Not at all. I just want to stress that whatever fault there is here doesn’t seem to me to be based solely in one party. Halliburton wasn’t a political football when they got all of those base contracts in the 1990’s, were they?
That was a very noncontroversial process at the time, even though it was done through a process that had the contracts in place before the contingency, and thus prevented other companies from bidding when the need arose, and orders began to be placed.
The same thing happened in this war, yet now it is a political issue because of the political affiliations of some of the players involved.
Defense contractors typically cultivate close ties with the government, and with members of both political parties. That is reality, and carping that the Republicans are whores in this regard is fine, I suppose, but the Democrats are on their knees as well, and have been for just as long.
Come on, nobody claims that LBJ was the most scrupulously honest man to sit in the Oval Office. But if you’re going to bring that stale nugget up as an crutch for Bush to lean on, maybe the Democrats should be constantly bring up Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus.
So in other words, it’s perfectly OK for the contractor-corporation buddy of a Republican administration to put human waste into our troops’ drinking water, because a Democratic President liked them too?
Amazing ethics you have there. Is this an example of the “values” that the Republicans are restoring?
I merely note that military contracts go to military contractors, and those companies can sometimes make mistakes. And even when they don’t, they at all times shmooze in very close to the government and to both parties.
Anyone who believes otherwise hasn’t been following things very closely.
John C. Stennis was a well respected southern Democrat, and an absolute hawk when it came to defense spending. His deference to the Navy and its programs has been well noted through the years, so much so that he has been called the father of America’s modern Navy. There is a Nimitz-class carrier named after him now.
Now, most of this was a perfectly legitimate effort on behalf of national security. But the fact that a major shipyard that builds warships is located in Mississippi, the state Stennis represented in the Senate for decades, has to figure into this equation as well.
These days, the Ingalls Shipyard is represented strongly by Trent Lott. He manages to steer lots of business their way. Not hard to do, as there aren’t many shipyards left that can do that sort of work.
This connection is pretty tight on both sides, and has been for decades. And sure, I can find lots of times when it has produced problems, and probably it is not an ideal system for anyone. However, both Republicans and Democrats had a part to play in constructing this sort of closeness, and it is futile to pin this one one party only.
Moto, you are trying to respond to an allegation of wrongdoing by a contractor who has been intimately linked to the present administration, has been noted many times for a wide variety of dubious and unethical practices, and in this present case is found to knowingly have provided contaminated water to service personnel and civilians as potable over a lengthy period of time without informing anyone of the problem.
Your response is that Democrats have had relationships with contractors in the past too, including Johnson.
Do you see how the two issues are hardly similar? Do you have any indication that Johnson or Stennis continued to provide contracts and to work closely with a contractor who had demonstrated repeated failures to provide services in an ethical or reliable manner? That might be slightly more relevant.
Don’t know. If the DoD takes care of this situation through a contract mechanism, then the only reason to hold a hearing would be to stir up shit, literally.
The article says that military audits have criticized Halliburton’s performance on these contracts, so we will see what happens in the future.
Part of the problem is a distinct lack of competition for many of these jobs, to be honest. Not many companies are willing to do what KB&R has been doing for decades - building military bases in not very nice places. This is the fourth war the company has done this in, and this has had its successful and its not so successful moments, I’m sure.
Completely agreed. I started to rephrase that to “allow human waste to enter” and was distracted by e-mail, submitted with what I thought I’d corrected. Sorry!
Look, you all are missing the point here. What I am saying is that Kellogg, Brown & Root and Halliburton have both been around for a mighty long time. Corporations are like that - they are the closest things we’ll ever see to eternal life.
The most successful of them outlast administrations, and indeed the lifetimes of politicians themselves. They last longer than governments in many countries, and longer than some countries have even been around.
This company has provided services to the government going right back to WWII. Brown and Root got a dam building contract from the feds in 1937, during the Roosevelt administration. And in these decades, far longer than I’ve been around, the company has cultivated close ties with Republicans and Democrats alike.
Again, the Clinton administration turned to KB&R to build bases in the former Yugoslavia. The company helped build the Johnson Space Center. And sure, they’ve done plenty of work under Republican administrations as well. Government contractors tend to work for the government.
Making the company itself a partisan issue seems silly, considering the close ties they’ve had with the Clinton administration, and other Democratic administrations. The company did not just dry up, or get no government contracts, when Clinton or Carter were in office, you know.
Well this is a discussion for another day. TODAYS discussion is about a PARTICULAR incident that we’re expressing outrage towards. You want to talk about past incidents and improprieties, open a thread.
Would admitting that KBR fucked up cause you physical pain or something? I’ve never seen someone so averse to admitting possible wrong doing.
I get your point, Mr. Moto, but all I’m saying is that it’s outrageous that Halliburton can misuse its contracts with impunity because it knows the White House is in its back pocket. If the Bush administration would take prompt action to force Halliburton to correct the situation, then I’d have less of a problem with Halliburton. But we all know that they are averse to rocking their favorite boat.
None of us are amazed that Democratic administrations have their favorite firms too. War profiteering has been around for centuries. But nothing done under Democratic rule compares to Halliburton’s wretched excess and as far as I know, vice president Humphrey was not the former CEO of any of the profiteers.