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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Broken_Clock who wrote (123357)	5/15/2008 8:36:53 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

This article from the New York Times may help clarify your thinking about the Halliburton contract to "build detention centers". You need to ask yourself what is really going on. You'll notice that Halliburton is being paid roughly $96 million per year for four years to not build anything. Does anything about that not sound right to you? nytimes.com * * * The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq. The contract with the Corps of Engineers runs one year, with four optional one-year extensions. Officials of the corps said that they had solicited bids and that KBR was the lone responder. A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jamie Zuieback, said KBR would build the centers only in an emergency . . * * * What is the money being paid for? Certainly not for building things at some uncertain point in the future. And I'd suggest it's not for what the press release says it's for. Congress generally keeps secrets, but they don't vote for things blind. Halliburton has become largely a conduit for government money. As in New Orleans they subcontract out nearly everything, and in the end most of the jobs never get done. What does the money really get spent on? A fine home in the South of France, currency support, debt swaps, or spy programs? In the 1960s the actual construction, not the budget allocation, was publicized as "climate research" or "weather satellites", or a cultural exchange program. What this particular contract is I can't tell you, but I can promise you it's not for what it says. .