Six Charged With Rigging Army Contracts

[TexasLawyer]

Source: UPI

Six Charged With Rigging Army Contracts
By Staff
May 19, 2007

Six people were arrested Friday for allegedly taking part in a contract-fixing scheme at the U.S. Army Medical Command at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

The defendants were indicted on charges they drew up contracts totaling $18 million for companies with which they were associated or even owned outright.

Three of the men charged were current or former U.S. Army employees, the San Antonio Express-News reported. All were charged with bribery related offenses.

Federal prosecutors alleged that the six defendants conspired to run the contracts at a San Antonio consulting firm owned by one of them. The contracts involved equipment and services provided to about 20 Army hospitals.

<snip>

Read more: http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_21281726.shtml

[TexasLawyer]

1. I guess they didn't pay

their protection money.

[KT2000]

2. Vanity Fair article

on the June issue - "The Sack of Washington" by Cullen Murphy (an excerpt from his book, "Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America")

He compares America and Rome and their failure to make distinction between private and public. As the lines blur, as they did in Rome, the public responsibilities and resources become the source of corruption. When the public responsiblities are handled by private parties, they have likley won that responsibility though payoffs, favors and all other sorts of misdeeds. Failure results.

The US is converting to this dilemma through privatization. I think it may already be out of control.

[EST]

3. I think you are right.

We having all these crises hanging fire and, it seems, everyone just wants to keep referring to them as incipient. We've poisoned the world, killed a million people in the last few years, we're broke and reduced to begging alms from China, along with scraps from their tables which have been thoughtfully laced with all sorts of poisons to complete the damage our own corporations have overlooked. Iraq is on fire and burning down and the powers that be insist on claiming that, for now, everything is still o k.

The oceans are rising, yet they insist that there is still a chance that it's all imaginary. There's not one damn place in this fucking country where you can fish and safely eat the catch because of poisons that corporations pay billions to the mouth breathers to claim that the damage isn't really as bad as it is.

The world is overpopulated by at least a billion people and the only solution seems to be more war and more poison, as the available land mass is shrinking--while the weather turns more ugly. The American west and southwest have used up almost all the water that has been accumulating for the last million years or so, while they drill down another three hundred feet for the last dregs of water, ignoring the fact that the glaciers are melting and that water is not going to be replaced--yet they tell us don't worry, be happy. It's not at crisis level, yet.

Greed is never going to die until the last human does.

[KT2000]

4. We just need

a government that does not grease the skids for greed.
Other countries have managed to do it.

[Morgana LaFey]

6. Out of control is right, because it's very difficult to UNdo what

privatizaation is all about and has done. You create whole companies in the process, and when you re-nationalize those responsiblities, it's a bit of a conundrum how to do it "fairly."

[acmavm]

5. Hmmm. I bet these clowns thought they'd get away with it because the

Vice President of the United States has for so long.