(AP) - HOUSTON-A federal judge has dismissed a federal complaint accusing Halliburton Co.'s former chief financial officer of aiding and abetting the company in filing financial reports that did not promptly disclose a 1998 change in accounting procedures.
What's missing from this story? "which occurred while Dick Cheney was CEO."
A provision in the Katrina Emergency Supplemental Appropriations (i.e., the $52 billion) would extend from $15,000 to $250,000 the purchasing limit for an individual transaction for federal employees with government-issued credit cards. This takes a temptation to steal office Post-It Notes to a whole new level — a quarter-million dollars of unaccountability per employee.
The Honorable Jerry Lewis Chairman Committee on Appropriations H218 The Capitol Washington, DC 20515
Dear Chairman Lewis:
I am writing about my very serious concerns with a provision in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill for Hurricane Katrina. A substantive provision was inserted in the bill, at the request of the Administration, which would raise the “micro-purchase” threshold from $15,000 to $250,000 for purchases relating to relief and recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Raising this threshold would mean that any federal employee with a government-issued credit card could buy up to $250,000 in goods or services in a single purchase. There would be no limit to the number of such purchases. This is an unwise provision that could lead to contract abuse and extensive waste, fraud, and abuse.
The use of government credit cards has a track record, and it is not a good one. In the decade since these credit cards were first introduced, GAO and agency Inspectors General have documented millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Recent examples cited in GAO reports include: • A Navy cardholder who made $250,000 in unauthorized purchases in less than a year, including buying a dog. • A Navy cardholder who spent $150,000 for automotive equipment, home building, and general home supplies, some of which the cardholder later resold for cash. • A Department of Education cardholder who made fraudulent purchases from pornographic websites, including one named SlaveLaborProductions.com.
There are about 500,000 of these credit cards in use in the federal government, so this provision could ultimately apply to $150 to $200 billion in taxpayer funds. The vast majority of federal employees are honest, upstanding people, but the ability to buy up to $250,000 in any single purchase is a great temptation. In addition, most federal employees are not trained to make purchases of this magnitude to ensure that taxpayers get the best value for their money.
There is another provision in the same section of the legislation that would give trained contracting officers the ability to use emergency procurement procedures passed in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The inclusion of this provision ensures that federal procurements of up to $250,000 can be made expeditiously, making the credit card provision unnecessary.
The federal response to Hurricane Katrina has been woefully inadequate to date. We should not now compound those problems by creating a situation which will inevitably lead to further waste, fraud, and abuse.
Sincerely, Henry A. Waxman Ranking Minority Member
This is a massive entitlement program like none other for Republican fraudsters within the government. Who will have the teeth to question the authority of the thousands upon thousands in Ferragamo shoe purchases that emerge from the State Department? Who will question furniture purchases for a recently acquired mansion in St. Michaels on the Chesapeake? Seriously, this potential for abuse could easily get into the tens of billions in a matter of months.
NEW ORLEANS -- On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.
The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Yesterday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it's still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.
The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.
Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.
More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.
A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.
He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.
The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."
Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.
Alternately, instead of adequate schools and municipal water service, we could provide each citizen of New Orleans with his own heliport, highball glasses, and place in Vail, thus leveling the playing field.
Former Enron chieftains Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Rick Causey have asked that their federal criminal cases be dismissed based on allegations prosecutors threatened witnesses to keep them from helping the three defend themselves.
Actions of the Enron Task Force have deprived Lay, Skilling and Causey "of their constitutional rights both to secure and confront witnesses, thereby stripping defendants of their ability fully and fairly to prepare for and defend themselves at trial. Put simply, witnesses are afraid to talk to us," the request stated.
Naturally these pity-party allegations are based on sealed affidavits that the public hasn't seen.
Boo fucking hoo. Who among these louts defended their employees from losing their life savings?
Q But, Scott, more concretely, an officer of the Northern Command is quoted as saying that as early as the time Hurricane Katrina went through Florida and worked its way up to the Gulf, there was a massive military response ready to go, but that the President did not order it. It could have been ordered on Sunday, on Monday, on Tuesday -- the call didn't come. Why not?
MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, let's point out a couple of things. There were a lot of assets that were deployed and pre-positioned prior to the hurricane hitting. And you have to look back --
Q These assets were deployed, but the order to use them never came. The Bataan was sitting off behind the hurricane.
MR. McCLELLAN: I know these are all facts that you want to look at and want to determine what went wrong and what went right. I'm not prepared to agree with your assessment just there. There is a much larger picture here that we have to take a look at, and --
Q It's not mine, it's an officer in the Northern Command.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- in terms of the President, the President issued disaster declarations ahead of time so that we could make sure we're fully mobilizing resources and pre-positioning them. But this was a hurricane of unprecedented magnitude.
Q Right, but the military can't go into action without his order.
And they didn't. But, as Scottie said on the record, the buck stops with the president who is fully accountable for this disaster.
But the real good this especially ill wind may blow Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Bush, along with the frantically bullish contingent on the Street, is that it provides them with perfect cover for just about anything that goes wrong. Should housing, which is already starting to show signs of serious fatigue, roll over, why Mr. Greenspan can cite Katrina's unsettling influence on energy costs and the resultant undermining of sentiment in general and that of would-be home buyers in particular.
If those already towering twin deficits continue to grow to the sky, putting the nation at even more financial risk, why, Mr. Bush is sure to label Katrina the culprit.
And if the economy, which despite reasonably good job numbers in August is beginning to slow, a trend that can only worsen with skyscraping energy costs and the attendant slide in consumer sentiment, Katrina will get the all's-well chorus off the hook.
In the same vein, bulls on the stock market, with its heavy speculative lacing and exceedingly rich valuations, will shrug philosophically as they explain that even the most perceptive souls like themselves couldn't possibly have been expected to foresee a freak of nature like Katrina and it's baleful effect on investor psyches.
In sum, never before will a hurricane have done so much to bail out so many people.
How like the Bushes to bail themselves out, again and again, at the expense of the poor.
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
Because, according to the wisdom of the vacationing Bush administration, brochures and toll-free numbers would have saved Lower Manhattan on 9-11-01.
Are the firefighters, who were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and MREs, reacting too hastily? Maybe they can use the brochures after all — by stuffing them into the breached levees and the mouths of Republicans at press conferences.
