Why doesn't this come as a surprise? http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_contracts_3
Sad and disgusting and I am not surprised in the least. My favorite part was from the Bechtel website... "We do not expect or receive political favors or government contracts as a result of those contributions." Then why the hell do you give away your hard earned money? For fun? You know corporations just love to spend their money on useless stuff. Unbelievable.
Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries. "Too much time"? So much for democracy huh?
From what I've read, they found a correlation between donations and fat gvt. contracts. But, you know, I'll bet there also a correlation between donations and getting beat for fat gvt. contracts. Businessmen who do business with the federal gvt. were always going to love Bush...he promised to spend alot of money and lower taxes on the rich. What could be better than that!!! It's not like they proved correlation but not causation. Until they show that giving correlated with contracts, and less-giving correlated with no contracts, they haven't even shown correlation.
Because in many cases there is only one bidder that is qualified to do the work? Don't think so? How many companies, do you know, can start an oil pumping station where all the documentation is in Arabic? I can think of one, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Haliburton. How many companies, do you know, can rebuild dozens of bridges overseas? I can only think of one, Bechtel. Find one peice of paper that states the procurment procedures were not followed. I would bet a bunch of money that it was all by the book. Who won the contract has NOTHING to do with contributions. It has everything to do with which company holds a particular set of resumes. There just aren't many companies that do this kind of work. It's a nice sounding story, i.e. influencing the bid process via political contributions. It's easy copy to write. The problem is there is not an ounce of truth to it.
Then why on earth would a company like Bechtel even bother to give hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions? Halliburton also? What's the point if you already got the market cornered?
Exactly. Companies do not frivolously throw money around...unless they expect something in return. Not to get you conspiracy theorists going, but I often wonder what came first, i.e. what prompted what.
Re: Re: Report Links Iraq Deals to Bush Donations You can think of only one AMERICAN company. I'll bet there are many in the Arab world that could pull this off.