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New Orleans can breathe a sigh of relief. George is in the thick of it now, doing what he does best — no, not snorting coke and falling off his bike. These are serious times, don’t be flippant.
I’m talking about handing out money to Halliburton:
The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.
KBR was assigned the work under a “construction capabilities” contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers’ effort to repair New Orleans’ levees.
Would that be the same Halliburton who had to pay back $27.4 million it overcharged the Pentagon last year? Who nonetheless got “award fees” for “very good work” in 2004 to the tune of $70 million? The very same Halliburton that Bunnatine Greenhouse was demoted for criticizing?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that, given the time frame, it was another no-bid contract for Halliburton, exactly the kind of favoritism Bunnatine Greenhouse was calling out in the first place.
No news here.
(Via AmericaBlog)
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I’m sorry to be right, but I called this one when I posted about Bush’s faux guitar playing and made up these new lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land,” which the Pres sings as “this land is my land”:
The Gulf Coast people were lost and hurtin’
but not these jokers behind the curtain,
don’t let them sell it to Halliburton -
this land was made for you and me!
Oy.
You are so right J. Our mood exactly. We’ve never hated them as much as today. Damn it, just damn it. mandt
the same halliburton whose no-bid contracts wound up being the fulcrum around which bunnatine greenhouse’s whistleblowing revolved? you remember greenhouse from just the other day? she’s the pentagon contract official who raised the alarms about halliburton and got herself demoted. and we’re supposed to bleed for judy miller whose doing time to enable the press to protect unnamed sources to in turn protect whisleblowers (or so arthur sulzberger persistently insists). that judith miller? that halliburton?
It’s a damned shame that it took an awful natural disaster like Katrina to finally, finally convince Americans that George W. Bush and his cohorts in crime haven’t got the first clue about actually governing. They’ve been so busy cutting taxes for the wealthy, taking millions from lobbyists and generally screwing the rest of us that they forgot they actually had a country to run. Republicans and their corporate supporters like Halliburton and KBR talk a good game, but I think most of us have figured them out. I predict a HUGE turnover in 2006!
Anderson Cooper for President!
Apparently Halliburton and KBR is the only contractor in the entire United States. Period.
Although that might come as news to, say, my friend who actually is a contractor who has worked on military installations, I’m sure it’s only because he has not gotten the memo from KBR. You’ve probably seen that memo–the one that says
“All your bases are belong to us.”