Bush's crony capitalism

Your Tax Dollars and Mine.... Bush's Crony Capitalism

As we predicted it would here, and here, the crony capitalism of the Bush administration has gotten completely out of control. They simply cannot resist the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of both the people of Baghad, and the American taxpayer, while 65% of the Iraq public remains unemployed and newly destitute.

A blogger from Iraq brings us this not so amusing anecdote in Baghdad Burning:

"Yesterday, I read how it was going to take up to $90 billion to rebuild Iraq. Bremer was shooting out numbers about how much it was going to cost to replace buildings and bridges and electricity, etc.

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !! "

These are your taxes dollars and mine paying for this, folks. Never before in the history of this country has an administration so blatantly ripped off the public. The greed is palpable, yet the so called "liberal" media stands nearly silent.

But I think in the long run, they will not get away with this.


Cher

they may eventually lose power, they might even be embarassed or humiliated. but they will still get to keep the money.

any attempt by a future administration to recover funds that have been, in effect, embezzled, will run up against the fact that it's all being done according to the letter of the law. you'd have to prove the regulators are corrupt, and even then, you nail the regulator, not the corporation that got the loot. so you'd have to prove bribery, which is pretty impossible to do because the money is funnelled through the rnc.

basically, in order to get the money back, you have to hope that they f*cked up somewhere and didn't dot a legal 'i' or cross a regulatory 't'. only then would there be a case to recover the money. even then, you have to prove your case in (republican-controlled, most likely) court, and then hope that the corporation hasn't shifted the funds around, leaving you with just an empty corporation to nail while the funds have moved away....

who says crime doesn't pay? all you have to do is share it with the legal bureaucracy ....

...I've added it to my list. And a damning ancedote, but no doubt true. The no-bid high value contracts awarded to Bush friends and family deserve investigation. Is THIS how Bush intends to "jump-start" the economy, with a perpetual war economy in which taxpayers pockets and futures are plundered to prop up the bottom line of cronies?

is really what is needed. When I used to manage federal grant programs for a living, I lived in fear of a GAO audit. Honestly, when those guys are on top of their game they can literally indict a ham sandwich. The GAO should be looking into this crap IMMEDIATELY!