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Corrupt politicians
Corrupt politicians: The war profiteers
Another example of a loving relationship between corporates and (in this case) the U.S. government.
Military contractors like Boeing, Halliburton and Lockheed, have beome increasingly embedded with the Pentagon bureaucrats who give them lucrative work as the jailing of Darleen Druyun, a former U.S. Air Force weapons buyer, demonstrates.
Darleen Druyun, former weapons buyer for the U.S. Air Force, checked into a special women’s prison about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico in the heart of Florida’s Panhandle region last week, for a nine month stay, after pleading guilty to giving Boeing special treatment on an $23.5 billion government contract.
Her crime? Druyun had been talking over her job opportunities with Boeing at the same time she was negotiating a contract that would let Boeing pump up the price tag by $6 billion on a lease agreement for one hundred 767s tankers.
Soon after the deal was inked, a Boeing executive ushered Druyun into the company as a vice president with an annual salary of $250,000 after she retired in late 2002.
Once a Pentagon star, Druyun, 57, spent most of her adult life climbing the rungs of the male-dominated Pentagon where she publicly cultivated an image as a hard-knuckled bargainer on billions of dollars in defense contracts with the nation’s largest defense companies. She was called the "Dragon Lady," but behind closed doors Druyun exercised a much cozier relationship when spending $30 billion a year, she admitted at her sentencing last fall. Since 2000, she gave special consideration on other billion-dollar contracts awarded to Boeing, a company where her daughter and future-son-in-law were given jobs, Druyun told the court.
Touted by the news media as the biggest Pentagon scandal in decades (I did hear anything about it on the news here, did you?), the Druyun story of a military company receiving preferential treatment over its competitors is not an isolated one. Motives of the individuals involved may differ, but one outcome remains a constant: military contractors with one foot in the Pentagon door are becoming increasingly embedded with the bureaucrats who give them lucrative work. Personally I was surprised to find out how many politicians have been business leaders or employed by MNCs before becoming involved in politics. They can be found not just in the U.$.A., but in most governments around the world. Ok, in this case it´s the other way around: Politicians becoming more corporate than they are already.
For decades there has been a constant revolving door where career government officials routinely retire from government into highly paid jobs with military contractors.
Take Lockheed, the largest military contractor in the United States, for example. Men who have worked, directly or indirectly for the company, hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex and director of the national spy satellite agency, according to a recent profile of the company in the New York Times. The list also includes Stephen Hadley, who has been named the next national security adviser to the president, succeeding Condoleezza Rice.
Today, a new trend has become more glaring. They are seen in the stark numbers of contracts – large and small – that are made without meaningful competition in the private sector to land the best deal for the war fighter and taxpayer. And after some contracts are signed, program managers are being found to use the agreements for services outside the scope of the original agreement – sometimes worth billions of dollars.
“If you’re on a highway and there aren’t any police around, what does the public generally do?” asks one quality assurance specialist with the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) in southern California whose job it is to monitor contractor performance. “They speed.”
“War on Terrorism” Spending Spree
Some of these contract abuses have coincided with the recent spending spree for the “war on terrorism” which has increased Pentagon spending on contracts from $267 billion in 2000 to an estimated $310 billion in 2004.
“Of the 11 task orders we reviewed,” said Government Accountability Office (GAO) comptroller David Walker during testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, “seven were, in whole or part, not within scope.”
Halliburton, the Defense Department’s 800-pound gorilla in Iraq, with its sweeping $10-billion contract for military logistics, was just one of the major defense contractors that benefitted from the practice. A quick $1.9 million deal to plan for fighting oil fires that Walker found "clearly out of scope" quickly morphed into another secret multi-billion-dollar order for rebuilding Iraq’s oil industry.
The GAO report never mentioned one of the most controversial agreements of the past year that allowed the Pentagon to hire private interrogators from a Virginia-based company called CACI to work at the Abu Ghraib prison through what was originally a database contract with the Department of Interior office in Arizona with an entirely different company. Several of these interrogators were implicated in the investigation of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in a classified Pentagon report.
Another investigation discovered that the Pentagon had exploited the Federal Technology Service (FTS), a government-wide clearing house for pre-approved technology contracts. Seventy-five percent of the $5 billion in sales that FTS does annually is with the military. But the Pentagon was found to often use the FTS for purposes other than technology, such as construction and mental health services, or to carefully select a preferred contractor for agreements that sometimes grew by two, ten, and even 100 times over the original dollar value with no competition.
Buy Native American
Military contractors have also recently been exploiting another major loophole to win lucrative contracts by partnering with corporations run by native American tribes, because tribal companies enjoy special status under law that allow them to receive contracts without first competing against other companies.
Recent news stories have reported that after landing the contracts, the tribal businesses – mostly Alaska native corporations – then frequently subcontract the work, according to writer Michael Scherer of Mother Jones magazine.
“The system was established in the mid-1990s to help native communities, where unemployment rates often exceed 40 percent,” Scherer notes in the January 2005 issue. “It has also become a way for large corporations with no Native American ownership to receive no-bid contracts, an avenue for federal officials to steer work to favored companies, and a device for speeding privatization.”
One tribal company, Olgoonik Corporation, won a $225 million contract for construction work on U.S. military bases and embassies, but much of the actual work is being done by Halliburton, Scherer reports. (See also Private Company Manages Daily Bombing of Korean Village)
The Los Angeles Times also recently identified two similar contracts worth as much as $1 billion signed with two small Alaska Native firms for security services as 36 military bases without competitive bidding. Part of the work was then subcontracted to two of the country's largest security firms: Wackenhut Services and Vance Federal Security Services, despite the fact that the same two companies both lost in contract competitions against other companies for similar security contracts, according to reporter T. Christian Miller.
“What once was considered corruption is now considered standard operating procedure,” comments Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group, Project on Government Oversight, known as POGO. “It’s depressing.”
Defenders of the status quo claim that each of these abuses are isolated and not reflective of the good work being done. Others find a growing need for concern over faulty contracts that overcharge and avoid competition that might deliver better value and pricing.
This entry is a summary of an article taken from Corpwatch.org.
~peace~