAC, and everyone in a military base is assumed to be there on a military purpose anyway, and it's not logistically practical for, local defense contractor employees to eat all three meals at their own dfac when they're out on a mission.

Well, for some reason, contractors from all locations found reasons to be eating at not just prosperity, but any of the KBR DFACs (Prosperity was just the most obvious example) whenever they could, as the grub was just outright superior.

Given the options of crappy grub, nonexistant grub, or superior grub for our soldiers, I'll go with superior every time, as the alternative would be that the contractor DFACs would be superior. It would just be bad for morale for soldiers to be manufacturing excuses to eat at the contractor DFAC rather than the other way around.

10 years 150 billion. One would think from this potential contract could signify any possibility that troop withdrawl from Iraq soon is not likely

Yeah, the money is made on the back end of those contracts. They base it on current conditions (which includes the cost of security at this point) and hope to make money at the end of the contract when (theoretically) it gets safer and therefor cheaper to provide the same service.