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POPSOur Tax Dollars At Work-Blackwater
More from the article as follows: "The Nisour Square shooting was the bloodiest and most controversial episode involving Blackwater in the Iraq war. At midday on Sept. 16, 2007, a Blackwater convoy opened fire on Iraqi civilians in the crowded intersection, spraying automatic weapons fire in ways that investigators later claimed was indiscriminate, and even launching grenades into a nearby school. Seventeen Iraqis were killed and dozens more were wounded." "Those responses deeply worried Blackwater officials. Before the Nisour Square shootings, the company had operated in Iraq without a license largely because the Iraqi government had never enforced the rules. Being blocked from the country would have been costly — the State Department deal was Blackwater’s single biggest contract. From 2004 through today, the company has collected more than $1.5 billion for its work protecting American diplomats and providing air transportation for them inside Iraq." "
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POPSBlackwater:Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable. My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no mo
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POPSFighting Fraud
To put it into perspective, ACORN received about $53 million of federal funding over the past 15 years. Meanwhile, Blackwater, the private military contractor to which the U.S. government has farmed out security duties, may owe the government as much as $55 million for allegedly failing to fulfill the terms of one of its federal contracts. Yet Blackwater (now known as Xe), a company that has five of its employees facing murder charges in a massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007, got a $217 million contract from the Obama administration to provide security in Iraq. The former Haliburton subsidiary, KBR, got $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq -- wiring that has fatally electrocuted 16 soldiers and two contractors. They haven’t been defunded by Congress. According to the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, the biggest three defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman -- have been cited 109 times for misconduct since 199
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POPSOink Report - 3 November 2009 I am so glad that children who won't be born for decades yet will be paying the interest on the money spent to keep the Merry-Go-Round Museum open. That must save or create a gajillion jobs.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSU.S. Offshoring and Multinational Corporations Perhaps the ultimate expression of capitalism results in the export of jobs to lowest-cost countries to enable what used to be “American companies”, now multinational corporations that have the sole goal of maximizing their corporate profits. The ultimate political expression has evolved to a sector of the world that is, in effect, ruled by multinational corporations. What is worse is that these multinationals fail to realize that ultimately they are undercutting their own profits and shrinking their own market by underminding their own profit center in formerly prosperous prime economies. The bonus from offshoring can only last so long and is highly subject to proper application and use within a given multinational corporation. Offshoring is not a cure-all for corporate profits, nor a real solution for long-term benefit to anyone. No government contracts should be given to multinational corporations, ever!
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POPSCan you hear me now???? I had a former employee call me earlier today inquiring about a job, and at the end of the conversation he gave me his phone number. I asked the former employee if this was a new cell phone number and he told me yes this was his “Obama phone.” I asked him what an “Obama phone” was and he went on to say that welfare recipients are now eligible to receive (1) a FREE new phone and (2) approx 70 minutes of FREE minutes every month. I was a little skeptical so I Googled it and low and behold he was telling the truth. TAX PAYER MONEY IS BEING REDISTRIBUTED TO WELFARE RECIPIENTS FOR FREE CELL PHONES. This program was started earlier this year. Enough is enough, the ship is sinking and it’s sinking fast. The very foundations that this country was built on are being shaken.. The age old concepts of God, family, and hard work have flown out the window and are being replaced with “Hope and Change” and “Change we can believe in.”
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POPSCongress Must Pass Republican Leader Boehner’s Defund ACORN Act
or any other form of agreement to this criminal organization. ACORN ally Representative Jerrold Nadler has lead the charge against the Defund ACORN Act. He has claimed that it is an unconstitutional *" Bill of Attainder " an argument that has been thoroughly rebutted by former FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky. Nadler had no such reservations when he co-sponsered legislation to punish AIG employees who had been awarded bonuses. *A legislative act pronouncing a person guilty of a crime, usually treason, without trial and subjecting that person to capital punishment and attainder. Such acts are prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. Congress moving to cut off funds to ACORN for the next 50 days is a merely a first step. An organization with ACORN’s history of voter registration fraud, tax evasion, and criminal activity should never again be eligible to receive any federal funds. Stopping payment to this criminal enterprise is not enough.
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POPSAny Way these Firms Can be Experts in Everything? What these government contractors are expert at is: 1. Placing job sites in states and districts of Congressional Members who serve on funding committee for Defense, IT, and Homeland Security. 2. Have Political Action Committees that donate money to candidates on same committees. 3. Having paid representatives at every meeting in Congress or government agency that could affect their funding.
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POPSStimulus jobs overstated by thousands I think we already knew this and it's interesting that the AP is actually investigating & reporting it. The WH plans to "fix" these errors. I wonder how they'll go about doing that. Does this mean that the university in Michigan (I think) will lose it's money to study volcanos in S. America?
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POPSInvested In War n 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets. Interestingly, the report also mentioned that members of the senate foreign relations and armed services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts. The burning questions for many people are the following: Are there any ethics left in politics? Could the universe ever exist without wars? The answer is no, because wars have been a major part of our social make up, in addition they force geostrategic changes, make profits for the elite, and reduce population.
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POPSCommercial Espionage Not only do I think it would be stupid not to believe the Chinese do it...when the stakes are high, everyone does it. Governments, companies, whatever. The Chinese are kind of right to suggest commerical and political victimization. This is an everyday reality with all contacts.
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POPSRape case to force US defence firms into the open Halliburton/KBR used a clause in her contract requiring disputes to be settled by arbitration to block legal action – a policy which, her lawyer says, has encouraged assaults by creating a climate of impunity. Franken described it as a denial of justice. "Contractors are using fine print to deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court," he said in a Senate debate. In legal papers Jones, who was 20 at the time, says she was fed a knockout drug while drinking with KBR firefighters. "When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again," the papers say.
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POPS Obama's Senior Moment voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with "universal" health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn't pretty. The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care . If a treatment isn't deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn't pay for it. Even France"which has a mix of public and private medicine "has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs. Yes, the U.S. "rations" by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources . . .
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POPSThe cost of supporting Israel
These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.” The billion-barrel SPR has cost taxpayers more than $134 billion so far. Making things worse, Israel gets “first
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POPSHere’s What Israel Is Really Costing American Taxpayers Want to know what's really sinking America? These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.”
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POPSObama Administration Moves to Shutdown Disclosure of Big Labor-ACORN Connections U.S. Big Labor Department swings into action Instead of focusing on the economy or the alarming unemployment trends, Obama’s Big Labor Department seems to have focused little on the men and women behind those numbers. Instead, Secretary Solis has focused like a laser beam on eliminating disclosure of labor bosses perks and their spending of money collected as a condition of employment from millions of workers. And that is not all; Obama’s Labor Department creatively and without rulemaking eliminated 2008 Bush Administration reform of Labor Officer conflict-of-interest reporting. The following is the de facto rulemaking: Note: The Office of Labor-Management Standards will publish in the spring 2009 Semi-Annual Regulatory Agenda notice of an intended rulemaking to revise the Form LM-30 (Labor Organization Officer and Employee Report). The rulemaking is intended to review questions of policy and law surrounding these reporting requirements. ......
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POPSGovernment Owned and Operated AIG Failing Another example of what happens when government sticks its nose into private industry. FAILURE! AIG was failing before US taxpayers were forced to bail them out, and guess what they are still failing. How much more taxpayer money is going to be needed to continue to prop up this failed company? And OBAMA wants to run our health care! GET REAL!
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POPSDon't Worry Be Happy if you are a communist in ZAF
Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande is often seen wearing a Mao cap and is known for breaking out into his favorite tune: "My mother was a kitchen girl, my father was a garden boy. That's why I am a communist." But his new wheels have soured his relationship with his close ally COSATU, the country's largest labor organization. COSATU has asked ministers to return their costly cars and instead opt for cheaper ones favored by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, who bought two cars for the same price as Nzimande's one. "Nzimande was the one least likely to go on a profligate expedition ... when the (SACP) often rails against the excesses of unchecked capitalism," said a Wednesday editorial in Johannesburg's daily newspaper The Star. But the SACP has defended Nzimande, saying the German luxury sedan was bought on the recommendations of the police VIP protection unit. The rule book for ministers also allows for such purchases. over the limit....sorry not much more anyway.
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POPSOn Facebook, MySpace? Obama's got your e-mail
In fact, according to the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, federal agencies have negotiated agreements and contracts with social networking sites like Google, YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook, AddThis, Blist, Flickr and VIMEO to collect information on visitors for federal websites. All of these private companies are known to have agreements with federal agencies, but the public has never seen them. In public comments submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, EPIC notes it has obtained documents that show federal agencies have negotiated these contracts with the private sector in violation of "existing statutory privacy rights." Those agencies include: Department of Defense, Department of the Treasury, and the National Security Agency. There are suspicions the White House is already involved. According to Obama "technology czar" Vivek Kundra, the "compelling need" driving this major policy reversal is the administration's desire to create "more open" government
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POPSUK Minister: Oil Deal Influenced Lockerbie Bomber Release The conservative "we never do wrong," UK Daily Telegraph says these accusations come from "domestic opponents," of the British government. But Mr. Straw is the government's Justice Secretary. And oil giant British Petroleum admits to lobbying for prisoner releases to help it get oil contracts. The cover story was this prisoner release was for "compassion," -- now it appears from inside and reliable sources it was more for oil. Sort of like fighting wars for 'freedom and democracy," but it's all about oil. Well...maybe they'll have a secret inquiry and get it all sorted out.
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POPSObama Administration Policies Could Be Big Problem for Small Businesses Textron was the single largest recipient of federal small business contracts. Textron is a Fortune 500 firm with 43,000 employees and over $14 billion in annual revenue. Textron brought in $775,773,505 in contracts through their AAI division. Other firms considered small businesses by the Obama Administration included, British Aerospace (BAE), Rolls-Royce, General Electric, Xerox, Office Depot, Staples, Dell Computer, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, 3M Corporation, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, GTSI, Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. During the campaign, President Obama promised to restore the Small Business Administration's (SBA) budget, restore the SBA Administrator to a cabinet-level position and implement the 5 percent woman-owned small business contracting goal. Not one of these campaign promises has been honored. President Obama has apparently kept his campaign promises to the super rich members of the
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POPSGov Paying Over a Half Million Dollars a Pound for Sliced Ham? Thomas Lifson And here I thought prosciutto was expensive. Is this going to be served to guests at one of the many parties the Obamas like to throw? Half million dollar a pound ham won't really uimpress the Saudis, if Obama offers it to them, no matter how low he bows. This makes the $100/lb wagyu steaks used at White House parties look like a bargain. Thomas Lifson You can find the details here: http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/contracts-recipient-summary&id=12-AG3J14120297196&mode=details&primeid=27
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POPSBrazil Seeks More Control of Oil Beneath Its Seas This month, Brazil’s government said it wanted the national oil company, Petrobras, to control all future development of the deep-sea fields discovered in 2007, which international geologists estimate could hold tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil. The change would make Petrobras the operator for the 62 percent of the new area that has yet to be bid out, consigning foreign companies to the role of financial investors. That would limit their ability to help set the pace for the oil fields’ development, while giving Petrobras significantly more power to generate jobs and award lucrative contracts.
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POPS Obama And Congress Are Crushing Small Businesses Economist Stephen Moore, who is an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, said the stimulus package that became law in February is “like injecting yourself with morphine. It may feel “pretty good now,” but six months from now when you have to pay for it there will be a problem, he said. Brett Parker, CFO of Bowlmor Lanes (which operates bowling alleys in four states), said the legislation known as “card check,” which would outlaw secret ballots by employees on unionization votes, is the single biggest threat to his company. If his company’s labor force were to be unionized, “it would be so enormously expensive and make it so difficult for us to run our business,” he said. Parker added: Our government right now is proposing some of the most radical, fundamental changes in America that we’ve seen in a long, long time, and I think people need to be very careful when they’re looking at these programs and not think about change as a goal. And if we let this president . . .
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