And you know this because? Oh, that's right...you don't...you're just passing along ideological spew.
Really? How is that?
Apparently, considerably less than $40 per, since Halliburton "corrected" the, erm, mistake.
New Halliburton waste alleged
Former company auditor: ‘It’s just a gravy train’
By Lisa Myers and the NBC Investigative Unit
updated 1:28 p.m. MT, Mon., July 26, 2004
The Pentagon has already awarded Halliburton Co., the controversial military contractor, deals worth up to $18 billion for its work in Iraq. But now former Halliburton insiders have come forward with new allegations of massive waste of taxpayer money.
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 do ents 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.
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."
Both deYoung and West have since left the company. Pentagon do ents obtained by NBC News support the whistleblowers' charges. In December auditors complained of Halliburton's "serious deficiencies," including "lack of cost control and cost consciousness." Some examples:
* Purchase of hundreds of high-end SUVs and pickups, loaded with options like CD players, which "most KBR employees do not need."
* "Duplication ... and gold-plating" in purchases of computers and high-tech equipment.
* Halliburton employees living in 5-star hotels.
The company declined an interview but suggests in an e-mail to NBC News that critics are politically motivated: "When Halliburton succeeds, Iraq progresses. Sadly, a few people don't want either of those results."
Halliburton also said the soda problem has been "corrected," and the laundry charges are being investigated, but insists it's "absolutely not true" the company is cavalier about taxpayer money.
Whistleblower deYoung thinks the problem is obvious. "They're using the war as an excuse, but it's not the war," she said. "It was very bad management."
Pentagon auditors apparently agree. They're withholding $186 million from the company and threatening to hold back even more unless Halliburton corrects the problems.
And it's a case. Not a six pack. At $40, that's $10 a six pack. It sounds lake a far more reasonable cost considering you're paying the delivery men six figures each, and security like Blackwater attached to the supply deliveries.
As for the other allegations in the article? Working or not, the people are there to be ready to work. If you need someone in six hours, you can't just hire someone from the states and teleport them there.
I said it years ago, and I'll say it again. President Clinton really ed up the military.
wc was a rabbit ear soldier.
You can find an example in any large corporation that does what they shouldn't. Here is a written statement: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."
Testemony of Mike West
Granted, there were wrong things occurring. Management was apparently looking to maximize profits to maximize bonuses, and they are hopefully fired for cause. Funny how it is likely true, but the left would never say so if true. I'm not going to pretend to know the right or wrong at various levels. I'm not that stupid, but apparently you liberals are.
No, the closest we had to wabbit ears were dipoles.
Yeah. I'm sure Clinton should've forseen the massive war profiteering that would take place after his term.
Here's some more Haliburton chicanery you can make up creative excuses for:
Halliburton's Fleecing Ends -- Or Does It?
Commentary by Margaret Carlson
July 17 (Bloomberg) -- I wonder how many customers McDonald's Corp. would keep if instead of including a Coke with a Happy Meal, as the menu promised, the company charged for it twice.
That's what Halliburton Co. did to Uncle Sam, billing $45 for soda by the case and billing for it again when served by the glass at meals.
It's all part of the cost-plus, no-bid life of Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, the sole source of just about everything the U.S. Army needs to supply troops in Iraq. For three years, the U.S. government kept paying double for soda and many other things with nary a complaint.
But last week, all that ground to a screeching halt when the Pentagon announced the end of no-bid contracts -- or did it?
Not really. That's like saying to the outlaw Jesse James, ``We'll no longer hand over the money. You have to ask nicely.''
Which is not to compare Halliburton to a common criminal.
There's nothing common about what Halliburton did and a heist of $1.4 billion, an estimate of Halliburton's overcharges by Pentagon auditors.
Two sets of hearings by Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Byron Dorgan, using the Pentagon's own information, exposed Halliburton's deceitful billing practices: charging for twice as many employees as actually hired and always choosing the most expensive vendor. Instead of paying 80 cents a pound for bacon, Halliburton paid $6. Instead of $450,000 for ice, Halliburton paid $3.4 million, blaming transportation costs. Where did it come from, Alaska?
`MWR Baghdad'
For 2,500 soldiers, KBR billed $152,000 for videos, and $617,000 for extra soft drinks for MWR (``morale, welfare and recreation''). How's $100 per bag of dirty laundry and $1.5 million for ``tailoring, seamstress service and textile repair'' sound? Need towels for the gym? Halliburton's happy to supply 'em at prices you won't believe.
At one hearing, former Halliburton employee Henry Bunting held up an ordinary towel made extraordinary after KBR insisted on embroidering a logo on it saying ``MWR Baghdad.'' That jacked the price up from $1.60 each to $7.50.
Halliburton charged for ``surge capacity'' for extra meals long after there was no chance 5,000 extra mouths would be passing through base camp to be fed. When Halliburton food manager Rory Mayberry noted the discrepancy, his superiors told him to keep quiet about it or face reassignment.
It would be bad enough if this awful behavior claimed no victims, but Halliburton's greed put soldiers already in harm's way at greater risk. Rather than purify the water, KBR ignored regulations so that soldiers bathed and brushed their teeth in water with E. coli bacteria floating in it. Rather than fix new but poorly maintained trucks, KBR abandoned or torched them, leaving soldiers stranded along roads mined with explosive devices, according to an eyewitness at Dorgan's hearings.
Sell-By Date
Food long past its sell-by date was served, along with food spoiled by insufficient refrigeration. Imagine coming home from a hard day at war trying not to get killed and being presented with rancid meat.
While soldiers were afraid to shower for fear of getting nasty bacterial infections, KBR managers charged the Pentagon for luxurious rooms with crystal clear water at the Kempinski Hotel on the ``unpolluted azure coastline'' of Kuwait for $10,000 a month, according to former Halliburton employee Marie DeYoung.
How could the Bush administration stand by and pay up while the troops were so poorly treated? The same way L. Paul Bremer, the U.S.'s former top official in Iraq, could get a Medal of Freedom even as a draft audit of the Coalition Provisional Authority shows that $8.8 billion went unaccounted for on his watch. At the same time, for telling auditors about those 5,000 daily meals not served (adding up to over $200 million), poor Rory Mayberry was banished to a hardship posting in Fallujah.
Life Is a Breeze
And consider what happened to Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest-ranking civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers. She added a handwritten note that couldn't be missed to the Halliburton contract the Secretary of Defense had to see when he signed off advising the contract be limited to one year. She had already criticized the Defense Department for letting Halliburton attend confidential Pentagon meetings.
Greenhouse was ignored, sidelined and lost her job. She later testified before Congress to ``the most blatant and improper contract abuse'' she'd ever witnessed.
For Halliburton, life is still a breeze. The Pentagon ignored its own auditors and paid most of Halliburton's bills, including hundreds of millions for gas from Kuwait. To justify paying for double meals, it upped Halliburton's take to 3 percent of costs and every individual meal was counted as 1.3 meals.
Terrible Message
Letting Halliburton continue, much less bid on government logistics contracts again, sends a terrible message. It says, If I catch you bilking the government, I'll suggest you knock it off. But I'll still pay you, and require only that you compete for the opportunity to do so again -- and likely win because of experience gained from three years on the job, more information than anyone but the Army itself, and an infrastructure already in place. Halliburton could lose if federal procurement officials took into account ``past performance,'' as required, although their pathetic performance in the past makes this unlikely.
In March, Waxman tried to amend the defense appropriations bill to deny contracts to any firm the Pentagon found billed more than $100 million in unreasonable costs. Republicans blocked it.(naturally)
With their tax cuts and sweetheart contracts, Republicans have asked mostly what their country could do for them even while the country is at war. Halliburton is just the lucky bidder. Cheney, Halliburton's chief executive during the second half of the 1990s, should be ashamed of his former company.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at [email protected]
Last Updated: July 17, 2006 00:10 EDT
Last edited by PixelPusher; 10-13-2009 at 12:26 AM.
Yes, they should have forseen these problems.
I don't care about your complaints against Halliburton. happens. The people responsible should be prosecuted and jailed!
This was a bad decision from the start, to replace soldiers with civilians in combat zones. Blame this on the way congress accepted the contracts, and the president that allowed it all to start in the early 90's. Prosecute the management responsible also.
she signed the contract, a no file rape charge cause should probably send up a red flag.
So, is anyone going to find out the view of those senators, or just keep arguing straw-men?
Also, appealing to pity does not make one correct in any argument.
I plan to place calls to both my senator's offices tomorrow.
Do you consider may argument as ones of fallacy?
Yeah, we covered the gist of their argument in this thread:
The ability for corporations to arbitrate cases of assault is - like - too important to mess with and whatnot."For overall justice in the American system, I think arbitration employment contracts is legitimate and we ought not to constrict it too much," said Sessions.
You board Republicans still have yet to explain how you are for rape and against imaginary sex slaves.
Oh steaks on friday. I don't know. But it was good. A1 sauce
Well that throws out the lib's whole play book.
The ability for a corporation to offer arbitration, for their employees. Why does Al Franken think because he got elected, he knows more about running a company than the people who actually run the company?
they don't give you the choice, so it's not an offer.
he knows what negligence smells like.....if you can't control the actions of your employees, you make people accept arbitration.Why does Al Franken think because he got elected, he knows more about running a company than the people who actually run the company?
smells more like willful negligence.
I think that this is a bit of a distortion of the truth. She does in fact get her day in court. It is just not a court of public record. She will probably get a large award from the arbitrators if her allegations turn out to be true. The only thing we loose is a big public show. We only have pieces of her allegations together with an arbitration clause in an employment contract and we want to automatically presume the worst. This is wrong on so many different levels.
His amendment essentially would strike arbitration clauses from employment contracts and takes away one of the most fundemental rights that we have and one of the greatest protections employers and employees have in our right to contract.
Plus, if the arbitrators make a wrong decision she could appeal to a court. It is a very hard process but my instincts tell me that if she has a case and the arbitrators were unjust, the court would probably overrule the decision. Again, the only thing we lose is the public show, which is why we have arbitration agreements.
The choice is to sign the contract. No one has to sign a contract that contains an arbitration clause, there are plenty of jobs that do not have them. However, if courts uphold cell phone contract arbitartion clauses, they will hold up employment arbitration clauses.
yes, corporate protection is the most important aspect involving rape.
"she will probably get a large award from the arbitrators if her allegations turn out to be true."
the arbitrators are chosen/paid by the corporations, I'm pretty sure, so nearly always side with the corporation. arbitration = employee raped (again).
you have the choice of working for them.
get rid of frivolous lawsuits and co. wouldn't need arbitration clauses.he knows what negligence smells like.....if you can't control the actions of your employees, you make people accept arbitration.
yo mamasmells more like willful negligence.
bouton- The arbitrator is paid by the corp. but is an independent third party. You way of thinking would take out every HR group in every co. in America because they are hired and paid by the co.
the courts ruled that she didn't have to abide by the contract and could take Halliburton to court.This is wrong on so many different levels.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote