By Joshua Holland
Posted on April 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/51247/
Truthout:
... a recent GAO inquiry reveals that about 113,800 contractors working for a variety of federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the General Services Administration, have built up $7.7 billion in unpaid taxes. This matches untidily with a March GAO report saying that more than 21,000 doctors, health professionals or medical suppliers, collecting billions in federal Medicare dollars, simultaneously owed more than $1 billion in federal income taxes.
According to another new report, when it comes to contracts for rebuilding Iraq, those patriotic contractors are still doing a heckuva job ...
The U.S. project to rebuild Iraq remains far short of its targets, leaving the country plagued by power outages, inadequate oil production and shortages of clean water and health care, according to a report to be issued today by a U.S. government oversight agency.
The 232-page quarterly review by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction presents a sobering picture of the challenges of reconstruction in a war zone.
The inspector general's report lays out how even successful endeavors -- for example, the completion of more than 800 school projects and training for thousands of teachers -- haven't realized their potential because of security risks. During a four-year-old insurgency and sectarian fighting, less than a third of Iraq's 3.5 million students attend class, according to the report, which cited Iraqi Education Ministry statistics.
The report found that almost all of the nearly $20 billion in reconstruction funds appropriated by Congress in 2003 has been allocated. More than half of the projects to be undertaken with that money have been completed, and many more are underway. In the medical field, for example, only 15 of 141 primary health-care centers have been completed -- and only eight of those are open to the public -- but 126 projects are slated to be finished by the end of the year.
As in past reports, the inspector general's office found some of the most significant reconstruction shortfalls were in electricity production. "Electricity has the longest way to go," special inspector general Stuart W. Bowen Jr. said in an interview Friday.
Before the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's power system produced 4,500 megawatts a day with an aging infrastructure in which 85 percent of power plants were at least 20 years old, the report said. Reconstruction officials initially hoped to increase daily output to 6,750 megawatts by the summer of 2004, a target later lowered to 6,000 megawatts. But in the most recent quarter, Iraq generated only 3,832 megawatts a day.
The shortage was particularly acute in Baghdad. Before the war, the city received an average of 16 to 24 hours of power a day. Last spring, Baghdad averaged eight hours of electricity a day. This year, during the last week of March, the city received only 6.5 hours a day. The rest of the country, however, received an average of 14 hours of power a day.
Slightly more than three-quarters of the $4.2 billion in reconstruction funds allocated by Congress for electricity have been spent, and 402 of 537 electricity projects have been completed.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/51247/
I would be very concerned with Systems Application & Technologies, Inc www.sa-techinc.com. Mr Adams and DeZavala were involved in EEO problems in the past and the Air Force won't have anything to do with them. See:
ReplyDeleteEEOC v. Systems Application & Technologies,Inc. CV-04-7702 GAF (RCx) (C.D. Cal. May 11, 2005)
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE - A private company that formerly provided security at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center has agreed to pay $237,000 and provide training to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit lawsuit n. a common term for a legal action by one person or entity against another person or entity, to be decided in a court of law, sometimes just called a "suit." The legal claims within a lawsuit are called "causes of action." (See: cause of action, case, suit). Systems Application & Technologies Inc. lost its Dryden contract last year after the federal government filed a lawsuit accusing a male SA Tech manager of touching four male SA Tech security employees on their thighs, shoulders, neck or crotch crotch (krch)n.
The angle or region of the angle formed by the junction of two parts or members, such as two branches, limbs, or legs.
, and of making sexual remarks. Under the lawsuit settlement, the company will be required to hire an equal employment opportunity consultant and to train its employees on sexual harassment sexual harassment n. unwanted sexual approaches (including touching, feeling, groping) and/or repeated unpleasant, degrading and/or sexist remarks directed toward an employee with the implied suggestion that the target's employment status, promotion or favorable treatment depend upon a positive response and/or "cooperation., including same-sex harassment.
Supervisors will also be held accountable if they fail to properly forward sexual-harassment complaints made by their workers, Noh said.
The company must post a toll-free number for employees to use in making complaints, she said.
Because Maryland-based SA Tech no longer works at Dryden, the training and other anti-harassment steps will be imposed at the company's Oxnard office and a second small California office.
The $237,000 will be split among the four employees, who apparently no longer work for SA Tech, Noh said. The manager no longer works for the company, she said.
The lawsuit was filed last September by the agency, alleging that the incidents occurred from 2000 to 2002. NASA was not named in the lawsuit.
SA Tech had worked at Dryden for six years before its contract ended in October, Dryden spokesman Alan Brown said. It had 24 employees providing security at Dryden.
NASA officials were not made aware of the alleged harassment before the EEOC filed its lawsuit, Brown said. NASA vigorously pursues a workplace free of harassment.