DynCorp Disgrace
Posted Jan. 14, 2002
By Kelly Patricia O'Meara
Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.
According to the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic, "in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."
Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston's effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States. That departure from the war-torn country was a far cry from what Johnston imagined a year earlier when he arrived in Bosnia to begin a three-year U.S. Air Force contract with DynCorp as an aircraft-maintenance technician for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters.
For more than 50 years DynCorp, based in Reston, Va., has been a worldwide force providing maintenance support to the U.S. military through contract field teams (CFTs). As one of the federal government's top 25 contractors, DynCorp has received nearly $1 billion since 1995 for these services and has deployed 181 personnel to Bosnia during the last six years. Although DynCorp long has been respected for such work, according to Johnston and internal DynCorp communications it appears that extracurricular sexcapades on the part of its employees were tolerated by some as part of its business in Bosnia.
...
Johnston was on the ground and saw firsthand what the military was complaining about. "My main problem," he explains, "was [sexual misbehavior] with the kids, but I wasn't too happy with them ripping off the government, either. DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do. There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts and, when the military would question why it was taking so long, he'd pull out the part and say 'Hey, you need to install this.' They'd have us replace windows in helicopters that weren't bad just to get paid. They had one kid, James Harlin, over there who was right out of high school and he didn't even know the names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid, but this is the way they [DynCorp] grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body — that's the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don't do an eight-hour day, they'll sign you in for it because that's how they bill the government. It's a total fraud."
Remember, Johnston was fired by this company. He laughs bitterly recalling the work habits of a DynCorp employee in Bosnia who "weighed 400 pounds and would stick cheeseburgers in his pockets and eat them while he worked. The problem was he would literally fall asleep every five minutes. One time he fell asleep with a torch in his hand and burned a hole through the plastic on an aircraft." This same man, according to Johnston, "owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. It's a sick sight anyway to see any grown man [having sex] with a child, but to see some 45-year-old man who weighs 400 pounds with a little girl, it just makes you sick." It is precisely these allegations that Johnston believes got him fired.
Johnston reports that he had been in Bosnia only a few days when he became aware of misbehavior in which many of his DynCorp colleagues were involved. He tells INSIGHT, "I noticed there were problems as soon as I got there, and I tried to be covert because I knew it was a rougher crowd than I'd ever dealt with. It's not like I don't drink or anything, but DynCorp employees would come to work drunk. A DynCorp van would pick us up every morning and you could smell the alcohol on them. There were big-time drinking issues. I always told these guys what I thought of what they were doing, and I guess they just thought I was a self-righteous fool or something, but I didn't care what they thought."
The mix of drunkenness and working on multimillion-dollar aircraft upon which the lives of U.S. military personnel depended was a serious enough issue, but Johnston drew the line when it came to buying young girls and women as sex slaves. "I heard talk about the prostitution right away, but it took some time before I understood that they were buying these girls. I'd tell them that it was wrong and that it was no different than slavery — that you can't buy women. But they'd buy the women's passports and they [then] owned them and would sell them to each other."
"At first," explains Johnston, "I just told the guys it was wrong. Then I went to my supervisors, including John Hirtz, although at the time I didn't realize how deep into it he was. Later I learned that he had videotaped himself having sex with two girls and CID has that video as evidence. Hirtz is the guy who would take new employees to the brothels and set them up so he got his women free. The Serbian mafia would give Hirtz the women free and, when one of the guys was leaving the country, Hirtz would go to the mafia and make sure that the guys didn't owe them any money."
"None of the girls," continues Johnston, "were from Bosnia. They were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say 'I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.' They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them usually between $600 and $800. In fact, there was this one guy who had to be 60 years old who had a girl who couldn't have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100 percent in bed with the mafia over there. I didn't get any results from talking to DynCorp officials, so I went to Army CID and I drove around with them, pointing out everyone's houses who owned women and weapons."
It sickens me so much. And DynCorp is still being awarded multi-million dollar contracts by our government. The same government led by a man who we saw making faces and crossing his eyes seconds before the camera went live for him to annouce that we were about to launch a war on Iraq - like it was a fucking joke to him! The man has no fucking soul. And neither does anyone who considers him a friend. This country and the whole fucking world NEEDS to be defended against these fuckers!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't you find it odd that your sources present so little information on these companies?
For instance, they'll happily mention that Caterpillar equipment is used to destroy 4,000 Palestinian homes. But they make no mention of the millions upon millions of homes throughout the world built with Caterpillar equipment. They'll tell you about a single Palestinian hospital demolished using Caterpillar equipment but they don't tell you about the thousands worldwide built with them.
Your sources will tell you about Caterpillar D9s that are used by the Israeli military. But they won't tell you that the Israeli military is the one outfitting those D9s as armored units. Why aren't they calling for a boycot of the armor manufacturers? Or, more aptly, a taxpayer boycott that would cut off funding for all of it?
Your sources will tell you about a Caterpillar D9 used to destroy a Palestinian school. But they won't tell you about the schools built with them. Furthermore, they won't tell you that Caterpillar is the leading supplier of school bus engines...engines that now run at 30% of the emissions of a decade ago.
By the way, you stole $1.2 billion in tax payments from Caterpillar last year.
Your sources will tell you the Pfizer violates the human "right" to the anti-HIV drugs Rescriptor, Viracept and Diflucan. What they fail to mention is that without Pfizer and its subsidaries that "right" would not exist becuase those anti-HIV drugs would be nothing more than a dream. Not a single person in this world would have access to those drugs without the men and women that created them and produce them. Furthermore, they make no mention of the millions that would have died save for Pfizer's production of penicillin over the past 100 years. They make no mention of the other drugs produced by Pfizer that save millions of lives throughout the world every year.
By the way, you stole $3.4 billion in tax payments from Pfizer last year.
Your sources will tell you that Halliburton served a bad meal to US troops. But they won't tell you about the hundreds of good meals served to US troops. They'll tell you about the no-bid contract Halliburton "received" from Dick Cheney. But they won't tell you that the contract is just an extension of contracts from before Cheney was in office. They'll tell you that Halliburton's revenues have skyrocketed, but they won't tell you that Halliburton is building oil distribution networks in Iraq that will help the revenues of the Iraqi state skyrocket.
By the way, your stole $79 million in tax payments from Halliburton last year.
Are any of these companies perfect? Definitely not. Are some of them involved in willful neglect, criminal activity, and unethical behavior? Certainly. But to pretend that, by default, those unethical acts define those corporations is as ridiculous as pretending that unethical acts define men.
Rather that culling your information from youtube "documentaries" and prisonplanet "exposes" I'd encourage you to research these firms from unbiased sources like Wikipedia and financial information clearinghouses. Learn about their practices, good and bad. Learn about their products, good and bad. Learn about their missions and ethics, good and bad. Learn about their employees and executives, good and bad. But to pretend that you've "researched" a firm by looking at information from sources with built-in biases either reflects laziness or an willful neglect of the available information.
A. There's no such thing as an unbiased source. Everything is contextually, and conjucturally situated and spoken/written through a given political, national, gendered, raced, sexed, aged viewpoint. The idea of an unbiased opinion is as ludicrous as thinking that one Truth exists over any other truth in a given situation. So while wikipedia may seem unbiased it's written entries come from particular people who are most likely the typical users of the internet white, male, middle-class, and american, and-as such-reflect their sensibilities and political underpinnings. As such I would argue that wikipedia is no less a politically charged than the liberal websites you were bashing.
B. Have you ever turned taxes and payment on its head? As a business owner do you ever feel that by paying your people less than what you are making that you are stealing from them? You are gaining more from their manual/mental labor than you are giving them right - isn't that the whole idea of profit? If that isn't stealing than how can taxes be considered stealing?
were these average, everyday, run of the mill sledgehammers or was the company modifying these sledgehammers specifically for the IDF? were the sledgehammers being sold knowing they would be used for this purpose?
Caterpillar does not modify the bulldozers for the IDF.
- the caterpillars used to build schools are not violating the UN and no human rights abuses are being done
So such things should not be considered???? We should only fixate on things that violate someone's definition of "abuse"???
-i'm sure even w/o pfizer the scientist(s) could still create aids drugs. as you said "...w/ the men and women who created them' men and women, not a corporation. it still could've been done. still doesn't mean they should hold up cheaper generics from being manufactured.
Then go create them. And sell them at cost and put Pfizer out of business.
-there is a huuuuuuuge difference between a good meal and serving our soldiers SPOILED meat knowingly, wouldn't you agree? so if you went into your favorite place to eat and the meat was spoiled, would you want to pay for it? what if they said 'but you came in yesterday and the meat was good!!' no...i'm guessing you'd refuse to pay for it let alone give them a huge tip on top of payment
There is a huge difference. There is no difference, however, when you ignore the other half of the equation. Millions of meals have been served that were good. If the US military wishes to withhold funds for bad meals, so be it. To not pay for the good meals, however, would be theft.
I read articles all the time. So many have been posted here. If you have some articles stating the positives of any of these companies then post them or refer me to them. I use wikipedia as a source from time to time as well (people sometimes complain it's a bad source). Are you suggesting that I don't read things, just go along with what other lefties tell me to? I make up my own mind, just because we don't come to the same conclusion doesn't discredit my opinion of it.
I treat your facts the same way I'd treat anyone who consistently posted stuff from FoxNews.com.
A. There's no such thing as an unbiased source. Everything is contextually, and conjucturally situated and spoken/written through a given political, national, gendered, raced, sexed, aged viewpoint. The idea of an unbiased opinion is as ludicrous as thinking that one Truth exists over any other truth in a given situation. So while wikipedia may seem unbiased it's written entries come from particular people who are most likely the typical users of the internet white, male, middle-class, and american, and-as such-reflect their sensibilities and political underpinnings. As such I would argue that wikipedia is no less a politically charged than the liberal websites you were bashing.
So in other words Wikipedia = prisonplanet.com?? The bias is the same? Please.
B. Have you ever turned taxes and payment on its head? As a business owner do you ever feel that by paying your people less than what you are making that you are stealing from them?
Of course. However there is a fundamental difference. No one is legally obligated to continue in such a job. If I don't pay my taxes, I'm arrested. If I quit my job, I am not. See how that works?
You are gaining more from their manual/mental labor than you are giving them right - isn't that the whole idea of profit?
:eek:
Of course not. The whole idea of profit is payment for the mind. If you do not share that profit based on the labor's contribution to it, eventually you will be run out of the market.
If that isn't stealing than how can taxes be considered stealing?
Because your taxes are backed with guns and prisons. Jobs are not. See how that works?
so none were correct...to summarize:
cheney helped spread what you agree to be misinformation
Yes.
b/c of the spreading of this misinfo the public gave enough support for war
In part, yes.
b/c of this war former companies and friends are profiting in corrupt ways
Along with many others, yes.
so then why did he help spread the misinfo if it wasn't to go to war and profit?
Perhaps because he simply had a hard-on for installing a "democracy" in Iraq.
and why did they make up their minds towards that particular solution (war)?
Because they're grand idealists who have a specific vision for how this world should work. And their vision requires control over millions of individuals. And that control requires force and war. Sound like anyone else you know?
Caterpillar does not modify the bulldozers for the IDF.
not themselves, as stated in something i already posted...
they still sell them w/ the knowledge of what it will be used for (that they are going to be modified and given/resold to the idf. if i sold rope to klansmen KNOWING they were gonna use it to make a noose and string up some black ppl...am i free of any guilt or wrongdoing?
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
not themselves, as stated in something i already posted...
You implied otherwise in your example.
they still sell them w/ the knowledge of what it will be used for (that they are going to be modified and given/resold to the idf.
Sure. But knocking down Palestinian homes is not their only purpose either.
if i sold rope to klansmen KNOWING they were gonna use it to make a noose and string up some black ppl...am i free of any guilt or wrongdoing?
You're certainly not guilty of hanging a man. But if it bothers you, I would recommend not selling them. I'm not interested in sending bulldozers to your house to stop you though.
So such things should not be considered???? We should only fixate on things that violate someone's definition of "abuse"???
of course not, where would you get such an idea from?
i think ppl should weigh things out. like reborn asked about coke and pepsi...both do bad things like support corrupt governments...so in that way they would be equal, but since coke privatizes water in other countries (maybe pepsi does but i haven't seen anything about it) so given that fact it makes me think both are bad but coke is worse.
so, ppl should weigh things out like which is more important: building schools (for profit and something several other companies could do) or selling equipment they know will be used to occupy another person's land and destroy innocent ppl's homes, run over some ppl (for profit)... and the profit isn't the problem, i'm simply pointing out that WHY they build schools. good for profit vs very bad for profit...maybe you can think the good outweighs the bad, i would disagree.
Then go create them. And sell them at cost and put Pfizer out of business.
what does that have to do w/ my point? you said 'w/o pfizer those drugs would just be a dream' pfizer didn't put the ideas into the creators heads, they simply employed them at the time it was thought and tested.
There is a huge difference. There is no difference, however, when you ignore the other half of the equation. Millions of meals have been served that were good. If the US military wishes to withhold funds for bad meals, so be it. To not pay for the good meals, however, would be theft.
i never said anything about not paying anyone at all if they do bad. you are still ignoring the point that they KNOWINGLY served troops SPOILED MEAT. it wasn't an accident, it was done merely to cut corners for more profit. woudl you take your car to a mechanic that changes your oil w/o problem but rips you off in other ways?
another issue you are ignoring is the bonus halliburton was given for their work. if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Because they're grand idealists who have a specific vision for how this world should work. And their vision requires control over millions of individuals. And that control requires force and war. Sound like anyone else you know?
why do they want control? what do they benefit from it? could a big part of it be.....profit?
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
of course not, where would you get such an idea from?
Perhaps from the article posted that refers to Caterpillar as an "evildoer" and as "horrific" but makes absolutely no mention of those things.
i think ppl should weigh things out. like reborn asked about coke and pepsi...both do bad things like support corrupt governments...so in that way they would be equal, but since coke privatizes water in other countries (maybe pepsi does but i haven't seen anything about it) so given that fact it makes me think both are bad but coke is worse.
And no mention of the fact that millions of people actually enjoy Coke? No mention of the millions of dollars donated to charity? No mention of the fact that Coca Cola is not the one actually hiring those killing the protestors at their Latin American bottling plants, as is implied by the article?
This is the best part of the article: "Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions." It implies that Coca Cola guilty just because they were sued. Coke was never convicted in that case -- they settled for $192.5 million.
By the way, you stole $1.8 billion in taxes from Coca Cola last year.
so, ppl should weigh things out like which is more important: building schools (for profit and something several other companies could do) or selling equipment they know will be used to occupy another person's land and destroy innocent ppl's homes, run over some ppl (for profit)... and the profit isn't the problem, i'm simply pointing out that WHY they build schools. good for profit vs very bad for profit...maybe you can think the good outweighs the bad, i would disagree.
You may disagree all you like.
what does that have to do w/ my point? you said 'w/o pfizer those drugs would just be a dream' pfizer didn't put the ideas into the creators heads, they simply employed them at the time it was thought and tested.
They did "simply employ them". They also 'simply" constructed labs, invested money, took risks, supplied the necessary tools and education and did what you did not. I stand by my statement...if it's so "simple" go out and do it yourself.
i never said anything about not paying anyone at all if they do bad. you are still ignoring the point that they KNOWINGLY served troops SPOILED MEAT.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm simply not going to build my entire viewpoint around it. Doing that would require ignoring every meal they served otherwise. See how that works?
it wasn't an accident, it was done merely to cut corners for more profit.
Really? Unfortunately there isn't a shred of evidence for that.
woudl you take your car to a mechanic that changes your oil w/o problem but rips you off in other ways?
No. I already said that Halliburton wouldn't see a dime of my money without taxation.
another issue you are ignoring is the bonus halliburton was given for their work. if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?
No. Thankfully that's not what happened. They were given a $72million bonus for logicstics services, which is outside of the scope of the food supply and accounting services. They were denied bonuses in those areas.
Yes. I believe Cheney and the neo-cons are seeking to stack the world's political deck in their favor. Their aim? "Security" and "open markets". They'll fail at both, but that's their aim.
why do they want control? what do they benefit from it? could a big part of it be.....profit?
A part of it, yes. But the "profit" you're haggling over is bullshit chump change. If you think the purpose of the war was so Cheney could make some money on Halliburton stock options that he is legally obligated to give to charity, you're not paying any attention. If that was the case, he simply would have engineered to have all military support services outsourced to Halliburton and his profit would have been accomplished and would have lasted much longer than a single war.
So in other words Wikipedia = prisonplanet.com?? The bias is the same? Please.
The bias is not the same, but both are inherently political. I, for one, would rather the political leanings of individuals who are writing and/or speaking to be laid out on the table before anything is said, done, or written. To not do so is dishonest at best and insidious at worst. The very fact that you can claim that wikipedia is unbiased speaks to that dishonesty when clearly the political leanings of that site make claims to the TRUTH that are undergirded by predominantly white, male, middle/upper class americans. This only serves to silence other voices and claims at alternative truths. So while you may not think that prisonplanet's truth is accurate, I would argue that the danger of the 'unbiased' opinions on wikipedia only serves to perpetuate the dominant myths and ideologies of those in power under the false assumption that it is the truth when in fact it is no different than prison planet.
Of course. However there is a fundamental difference. No one is legally obligated to continue in such a job. If I don't pay my taxes, I'm arrested. If I quit my job, I am not. See how that works?
You seem to place a whole lot of belief in an individuals agency without looking at the structures that help shape their lives. Not everyone has the same situation as you. Not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job that underpays them, b/c it puts food on the table, and they are only qualified for that type of job. Not everyone was born into the same privilege as you, as you were not born into the same privilege of George W., John Kerry, etc. Your choices of where to go, what job to work, etc. are shaped by things that are out of your control, and to just say that someone could easily quit a job is based out of a reality that does not exist for most people. So yes they could quit, but in our society many would have no means for subsistence.
Of course not. The whole idea of profit is payment for the mind. If you do not share that profit based on the labor's contribution to it, eventually you will be run out of the market.
A. Who told you that? Now who is taking certain teachings from school for granted? Profit is based off the exploitation of mental/manual labor, that whole payment from the mind is rooted in classist ideology so that the rich can appease their guilty conscious.
Because your taxes are backed with guns and prisons. Jobs are not. See how that works?
Ummm...that depends on how you look at things, and certainly that is quite an Americanist assumption that jobs are not backed with guns and prisons, b/c I'm sure people in Cambodia, Indonesia, South America, China, Phillipines, etc. who work for U.S. based companies would have a pretty strong argument against that claim.
No mention of the fact that Coca Cola is not the one actually hiring those killing the protestors at their Latin American bottling plants, as is implied by the article?
are you saying they have NO control over who DOES hire them?
This is the best part of the article: "Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions." It implies that Coca Cola guilty just because they were sued. Coke was never convicted in that case -- they settled for $192.5 million.
b/c they settled doesn't make them innocent either.
the racial discrimination goes beyond hiring practices...what sources have you read on this, ffg?
'As reported on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” (6/18/02), current and former employees of the local Coca-Cola bottler in Dallas accused the company of stocking store shelves in black and Hispanic neighborhoods with expired soft drinks. (Canned soft drinks have about a nine-month shelf life before going flat.)
By the way, you stole $1.8 billion in taxes from Coca Cola last year.
no i didn't, weren't they found guilty of things like manipulating teh results of studies on things like their frozen coke at burger king? so making a profit by deception?
here's what i don't get about you; you place a large part of blame on the consumer for their choices saying they should read up on what they buy so they know what's in them, the conditions they are made in...so why do you always try to delegitimize anyone who does spreads any info?
They did "simply employ them". They also 'simply" constructed labs, invested money, took risks, supplied the necessary tools and education and did what you did not. I stand by my statement...if it's so "simple" go out and do it yourself.
and i stand by mine; pfizer wasn't the only conditions they inventors could work in. also i would think the ppl who invented the drugs had a pretty good education before being employed by pfizer. they could've just as easily done this at a university or glaxo-smith kline or merck...
if i wrote a book on a computer at a library would i owe them part of the profit? they provided me the necessary tools to do it.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm simply not going to build my entire viewpoint around it. Doing that would require ignoring every meal they served otherwise. See how that works?
and to me when they knowingly do things like serve spoiled meat i take that into consideration, again, you can overlook it, i can't
take this from the daily kos link:
Mr. Rory Mayberry, Food Production Manager at Camp Anaconda in Iraq from February to April 2004, testified (via video feed) that KBR regularly and consistently fed expired food (food past its freshness date by up to a year!) to our troops in Iraq. When the United States military occasionally refused the spoiled food, Halliburton truckers were instructed to take them to the next base in the hope that they would escape scrutiny. Refrigerated food and frozen food in the refrigeration trucks would be left to spoil when the trucks were turned off. He also said that the KBR management would throw parties for themselves three to four times a week and served perfectly good food at the parties. Added to this, they would feed the troops 10,000 meals and charge the government for 20,000 meals.
even a link from 'veterans today':
Outrage overflowed on Capitol Hill this summer when members of Congress learned that Halliburton's dining halls in Iraq had repeatedly served spoiled food to unsuspecting troops.
But the outrage apparently doesn't end with spoiled food. Former KBR employees and water quality specialists, Ben Carter and Ken May said that KBR knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq's Euphrates River. One internal KBR email provided to HalliburtonWatch says that, for "possibly a year," the level of contamination at one camp was two times the normal level for untreated water.
"I discovered the water being delivered from the Euphrates for the military was not being treated properly and thousands were being exposed daily to numerous pathogenic organisms," William Granger of KBR Water Quality for Iraq reached this conclusion in an email after investigating Carter's complaint: "Fact: We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated. The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River." Granger admitted that the contamination was "most likely … ongoing through the entire life" of the camp, but that he was "not sure if any attempt to notify the exposed population was ever made."
Granger had written a scathing, 21-page report to KBR management about water quality at Ar Ramadi. The report proves the company's "incompetence and willful negligence" in protecting the water supply.
hmmm another nice article in the list:
DCAA repeatedly warned Halliburton that its food and the kitchens where it is prepared are "dirty," NBC News reported. At one point, auditors found that Halliburton's promises to clean up its food and kitchens "have not been followed through."65...
Company policy also required purchasing food even if it was spoiled when delivered. When the subcontractor dropped off food at Halliburton locations in Iraq, there was often no place to store it, so the food would sit in
Halliburton freezers on the trucks until the fuel ran out. "[Halliburton] wouldn't refuel the trucks so the food would spoil," the former employee said. "This happened quite a bit."
This behavior works as an overcharge of DoD for food service since Halliburton is required to purchase additional food to replace the spoiled food.
No. Thankfully that's not what happened. They were given a $72million bonus for logicstics services, which is outside of the scope of the food supply and accounting services. They were denied bonuses in those areas.
and you really havent read any other problems outside of the food services??
here's a bunch involving their LOGCAP contract (pssst, L stands for your Logistics
DCAA has issued numerous audits since 2003 showing Halliburton had repeatedly violated the FAR via “significant” and “systemic” deficiencies in how it estimates and validates cost.40 As a result, the Defense Department Inspector General and the Justice Department opened a criminal fraud investigation.41 In describing the company’s billing system as “inadequate,”42 the DCAA reported that Halliburton had demanded payment for at least $1.4 billion in “questioned” and “unsupported” expenses in the Middle East.43
An investigation by the inspector general of the now-disbanded U.S. Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) found that between 27 percent and 41 percent of
government property managed by Halliburton, valued at between $11.1 and $26.2 million, had gone missing because of mismanagement.64 About a third of the government items managed by Halliburton, including trucks, computers and office furniture had disappeared.
Halliburton agreed last year to pay a $7.5 million fine and to stop “committing or causing future securities law violations” when it settled a fraud complaint brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).81 The SEC accused the company of providing "materially misleading" information to investors by artificially inflating the amount of revenues it experienced over a number of years.
In January, the U.S. embassy in Iraq threatened to terminate Halliburton’s contracts because of serious cost overcharges and what it called “poor performance.”91 It has been one year since the Army's chief of procurement policy, Tina Ballard, requested the Army “immediately” terminate Halliburton’s troop support contract, or LOGCAP, by parceling the work out to a wider range of companies.92 A Halliburton spokesperson praised Ms. Ballard’s request as “positive” and “expected.” Although the chief executive officer,
David Lesar, indicated Halliburton was prepared not to bid on new LOGCAP work,93he threatened taxpayers by saying, “If we do choose to rebid, we're going to jack the margins up significantly."94
DoD terminated Halliburton from an Iraqi gasoline importation contract and assigned it to an internal office known as the Defense Energy Support Center. The result was a 50 percent reduction in gasoline prices charged to U.S. taxpayers.95
On June 25, 2004, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U.S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year.
In July 2004, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, and insufficient training of contract management officials under the troop logistics contract (known as LOGCAP) in Iraq. GAO reported that, when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher. See Report from House Committee on Government Reform, Minority Staff.
In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary and found "numerous, systemic issues . . . with KBR's estimates." According to DCAA, "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now." When DCAA examined seven LOGCAP task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion. Read Rep. Henry Waxman's letter discussing the DCAA's August 16 memorandum.
On August 17, 2004, the Army announced it would withhold 15 percent of future payments to Halliburton because of suspicious bills. A few hours later, however, the Army announced it would not withhold those payments, but would instead give Halliburton "more time" to explain why it billed taxpayers for work that was apparently never undertaken or completed. The Army's decision was the third time it had extended the deadline for Halliburton to justify undocumented expenses, including $1.8 billion for work in Iraq and Kuwait.
On September 16, 2004, the Pentagon determined that $34.2 million (or 16 percent) of the costs associated with KBR's "Task Order 6" of the Iraqi oil infrastructure contract (RIO) were unreasonable, including $14.9 million in overcharges and $17.7 million in "unsupported" costs.
On November 10, 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman released new State Department documents that disclose efforts by senior Administration officials, including the Ambassador to Kuwait, to steer a lucrative Halliburton fuel subcontract to a favored Kuwaiti company. The documents also describe allegations of widespread bribes and kickbacks sought by Halliburton officials. One subcontractor said it's "common knowledge" that Halliburton officials are "on the take" and "solicit bribes openly" in exchange for awarding contracts.
On November 23, 2004, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (formerly the CPA IG) examined a $569 million LOGCAP task order and found that Halliburton "did not provide . . . sufficiently detailed cost data to evaluate overall project costs or to determine whether specific costs for services performed were reasonable." The IG concluded that the Army "did not receive sufficient or reliable cost information to effectively manage" the task order.
On February 8, 2005, the Pentagon ignored its own auditors and decided to pay $1.8 billion to Halliburton's KBR subsidiary for work that nobody can prove ever took place. The work was allegedly performed in Iraq and Kuwait under the Army's LOGCAP contract. The Army could have suspended or banned Halliburton from future contracts, but decided to take no action. In what the Washington Post called "a departure from normal policy," the Army decided to ignore its own auditors and pay KBR for all costs, plus the standard one to three percent fee, without any explanation that could justify the company's suspicious bills.
On March 14, 2005, a Pentagon audit revealed another $108 million in overcharges by KBR for delivering gasoline to Iraq. The Pentagon had previously released a redacted version of the audit to conceal the overcharge from the public, at KBR's request. Click here for the Pentagon's executive summary of the audit. Click here for the revised audit. See Rep. Henry Waxman's letter on the matter.
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
The bias is not the same, but both are inherently political. I, for one, would rather the political leanings of individuals who are writing and/or speaking to be laid out on the table before anything is said, done, or written. To not do so is dishonest at best and insidious at worst. The very fact that you can claim that wikipedia is unbiased speaks to that dishonesty when clearly the political leanings of that site make claims to the TRUTH that are undergirded by predominantly white, male, middle/upper class americans.
I'll grant you that wikipedia is not free from some inherent bias. I will not grant you that an op-ed presented as journalism where a fraction of the author's bias is "on the table" is a good source of truth.
The former at least strives to overcome bias and present things in a factual manner. The latter does the opposite far too often, as is evidenced in the article posted in this thread.
This only serves to silence other voices and claims at alternative truths.
I'm not trying to silence anything. Prisonplanet can start broadcasting on streetcorners for all I care. However, I'm not going to accept their words just because they are "other voices" presenting "alternative truths". They have to demonstrate an interest in fact, not in conclusion if I'm going to consider them a journalistic or fact-based source.
So while you may not think that prisonplanet's truth is accurate, I would argue that the danger of the 'unbiased' opinions on wikipedia only serves to perpetuate the dominant myths and ideologies of those in power under the false assumption that it is the truth when in fact it is no different than prison planet.
Yet those "dominant myths and ideologies" may have validity even in the face of prisonplanet's "truth". If Wikipedia's bias make it wrong, prisonplanet doesn't suddenly become right. It suffers from many of the exact same inherent biases you point to, and its "facts" fail far more often.
You seem to place a whole lot of belief in an individuals agency without looking at the structures that help shape their lives. Not everyone has the same situation as you. Not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job that underpays them, b/c it puts food on the table, and they are only qualified for that type of job.
Certainly, but such a situation is not the fault of the employer. I'm not going to punish an employer or refer to the employer as a "thief" just because one of their employees uses them as an employer of last resort.
Not everyone was born into the same privilege as you, as you were not born into the same privilege of George W., John Kerry, etc.
What privilege was I born with and how did it directly contribute to one thing I have? Don't speak of averages -- I am a person not an average. Tell me how I was born with what I have.
Your choices of where to go, what job to work, etc. are shaped by things that are out of your control, and to just say that someone could easily quit a job is based out of a reality that does not exist for most people. So yes they could quit, but in our society many would have no means for subsistence.
Good god.
My choices were shaped by my mind, which is very much in my control. Certainly outside influences influence my daily life, but those influences pull in many directions. I am not some kind of inanimate slave to those influences.
A. Who told you that?
Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in particular.
Now who is taking certain teachings from school for granted?
I can't imagine many schools these days that would teach you that profit is payment for the mind.
Profit is based off the exploitation of mental/manual labor, that whole payment from the mind is rooted in classist ideology so that the rich can appease their guilty conscious.
I just got back from the coffee shop down the street. Paid $1 of a cup of coffee that probably cost $.10 to make. Tell me again how I was "exploited".
B. Tell that to Wal-Mart's competitors.
Target is well aware of that fact, as are many of the independent grocers and retail chains that beat Wal-Mart every day, at least to a certain extent.
Ummm...that depends on how you look at things, and certainly that is quite an Americanist assumption that jobs are not backed with guns and prisons, b/c I'm sure people in Cambodia, Indonesia, South America, China, Phillipines, etc. who work for U.S. based companies would have a pretty strong argument against that claim.
Yes they would. Where have you ever seen me say that slave labor, in any nation, is just?
well, it's not a list of the 14 best corporations, is it?
No. It's a random list about some bad actions committed by corporations. Some substantiated, some not. However, it is then turned into a treatise on "evildoing" by its authors, meant to erase any concept that these corporations also do much good in the world.
feel free to write up that article and post it
That's not a bad idea. Think prisonplanet would post it, in the interest of being "fair and balanced"?
so b/c lots of ppl enjoy their product it makes it ok to privatize water!? how does how their product taste erase the bad??
It doesn't. I never suggested it did. If one is going to write about corporations, however, don't you think it would make sense to discuss why people buy their products, however, and what perceived benefits those products have????
hitler was said to be a pretty nice guy...maybe we should stop saying he was a bad person
Maybe you should stop turning him in to "pure evil" and understand he was a human being with serious problems. Only then could you understand him, his actions, and what they mean.
are you saying they have NO control over who DOES hire them?
The people who hire them are Coke's enemies, friend. They are drug cartels and/or seriously misguided "socialist" community groups that will stop at nothing to prevent people from working for foreign companies.
All good reasons to not buy Coke...at least the ones that are actually validated by fact.
b/c they settled doesn't make them innocent either.
I never claimed that. But the article does claim they're guilty.
the racial discrimination goes beyond hiring practices...what sources have you read on this, ffg?
'As reported on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” (6/18/02), current and former employees of the local Coca-Cola bottler in Dallas accused the company of stocking store shelves in black and Hispanic neighborhoods with expired soft drinks. (Canned soft drinks have about a nine-month shelf life before going flat.)
There you go again..."accused the company" means guilty.
no i didn't, weren't they found guilty of things like manipulating teh results of studies on things like their frozen coke at burger king? so making a profit by deception?
They made no profit. They employees were fired, the money was returned.
here's what i don't get about you; you place a large part of blame on the consumer for their choices saying they should read up on what they buy so they know what's in them, the conditions they are made in...so why do you always try to delegitimize anyone who does spreads any info?
:rolleyes:
If your goal was actually spreading balanced info, I'd have no problem with you or your posts. That is not your goal however.
Look, if I came on here and claimed that I was teaching people philosophy, would you be cool with that? I hope not. I'm here espousing a particular philosophy, the one I subscribe to and think works best in life. While my particular philosophy allows people to hold any philosophy they choose, I'm not going to advocate they subscribe to one of self-sacrifice and suffering or pretend that I'm advocating it.
i ahve your permission!? thanks!!!
You don't need it.
and i stand by mine; pfizer wasn't the only conditions they inventors could work in. also i would think the ppl who invented the drugs had a pretty good education before being employed by pfizer. they could've just as easily done this at a university or glaxo-smith kline or merck...
But they didn't. Just blind chance, huh?
if i wrote a book on a computer at a library would i owe them part of the profit? they provided me the necessary tools to do it.
I'd have absolutely no problem with that, assuming the library informed you that that was the terms of your use of their equipment. Libraries, however, operate on opposite terms. They allow you to use their equipment for free. Kind of explains why you don't see medicinal labs at libraries.
and to me when they knowingly do things like serve spoiled meat i take that into consideration, again, you can overlook it, i can't
I'm not overlooking the situation, nor do I overlook the substantiated claims in the information you posted. I'm simply taking issue with ignoring all of the GOOD. Look, when Halliburton gives troops contaminated water, it makes huge news, and rightfully so. Giving troops contaminated water is not a good thing, ok? But when, two days later, Halliburton installs localized filtration systems at a base, how much news does that make? Very little.
See, you want to turn my position into "ffg thinks business can do no wrong". I don't. Businesses do lots of bad things, and they do lots of good things. Kind of like people. Sometimes the bad is willful, sometimes it's not. But what scares me is that people like you don't ever want to recognize or "educate" on the good, and don't even consider that the bad often stems from simple mistakes. Do you understand how hard it is to do what Halliburton is doing? Before Halliburton, do you think that soldiers were never given spoiled meat or bad water? Again, it doesn't justify it when it happens. But to pretend that it means some kind of systematic corruption is ludicris.
I'm going to put this right here on it's own so you can't ignore it anymore:
The good a corporation does will never erase the bad it does. The reverse is also true.
Ok? Please let me know that you saw this.
i see it. while it can't erase the other one can be worse or better than the other to sway one's personal judgement towards or against
but ya know what's funny? there's a mountain more of evidence against abuses dealing w/ halliburton's logistical work (which the bonus was for) than the spoiled meat
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
i see it. while it can't erase the other one can be worse or better than the other to sway one's personal judgement towards or against
Certainly. But those judgments only work if they involve both sides, right?
but ya know what's funny? there's a mountain more of evidence against abuses dealing w/ halliburton's logistical work (which the bonus was for) than the spoiled meat
But you have to remember how LOGCAP works. LOGCAP is a cost-plus contract, the kind often used by the Clinton administration (and many others). LOGCAP allows Halliburton to make a 2% profit. Unfortunately, it also fucks the taxpayer because there are no built-in cost control mechanisms. Effectively the only way to raise profit is to raise cost. Halliburton's bonus also includes deductions for mistakes made and deductions are also made in the standard billing process. This is not unique or even untoward. It only looks weird if you have a mindset that says that a few mistakes or acts of willful neglect erases all of the other successes or acts of willful care. Your example was really telling:
" if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?"
The more apt example would be an employee that did a great job, came in on time, did his job as well as he could, but then stole something from the office. In that case, I would punish the employee for stealing, but I also might reward him for all the other stuff. See how that works?
I'll grant you that wikipedia is not free from some inherent bias. I will not grant you that an op-ed presented as journalism where a fraction of the author's bias is "on the table" is a good source of truth.
The former at least strives to overcome bias and present things in a factual manner. The latter does the opposite far too often, as is evidenced in the article posted in this thread.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree here, because I'd rather know exactly where the authorial voice is coming from before I make decisions on its claim to validity.
I'm not trying to silence anything. Prisonplanet can start broadcasting on streetcorners for all I care. However, I'm not going to accept their words just because they are "other voices" presenting "alternative truths". They have to demonstrate an interest in fact, not in conclusion if I'm going to consider them a journalistic or fact-based source.
So when El Kabong drops loads of facts on you, you still decide to argue those are wrong? And I also find it funny that you cite wikipedia as a "factual" source of anything in the first place given that it could be anyone who posted the info up there. It's claims to truth and fact are no different than prison planet, my argument is that in this country many people, like you, actually believe that they are.
Yet those "dominant myths and ideologies" may have validity even in the face of prisonplanet's "truth". If Wikipedia's bias make it wrong, prisonplanet doesn't suddenly become right. It suffers from many of the exact same inherent biases you point to, and its "facts" fail far more often.
I didn't say that prisonplanet was right if wikipedia is wrong...I'm just saying that I find info given whereby the author situates her/himself contextually within a given moment much more compelling than some positivistic claim on facts and truths.
Certainly, but such a situation is not the fault of the employer. I'm not going to punish an employer or refer to the employer as a "thief" just because one of their employees uses them as an employer of last resort.
But yesterday you labeled us theives for accepting tax dollars, which by my account, I never really had a vote on? So how am I a thief for taking those tax dollars, and the employer who's exploiting people not? Who has a more direct choice in the matter?
What privilege was I born with and how did it directly contribute to one thing I have? Don't speak of averages -- I am a person not an average. Tell me how I was born with what I have.
I love how you keep repeating that you are a person not an average. I know that you are, we are all different, we are all individuals, we all get dealt different hands. When it came to the gene pool you won the motherfucking lottery deal with it. You can't tell me that you really think you don't have more privilege than a poor kid from the inner-city who studies off books from the 1950's who's best hope of getting out of school is going to some shitty community college. You have got to be kidding me! Just b/c you believe that you got here individually doesn't mean you didn't get a lot of help along the way.
My choices were shaped by my mind, which is very much in my control. Certainly outside influences influence my daily life, but those influences pull in many directions. I am not some kind of inanimate slave to those influences.
I never said that...to say that would make me a rote-Marxist and that is far too deterministic for my beliefs. I say you believe far too much in the individual agents choice as to make you sort of the anti-marx. Somewhere in between is where I lie, I believe that class/race/sex/gender/age etc. structures shape our lives and that we make choices based off of those structures. At the same time we actually have the ablility to change the structures with our actions. You see it's fluid, individuals are not all powerful, and the structure doesn't always decide for you but it definitely has far more say in your life than you are willing to give it credit.
I find Ayn Rand quite funny actually b/c Nietzche is one of her early influences given that he was the initial person to write about genealogy, using the past a detailed look at history (and the people writing that history) to better understand the present. Somehow however she found this too subjective, and she herself decided that objectivity (clearly a subjective political act) was the way to go. For a better use of Nietzche see Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality vols. 1-3.
I do like that she actually spoke out against Kant that knob.
Target is well aware of that fact, as are many of the independent grocers and retail chains that beat Wal-Mart every day, at least to a certain extent.
Wal-Mart's still runnin' strong...it'll eventually be taken down by someone more efficient and destructive than they are...maybe farfrom-mart.
You have stuck up for unpaid overtime in the past, which is unwanted work with no compensation.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree here, because I'd rather know exactly where the authorial voice is coming from before I make decisions on its claim to validity.
Ok. I'm not sure how 'validity" relates to the source of an author's voice within the context of fact, but I'll agree to disagree.
So when El Kabong drops loads of facts on you, you still decide to argue those are wrong?
Where did I say they were wrong? Some of the aren't fully substantiated, but the majority of them are quite true to the best of my knowledge. My beef here is that those facts are incomplete.
And I also find it funny that you cite wikipedia as a "factual" source of anything in the first place given that it could be anyone who posted the info up there. It's claims to truth and fact are no different than prison planet, my argument is that in this country many people, like you, actually believe that they are.
I cite wikipedia as a source that values fact over conclusion. Please read my post. I did not say that Wikipedia is 100% factual without errors or omissions. It is not. Here's the difference. When I look up something on Wikipedia, at least I get a broad spectrum of the information regarding that topic. When I look up something at prisonplanet, I get a severe subset of the information tailored to their conclusions. When the average contributor to Wikipedia posts something, they do so in the interest of presenting a big-picture representation of fact. When the average contributor to prisonplanet posts something, they do so in the interest of presenting a conclusion with the fact to back it up. Do you understand the difference?
I didn't say that prisonplanet was right if wikipedia is wrong...I'm just saying that I find info given whereby the author situates her/himself contextually within a given moment much more compelling than some positivistic claim on facts and truths.
Of course you do. That way it doesn't matter when something is right or wrong in the next moment.
But yesterday you labeled us theives for accepting tax dollars, which by my account, I never really had a vote on?
One doesn't "accept" tax dollars. One collects them with the force of law. That's why there are the different words "tax" and "alm".
You certainly did not vote on corporate or individual income tax rates. At least not directly. I doubt such a vote would ever occur in this country, though I wish it would. However, if you willingly accept services from this government in value greater than you pay in, you are a thief.
So how am I a thief for taking those tax dollars, and the employer who's exploiting people not? Who has a more direct choice in the matter?
Because in the confine of your example, the employer is not exploiting anyone. Certainly some corporations exploit workers, typically workers overseas. But an employer is not exploiting you by default just because you work for them.
I love how you keep repeating that you are a person not an average. I know that you are, we are all different, we are all individuals, we all get dealt different hands.
You keep speaking of people as if they're just blobs of clay constantly shaped by the external world without any control or choice or will. Your statements seem to deny the unique consciousness of every human being.
When it came to the gene pool you won the motherfucking lottery deal with it.
Just because I'm white and a man?
You can't tell me that you really think you don't have more privilege than a poor kid from the inner-city who studies off books from the 1950's who's best hope of getting out of school is going to some shitty community college.
I was born with more privilege than he was. Yet some of those kids have done a shitload more than I have.
You have got to be kidding me! Just b/c you believe that you got here individually doesn't mean you didn't get a lot of help along the way.
But you're not talking about "help along the way". Of course I had help along the way. I had the help of my family, my friends, my coworkers, my educators....the list goes on and on. But I dealt with those things, good and bad, as myself.
What you're telling me is that what I have primarily comes from my genes. Yet you can't even begin to cite one specific example from my life that fits that scenario.
I never said that...to say that would make me a rote-Marxist and that is far too deterministic for my beliefs. I say you believe far too much in the individual agents choice as to make you sort of the anti-marx.
I'm as anti-Marx as the come, my friend.
Somewhere in between is where I lie, I believe that class/race/sex/gender/age etc. structures shape our lives and that we make choices based off of those structures. At the same time we actually have the ablility to change the structures with our actions. You see it's fluid, individuals are not all powerful, and the structure doesn't always decide for you but it definitely has far more say in your life than you are willing to give it credit.
Ok. I'll give it credit when someone can actually demonstrate it's "power" over me.
I find Ayn Rand quite funny actually b/c Nietzche is one of her early influences given that he was the initial person to write about genealogy, using the past a detailed look at history (and the people writing that history) to better understand the present. Somehow however she found this too subjective, and she herself decided that objectivity (clearly a subjective political act) was the way to go. For a better use of Nietzche see Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality vols. 1-3.
Somehow? She found that too subjective by believing that history is outside the man who writes about it.
For a better use of objectivity in both the political and individual context, see Rand's "Fountainhead".
I do like that she actually spoke out against Kant that knob.
I'm surprised you reject Kant, considering that he loved the idea of a priori knowledge and his theories required that man's mind is impotent.
Umm...I was taught that in my economics courses. God I hated those classes..."how to take advantage of the disadvanteged" by Rich People.
Ok. Interesting that an economics class would teach you how to profit by taking advantage of people. I didn't know that economics was being taught via the logic of Three-Card-Monty these days.
What?
The coffee shop made a 900% profit off of me on that cup of coffee. How did they "exploit" me?
Wal-Mart's still runnin' strong...it'll eventually be taken down by someone more efficient and destructive than they are...maybe farfrom-mart.
Yet Wal-Mart is already losing in some areas to other grocers and supermarkets. Why? The answer is actually hidden in your statment above. Efficiency and destruction are more often at odds than they are complimentary.
You have stuck up for unpaid overtime in the past, which is unwanted work with no compensation.
I certainly will stick up for unpaid overtime (at least in the context of human rights, not necessarily as ethical behavior), unless one of the following is true:
- A contract between employee and employer exists requiring overtime work to be paid
- The employee is unable to refuse without incurring physical force
Yes. I believe Cheney and the neo-cons are seeking to stack the world's political deck in their favor. Their aim? "Security" and "open markets". They'll fail at both, but that's their aim.
A part of it, yes. But the "profit" you're haggling over is bullshit chump change. If you think the purpose of the war was so Cheney could make some money on Halliburton stock options that he is legally obligated to give to charity, you're not paying any attention. If that was the case, he simply would have engineered to have all military support services outsourced to Halliburton and his profit would have been accomplished and would have lasted much longer than a single war.
no, i never said tjhe only purpose was for halliburton's profit...in fact i've posted several other reasons...but to say the profit for rebuilding had nothing to do w/ it is ludacris. the suggestion that if profit was a motivation they would give ALL the contracts to them is equally ludacris
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
no, i never said tjhe only purpose was for halliburton's profit...in fact i've posted several other reasons...but to say the profit for rebuilding had nothing to do w/ it is ludacris.
But he's not making a dime of profit off of it:
"In recent years the company has become the center of several controversies involving the 2003 Iraq War and the company's ties to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney retired from the company during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign with a severance package worth $20 million[citation needed]. As of 2004, he had received $398,548 in deferred compensation from Halliburton while Vice President.[3] Cheney also retains unexercised stock options at Halliburton, which have been valued at nearly $8 million.[3]
Concerns have been raised regarding the possible conflict of interest resulting from Cheney's deferred compensation and stock options from Halliburton. However, before entering office in 2001, Cheney bought an insurance policy that guaranteed a fixed amount of deferred payments from Halliburton each year for five years so that the payments would not depend on the company's fortunes.[3] He is legally bound by an agreement he signed which turns over power of attorney to a trust administrator to sell the options at some future time and to give the after-tax profits to three charities. The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney's home state), 40% will go to George Washington University's medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education. The agreement states that it is "irrevocable and may not be terminated, waived or amended," preventing Cheney from taking back the options at a later date.[3]"
Certainly. But those judgments only work if they involve both sides, right?
which do you think is more common knowledge?
that 'millions of ppl enjoy drinking coke' or they privatize water and even collecting rain water is illegal? a lot of the 'other/good' side is common knowledge. certain actions ppl would think are so bad no matter the good the company does will not erase the bad enough for them to support the company. like the privatization; that far outweighs, in my mind, any money they give to charity.
But you have to remember how LOGCAP works. LOGCAP is a cost-plus contract, the kind often used by the Clinton administration (and many others). LOGCAP allows Halliburton to make a 2% profit. Unfortunately, it also fucks the taxpayer because there are no built-in cost control mechanisms. Effectively the only way to raise profit is to raise cost. Halliburton's bonus also includes deductions for mistakes made and deductions are also made in the standard billing process. This is not unique or even untoward. It only looks weird if you have a mindset that says that a few mistakes or acts of willful neglect erases all of the other successes or acts of willful care.
a few mistakes?? simple neglect?? are you kidding me? feeding them spoiled meat, giving them contaminated water 'The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River'...did you honestly even read the list of the logisitcial audits??
'the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U.S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year.' over $10million they've overcharged just for this one hotel since the war started...and that's a 'simple mistake'? up to $26 million in missing equipment is just 'neglect'?
sorry, but when these ppl are cutting the headstart program and lots of other things while this is happening and allowing them to receive a bonus is absurd
" if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?"
The more apt example would be an employee that did a great job, came in on time, did his job as well as he could, but then stole something from the office. In that case, I would punish the employee for stealing, but I also might reward him for all the other stuff. See how that works?
i guess that is another difference...i see a lot of problems w/ halliburton's work, you want to simply brush them off as 'neglect' and 'mistakes' i don't think that list of abuses (and it is far from a complete list) does not a "great job" make this employee is not only stealing staplers, he's putting 40% more time on his time card than he worked. he's telling you materials cost one thing but really inflating hte price and skimming some off the top.
man, how does your business run w/ this kind of work ethic you title 'great'?
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
How are you going to hold CAT or any other company responsible for the MISuse of its product by the end user. Mind you, the misuse is intent only, not purpose. CAT machines ARE made to tear up things, they are NOT designed or built for Isreal's intent (to destroy Palestinian homes). Additionally, Israel is an ally - what corporation would question conducting business with an ally???
And there are so many American companies conducting business with enemy states and rogue nations! There are Fortune 500 companies that are DRIVING the economy of nations like Syria, Iran, and Libya to name a few (Conoco-Philips, General Electric, etc). Just about everyone with a 401(k) pension plan or mutual fund has money invested in companies that are doing business in so-called rogue states.
which do you think is more common knowledge?
that 'millions of ppl enjoy drinking coke' or they privatize water and even collecting rain water is illegal? a lot of the 'other/good' side is common knowledge. certain actions ppl would think are so bad no matter the good the company does will not erase the bad enough for them to support the company. like the privatization; that far outweighs, in my mind, any money they give to charity.
So you're here to spread uncommon knowledge? That's your purpose?
If you feel that Coke's actions in India have outweighed the positives of their actions elsewhere, that's fine.
a few mistakes?? simple neglect?? are you kidding me? feeding them spoiled meat, giving them contaminated water 'The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River'...did you honestly even read the list of the logisitcial audits??
'the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U.S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year.' over $10million they've overcharged just for this one hotel since the war started...and that's a 'simple mistake'? up to $26 million in missing equipment is just 'neglect'?
sorry, but when these ppl are cutting the headstart program and lots of other things while this is happening and allowing them to receive a bonus is absurd
Halliburton is not cutting the headstart program, ok? Dear God.
It is "neglect". Do you understand what the word means? $10m in overcharges on a $5.6B contract is a 0.1% overcharge. Do you understand that, while wrong, it's not the end of the world?
A family member of mine works for the Michigan Welfare System and deals with the financials of daycare-related services. Everyday there's another day care center in Michigan that overcharges the state for daycare services. Sometimes its willful fraud. Other times it's a mistake. Should she be running around trying to shut down day care centers just because a few bills out of thousands are incorrect???
i guess that is another difference...i see a lot of problems w/ halliburton's work, you want to simply brush them off as 'neglect' and 'mistakes' i don't think that list of abuses (and it is far from a complete list) does not a "great job" make this employee is not only stealing staplers, he's putting 40% more time on his time card than he worked. he's telling you materials cost one thing but really inflating hte price and skimming some off the top.
AGGHHH!!! That list of abuses does not a "great job" make. That's because the list of abuses doesn't contain the thousands of correct bills, the millions of gallons of clean drinking water, and the millions of pounds of safe meals provided. What don't you understand about this?
man, how does your business run w/ this kind of work ethic you title 'great'?
It works because I understand that not a single person is perfect. It's called dealing with reality. It's about punishing people for their errors and rewarding them for their successes. What's so hard about that to understand?
Comments
DynCorp Disgrace
Posted Jan. 14, 2002
By Kelly Patricia O'Meara
Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.
According to the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic, "in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."
Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston's effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States. That departure from the war-torn country was a far cry from what Johnston imagined a year earlier when he arrived in Bosnia to begin a three-year U.S. Air Force contract with DynCorp as an aircraft-maintenance technician for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters.
For more than 50 years DynCorp, based in Reston, Va., has been a worldwide force providing maintenance support to the U.S. military through contract field teams (CFTs). As one of the federal government's top 25 contractors, DynCorp has received nearly $1 billion since 1995 for these services and has deployed 181 personnel to Bosnia during the last six years. Although DynCorp long has been respected for such work, according to Johnston and internal DynCorp communications it appears that extracurricular sexcapades on the part of its employees were tolerated by some as part of its business in Bosnia.
...
Johnston was on the ground and saw firsthand what the military was complaining about. "My main problem," he explains, "was [sexual misbehavior] with the kids, but I wasn't too happy with them ripping off the government, either. DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do. There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts and, when the military would question why it was taking so long, he'd pull out the part and say 'Hey, you need to install this.' They'd have us replace windows in helicopters that weren't bad just to get paid. They had one kid, James Harlin, over there who was right out of high school and he didn't even know the names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid, but this is the way they [DynCorp] grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body — that's the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don't do an eight-hour day, they'll sign you in for it because that's how they bill the government. It's a total fraud."
Remember, Johnston was fired by this company. He laughs bitterly recalling the work habits of a DynCorp employee in Bosnia who "weighed 400 pounds and would stick cheeseburgers in his pockets and eat them while he worked. The problem was he would literally fall asleep every five minutes. One time he fell asleep with a torch in his hand and burned a hole through the plastic on an aircraft." This same man, according to Johnston, "owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. It's a sick sight anyway to see any grown man [having sex] with a child, but to see some 45-year-old man who weighs 400 pounds with a little girl, it just makes you sick." It is precisely these allegations that Johnston believes got him fired.
Johnston reports that he had been in Bosnia only a few days when he became aware of misbehavior in which many of his DynCorp colleagues were involved. He tells INSIGHT, "I noticed there were problems as soon as I got there, and I tried to be covert because I knew it was a rougher crowd than I'd ever dealt with. It's not like I don't drink or anything, but DynCorp employees would come to work drunk. A DynCorp van would pick us up every morning and you could smell the alcohol on them. There were big-time drinking issues. I always told these guys what I thought of what they were doing, and I guess they just thought I was a self-righteous fool or something, but I didn't care what they thought."
The mix of drunkenness and working on multimillion-dollar aircraft upon which the lives of U.S. military personnel depended was a serious enough issue, but Johnston drew the line when it came to buying young girls and women as sex slaves. "I heard talk about the prostitution right away, but it took some time before I understood that they were buying these girls. I'd tell them that it was wrong and that it was no different than slavery — that you can't buy women. But they'd buy the women's passports and they [then] owned them and would sell them to each other."
"At first," explains Johnston, "I just told the guys it was wrong. Then I went to my supervisors, including John Hirtz, although at the time I didn't realize how deep into it he was. Later I learned that he had videotaped himself having sex with two girls and CID has that video as evidence. Hirtz is the guy who would take new employees to the brothels and set them up so he got his women free. The Serbian mafia would give Hirtz the women free and, when one of the guys was leaving the country, Hirtz would go to the mafia and make sure that the guys didn't owe them any money."
"None of the girls," continues Johnston, "were from Bosnia. They were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say 'I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.' They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them usually between $600 and $800. In fact, there was this one guy who had to be 60 years old who had a girl who couldn't have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100 percent in bed with the mafia over there. I didn't get any results from talking to DynCorp officials, so I went to Army CID and I drove around with them, pointing out everyone's houses who owned women and weapons."
That's when Johnston's life took a dramatic turn.
Read more if you wish
It sickens me so much. And DynCorp is still being awarded multi-million dollar contracts by our government. The same government led by a man who we saw making faces and crossing his eyes seconds before the camera went live for him to annouce that we were about to launch a war on Iraq - like it was a fucking joke to him! The man has no fucking soul. And neither does anyone who considers him a friend. This country and the whole fucking world NEEDS to be defended against these fuckers!!!!!!!!!!!!
A. There's no such thing as an unbiased source. Everything is contextually, and conjucturally situated and spoken/written through a given political, national, gendered, raced, sexed, aged viewpoint. The idea of an unbiased opinion is as ludicrous as thinking that one Truth exists over any other truth in a given situation. So while wikipedia may seem unbiased it's written entries come from particular people who are most likely the typical users of the internet white, male, middle-class, and american, and-as such-reflect their sensibilities and political underpinnings. As such I would argue that wikipedia is no less a politically charged than the liberal websites you were bashing.
B. Have you ever turned taxes and payment on its head? As a business owner do you ever feel that by paying your people less than what you are making that you are stealing from them? You are gaining more from their manual/mental labor than you are giving them right - isn't that the whole idea of profit? If that isn't stealing than how can taxes be considered stealing?
Caterpillar does not modify the bulldozers for the IDF.
So such things should not be considered???? We should only fixate on things that violate someone's definition of "abuse"???
Then go create them. And sell them at cost and put Pfizer out of business.
There is a huge difference. There is no difference, however, when you ignore the other half of the equation. Millions of meals have been served that were good. If the US military wishes to withhold funds for bad meals, so be it. To not pay for the good meals, however, would be theft.
I treat your facts the same way I'd treat anyone who consistently posted stuff from FoxNews.com.
So in other words Wikipedia = prisonplanet.com?? The bias is the same? Please.
Of course. However there is a fundamental difference. No one is legally obligated to continue in such a job. If I don't pay my taxes, I'm arrested. If I quit my job, I am not. See how that works?
:eek:
Of course not. The whole idea of profit is payment for the mind. If you do not share that profit based on the labor's contribution to it, eventually you will be run out of the market.
Because your taxes are backed with guns and prisons. Jobs are not. See how that works?
Yes.
In part, yes.
Along with many others, yes.
Perhaps because he simply had a hard-on for installing a "democracy" in Iraq.
Because they're grand idealists who have a specific vision for how this world should work. And their vision requires control over millions of individuals. And that control requires force and war. Sound like anyone else you know?
not themselves, as stated in something i already posted...
they still sell them w/ the knowledge of what it will be used for (that they are going to be modified and given/resold to the idf. if i sold rope to klansmen KNOWING they were gonna use it to make a noose and string up some black ppl...am i free of any guilt or wrongdoing?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
You implied otherwise in your example.
Sure. But knocking down Palestinian homes is not their only purpose either.
You're certainly not guilty of hanging a man. But if it bothers you, I would recommend not selling them. I'm not interested in sending bulldozers to your house to stop you though.
of course not, where would you get such an idea from?
i think ppl should weigh things out. like reborn asked about coke and pepsi...both do bad things like support corrupt governments...so in that way they would be equal, but since coke privatizes water in other countries (maybe pepsi does but i haven't seen anything about it) so given that fact it makes me think both are bad but coke is worse.
so, ppl should weigh things out like which is more important: building schools (for profit and something several other companies could do) or selling equipment they know will be used to occupy another person's land and destroy innocent ppl's homes, run over some ppl (for profit)... and the profit isn't the problem, i'm simply pointing out that WHY they build schools. good for profit vs very bad for profit...maybe you can think the good outweighs the bad, i would disagree.
what does that have to do w/ my point? you said 'w/o pfizer those drugs would just be a dream' pfizer didn't put the ideas into the creators heads, they simply employed them at the time it was thought and tested.
i never said anything about not paying anyone at all if they do bad. you are still ignoring the point that they KNOWINGLY served troops SPOILED MEAT. it wasn't an accident, it was done merely to cut corners for more profit. woudl you take your car to a mechanic that changes your oil w/o problem but rips you off in other ways?
another issue you are ignoring is the bonus halliburton was given for their work. if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
is that what YOU believe?
why do they want control? what do they benefit from it? could a big part of it be.....profit?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Perhaps from the article posted that refers to Caterpillar as an "evildoer" and as "horrific" but makes absolutely no mention of those things.
And no mention of the fact that millions of people actually enjoy Coke? No mention of the millions of dollars donated to charity? No mention of the fact that Coca Cola is not the one actually hiring those killing the protestors at their Latin American bottling plants, as is implied by the article?
This is the best part of the article: "Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions." It implies that Coca Cola guilty just because they were sued. Coke was never convicted in that case -- they settled for $192.5 million.
By the way, you stole $1.8 billion in taxes from Coca Cola last year.
You may disagree all you like.
They did "simply employ them". They also 'simply" constructed labs, invested money, took risks, supplied the necessary tools and education and did what you did not. I stand by my statement...if it's so "simple" go out and do it yourself.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm simply not going to build my entire viewpoint around it. Doing that would require ignoring every meal they served otherwise. See how that works?
Really? Unfortunately there isn't a shred of evidence for that.
No. I already said that Halliburton wouldn't see a dime of my money without taxation.
No. Thankfully that's not what happened. They were given a $72million bonus for logicstics services, which is outside of the scope of the food supply and accounting services. They were denied bonuses in those areas.
Yes. I believe Cheney and the neo-cons are seeking to stack the world's political deck in their favor. Their aim? "Security" and "open markets". They'll fail at both, but that's their aim.
A part of it, yes. But the "profit" you're haggling over is bullshit chump change. If you think the purpose of the war was so Cheney could make some money on Halliburton stock options that he is legally obligated to give to charity, you're not paying any attention. If that was the case, he simply would have engineered to have all military support services outsourced to Halliburton and his profit would have been accomplished and would have lasted much longer than a single war.
You seem to place a whole lot of belief in an individuals agency without looking at the structures that help shape their lives. Not everyone has the same situation as you. Not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job that underpays them, b/c it puts food on the table, and they are only qualified for that type of job. Not everyone was born into the same privilege as you, as you were not born into the same privilege of George W., John Kerry, etc. Your choices of where to go, what job to work, etc. are shaped by things that are out of your control, and to just say that someone could easily quit a job is based out of a reality that does not exist for most people. So yes they could quit, but in our society many would have no means for subsistence.
A. Who told you that? Now who is taking certain teachings from school for granted? Profit is based off the exploitation of mental/manual labor, that whole payment from the mind is rooted in classist ideology so that the rich can appease their guilty conscious.
B. Tell that to Wal-Mart's competitors.
Ummm...that depends on how you look at things, and certainly that is quite an Americanist assumption that jobs are not backed with guns and prisons, b/c I'm sure people in Cambodia, Indonesia, South America, China, Phillipines, etc. who work for U.S. based companies would have a pretty strong argument against that claim.
well, it's not a list of the 14 best corporations, is it?
feel free to write up that article and post it
so b/c lots of ppl enjoy their product it makes it ok to privatize water!? how does how their product taste erase the bad??
hitler was said to be a pretty nice guy...maybe we should stop saying he was a bad person
are you saying they have NO control over who DOES hire them?
Other crimes and abuses by Coke include:
• Overexploitation and Pollution of Water Sources in India (http://www.indiaresource.org),
Mexico (http://www.ciepac.org), Ghana and elsewhere (http://www.polarisinstitute.org)
• Benefiting from Hazardous Child Labour in Sugar Cane Fields in El Salvador as
documented by Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org)
• Aggressive Marketing to Children of Nutritionally Worthless and Damaging Products
(http://www.commercialexploitation.org and http://www.schoolpouringrights.com/)
• Anti-worker Policies in Turkey, Indonesia and Latin America
(http://www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org and http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/)
• Giving executives hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options and bonuses while laying off thousands of employees
• Fraudulent Business Practices
• Tax avoidance and corporate welfare schemes
b/c they settled doesn't make them innocent either.
the racial discrimination goes beyond hiring practices...what sources have you read on this, ffg?
'As reported on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” (6/18/02), current and former employees of the local Coca-Cola bottler in Dallas accused the company of stocking store shelves in black and Hispanic neighborhoods with expired soft drinks. (Canned soft drinks have about a nine-month shelf life before going flat.)
no i didn't, weren't they found guilty of things like manipulating teh results of studies on things like their frozen coke at burger king? so making a profit by deception?
here's what i don't get about you; you place a large part of blame on the consumer for their choices saying they should read up on what they buy so they know what's in them, the conditions they are made in...so why do you always try to delegitimize anyone who does spreads any info?
i ahve your permission!? thanks!!!
and i stand by mine; pfizer wasn't the only conditions they inventors could work in. also i would think the ppl who invented the drugs had a pretty good education before being employed by pfizer. they could've just as easily done this at a university or glaxo-smith kline or merck...
if i wrote a book on a computer at a library would i owe them part of the profit? they provided me the necessary tools to do it.
and to me when they knowingly do things like serve spoiled meat i take that into consideration, again, you can overlook it, i can't
really? and what sources have you read on this?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=halliburton+spoiled
looooots of sites that would say otherwise
take this from the daily kos link:
Mr. Rory Mayberry, Food Production Manager at Camp Anaconda in Iraq from February to April 2004, testified (via video feed) that KBR regularly and consistently fed expired food (food past its freshness date by up to a year!) to our troops in Iraq. When the United States military occasionally refused the spoiled food, Halliburton truckers were instructed to take them to the next base in the hope that they would escape scrutiny. Refrigerated food and frozen food in the refrigeration trucks would be left to spoil when the trucks were turned off. He also said that the KBR management would throw parties for themselves three to four times a week and served perfectly good food at the parties. Added to this, they would feed the troops 10,000 meals and charge the government for 20,000 meals.
even a link from 'veterans today':
Outrage overflowed on Capitol Hill this summer when members of Congress learned that Halliburton's dining halls in Iraq had repeatedly served spoiled food to unsuspecting troops.
But the outrage apparently doesn't end with spoiled food. Former KBR employees and water quality specialists, Ben Carter and Ken May said that KBR knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq's Euphrates River. One internal KBR email provided to HalliburtonWatch says that, for "possibly a year," the level of contamination at one camp was two times the normal level for untreated water.
"I discovered the water being delivered from the Euphrates for the military was not being treated properly and thousands were being exposed daily to numerous pathogenic organisms," William Granger of KBR Water Quality for Iraq reached this conclusion in an email after investigating Carter's complaint: "Fact: We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated. The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River." Granger admitted that the contamination was "most likely … ongoing through the entire life" of the camp, but that he was "not sure if any attempt to notify the exposed population was ever made."
Granger had written a scathing, 21-page report to KBR management about water quality at Ar Ramadi. The report proves the company's "incompetence and willful negligence" in protecting the water supply.
hmmm another nice article in the list:
DCAA repeatedly warned Halliburton that its food and the kitchens where it is prepared are "dirty," NBC News reported. At one point, auditors found that Halliburton's promises to clean up its food and kitchens "have not been followed through."65...
Company policy also required purchasing food even if it was spoiled when delivered. When the subcontractor dropped off food at Halliburton locations in Iraq, there was often no place to store it, so the food would sit in
Halliburton freezers on the trucks until the fuel ran out. "[Halliburton] wouldn't refuel the trucks so the food would spoil," the former employee said. "This happened quite a bit."
This behavior works as an overcharge of DoD for food service since Halliburton is required to purchase additional food to replace the spoiled food.
and you really havent read any other problems outside of the food services??
here's a bunch involving their LOGCAP contract (pssst, L stands for your Logistics
DCAA has issued numerous audits since 2003 showing Halliburton had repeatedly violated the FAR via “significant” and “systemic” deficiencies in how it estimates and validates cost.40 As a result, the Defense Department Inspector General and the Justice Department opened a criminal fraud investigation.41 In describing the company’s billing system as “inadequate,”42 the DCAA reported that Halliburton had demanded payment for at least $1.4 billion in “questioned” and “unsupported” expenses in the Middle East.43
An investigation by the inspector general of the now-disbanded U.S. Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) found that between 27 percent and 41 percent of
government property managed by Halliburton, valued at between $11.1 and $26.2 million, had gone missing because of mismanagement.64 About a third of the government items managed by Halliburton, including trucks, computers and office furniture had disappeared.
Halliburton agreed last year to pay a $7.5 million fine and to stop “committing or causing future securities law violations” when it settled a fraud complaint brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).81 The SEC accused the company of providing "materially misleading" information to investors by artificially inflating the amount of revenues it experienced over a number of years.
In January, the U.S. embassy in Iraq threatened to terminate Halliburton’s contracts because of serious cost overcharges and what it called “poor performance.”91 It has been one year since the Army's chief of procurement policy, Tina Ballard, requested the Army “immediately” terminate Halliburton’s troop support contract, or LOGCAP, by parceling the work out to a wider range of companies.92 A Halliburton spokesperson praised Ms. Ballard’s request as “positive” and “expected.” Although the chief executive officer,
David Lesar, indicated Halliburton was prepared not to bid on new LOGCAP work,93he threatened taxpayers by saying, “If we do choose to rebid, we're going to jack the margins up significantly."94
DoD terminated Halliburton from an Iraqi gasoline importation contract and assigned it to an internal office known as the Defense Energy Support Center. The result was a 50 percent reduction in gasoline prices charged to U.S. taxpayers.95
On June 25, 2004, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U.S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year.
In July 2004, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, and insufficient training of contract management officials under the troop logistics contract (known as LOGCAP) in Iraq. GAO reported that, when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher. See Report from House Committee on Government Reform, Minority Staff.
In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary and found "numerous, systemic issues . . . with KBR's estimates." According to DCAA, "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now." When DCAA examined seven LOGCAP task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion. Read Rep. Henry Waxman's letter discussing the DCAA's August 16 memorandum.
On August 17, 2004, the Army announced it would withhold 15 percent of future payments to Halliburton because of suspicious bills. A few hours later, however, the Army announced it would not withhold those payments, but would instead give Halliburton "more time" to explain why it billed taxpayers for work that was apparently never undertaken or completed. The Army's decision was the third time it had extended the deadline for Halliburton to justify undocumented expenses, including $1.8 billion for work in Iraq and Kuwait.
On September 16, 2004, the Pentagon determined that $34.2 million (or 16 percent) of the costs associated with KBR's "Task Order 6" of the Iraqi oil infrastructure contract (RIO) were unreasonable, including $14.9 million in overcharges and $17.7 million in "unsupported" costs.
On November 10, 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman released new State Department documents that disclose efforts by senior Administration officials, including the Ambassador to Kuwait, to steer a lucrative Halliburton fuel subcontract to a favored Kuwaiti company. The documents also describe allegations of widespread bribes and kickbacks sought by Halliburton officials. One subcontractor said it's "common knowledge" that Halliburton officials are "on the take" and "solicit bribes openly" in exchange for awarding contracts.
On November 23, 2004, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (formerly the CPA IG) examined a $569 million LOGCAP task order and found that Halliburton "did not provide . . . sufficiently detailed cost data to evaluate overall project costs or to determine whether specific costs for services performed were reasonable." The IG concluded that the Army "did not receive sufficient or reliable cost information to effectively manage" the task order.
On February 8, 2005, the Pentagon ignored its own auditors and decided to pay $1.8 billion to Halliburton's KBR subsidiary for work that nobody can prove ever took place. The work was allegedly performed in Iraq and Kuwait under the Army's LOGCAP contract. The Army could have suspended or banned Halliburton from future contracts, but decided to take no action. In what the Washington Post called "a departure from normal policy," the Army decided to ignore its own auditors and pay KBR for all costs, plus the standard one to three percent fee, without any explanation that could justify the company's suspicious bills.
On March 14, 2005, a Pentagon audit revealed another $108 million in overcharges by KBR for delivering gasoline to Iraq. The Pentagon had previously released a redacted version of the audit to conceal the overcharge from the public, at KBR's request. Click here for the Pentagon's executive summary of the audit. Click here for the revised audit. See Rep. Henry Waxman's letter on the matter.
if you need the links to these audits you can find them here
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/audits.html
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
I'll grant you that wikipedia is not free from some inherent bias. I will not grant you that an op-ed presented as journalism where a fraction of the author's bias is "on the table" is a good source of truth.
The former at least strives to overcome bias and present things in a factual manner. The latter does the opposite far too often, as is evidenced in the article posted in this thread.
I'm not trying to silence anything. Prisonplanet can start broadcasting on streetcorners for all I care. However, I'm not going to accept their words just because they are "other voices" presenting "alternative truths". They have to demonstrate an interest in fact, not in conclusion if I'm going to consider them a journalistic or fact-based source.
Yet those "dominant myths and ideologies" may have validity even in the face of prisonplanet's "truth". If Wikipedia's bias make it wrong, prisonplanet doesn't suddenly become right. It suffers from many of the exact same inherent biases you point to, and its "facts" fail far more often.
Certainly, but such a situation is not the fault of the employer. I'm not going to punish an employer or refer to the employer as a "thief" just because one of their employees uses them as an employer of last resort.
What privilege was I born with and how did it directly contribute to one thing I have? Don't speak of averages -- I am a person not an average. Tell me how I was born with what I have.
Good god.
My choices were shaped by my mind, which is very much in my control. Certainly outside influences influence my daily life, but those influences pull in many directions. I am not some kind of inanimate slave to those influences.
Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in particular.
I can't imagine many schools these days that would teach you that profit is payment for the mind.
I just got back from the coffee shop down the street. Paid $1 of a cup of coffee that probably cost $.10 to make. Tell me again how I was "exploited".
Target is well aware of that fact, as are many of the independent grocers and retail chains that beat Wal-Mart every day, at least to a certain extent.
Yes they would. Where have you ever seen me say that slave labor, in any nation, is just?
I'm going to put this right here on it's own so you can't ignore it anymore:
The good a corporation does will never erase the bad it does. The reverse is also true.
Ok? Please let me know that you saw this.
No. It's a random list about some bad actions committed by corporations. Some substantiated, some not. However, it is then turned into a treatise on "evildoing" by its authors, meant to erase any concept that these corporations also do much good in the world.
That's not a bad idea. Think prisonplanet would post it, in the interest of being "fair and balanced"?
It doesn't. I never suggested it did. If one is going to write about corporations, however, don't you think it would make sense to discuss why people buy their products, however, and what perceived benefits those products have????
Maybe you should stop turning him in to "pure evil" and understand he was a human being with serious problems. Only then could you understand him, his actions, and what they mean.
The people who hire them are Coke's enemies, friend. They are drug cartels and/or seriously misguided "socialist" community groups that will stop at nothing to prevent people from working for foreign companies.
All good reasons to not buy Coke...at least the ones that are actually validated by fact.
I never claimed that. But the article does claim they're guilty.
There you go again..."accused the company" means guilty.
They made no profit. They employees were fired, the money was returned.
:rolleyes:
If your goal was actually spreading balanced info, I'd have no problem with you or your posts. That is not your goal however.
Look, if I came on here and claimed that I was teaching people philosophy, would you be cool with that? I hope not. I'm here espousing a particular philosophy, the one I subscribe to and think works best in life. While my particular philosophy allows people to hold any philosophy they choose, I'm not going to advocate they subscribe to one of self-sacrifice and suffering or pretend that I'm advocating it.
You don't need it.
But they didn't. Just blind chance, huh?
I'd have absolutely no problem with that, assuming the library informed you that that was the terms of your use of their equipment. Libraries, however, operate on opposite terms. They allow you to use their equipment for free. Kind of explains why you don't see medicinal labs at libraries.
I'm not overlooking the situation, nor do I overlook the substantiated claims in the information you posted. I'm simply taking issue with ignoring all of the GOOD. Look, when Halliburton gives troops contaminated water, it makes huge news, and rightfully so. Giving troops contaminated water is not a good thing, ok? But when, two days later, Halliburton installs localized filtration systems at a base, how much news does that make? Very little.
See, you want to turn my position into "ffg thinks business can do no wrong". I don't. Businesses do lots of bad things, and they do lots of good things. Kind of like people. Sometimes the bad is willful, sometimes it's not. But what scares me is that people like you don't ever want to recognize or "educate" on the good, and don't even consider that the bad often stems from simple mistakes. Do you understand how hard it is to do what Halliburton is doing? Before Halliburton, do you think that soldiers were never given spoiled meat or bad water? Again, it doesn't justify it when it happens. But to pretend that it means some kind of systematic corruption is ludicris.
i see it. while it can't erase the other one can be worse or better than the other to sway one's personal judgement towards or against
but ya know what's funny? there's a mountain more of evidence against abuses dealing w/ halliburton's logistical work (which the bonus was for) than the spoiled meat
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Certainly. But those judgments only work if they involve both sides, right?
But you have to remember how LOGCAP works. LOGCAP is a cost-plus contract, the kind often used by the Clinton administration (and many others). LOGCAP allows Halliburton to make a 2% profit. Unfortunately, it also fucks the taxpayer because there are no built-in cost control mechanisms. Effectively the only way to raise profit is to raise cost. Halliburton's bonus also includes deductions for mistakes made and deductions are also made in the standard billing process. This is not unique or even untoward. It only looks weird if you have a mindset that says that a few mistakes or acts of willful neglect erases all of the other successes or acts of willful care. Your example was really telling:
" if one of your employees did a real bad job, came in late, called in, did his job 1/2 assed, stole stuff from the office...would you give him a raise?"
The more apt example would be an employee that did a great job, came in on time, did his job as well as he could, but then stole something from the office. In that case, I would punish the employee for stealing, but I also might reward him for all the other stuff. See how that works?
So when El Kabong drops loads of facts on you, you still decide to argue those are wrong? And I also find it funny that you cite wikipedia as a "factual" source of anything in the first place given that it could be anyone who posted the info up there. It's claims to truth and fact are no different than prison planet, my argument is that in this country many people, like you, actually believe that they are.
I didn't say that prisonplanet was right if wikipedia is wrong...I'm just saying that I find info given whereby the author situates her/himself contextually within a given moment much more compelling than some positivistic claim on facts and truths.
But yesterday you labeled us theives for accepting tax dollars, which by my account, I never really had a vote on? So how am I a thief for taking those tax dollars, and the employer who's exploiting people not? Who has a more direct choice in the matter?
I love how you keep repeating that you are a person not an average. I know that you are, we are all different, we are all individuals, we all get dealt different hands. When it came to the gene pool you won the motherfucking lottery deal with it. You can't tell me that you really think you don't have more privilege than a poor kid from the inner-city who studies off books from the 1950's who's best hope of getting out of school is going to some shitty community college. You have got to be kidding me! Just b/c you believe that you got here individually doesn't mean you didn't get a lot of help along the way.
I never said that...to say that would make me a rote-Marxist and that is far too deterministic for my beliefs. I say you believe far too much in the individual agents choice as to make you sort of the anti-marx. Somewhere in between is where I lie, I believe that class/race/sex/gender/age etc. structures shape our lives and that we make choices based off of those structures. At the same time we actually have the ablility to change the structures with our actions. You see it's fluid, individuals are not all powerful, and the structure doesn't always decide for you but it definitely has far more say in your life than you are willing to give it credit.
I find Ayn Rand quite funny actually b/c Nietzche is one of her early influences given that he was the initial person to write about genealogy, using the past a detailed look at history (and the people writing that history) to better understand the present. Somehow however she found this too subjective, and she herself decided that objectivity (clearly a subjective political act) was the way to go. For a better use of Nietzche see Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality vols. 1-3.
I do like that she actually spoke out against Kant that knob.
Umm...I was taught that in my economics courses. God I hated those classes..."how to take advantage of the disadvanteged" by Rich People.
What?
Wal-Mart's still runnin' strong...it'll eventually be taken down by someone more efficient and destructive than they are...maybe farfrom-mart.
You have stuck up for unpaid overtime in the past, which is unwanted work with no compensation.
Ok. I'm not sure how 'validity" relates to the source of an author's voice within the context of fact, but I'll agree to disagree.
Where did I say they were wrong? Some of the aren't fully substantiated, but the majority of them are quite true to the best of my knowledge. My beef here is that those facts are incomplete.
I cite wikipedia as a source that values fact over conclusion. Please read my post. I did not say that Wikipedia is 100% factual without errors or omissions. It is not. Here's the difference. When I look up something on Wikipedia, at least I get a broad spectrum of the information regarding that topic. When I look up something at prisonplanet, I get a severe subset of the information tailored to their conclusions. When the average contributor to Wikipedia posts something, they do so in the interest of presenting a big-picture representation of fact. When the average contributor to prisonplanet posts something, they do so in the interest of presenting a conclusion with the fact to back it up. Do you understand the difference?
Of course you do. That way it doesn't matter when something is right or wrong in the next moment.
One doesn't "accept" tax dollars. One collects them with the force of law. That's why there are the different words "tax" and "alm".
You certainly did not vote on corporate or individual income tax rates. At least not directly. I doubt such a vote would ever occur in this country, though I wish it would. However, if you willingly accept services from this government in value greater than you pay in, you are a thief.
Because in the confine of your example, the employer is not exploiting anyone. Certainly some corporations exploit workers, typically workers overseas. But an employer is not exploiting you by default just because you work for them.
You keep speaking of people as if they're just blobs of clay constantly shaped by the external world without any control or choice or will. Your statements seem to deny the unique consciousness of every human being.
Just because I'm white and a man?
I was born with more privilege than he was. Yet some of those kids have done a shitload more than I have.
But you're not talking about "help along the way". Of course I had help along the way. I had the help of my family, my friends, my coworkers, my educators....the list goes on and on. But I dealt with those things, good and bad, as myself.
What you're telling me is that what I have primarily comes from my genes. Yet you can't even begin to cite one specific example from my life that fits that scenario.
I'm as anti-Marx as the come, my friend.
Ok. I'll give it credit when someone can actually demonstrate it's "power" over me.
Somehow? She found that too subjective by believing that history is outside the man who writes about it.
For a better use of objectivity in both the political and individual context, see Rand's "Fountainhead".
I'm surprised you reject Kant, considering that he loved the idea of a priori knowledge and his theories required that man's mind is impotent.
Ok. Interesting that an economics class would teach you how to profit by taking advantage of people. I didn't know that economics was being taught via the logic of Three-Card-Monty these days.
The coffee shop made a 900% profit off of me on that cup of coffee. How did they "exploit" me?
Yet Wal-Mart is already losing in some areas to other grocers and supermarkets. Why? The answer is actually hidden in your statment above. Efficiency and destruction are more often at odds than they are complimentary.
I certainly will stick up for unpaid overtime (at least in the context of human rights, not necessarily as ethical behavior), unless one of the following is true:
- A contract between employee and employer exists requiring overtime work to be paid
- The employee is unable to refuse without incurring physical force
no, i never said tjhe only purpose was for halliburton's profit...in fact i've posted several other reasons...but to say the profit for rebuilding had nothing to do w/ it is ludacris. the suggestion that if profit was a motivation they would give ALL the contracts to them is equally ludacris
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
But he's not making a dime of profit off of it:
"In recent years the company has become the center of several controversies involving the 2003 Iraq War and the company's ties to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney retired from the company during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign with a severance package worth $20 million[citation needed]. As of 2004, he had received $398,548 in deferred compensation from Halliburton while Vice President.[3] Cheney also retains unexercised stock options at Halliburton, which have been valued at nearly $8 million.[3]
Concerns have been raised regarding the possible conflict of interest resulting from Cheney's deferred compensation and stock options from Halliburton. However, before entering office in 2001, Cheney bought an insurance policy that guaranteed a fixed amount of deferred payments from Halliburton each year for five years so that the payments would not depend on the company's fortunes.[3] He is legally bound by an agreement he signed which turns over power of attorney to a trust administrator to sell the options at some future time and to give the after-tax profits to three charities. The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney's home state), 40% will go to George Washington University's medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education. The agreement states that it is "irrevocable and may not be terminated, waived or amended," preventing Cheney from taking back the options at a later date.[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton#Dick_Cheney_ties
Why? It would create even more profit.
sorry, had to get that off of my chest
which do you think is more common knowledge?
that 'millions of ppl enjoy drinking coke' or they privatize water and even collecting rain water is illegal? a lot of the 'other/good' side is common knowledge. certain actions ppl would think are so bad no matter the good the company does will not erase the bad enough for them to support the company. like the privatization; that far outweighs, in my mind, any money they give to charity.
a few mistakes?? simple neglect?? are you kidding me? feeding them spoiled meat, giving them contaminated water 'The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River'...did you honestly even read the list of the logisitcial audits??
'the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U.S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year.' over $10million they've overcharged just for this one hotel since the war started...and that's a 'simple mistake'? up to $26 million in missing equipment is just 'neglect'?
sorry, but when these ppl are cutting the headstart program and lots of other things while this is happening and allowing them to receive a bonus is absurd
i guess that is another difference...i see a lot of problems w/ halliburton's work, you want to simply brush them off as 'neglect' and 'mistakes' i don't think that list of abuses (and it is far from a complete list) does not a "great job" make
man, how does your business run w/ this kind of work ethic you title 'great'?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
And there are so many American companies conducting business with enemy states and rogue nations! There are Fortune 500 companies that are DRIVING the economy of nations like Syria, Iran, and Libya to name a few (Conoco-Philips, General Electric, etc). Just about everyone with a 401(k) pension plan or mutual fund has money invested in companies that are doing business in so-called rogue states.
I would think this would concern you more.
So you're here to spread uncommon knowledge? That's your purpose?
If you feel that Coke's actions in India have outweighed the positives of their actions elsewhere, that's fine.
Halliburton is not cutting the headstart program, ok? Dear God.
It is "neglect". Do you understand what the word means? $10m in overcharges on a $5.6B contract is a 0.1% overcharge. Do you understand that, while wrong, it's not the end of the world?
A family member of mine works for the Michigan Welfare System and deals with the financials of daycare-related services. Everyday there's another day care center in Michigan that overcharges the state for daycare services. Sometimes its willful fraud. Other times it's a mistake. Should she be running around trying to shut down day care centers just because a few bills out of thousands are incorrect???
AGGHHH!!! That list of abuses does not a "great job" make. That's because the list of abuses doesn't contain the thousands of correct bills, the millions of gallons of clean drinking water, and the millions of pounds of safe meals provided. What don't you understand about this?
It works because I understand that not a single person is perfect. It's called dealing with reality. It's about punishing people for their errors and rewarding them for their successes. What's so hard about that to understand?