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Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
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RaiderATO Offline
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Post: #41
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.

I'm glad they chose to go with another contractor then. waitaminute....
05-30-2011 03:12 PM
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RobertN Offline
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Post: #42
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-30-2011 03:12 PM)Raider_ATO Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.

I'm glad they chose to go with another contractor then. waitaminute....
You guys seriously don't remember all the stories about Haliburton being fined for overcharging the government?

Btw, no I can't give you companies that could do it better or cheaper. Just because I can't doesn't mean that there aren't. I am sure there are plenty just in your friggin state whatever that state may be. I am not about to look up a list of large contractors who can do the job.
05-30-2011 06:09 PM
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Owl 69/70/75 Offline
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Post: #43
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-30-2011 06:09 PM)RobertN Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 03:12 PM)Raider_ATO Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.
I'm glad they chose to go with another contractor then. waitaminute....
You guys seriously don't remember all the stories about Haliburton being fined for overcharging the government?
Btw, no I can't give you companies that could do it better or cheaper. Just because I can't doesn't mean that there aren't. I am sure there are plenty just in your friggin state whatever that state may be. I am not about to look up a list of large contractors who can do the job.

I'll save you the trouble of looking it up.

There are four companies that might be able to handle it - Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and Schlumberger. Schlumberger is French. Bechtel and Fluor have historically been the republicans' go-to companies and Halliburton has historically been the democrats' go-to company, as in Vietnam under LBJ. LBJ and George Brown (the "B" in KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary doing the lion's share in Iraq) were long-time drinking buddies. There are those who will say that Halliburton got tired of seeing work go to Fluor and Bechtel under republican administrations and brought Cheney in to get a connection to the republicans. If that's true, it obviously worked.

You'll notice the word "might" in the lead sentence of the previous paragraph. It's not at all certain that anybody but Halliburton/KBR could manage a project of this size.

For the record, and I've said this on here many times before, what I think SHOULD have happened is what Biden said--Iraq should really be split into three countries--1) an independent Kurdistan in the north that could stand alone, 2) a predominantly Shi'a country in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, that could keep the name Iraq and would be oil-wealthy but would need outside help (US? NATO? UN?) to keep order and to prevent a fight between Iran and Saudi, and 3) the predominantly Sunni western provinces, which probably could not stand alone (no oil) and would therefore most logically be folded into Saudi Arabia. The problem with doing this is that Turkey opposes an independent Kurdistan. Why is this relevant to this discussion? Because the Turks want EU membership more than anything else, so you tell the French that Schlumberger gets the contract to handle Kurdistan if the French can convince the Turks, and the French tell Turkey that Kurdistan is the price of EU membership. This is the kind of thing you can do when you work through diplomacy instead of going it alone.

Let Schlumberger have the contract for Kurdistan, let Bechtel or Flour spilt the Shi'a area and the other the Sunni area, and let Halliburton have overall responsibility. That would have cost more than the way we did it, because there are considerable advantages of scale in this kind of operation, but it would have faded some of the political heat.

Most of the "overcharges" have resulted because auditors have applied 20/20 hindsight to decisions that had to be made in a split second for life/death reasons. Is it reasonable to hold someone to the same standard for a split-second decision as for a decision made with the benefit of six months of hindsight? I think not. You may disagree.
(This post was last modified: 05-30-2011 08:59 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
05-30-2011 08:58 PM
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SumOfAllFears Offline
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Post: #44
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-30-2011 06:09 PM)RobertN Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 03:12 PM)Raider_ATO Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.

I'm glad they chose to go with another contractor then. waitaminute....
You guys seriously don't remember all the stories about Haliburton being fined for overcharging the government?

The reports were from a liberal left wing smear campaign funded by spooky-dude. If there were any truth provable by facts(know you are not much on facts), there would have been prosecutions and investigations. Some minor irregularities, yes as expected for an operation that enormous , but those got cleaned up.
05-30-2011 11:49 PM
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Native Georgian Online
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Post: #45
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-27-2011 09:53 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  Barney Frank may be a little pre-occupied these days. Back home in Boston, the Commonwealth is trying to reconfigure 10 congressional districts into nine. One of them will get tossed overboard, and it just might be Frank's. The political waters around the Massachusetts legislature are as dark, deep, and rancid as any in the United States, and I would never presume to predict how their redistricting process will ultimately play out. But Frank better stay on his toes.

It's starting to look like Barney will probably survive this round, after all. Gossip is that Jack Tierney's district MA-06 (Salem/North Shore) is the one on the chop-block.
06-02-2011 04:49 PM
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Hambone10 Offline
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Post: #46
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(05-30-2011 01:46 PM)RobertN Wrote:  I don't know why the Obama administration has continued to go with Haliburton. They have stolen money from you and me. I just can't buy that there is no other company capable of doing the job better or at a more favorable price to taxpayers. Maybe the military should get away from using outsourced workers and insource some of the work?

I don't want to beat you up TOO hard on a pretty well reasoned response by you Robert... thank you...

You may be right... but as Owl alluded to, the list is extremely short.

The outsourcing is actually the result of many of Clinton's decisions... which I generally agree with. While it may cost more while "on the ground", the cost of maintaining a ready force to do all that they do is astronomical. Remember that many of the military have long term training, pension and benefit costs. My dad is 30 years retired and still "on the payroll".

(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.
That happens much more than you'd think in large projects, and is USUALLY the result of mistakes or weak oversight (resulting in fines) rather than intent, resulting in prosecution.
06-02-2011 06:05 PM
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Owl 69/70/75 Offline
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Post: #47
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
(06-02-2011 06:05 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  
(05-30-2011 02:41 PM)RobertN Wrote:  Obviously Fox "News" didn't mention the overcharging by Haliburton.
That happens much more than you'd think in large projects, and is USUALLY the result of mistakes or weak oversight (resulting in fines) rather than intent, resulting in prosecution.

What a lot of the Halliburton "overcharges" have turned out to be are fact scenarios like this. A unit calls and is under some stress and needs fuel right now. Halliburton calls someone who can get it to them for $5/gallon, so they cut a deal, fuel gets delivered, and unit gets out of the bind. Six months later, somebody who is auditing the bill makes 20 phone calls and finds someone who says he would have delivered the fuel for $4.50/gallon. So Halliburton "overcharged" by 50 cents a gallon. Except it's a whole lot easier to look back with 20/20 hindsight and assume you should have taken 20 bids when the original decision was made under the gun with lives on the line. As a result, a lot of the "overcharge" allegations have been dropped once all the facts came in. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Of course, what happens is that the allegations are page one headlines, the subsequent resolution in favor of Halliburton gets mentioned, if at all, in the fine print on the business page.

I'm not carrying Halliburton's water on this, just pointing out facts that are needed for a full picture. I know this, if I'm in the unit that's under pressure and needing fuel, that's not the time I want Halliburton calling around for 20 bids.
06-02-2011 07:19 PM
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Smaug Offline
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Post: #48
RE: Barney Frank Admits Using Clout for Fannie Mae Job
Nah, the "Dick Cheney is screwing you" narrative is just to sweet to let slide.
06-02-2011 09:12 PM
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