Video via Maine Owl blog Transcript there.

North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan’s presentations on waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq contracting. The U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people all have been taken to the cleaners by the criminal Republican administration in Washington DC. From Monday, March 31, 2008.

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We had to send in agents from the U.S. embassy in Iraq to rescue this kid, yet Halliburton/KBR still holds U.S. contracts. Unfuckingbelievable…….. or not.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then’subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

More at the Blotter

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By STEVEN R. HURST
Associated Press

So where are the contractors that were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to fix this problem? Probably vacationing in the Bahamas! - JS

BAGHDAD - Iraq’s power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
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Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari[/tag] said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he said.

Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.

Karbala province south of Baghdad has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the provincial capital, the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

“We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having,” said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.

read more HERE

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Deep in the jungles of the upper Amazon, in a land rife with coca plantations and drug runners, roughly 1,500 Bolivian soldiers and police camp out each night at U.S. taxpayer expense. They are offered three meals and a snack each day as part of a $31 million State Department effort to stop the cocaine trade at its source.

Until this spring, the troops were fed by a local Bolivian company, contracted to the United States through a competitive process for $3.34 per soldier per day. But in March, the same contract was awarded — without competition — to an Alaskan Inupiat Eskimo firm, Olgoonik Management Services, which is headquartered 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The new cost is $5.16 per soldier per day, an increase of 54 percent, or about $1 million more each year.

Given the State Department’s $32 billion budget, an additional $1 million for food hardly ranks as a major scandal. But this tangled tale of how an Alaskan tribal company ended up in a South American tropical forest sheds an illuminating spotlight on the often’secretive world of federal contracting, an area of government rife with abuse and poor oversight. It is a story that involves Bolivian police, Balkan nationals, a no-bid contract, a senator whose office has been contacted by the FBI, emergency military rations and a helping hand from the biggest private contractor in Iraq — a recently spun-off division of Halliburton , the Fortune 200 company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. It is also a story that squarely addresses one of the principal concerns of lawmakers looking to reform federal contracting: the ability of Alaska native companies to get no-bid government contracts of any value. During the Bush administration those contracts have grown fivefold and now probably top $1 billion.

The so-called Alaska Native Corporation privilege came into effect in 1986 at the urging of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the powerful former chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who recently announced that he has been asked for documents in a widening FBI investigation of political corruption in his home state. Stevens pushed through a law that exempted Alaska native companies from many of the limitations that apply to other federal minority-preference programs. Unlike other small minority businesses, Alaskan firms can get “small business” preferences even if they are owned by multibillion-dollar parent companies and employ no native Alaskans. One government contracting official recently told congressional investigators that the program amounted to an “open checkbook” given that there are no limits on the size of the awards.

More at CorpWatch

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Tim Hightower (no, not the Hightower from Police Academy), gives us the raw figures of how the contracting industry has ballooned since Bush was sworn into office. For the first time in American history, a majority of government employees are owned by corporations:

Since the Carter years, Washington has drifted toward more and more outsourcing of public functions to private contractors, but Bush Incorporated has turned that gradual increase into a fullblown, jet-powered rush to privatization. The shadowy and highly lucrative world of government contracting has boomed under George W, rising 86% since he’s been in office and now totaling nearly $400 billion a year. Get this: There are now more people doing federal jobs under corporate contracts than there are people employed directly by the government. In other words, in today’s government, corporate servants outnumber civil servants.

Full post and links at The Blue State

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From CorpWatch

Halliburton Co. is one of eight companies voters can choose to be inducted to Corporate Accountability International’s Corporate Hall of Shame.

The Boston organization said Houston-based Halliburton was chosen for allegedly being “the nation’s leading war profiteer, for grossly under-delivering — and shortchanging our troops — on more than $20 billion in lucrative government contracts and for planning to move its headquarters to Dubai, enabling them to shirk paying their full share of United States taxes.”

Online polls open May 16 on the Boston organization’s Web site, www.stopcorporateabuse.org, for those who wish to cast their vote for Halliburton or the other potential inductees, which include Coca-Cola Co., ExxonMobil Corp., Ford Motor Co., Kimberly-Clark Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Nestlé SA and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Corporate Accountability International, formerly Infact, is a membership organization that wages campaigns challenging alleged irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world.

Voters can choose up to three nominees or can add their own nominee.

The top three vote-getters will be announced in June.

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Could they take Cheney with them??? So now they won’t have to pay taxes on all the moolah they make from we Americans. The American way, eh?

MANAMA, (Reuters) — Halliburton Co., the U.S. oilfield service giant, said Sunday its chief executive plans to open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates in an effort to expand business in the Eastern Hemisphere.

“My office will be in Dubai, and I will run our entire worldwide operations from that office,” Halliburton chief executive David Lesar said at an energy conference in Bahrain. “Dubai is a great business centre.”

The company said it will maintain its global headquarters in Houston, where the company is currently based.

An analyst said the move made sense. “The company as a whole has continued to diversify internationally, and the Middle East is a point that they have targeted,” said William Sanchez, a U.S.-based analyst at Howard Weil Inc. “They are being opportunistic in putting the CEO in the middle of the action.”

During 2006, more than 38 percent of Halliburton’s $13 billion in oil services revenue was generated in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Sanchez said he believed Halliburton’s move to Dubai is not tax related. Instead he views it as a strategic play.

Lesar said Halliburton is considering listing its shares on one of the Middle East bourses as it looks at growth potential in the hemisphere.

More at CNN.com

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