Corruption

by Gary Farber

My apologies for having posted so little since becoming an official ObWier; I'm now leaving for Oakland, CA, in less than two weeks, and am working on moving, and minimizing my usual irrational panic. 

Perversely, I have done some link dump posts at my home blog, Amygdala, in recent weeks, so feel free to check those out before they're too aged, if you desperately need more reading.

I've certainly been frustrated to not join in on the income inequality discussions when there is such wrongness being perpetrated on the internet, and even ObWi, but I'm sure it will still be there when I get back, and meanwhile the rest of you do such a great job in comments, as do the other front page bloggers, it's not as if I'm necessary, anyway.  (But it's a topic I'm passionate on, nonetheless, so later on that, dudettes and dudes.)

Meanwhile, to briefly follow up on a past post of Dr. Science's, SF³ has withdrawn the invitation to Elizabeth Moon to attend WisCon 35 as guest of honor.  That followed SF³, the parent body of WisCon, having passed these two resolutions on October 3rd.  This is a precedent for sf conventions, for better or worse.

In another very quick hit, Why Does Abu Dhabi Own All of Chicago's Parking Meters? Yes, let's discuss privatization, virtues and faults, uses and limitations.  Let's start by reading some of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, as excerpted at the link.

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by hilzoy

When I first saw this story, about how “Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency’s prestigious honors and summer intern programs”, I didn’t immediately flag its importance. I suspect that this was because of the phrase “the agency’s prestigious honors and summer intern programs”, which suggested small, unimportant programs, a sort of DoJ analog to the Congressional Page program. It was only when I sat down to read the DOJ Inspector General’s report (pdf) that the story is based on that I realized that I was wrong.

According to the report (p. 3), “The Attorney General’s Honors Program is the exclusive means by which the Department hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks who do not have prior legal experience.” That is: it’s not some minor program; it’s one of the main ways in which DoJ lawyers get hired. Their appointments are permanent. Moreover, the people who are hired under this program are career, not political, appointees, which means that it is against the law to take politics into account when hiring them. But according to the report, for two of the five years it covers, political considerations were huge:

“The documentary evidence and witness interviews also support the conclusion that two members of the 2006 Screening Committee, Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law. For example, the evidence showed that McDonald wrote disparaging statements about candidates’ liberal and Democratic Party affiliations on the applications she reviewed and that she voted to deselect candidates on that basis.

We also found that Elston, the head of the 2006 Committee, failed to take appropriate action when he learned that McDonald was routinely deselecting candidates on the basis of what she perceived to be the candidates’ liberal affiliations. The evidence also showed that Elston himself deselected some candidates – and allowed the deselection of others – based on impermissible considerations.” (p. 99)

Or, to quote the member of the screening committee whom the IG found to have acted in good faith:

“I’m still kind of reeling from the résumés that you . . .showed me . . . people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford who were deselected. There were a lot of them. And I am shocked and very disappointed about that. . . . I didn’t know that this was going on. I thought that this was being conducted in good faith. I was conducting my reviews in good faith and making my recommendations based on merits and what I thought were the people [who] were going to be the most qualified candidates for the Department. And I’m sickened by this. And I’m not happy that I’m associated with this.” (p. 75)

If you read the whole report, or even just the part that focusses on 2006 (the worst year), it is sickening. You can see some of the data from the report here; it’s really worth looking at. (Percentages of identifiably liberal vs. identifiably conservative candidates who were rejected, etc.) Some other highlights below the fold.

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by hilzoy

This is pretty extraordinary:

“Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.”

That’s a pretty impressive list of problems, if I ask me. Could it possibly get worse? Well, yes. I left out the entire domestic violence angle, and the bit about the head of the company having a forged driver’s license that would have made him ineligible for contracts if he hadn’t gone into a diversion program for first offenders. That’s a tangent. This is the main point:

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“After Philadelphia’s housing director refused a demand by President Bush’s housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.

“Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?” Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene.

“Take away all of his Federal dollars?” responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, “:-D,” at the end of her January 2007 note.

Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: “Let me look into that possibility.” (…)

On the date these e-mails were sent, HUD notified the housing authority that it had been found in violation of rules requiring that 5 percent of housing be accessible to disabled residents. The department later argued that because the authority refused to acknowledge it was in violation and to agree to a specific remedy, it was in violation of a broader agreement that put $50 million in federal funding in jeopardy.”

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“Howard J. Krongard, the State Department’s inspector general, has repeatedly thwarted investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and censored reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform charged yesterday in a 13-page letter. (…)

Waxman accused Howard Krongard of:

▪ Refusing to send investigators to Iraq and Afghanistan to investigate $3 billion worth of State Department contracts.

▪ Preventing his investigators from cooperating with a Justice Department probe into waste and fraud in the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

▪ Using “highly irregular” procedures to personally exonerate the embassy’s prime contractor of labor abuses.

▪ Interfering in the investigation of a close friend of former White House adviser Karl Rove.

▪ Censoring reports on embassies to prevent full disclosure to Congress.

▪ Refusing to publish critical audits of State’s financial statements.

Among the e-mails obtained by the committee are exchanges in which staff members discussed Krongard’s decision not to cooperate with the Justice Department on the embassy investigation.

“Wow, as we all [k]now that is not the normal and proper procedure,” an investigator wrote to John A. DeDona, an assistant inspector general. DeDona forwarded the e-mail to Deputy Inspector General William E. Todd, saying, “I have always viewed myself as a loyal soldier but hopefully you sense my frustration in my voicemail yesterday.”

Todd wrote back: “I know you are very frustrated. John, you need to convey to the troops the truth, the IG told us both Tuesday to stand down on this and not assist, that needs to be the message.”

DeDona responded: “Unfortunately, under the current regime, the view within INV [the office of investigations] is to keep working the BS cases within the beltway, and let us not rock the boat with more significant investigations.””

Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker describes one of the most egregious examples:

“There have been allegations that the contractor First Kuwaiti used forced labor building the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. So Krongard looked into it.

Only he had a peculiar method, according to Waxman’s investigation. First, he insisted on doing the report entirely by himself and shut out his staff. And instead of seeking out the source of the allegations, he allowed the contractor to choose the employees that he’d interview. He ultimately interviewed six employees.

The result? Krongard declared that he found no evidence of human trafficking.

But when Waxman sought the investigative materials that Krongard had generated in the course of his probing investigation, Krongard only turned over 20 pages total (after a subpoena from Waxman). Of those 20 pages, only six of them were Krongard’s own work product — sketchy handwritten notes from his interviews with the contractor’s handpicked witnesses.”

It’s really worth reading Waxman’s entire letter (pdf). If the allegations in it are true, the State Department’s IG, whose entire function in life is to ferret out waste, fraud, and corruption, has instead been covering not just for the very things he’s supposedly in charge of finding, but slavery. This, no doubt, is just one more example of the Bush administration’s desire to bring freedom to the Middle East.

Meanwhile:

“The federal Office of Special Counsel is investigating allegations that Rachel Paulose, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, mishandled classified information, decided to fire the subordinate who called it to her attention, retaliated against others in the office who crossed her, and made racist remarks about one employee.”

Besides allegations of leaving classified information about terrorism investigations lying about, “Paulose allegedly denigrated one employee of the office, using the terms “fat,” “black,” “lazy” and “ass.””

I fail to see why anyone would think that the bet possible candidate for a US Attorney’s job would be someone who either leaves classified information lying around or uses terms like that in reference to their subordinates.

Last, but not least, there’s the ongoing investigation into Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Intertubes), in which the head of an oil company that was awarded $170 million in government contracts admitted paying for extensive remodeling on Stevens’ home. Since Stevens has come up in other contexts as well, there’s reason to hope that we might soon see the last of the Senator who just topped The Hill’s list of Senators who got the most money in earmarks in this year’s Defense Appropriations Bill, and whose pet causes include “the University of Alaska’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which began as a far-fetched investigation into harnessing the power of the aurora borealis” ($100 million.)

And not a moment too soon. (Note: I’ve put some excerpts from a TNR profile of Stevens below the fold. They’re pretty amazing.)

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