According to this WaPo story, Halliburton will no longer have exclusive, no-bid contracts to provide a boatload of services to our armed forces abroad. Oh great. Four years and $14.5 BILLION later [$7.3 B alone in 2005] the plug is being pulled. But holy shit, the damage has been done, and then some.
Cutting the no-bid contracts now, is a calculated move:
The decision on Halliburton comes as the U.S. contribution to Iraq’s reconstruction begins to wane, reducing opportunities for U.S. companies after nearly four years of massive payouts to the private sector.
Wha? No more contracts? So there won’t even be too much money to bid on anyways? Great. That’s sort of like stealing money from everyone in the phone book and then stopping around the letter “X” because there aren’t too many more people to steal from with last names beginning with X, Y and Z and it’s not worth the effort any more because you’ve already made $14.5 BILLION.
Through midday trading, HAL stock is down almost a point.
Halliburton sucks. Let us shout the ways…
nobody is around to see or hear it fall, does it make a sound??
There was a time that allegations of corruption such as no-bid contracts for usurping billions in public funds would have illicited outrage and investigations. If money stealing was proven, heads would role. Why nowadays do such allegations seem so dead on arrival with the mass of voting Americans. Has the opposition been inept (willingly or unwillingly) in exposing this crime and heist?? Do Americans trust the conservatives in power so much as to rule these charges bogus apriori?? Let’s see what the next election offers, but you got to admit that not much negative press comes out of any Dem. party efforts on this issue! Why is that on both the lack of efforts and the lack of responses??
Why no response from the opposition? Perhaps because when they were in office, they had exactly the same arrangement. Who do you think did the support work in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia during the Clinton administration?
Wait. Does this mean the war is over?
I think all it means is that 2006 is an election year where Republicans are at a huge disadvantage due to rampant corruption and ineptitude, so the administration is trying to eliminate some of the more prominent examples.