I was raised on robbery

Alan Grayson is running for Congress in the Florida 8th District, and he's kinda pissed off:

Alan Grayson has spent the last four years of his life combating some of the worst abuses of the war. He has filed dozens of citizen lawsuits against crooked contractors who have cheated American troops and taxpayers. He is the prosecuting attorney in all five fraud cases currently pending against contractors in Iraq. He won a $10 million jury verdict last year, the second largest False Claims Act verdict in history in a case that the Justice Department refused to prosecute. In addition, Alan has testified before Congress four times regarding fraud in Iraq.

Tom Foreman of CNN has called Alan "a leading critic of the war in Iraq."


The Wall Street Journal said Alan is "fighting a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.

There are videos all over his site besides the YouTube at the top. This is a serious guy, and anyone who could send him a few $$ would be doing a good thing.

Update: Here's from an interview Grayson did with Matt Stoller at OpenLeft:

Alan Grayson: I'm Alan Grayson, and I'm the Democratic candidate for Congress in Florida's district eight. And I'm the attorney of record in every single case now pending in Federal court involving war profiteers in Iraq. These are cases in which I represent whistleblowers. The Florida civil rights association named me Humanitarian of the Year for my work in this regard, taxpayers against fraud named me lawyer of the year, and I've been featured in Vanity Fair magazine, in media like CBS evening news, 60 minutes, and even Dailykos, imagine that.
I'm running because I'm fed up with the government mismanagement, the Bush administration's shameless pandering to war profiteers. I think they set out on a deliberate course to make this war good for the people who were their friends. And I want to try to hold them accountable when I'm in Congress. When I'm in Congress... the Bush administration's worst nightmare is going to be me with subpoena power because I know everything that they've done, and I'm going to hold them accountable for it.

Matt Stoller: But wait wait, let me just interrupt you there, the Bush administration's gone in 2009.

Alan Grayson: Oh but all the people they set up as the new kings and queens of America are still around. What Eisenhower said, that we need to fear the military industrial compex, has become true because they have manufactured a five year war that they want to perpetuate for a generation or even a century so that they can keep lining the pockets of their friends, the war whores.

Indeed. Read the whole thing, this guy is right on track.

The Profits That Bush Honors ... or ...The Wrath of Kahn

Inside the world of war profiteers
From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

[...]
Federal prosecutors in Rock Island have indicted four former supervisors from KBR, the giant defense firm that holds the contract, along with a decorated Army officer and five executives from KBR subcontractors based in the U.S. or the Middle East.
[...]
The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.
[...]
Last week, the Army pledged to add 1,400 positions to its contracting command.
[...]
Former KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans, who was wearing a wire strapped on by a Rock Island agent, wondered aloud whether to return $65,000 in kickbacks he got from his two companions, executives from the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co.

One of the men, Tamimi operations director Shabbir Khan, urged him to hide the money by concocting phony business records.
[...]
October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Khan threw a birthday party for Seamans at a Tamimi "party house" near the Kuwait base known as Camp Arifjan. Khan "provided Seamans with a prostitute as a present," Rock Island prosecutors wrote in court papers. Driving Seamans back to his quarters, Khan offered kickbacks that would total $130,000.
[...]
In April 2003, as American troops poured into Iraq, Seamans gave Khan inside information that enabled Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans submitted change orders that inflated that subcontract to $7.4 million.
[...]
By July 2005, Tamimi had secured some 30 KBR troop feeding subcontracts worth $793.5 million, records show. Khan continued to negotiate Iraq war subcontracts for Tamimi until shortly before he was arrested in Rock Island in March 2006.
[...]
"If you ever gave Tamimi a hard time, you'd get a call," former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf told the Tribune.

When subcontracts came up for renegotiation, DeWolf said, companies like Tamimi "would say, 'Fine, we're going to pull out all of our people and equipment.' They really had KBR and the government over the barrel."

February 21, 2008 Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

Full disclosure: I rearranged a few of the paragraphs in the article to make a timeline. I recommend you read the whole article.

I'll wait ...

... hmm, hmm da, de da, da, dada, da duh, da, de dah ...

good, you're back! And in related news:

Former Halliburton subsidiary KBR's 4th quarter profits up 65%

Former Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc. said Tuesday fourth-quarter profit rose 65 percent, lifted by contributions from natural-gas projects, work in Iraq and a tax benefit related to a 2006 asset sale.

Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

You have no value, You're just another one, Death will quench your hunger

Bush Leading Iraq to peace, freedom and stability

IRAQ: Saddam Provided More Food Than the U.S.

Friday, December 28, 2007
BAQUBA - The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive.

The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008.
[...]
The sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, were described as “genocidal” by Denis Halliday, then UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Halliday quit his post in protest against the U.S.-backed sanctions.

The sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and as many adults, according to the UN. They brought malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicines. Iraqis became nearly completely reliant on food rations for survival.
[...]
The imminent move will affect nearly 10 million people who depend on the rationing system.
[...]
According to an Oxfam International report released in July this year, “60 percent (of Iraqis) currently have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 percent in 2004.”

The report said that “43 percent of Iraqis suffer from absolute poverty,” and that according to some estimates over half the population are now without work. “Children are hit the hardest by the decline in living standards. Child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 percent before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to 28 percent now.”
[...]
Many fear the food ration cuts can spark unrest. “The government will commit a big mistake, because providing enough food ration could compensate the government’s mistakes in other fields like security,” a local physician told IPS.”

In the 4.5 years since we illegally invaded Iraq, a country that we knew had no WMDs and no connection to 9/11, an invasion that was planned from day 1 of the bush regime, we have had more Iraqi civilians die under our regime than under 20 years of Saddam's.

We have not been able to surpass the food, water, sewage, electricity and even oil production that he maintained for Iraqis under UN sanctions.

All this while we spend about $15 BILLION a month on Iraq. The money would be better spent on butter, not guns. Arming both sides of a civil war while starving the population is a recipe for disaster.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

In another example of a Democrat doing the right thing, Rep. Dave Obey (D-WI) has slammed shut GWBush's rubber checkbook:

In a press conference today with Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and Congressman James McGovern (D-MA), the Vice Chairman of the Rules Committee, Seventh District Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI), the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that he will not take up President Bush’s nearly $200 billion war supplemental request this year; calling the policy behind the President’s request “a dead end policy.”

“The policy outlined by the President is being sold to the country as a plan to reduce our troop levels in Iraq, but it is quite the opposite. When you strip away the fog, it’s simply a plan to get us back six months from now to the same place we were six months ago before the surge began. It is not being undertaken because of any new determination to reduce troop levels. It is simply recognizing that we do not have enough troops to sustain the surge level. It’s a confession that the President has not a clue about how to get us out of that civil war and instead plans to punt the problem to his successor – ruining two administrations rather than just one,” Obey said. “As Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I have no intention of reporting out a $200 billion supplemental that will give the President a blank check for an entire fiscal year and I have no intention of acquiescing in a policy that will result in draining the treasury so dry that it will result in the systematic disinvestment of America’s future.”

Go Dave! This is a smart move, I think, because it forces GWBushCo into a defensive posture. He and the other administration tools will now have to try and explain themselves to the 75% of the American people who want the war to end.

That will be a lot like explaining to Mom & Dad the dent in the car you weren't supposed to drive.

Lolli pop lolli pop oh lolli lolli lolli lolli pop

[graphics by Dancin' Dave]