Iraq for Sale is a documentary about the shit-fuck way our corrupt government has lined their pockets by killing hundreds of thousands of people. And they don't give a fuck. In Bush's signing statement that I blogged about a few weeks ago, he reserved the right to prevent audits on contractors. Why in the holy-hell would he do that if he's a conservative and cares about keeping costs down? It's so corrupt it is frightening. And idiots like me and you are funding it. Just as an example, Halliburton charges us, the people, $100 for one serviceman's load of laundry. And they don't even get it clean. One guy decided to do his own laundry in the sink to actually clean it and his superiors told him that was verboten...he had to use Halliburton. Where is the competition that the free market provides? It makes me sick.
Halliburton's stock price has quadrupled during the war...and they've provided the shittiest service to our beloved volunteer army. They've also served them with filth-water and sent civilians into battlezones when they knew in advance they would be attacked. Where is the rage?
Updated: The situation is so bad, it makes me more cynical than usual. The nature of the cost-plus contract between Halliburton and the government encourages Halliburton to be inefficient. If a seatbelt in their Hummer breaks down, they burn the vehicle and buy another one. The more they spend, the more profit they make. Which takes us back to service level agreements. Why in the fuckity-fuck wouldn't someone in the government write SLA's into the contract? This just makes me think it was a Cheney deal to make his stock go up. Sickening.
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As someone who has worked on government contracts, I can tell you the cost-plus model is truly the gravy-train which is why you rarely see it in well-administered programs. Even as a yellow-dog, I do think the outsourcing of government functions can be done in an effective and cost-efficient way. But the contracts have to structured to incent the contractors correctly to be more efficient. With the right SLAs in place, you can do that. You get what you measure.
Another area that causes a lot of consternation amongst my liberal (and not-so-liberal) brethren is no-bid contracts. The government contracting process is long, slow, and expensive. If every little thing was put out to bid, a lot of things would grind to a halt and become prohibitively expensive. The contractors all have to roll the cost of bidding back into their contracts. It is certainly easy to abuse and I'm not so sure how you prevent the abuses, but it's worth considering the unintended consequences of mandating everything gets bid on.
Here's a great article about the Maginot line we are proposing to build on our southern border: http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2688
Basically, the border fence goes through poor folks' and government property and skips over wealthy, Republican landowners. Because apparently terrorists and illegal immigrants wouldn't dare cross a Republican's property. Another project that doesn't make our country safer and enriches government contractors.
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