Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?...Another great piece from Scahill

[debbierlus]

Forgive if this is a repost, I did not see it up, it came out on the 25th.

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."

..The legislation applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or others affiliated with a group charged with any of the above.

According to the Project on Oversight and Government Reform, this legislation could potentially eliminate a virtual Who's Who of defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and KBR and other corporations like AT&T, FedEx and Dell.

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is being attacked. Yet the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company, which is headed by Erik Prince. Prince was a major donor to Republican causes and campaigns, including those of some of the Defund ACORN bill's sponsors, like Indiana Republican Mike Pence, one of the key figures hunting down Van Jones. A former employee recently described Prince as a man who "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe" and said that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Blackwater has a $217 million security contract through the State Department in Iraq--a contract just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. It also holds a $210 million State Department "security" contract in Afghanistan, running through 2011 and another multimillion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for "training" in Kabul. This is on top of Blackwater's clandestine work for the CIA, including continuing work on the drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This also does not take into account Blackwater's lucrative domestic work training law enforcement and military forces in the United States at the company's compounds in North Carolina, California and Illinois, nor the private "security" work it does for entities like the International Republican Institute, nor the work it does in training "faith-based organizations." Nor does it include the contracts doled out to Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, which works for foreign governments and Fortune 500 corporations.

Then there is this fact: Blackwater was paid more than $73 million for federally funded, no-bid security contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, billing taxpayers $950 per man per day, a spending decision the Bush administration called "the best value to the government." In the wake of the hurricane ACORN, meanwhile, only helped poor people who were suffering as a result of the government's total failure to respond.

More at the thenation:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091012/scahill

[omega minimo]

1. Defund Blackwater

[debbierlus]

2. Blackwater = Scum of the Earth

[HipChick]

3. Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman as well

Lockheed Martin: they've been investigated for multiple business ethics violations, and fraud by the US government, and have been fined a total of 11 times, totaling a little under 70 million dollars.

Northrup Grumman: ..They've also been hit up by the government for fraud and fined 9 times to the tune of 500 million dollars! The most egregious of these fraud cases being knowingly giving the Navy defective aircraft, price gouging the US government on space projects contracted to them, and knowingly giving the US Airforce satellite systems that were knowingly faulty and would more than likely fail. + illegal gun running operation which they were caught shipping arms to China, Yemen, Angola and the Ukrain.

[debbierlus]

4. The military industrial complex at its finest

[debbierlus]

5. kick