Check Out The Latest Huge Purchases By The Pentagon

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/weekly-defense-contracts-spending-july-16-2012-7

***SNIP


Big names include BAE, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, L-3, Lockheed Martin and SAIC were awarded a multi-year $5.6 billion contract for professional support services.
This round of contracts provides support services to intelligence missions, defense planners, and policy makers.
This kind of contract where the Pentagon outsources work that could potentially be done internally has been criticized by watchdog groups such as the Project of Government Oversight, as each private employee is significantly costlier.



$2.8 Billion for almost a thousand helicopters
Sikorsky Aircraft, the makers of the Huey and the Black Hawk, just learned that they'll be covering the rent for quite a while.



$531 million worth of drones
General Atomics, the people behind the wildly successful Predator and Reaper drones, just scored two huge contracts this week.


***MORE AT LINK

[valerief]

1. Can't let those tax dollars go to taxpayers! nt

[Scuba]

2. Funny, I don't feel any safer.

Now if I had Medicare, then I'd feel safer.

[L0oniX]

7. +1000000

[hunter]

16. Well said.

It seems the U.S. health care system wants me dead sometimes, especially the insurance companies.

The odds of a terrorist blowing up my house are very remote. The odds I'll end up homeless because of health problems are not.

[Octafish]

3. Thank Cheney!

Sneer set things up nice for Corporate Freeloaders during his stint as Poppy's Secretary of War Spending.

Cheney's Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door

News: As Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor -- whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.

By Robert Bryce
Mother Jones
August 2, 2000

EXCERPT...

In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.

After Bill Clinton's election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant -- which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company's largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.

Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company's help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/08/cheneys-multi-million-dollar-revolving-door

Thank you for the heads-up, XChrom. Things didn't change as I'd hoped.

What a country.

[dixiegrrrrl]

19. Brown and Root go all the way back to LBJ days, if memory serves.

Were instrumental in helping ole LBJ's rise to power.

[Octafish]

22. Made a mint out of Vietnam.

Yep. The Permawar is Buy-Partisan.

Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy

EXCERPT...

The story of Halliburton's ties to the White House dates back to the 1940s, when a Texas firm called Brown & Root constructed a massive dam project near Austin. The company's founders, Herman and George Brown, won the contract to build Mansfield Dam thanks to the efforts of Johnson, who was then a Texas congressman.

After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the mid-1960s, newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson's political campaign.

More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root was a part won a $380 million contract to build airports, bases, hospitals and other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" — as they were known — for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.

Brown & Root also became a target for anti-war protesters: they called the firm the embodiment of the "military-industrial complex" and denounced it for building detention cells to hold Viet Cong prisoners in South Vietnam.

CONTINUED...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483

Seems a lotta that Suite 8F Group made a killing.

[raouldukelives]

24. Killing to making a killing. Corpofreedom here we come do-da. nt

[B Stieg]

4. Thanks!

This is the kind of journalism that the MSM should be doing!

[xchrom]

6. welcome!

[Gregorian]

5. At the cost of the wellfare of the people, and the environment.

It's truly obscene.

[L0oniX]

8. Predator and Reaper drones = corporations.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

9. Is it time to change the slogan: "Change You Can Believe In"?

[OnyxCollie]

15. "Ponies You Can Believe In."

[Initech]

10. No money for education, government workers, or social safety nets, but there's always room for war!

[cbrer]

11. Bell Helicopter builds the Huey (UH-1)

Not sure if they'v licensed it to anyone

[MADem]

23. I doubt they'd license it to Sikorsky--they're like Macy's and Gimbel's!!! nt

[tomm2thumbs]

12. are the jobs created considered private sector or public sector

because if they are considered private sector, how is it the government is paying the tab ?

[SickOfTheOnePct]

21. Private sector

They're contractors, so they would fall under private sector jobs.

Not sure about what you mean by your question about how it's paid for, as it's paid for the same way it would be if they were public sector jobs.

The idea that these employees are much costlier is not the whole story either...yes, they're costlier in the immediate term, but not in the long term, because the unlike government employees, the government has no long-term costs/responsibilities for these employees.

[tomm2thumbs]

26. thanks for the reply

I was wondering when the right wingers complain about 'government spending' all the time but it benefits private sector, how they can argue govt spending doesn't help create jobs in the private sector

no need to reply - just missed your reply until just now - thanks

[99Forever]

13. Why is it...

... Washington DC can ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, find as much money as the MILITARY can pour down rat holes and give to their greedy cronies, but can't EVER find money to help us people? And it ain't "just the repubs" fucking doing it.

[OnyxCollie]

14. War is over!

[DemoTex]

17. It was a "Republican" who warned us of this shit.

President Dwight David Eisenhower's farewell address (1/17/1961) is the well known warning about the dangers of establishing a military-industrial complex. It was duly ignored by almost - if not - all of his successors, D & R alike.

[woo me with science]

18. Austerity for the people.

Occupy.

[DiverDave]

20. A true story:

The first trucking company I worked for hauled alot of military equipment.
I picked up a deuce and a half (a truck) and took it to Charleston S.C.
There was a lineup of trucks dropping off all sorts of wheeled equipment.
I asked the guy unloading them where they were going.
"nowhere" he replied.
Seems that through a loophole the size of my truck allows the army to not count anything 'in transit'
on their books.
So they put a ship-full of stuff in the Atlantic and can get the money to REPLACE them as they are supposed to have them on their books.
The company's that make them get to sell more and they can bribe everyone connected with the movements of said equipment.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

[woo me with science]

25. Kick. nt