Sen. Sanders: Pentagon paid billions to fraudsters

[kpete]

Source: Raw Story/Agence France-Presse

Sen. Sanders: Pentagon paid billions to fraudsters

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 -- 5:36 pm


WASHINGTON — The US military paid $285 billion over three years to hundreds of military contractors that defrauded the Pentagon over the same stretch of time, a US senator charged Wednesday.

Brandishing a 45-page January 2011 US Department of Defense report on the issue, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders called for "far more vigorous enforcement" by the US military "to protect taxpayers from massive fraud."

"The sad truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money," he charged.

Sanders underlined that the report, which his office made public, showed that from 2007-2009 the Pentagon spent $270 billion on 91 contractors involved in fraud cases that yielded judgments of more than $1 million.



Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/sanders-pentagon-billions-fraudsters/

---

REPORT:
http://sanders.senate.gov/graphics/Defense_Fraud_Report1.pdf
more info here:
Senator Sanders staff summarized the findings of the report as follows:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/2/2/940790/-Bernie-v.-Bulls**t-:-The-Pentagon-and-Fraud

[msongs]

1. steal a twinkie go to jail, steal $285 billion get more US contracts for never ending wars nt

[FiveGoodMen]

2. No fucking kidding!

:grr:

[FailureToCommunicate]

3. Jean Valjean stole a Twinkie?

(Sorry, couldn't resist. Too punchy from snow shoveling all day)

Go Bernie!

[Mopar151]

44. From an old biker magazine (Easyriders prison columm)

The law, in it's magnificent equanimity, forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging, and sleeping under bridges. Anatole France

[TxVietVet]

4. Haliburton????

Kellogg-Brown and Root???????

WE, THE PEOPLE ALREADY KNEW THAT. :yoiks:
No one does anything about the thieving military industrial complex of crooks.
If someone starts to squawk about it, he'll soon be out of office.

[KoKo]

5. Paging Eric Holder...."Mr. Holder please come to the courtesy phone in the lounge"

So...what's going on here?

[Le Taz Hot]

21. He's busy.

I'm sure somebody's growing a pot plant somewhere.

[Enthusiast]

33. Ed Zackery

[ElsewheresDaughter]

29. He's busy busting union members and pety ahem mafiaosa's selling shit from car trunks in NJ & NY

[Enthusiast]

35. A bit curious, no? nt

[molly77]

57. Eric Holder is also busy listening in on the phone conversations of anti war protesters.

Rounding them up. Going to trial. Hey , any white supremacists been investigated by the FBI? Or are they your kind of people?

[alp227]

6. no surprise here n/t

[indepat]

7. It would seem the greatest collateral benefit resulting from pre-emptive war inures

to the sole benefit of contractors via excessive profits and outright fraud, but who's in this great land gives even a tiny diddle-dy-fuck since social security recipients can be screwed out of their earned and paid-for benefits to make up any short fall? Now is this not some kind of great way to run the country or what? :shrug:

[FailureToCommunicate]

28. Dozy sentence: "It would seem the greatest...

"It would seem the greatest collateral benefit resulting from pre-emptive war inures to the sole benefit of contractors via excessive profits and outright fraud, but who in this great land gives even a tiny diddle-dy-fuck since social security recipients can be screwed out of their earned and paid-for benefits to make up any short fall?"

+1!

[Enthusiast]

34. Imagine. We are still in Afghanistan

for no good or reasonable reason. And these fraudulent practices continue today.

[OwnedByFerrets]

8. But, but, but....the only fraud commited in the U.S.

is committed by medicare gramma's

just in case... :sarcasm:

[valerief]

30. Don't forget the "welfare queens", too!

:sarcasm:

[robinlynne]

9. Can we get that back please?

[DeSwiss]

10. When your country is effectively run.....

...by a Military-Industrial-Complex, such matters are but a trifle. A mere annoyance when viewed against the larger picture. A picture that seeks to overcome all previous empire declines such as with the Romans whose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Overexpansion_and_inflation">financial over-extensions, debts and inflation rottened out the infrastructure at home. And its dependence upon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Vegetius_on_military_decline">mercenaries and thugs to take the place of an army who was no longer willing to fight for corrupt politicians.

And so even now we wither away in Afghanistan -- the graveyard of modern empires -- we continue ignoring history and common sense. Throwing good money after bad while we talk of cutting back the benefits of law-abiding and tax-paying citizens at-home. I believe that we have reached a point where nothing short of an insurrection from within, or a revolution from without, will stop the course we are presently upon. Elections won't cut it any more. We can't vouch for the results anyway.

- And this is especially so since the corrupt judges of the Supreme Court have ruled that a piece paper is equivalent to that of a human being......

K&R

[Amonester]

36. Yep. IGNORING the lessons of history makes them an inevitable

repeat.

Of course, nothing will be done because...

Because.


Police everywhere
Justice nowhere

K&R

[defendandprotect]

11. We have to DRAFT Bernie Sanders for president 2012 -- Who do you trust?

[OnyxCollie]

12. K&R. nt

[HCE SuiGeneris]

13. Indictment. Trial. Recompense. n/t

[Initech]

14. One day every one of those motherfuckers will get caught.

[earcandle]

15. soon, my little dearie, very very soon.......

[No Elephants]

22. Apparenotly, though, getting caught does not mean jail, or even an end to your new govt contracts,

they probably don't care.

[disndat]

31. Like Mubarak in Egypt

thanks to WikiLeaks, Facebook and Twitter.

[AlbertCat]

42. One day every one of those motherfuckers will get caught.

You forgot the :sarcasm:

There's nothing, the law, karma, some god or the Power Rangers, to guarantee any of these crooks gets caught. This is not a Hollywood film, y'know. This is reality, where justice is not guaranteed.

[Initech]

61. The key words were "one day". I didn't forget the sarcasm icon.

I'm too optimistic to think it'll happen in my lifetime. :evilgrin:

[begin_within]

16. Apparently white-collar crime is acceptable to the majority of Americans.

[Oldtimeralso]

17. How About the 2.3 Trillion?

Rumsfeld held a press conference on September 10, 2001 to announce that the DOD could not account for 2.3 Trillion of our tax dollars.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU

[jwirr]

18. For the last 10 years the repugs in government have systematically

ripped off any money they could get their hands on - why should we be surprised that the contract buddies would be part of it? The people who made the contracts no doubt got some pretty hefty kick backs in the deals. Military spending is the only kind of government expense that we buy a lot of things that we hope never to use and the give us no return for our money. As far as I am concerned the only thing we get out of military spending is the wages that the soldiers get paid. That at least contributes something usable to the economy.


NOTE: This was an argument that I heard when I was in college in the 70s and I may not have stated it clearly.

[Kurovski]

19. K&R. (nt)

[grahamhgreen]

20. Kick

[lonestarnot]

23. And I'll bet Senator Sanders will be the only one asking for any of the money back. Disgusting.

[Nihil]

27. The others have already been receiving it ...

... as a reward for keeping the fraudulent situation a going concern ...

[Frisbee]

48. True, but in all fairness to the rest of our elected representatives...

The vast majority of them are probably either friends with those who profit from DoD fraud, hold stock in those very same companies, campaign using money from said fraudsters or expect to be working in the MIC when they leave office. (or some combination of)

[Quantess]

24. I ♥ Bernie Sanders.

[Joanne98]

25. We want the money back!

[KansDem]

49. Really! A quarter of a trillion dollars will do wonders to shrink the deficit.

Also tax the rich and end the wars, too! Call Congress! Right ........ now!!!

[Overseas]

26. Here's a contractor fraud database link

http://www.contractormisconduct.org/

[Enthusiast]

32. Enforcement would require

investigations. We only vestigate blow jobs round hea.

[femrap]

37. War is a racket....k and r

[Aleric]

38. Government agencies are complicit

I've worked on two government contracts in the last few years. In one case the government agency dragged the project for 8 years preventing it from succeeding and finally pulled the plug when the administration change provided it with political cover. And this was their third attempt in 20 years to do something that the contractor advised they buy off-the-shelf in the first place.

In another instance, I sat at a military base for TWO MONTHS waiting for a computer so that I could simply DO the job I was being paid for.

I really hope I never have to take another government job again.

[on point]

39. I know where repukes can look for fraud, waste and abuse...

[yurbud]

40. How much could we save by cutting off corporate welfare through the DoD?

[yurbud]

41. Randi Rhodes had best solution: when troops are in combat, defense contracts switch to cost ONLY and

all their execs are placed on the military pay scale.

How often would we have wars with a law like that?

[pam4water]

43. Now if we could only get some of the money back.

[liberation]

45. Lets focus instead on those mythical single black mothers driving around in Cadillacs...

... why is Sen Sanders going against the patriotic defense vendors? America is the land of freedom to do business and ingenuity, and now Sen Sanders wants to penalize these highly successful business folk just for the "minor" detail that their developed a business plan centered around defrauding tax dollars from the defense department. I think he is doing this out of spite and jealousy.


These people are hated just because they are rich. Granted all that money came from the tax payers, and technically they're sucking off the public tit. But they "earned" all those dollars each day while they were pulling themselves by their own bootstraps.

[liberation]

46. Lets focus instead on those mythical single black mothers driving around in Cadillacs...

... why is Sen Sanders going against the patriotic defense vendors? America is the land of freedom to do business and ingenuity, and now Sen Sanders wants to penalize these highly successful business folk just for the "minor" detail that their developed a business plan centered around defrauding tax dollars from the defense department. I think he is doing this out of spite and jealousy.


These people are hated just because they are rich. Granted all that money came from the tax payers, and technically they're sucking off the public tit. But they "earned" all those dollars each day while they were pulling themselves by their own bootstraps. Because remember: it is only welfare and an entitlement if it involves poor minority individuals. When rich people defraud orders of magnitude more tax dollars, it is called a "business plan." And it is like totally OK then.

[loudsue]

47. This pisses me off more than anyone will ever be able to know.

FOR SO MANY REASONS!!!

First, if the fucking teabaggers are so concerned about someone getting something they aren't getting, and they're so concerned with mismanagement in Washington, why in the hell don't they focus on this?? It's STEALING BY CROOKS five times what it would cost to provide medical care to everyone. It's thievery. Plain and simple. They could even keep their tax breaks for their extremely wealthy idols in the upper class if we just had the money that the Pentagon's good-ole-boy contractors STEAL in one year.

Our schools are being torn apart. Our infrastructure is crumbling. And the pentagon is doing worse than what Wall Street is doing in STEALING taxpayer dollars.

I'm SICK OF IT!!!

[Plucketeer]

50. Sadly,

the Egyptians have more "cahones" than we do. Of course, they have the pyramids to brag about - while we only have pyramid schemes to brag about!

[GreenTea]

51. These are the same republicans corporate theives who scream "America, Love it or Leave it" as they

fleece Americans in the bullshit name of "fighting terrorism".

When in reality these lying filthy greedy republican corporatist bastards are just lining their own pockets.... getting everyone to go along blindly with their bullshit patriotism as they rob our country blind.

And are exactly the first ones to be be against health care for all and every other social safety-net program.

These greedy self-serving republican corporate bastards want all our tax dollars for themselves as they deceitfully get government contracts they never intend to for-fill and haven't!

[saras]

52. What we COULD do...

Even more important than putting the perps in jail is TAKING THE MONEY BACK.

[TatonkaJames]

53. What's the sense ?

Nearly everyone is corrupt in government and forget contractors dealing with it,
they are worse. They will do what they want, and until we the people are at our
breaking point like we see these days in Egypt, it will cost the taxpayers money
and make the rich and politicians wealthier.

[mbperrin]

54. I didn't realize the Pentagon paid anybody else BUT fraudsters!

Whadya think? They're in business to help US?





Whoa. whatta concept.

[SpiralHawk]

55. the republicon crusade for profit

ptoooey

[indimuse]

56. WHY DO WE FIGHT?

We don't...THEY DO! It needs to STOP! They CREATE WAR..It is their *Business*..without it they'd be broke and POWERLESS! Just like us...

[Swampguana]

58. Kick

[lobodons]

59. Issa should look into this

Issa should spend one of his kabillion hearings on this. Billions of $$ is a lot of money.

[L0oniX]

60. Gee TC how do we reduce the deficit? DUH! Problem is that a lot of congress critters hold stocks...

with some of these corporate fraudsters. No wonder they won't cut the pentagon budget.

[raccoon]

62. Kick. nt