Unlike the GOP the Dems are doing something....

By Jim Morris and Marina Walker Guevara


WASHINGTON, May 6, 2008 — In the spring of 2006, Boeing paid one of the largest fines ever imposed on a U.S. company for violating the Arms Export Control Act. From 2000 to 2003, the aerospace and defense giant had defied State Department regulations and warnings about the unauthorized export of commercial aircraft equipped with a microchip that had military applications.


Some of those planes ended up in China, a country to which export of defense items was further restricted after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Boeing, which already had been fined three times for violations of arms exports laws, paid the U.S. government $15 million to settle the case and agreed to the appointment of an outside "special compliance official."


Despite such transgressions, Boeing didn't forfeit its role as adviser to the State Department on the very laws and regulations the company had flouted. For 16 years, at least one Boeing representative has sat on the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , created in 1992 to help State reduce "impediments to legitimate exports" while safeguarding national security. DTAG's members include representatives of prominent weapons manufacturers and suppliers, such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, as well as defense industry lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants – but no outside critics.


Balance in membership – required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, or FACA — has never been one of DTAG's hallmarks. Scholars and think-tank analysts have traditionally held only one or two seats on the 40-to-50-member panel, and in 2006 they were dropped altogether.
DTAG isn't an anomaly. There are [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , with some 67,000 members, attached to the executive branch. Some, such as the National Coal Council, appear to be little more than corporate lobbying wings with special access to top agency officials. "What we need is openness and transparency in these advisory committees so that we can feel that what they tell us is credible," said Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat. "I don't think FACA, as written, has gone as far as its framers hoped in diminishing the influence of industry," agreed David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Congressional Action


After years of paying scant attention to FACA abuses – imbalances on committees, unwarranted secrecy, agency interference — [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. to the 36-year-old law. Legislation sponsored by Waxman and another Democrat, William Lacy Clay of Missouri, would, in Clay's words, "improve balance, transparency and independence" among panels. The proposed amendments would require that committee appointments be made without regard to political affiliation and would strengthen conflict-of-interest disclosure rules for panelists. They also would clamp down on efforts to circumvent FACA and avoid public disclosure.


The bill is expected to go to the House floor for a vote this spring. At a hearing on April 2, the day it was introduced, several witnesses pleaded for congressional intervention.


"[T]he courts have opened loopholes in FACA's coverage and federal agencies have whittled away at its open government mandates," Sidney Shapiro, an associate dean at the Wake Forest School of Law, told the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives. "Congress should arrest these trends before we witness more stories of secret, biased, or unaccountable advisory committees influencing national energy policy, food safety standards, or environmental protection requirements."


The advisory system's flaws transcend any one administration. But the Bush White House has left its own imprint, sometimes skirting FACA altogether by accepting "informal" advice from business leaders and lobbyists, as it did with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force in 2001, and refusing to make records public. Critics say it has also tinkered with panels—most notably, those focused on science—in an apparent attempt to make them ideological clones of the White House. Some have been eliminated altogether, as in [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. .


Read all of it here; [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

KJ

It's been going on for decades, yet it's all George Bush's fault.

Glad to see Pelosi, Reid, Schumer and Company are tackling THE most important problem facing this Country at the present time.

As am I. gald we see eye to eye on this. AWESOME post K.J

Yeah no kidding. I so much more worried about planes with military chips in them than I am the ICBMs that china has thanks to the technology being passed to them for a contribution to the democratic national committe.

An Act in Disrepair


There are, to be sure, plenty of civic-minded advisory bodies. Among them is the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, whose members have hectored the EPA to adopt stricter air pollution standards. But Georgetown's David Vladeck, who litigated a number of FACA cases when he was with Public Citizen, worries that the evenhanded, open system envisioned by the act has fallen into disrepair.
"It's not as though agencies aren't calling on outsiders for help," Vladeck said. "They're just doing it in a less formal, less visible, less transparent, and less accountable way."


Congressman Waxman agrees. He was an early critic of Cheney's energy task force and has continued to denounce the Bush administration for what he calls excessive secrecy.


A 2004 report prepared by the Democratic staff of Waxman's House Government Reform Committee charged that the administration had "acted to weaken and avoid FACA's requirements." It offered several examples, among them the President's Commission on Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction – better known as the WMD Commission – indirectly exempted from FACA by provisions the president placed in the executive order creating it.


The Bush White House, Waxman said, has shown a willingness to abolish panels "they think may be too honest" or alter the composition of committees "to get the people they want. . . . I think it becomes a process not to give us the best advice . . . but to be sure the government gets the advice they want to get."


Scientific panels, in particular, have not fared well the past seven years.
In August 2007, for example, the EPA disbanded the National Pollution Prevention and Toxics Advisory Committee, created in 2002 to give the agency a cross section of input on issues such as nanotechnology and lead poisoning. After a promising start, the committee fell dormant after three scientists – all environmental advocates – resigned in protest in October 2006.


The scientists complained that the group had been stymied by representatives of the chemical industry, who resisted efforts to reach consensus on matters of chemical policy, and that the EPA had not done enough to resolve the conflicts. "It was basically an us-against-them dynamic, which didn't allow real progress forward," said one of those who quit, Joel Tickner, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell's School of Health & Environment. In his letter announcing the committee's breakup, EPA Assistant Administrator James Gulliford thanked the remaining members for their service and wrote that he had decided to "utilize a range of approaches to obtain stakeholder input, formal and informal, instead of reconstituting the [committee]."


The Bush administration has been accused not only of killing troublesome panels, but also of meddling in the advisory process – something FACA was supposed to prevent. The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. of such interference—from the appointment of people with lead industry ties to a CDC panel on childhood lead poisoning to the application of political litmus tests for nominees to committees that advise the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Army. Richard Jackson, a former director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, said that, "In 2001, there were [administration] people calling members of committees, asking them who they voted for and whether they supported the president's policies, which is unprecedented."


Asked to respond to charges of panel manipulation, White House spokeswoman Christie Parell offered a clipped response: "We appoint qualified individuals to serve in administration positions," she said.
Were he still alive, Sen. Metcalf would likely be appalled—but not terribly surprised—by the fate of FACA. During his 1971 testimony, he warned that industry held "a favored position" in the advisory process, raising the specter of a "corporate state." And he posed a question that remains relevant: "Do we want the government to be open to all, or do we want it closed to all but elite industrialists?"

[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

The Bush Administration also doesn't hold with whistle blower protections...so they go after anyone who speaks up about the abuses. However, there are enough patriots left that they keep speaking..and being heard.

If any here are interested in facts and REAL investigative reporting...some interesting finds.... [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

KJ

Well how about this TAX PAYER money?? I'd call this special interest!!!!

Baghdad Bonanza

The Top 100 Private Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Bill Buzenberg

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company, according to a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR—which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Haliiburton--was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the Center's list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.


Another private security company Blackwater USA, whose employees recently killed as many as 17 Iraqi civilians in what the Iraqi government alleges was an unprovoked attack, is 12th on the list of companies and joint ventures, with $485 million in contracts. (On November 14, the New York Times reported that FBI investigators have concluded that 14 of the 17 shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, and that Justice Department prosecutors are weighing whether to seek indictments.) [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , which immediately precedes Blackwater on the Top 100, came under fire in July after a pair of whistleblowers told a House committee that the company essentially "kidnapped" low-paid foreign laborers brought in to help build the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti and the U.S. State Department denied the charges.


Other key findings from the Center's analysis:

• Over the three years studied, more than $20 billion in contracts went to [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. whose identities—at least so far—are impossible to determine.

• Nearly a third of the companies and joint ventures on the Top 100 are based outside the United States. These foreign contractors, along with the $20 billion in contracts awarded to the unidentified companies, account for about 45 percent of all funds obligated to the Top 100.

• U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006.


According to David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, the outsourcing of government has escalated across the board over the past five years, although oversight of the process has shrunk during this same period. In an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, Walker noted particular problems with military contracting. "We have identified about 15 systemic, longstanding acquisition and contracting problems that exist within the Defense Department—which is the single biggest contractor within the U.S. government—that we are still not making enough progress on," said Walker, who heads the Government Accountability Office. "I mean, this stuff isn't rocket science."


While KBR earns the top spot among individual companies and their subsidiaries, the firm's $16 billion in obligated contracts is eclipsed by $20.4 billion in contracts that went to a nebulous collection of companies identified by the U.S. government only as "foreign contractors." The Center has filed a Freedom of Information request for the 50 largest contracts—collectively worth some $19.6 billion—awarded to these unnamed companies. The largest of these contracts is worth more than $6 billion—a sum that would catapult the unidentified recipient to the No. 2 spot on the Top 100.


In October 2003, when the Center published "Windfalls of War," Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown, and Root was also the top recipient of U.S. government contracts for the postwar effort, with more than $2.3 billion in awards over two years (see the story [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. ). By contrast, Bechtel, the only other company on that 2003 roster to have received more than $1 billion in awards, won a second large contract in January 2004—this one for $1.8 billion—but left Iraq after completing its work in March 2007. Since this Top 100 represents contracts newly awarded in fiscal years 2004 to 2006, Bechtel is not on the list.


When the 2003 study was published, federal agencies did not comprehensively distinguish war contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan from other government contracts; therefore, Center researchers had to flush out these contracts one by one. Since then, however, most such contracts list Iraq or Afghanistan as their "place of performance," making the contracting process more transparent and the search for data—available from the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System—more methodical.

Read it all.. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

Why haven't I been hearing a lot of whining and complaining about this? I've been bringing it up for months and not a peep out of any of you, other than the usual abuse.

Transparency and accountability in Government SPENDING...but NO, you wail about giving the Soldiers something!!!

Warpigs...Chicken Hawks...CB Rambo's

KJ

So what is THE most important problem surely not IRAQ.

I guess Bill Clinton never should have chosen KBR for LOGCAP in 1994.

See, it IS Clinton's fault.

KJ, I can tell you that Henry Waxman is a total fraud. I personally sent him info about hundreds of thousands of wasted and stolen taxpayer dollars in Iraq. He and his staff never even replied. And I'm talking about job#s, lot #s of stolen electrical tools, plumbing projects that were totally bogus,etc etc. Also had a bunch of other contractors who were willing to blow the whistle on KBR and he did NOTHING. He is just a publicity hound wasting taxpayers money just like those he rails against.

Big Duker...was this after the Dems took control? I'm surprised you weren't contacted because they have been doing hearings on this. I would have expected you to at least receive a letter or something back..disappointing.

I hope you still have all your information...things may change.

KJ