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Blood Money
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008The Chicago Tribune looks into the world of war profiteers.
Look like all of those KBR and Halliburton critics may have been on to something, no?
16 Responses to “Blood Money”
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Frankly, Radley, whenever the government spends gobs of money, there will always be people who make gobs of money illegally from the government. The take seems to be 5 per cent or so — I don’t know, nor is it easy to get, numbers for KBR and other contractors. But this happens in all government endeavors, especially because those in the government who are assigned the task of looking after the money realize that (a) hey, it’s not my money and (b) most of the time, we get away with it!
The only real solution is to get the money out of the government, which I’m sure you know. As the saying goes, “Giving power and money to government is like giving whiskey and the car keys to teenage boys” (attributed to P.J. O’Rourke).
So, they received 28 billion payments-watch problems closely-and have refunded 1million. That is a percentage of 3 to minus 5th or .00003
Care to compute what part of buck that is?
[...] it’s assumed projects will be completed on time and there wouldn’t be corruption [via Radley Balko]. I know we have low expectations for the federal government, but still. Save and Share: These [...]
Henry,
The government is always going to need to contract out work to build software and hardware for its needs. The last thing that we want is the government to hire thousands of new engineers when it can easily just contract out the work to the private sector. As a code monkey myself, I can say with a lot of certainty that it would not bode well for limited government goals to have all of those engineers either sitting on their asses like typical government employees or being typical engineers and spending all day designing cool stuff to build with our tax dollars. I know that I would be in the latter because my mind keeps moving like a shark when it comes to thinking up stuff that would be cool to try to build.
If you want to reduce the cost of normal contracting, here’s what you do. Centralize the entire security clearance process under the Defense Security Service for all departments of the federal government, and then boost the DSS’ budget and manpower by about 300-500%. What that would do is make the process of investigating and clearing new contractors much less financially risky, and allow a regular influx of fresh labor into the market for cleared engineers. The reason that engineers with full Top Secret access make so much is because the government has cleared nearly enough of them to meet its full needs. Only around 37% of that labor pool has been filled.
So the solution, as I see it, is to simultaneously increase the ability of the DSS to clear people left and right, and to decrease the overall need for contractors in the first place.
One last thing, I don’t agree with anything that I have heard of Halliburton doing abroad. The government has no business hiring them to build up infrastructure that isn’t essential to the functioning of our military abroad. Every piece of civilian infrastructure that they build for the “hearts and minds” campaign is unconstitutional and a violation of the economic rights of the taxpayers.
Perhaps, but the amount varies. Corruption and diverting of funds is much higher in, say, Mexico and India than the U.S. So, yes, while we should reduce how much the government spends, we should also put a spotlight on this sort of thing. We can be less corrupt than we are, and we should be, at any level government spending.
Yes. And I find it highly objectionable to have to spend oodles of tax dollars rebuilding shit that we just spent oodles of tax dollars to destroy. It just bears too much similarity to repeatedly smacking yourself in the nuts a big ol’ hammer.
Dave, I hope that you have had no such experience.
However, KBR/Halliburton bid for many of these contracts. Some of these contracts were for the performance of activities in a war zone, which is inherently risky. Lastly, the competition for some of these logistic support activities during the early part of the GWOT consisted of two companies - the French giant Schlumberger (remember how the French were?) and the Arab giant Bin Laden Construction Group. Now that would have been ironic - or else stupid - to have BLCG providing worldwide logistics for US troops during the GWOT.
chsw
Just one more thing… ..Profiteering through market forces is one thing, corruption is an entirely different and more serious matter. Actual corruption is always unacceptable. In the past, corruption in war contracting led to shoddy weaponry, uniforms, bad provisions and such. As a senator, Harry Truman knew this from his experience in WW1. That’s why he formed his famous committee which referred dozens of people to the DOJ for prosecution. Kickbacks are nothing new, but they lead to a higher cost provider - again it’s the corruption and not market forces.
Throw the book at them.
chsw
for the gent above who said that “spending tax dollars to rebuild what we spent tax dollars to destroy” was a bad idea ….
there is a historical precedent for that that seems to have a pretty good reputation. once upon a time we fought a war, and devastated our enemies mightily. we smote the crap out of them, at *huge* cost in US lives and $$$.
then, in order to plant a seed of *a fruit favorable to our interests*, (and incidentally keep millions upon millions of people out of a very real slavery), we turned around and spent untold MORE $$$ to rebuild those very same enemies.
we spent MUCH more in money and lives doing this than we have so far in iraq.
it was called “the marshall plan”. it was a huge success. history - and historians - unanimously hail it as a brilliant, visionary move. bold, brave, farsighted …. all that.
how is what bush is doing in iraq so very different? why is what was brilliant & visionary 60 years ago such a stupid move today? why was it ok for us to station troops in europe at huge cost for 50 years to make it work, when bush - doing essentially the same thing at MUCH LESS COST- is a failure after just 4 years?
as for the corruption re halliburton: check out how much $$$ texas company brown & root made building vietnam during texas president LBJ’s little adventure there. how come nobody ever talks about that? is it a democrat thing?
So, Iraq is the new post war Europe and Bush is a genius. I don’t think I can buy into that. Not without better drugs anyway.
The fact that corruption has happened in the past doesn’t make me even a tiny bit more willing to accept it in the present.
don’t misunderstand my moving, ringing defense of bush, dave. i don’t like the guy, and think he handled the 9-11 response all wrong - although probably in a different way from most people. MY preferred response featured dozens of arab/islamic world capitols turned into glowing radioactive glass.
but, sadly, i wasn’t president and didn’t get to make that call.
what bugs me about iraq war bashers is the double standard: bush essentially copied truman’s post ww2 actions - actions that all good liberals and historians sing the praises of - and is getting bashed relentlessly for doing what would be called “good works” if he were a democrat.
9-11 was unique in american history. it demanded a *big* response from america, both for revenge reasons and to dissuade *other* osama’s from trying something like it. bush, as a typical half-manly country-club republican like his daddy, tried to half-ass it. he made the army fight *fair*. he wouldn’t destroy mosques, despite them being legitimate mil targets. he didn’t hang “insurgents” on sight from streetlamps. when “insurgents” fired from a crowd of women & kids - as they so bravely do - he made the army *put themselves at risk* by not allowing massive freefire responses. he allowed US soldiers to be killed by refusing to mine the iranian & syrian borders to stop IED flow. and on & on.
those are ALL actions that *should have* endeared him to liberals. yet, they didn’t. those were all actions that LBJ *didn’t do* in vietnam. yet he’s not hammered for it. LBJ *should be* routinely hammered for allowing brown & root corruption in vietnam: yet he isn’t. so is it accurate to say that liberal hostility to bush and the iraq occupation based on intellectual honesty on their part?
i say no. historical precedent seems to agree with me.
The difference between the Marshall Plan and what we are doing in Iraq is the countries involved. The Western states that were rebuilt with that money were already mature industrial states. Iraq is not a mature industrial state. Much of its wealth comes from oil, not making and providing goods and services to a market the way that the Western European states did before and after WWII.
Furthermore, it’s all but impossible for non-Muslims to win a hearts and minds campaign with the Islamic world. The Islamic world is filled with vitriolic hatred of non-believers. Not all Muslims are like that, but too many of them are.
OH, THAT HORRIBLE PROFITING! MARX SPINS IN HIS GRACE!
– Why is capitalism bad during war but good anytime else, for some libertarians?
> However, KBR/Halliburton bid for many of these contracts….
Exactly, meaning they were the *lowest* bidder. If anyone here can do it better/faster/cheaper, put in your lower bid, save the taxpayers some cash, and get rich yourself the good ol’ American capitalist way. (Apparently one must now be a “war profiteer” to even accomplish this, since every other sector of the economy is thoroughly socialized by now).
nom de guerre, I think our opinons diverge in so many respects that it’s probably not worth the effort to find middle ground. Despite the rhetoric, I don’t think the war with Iraq was really a legitimate response to 9-11, nor do I think the current state of affairs in Iraq is comparable to post war Europe. I especially disagree that nuking “dozens” of Islamic capitol cities would be an effective response to 9-11.
well, of course you do, dave. that’s kind of the *point*.
if i were to say that “bush is the worst president ever because he didn’t nuke all of islam!!”, you’d say something to the effect of “just because he didn’t follow *your* idiotic plan, NdG, doesn’t make him all that bad. he had to do SOMEthing after 9-11, and he did it on a more measured, grown-up basis.”
all of which is true. he formulated a measured, semi-compassionate response in which military action centered *entirely* on armed combatants, even at the risk of putting our soldiers in danger by carrying out those ROE’s. he took pains that no democrat president in wartime has EVER gone to.
yet still the left hates his guts. i say that the left would hate his guts no matter what he’d done, because the left’s hatred of him is not intellectually honest. they don’t hate him because of iraq; or halliburton; or gitmo.
they hate him because he beat gore. they hate him because their “let’s endrun the will of the people via the judiciary” strategy failed that time. everything else is just noise.