(H/T to Driftglass.)

Just when you think Halliburton couldn't be any more blatant, and Congress members couldn't be any more corruptible, it gets worse. No, we don't need publicly funded campaigns! Nope:

As Congress investigated its role in the doomed Deep Horizon oil rig, Halliburton donated $17,000 to candidates running for federal office, giving money to several lawmakers on committees that have launched inquiries into the massive spill.

Gee, I wonder why. Do you suppose they simply want them to let them know there'll be no hard feelings if they should find Halliburton at fault in some way? I'm sure it's something like that.

The Texas-based oil giant’s political action committee made 14 contributions during the month of May, according to a federal campaign report filed Wednesday — 13 to Republicans and one to a Democrat. It was the busiest donation month for Halliburton’s PAC since September 2008.

Of the 10 current members of Congress who got money from Halliburton in May, seven are on committees with oversight of the oil spill and its aftermath.

They just want them to know they're behind them 100% as they do their jobs!

Halliburton’s political contributions in May are the highest they’ve been since September 2009, when the PAC also gave $17,000 in donations. In fact, the last time the company gave more than $17,000 in one month was when it donated $25,000 during the heat of the presidential campaign in September 2008.

I've often told people that instead of the netroots funding candidates, I'd rather see all that money go to hiring our own lobbying firm. Because then we could pay them off, too: to be honest.

Jason Leopold has the story over at Truthout. Another day, another story of a huge corporate behemoth running amok and roughshod over the most basic safety regulations and protocols.

In 2008, an employee of BP hired to oversee and maintain required document databases relating to regulatory safety requirements raised concerns about a related BP Gulf project, Atlantis.

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at the person's request because the whistleblower still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008. Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

It was then that the whistleblower, who was hired to oversee the company's databases housing documents related to its Atlantis project, discovered that the drilling platform had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving the platform vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began last week following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.

The specifics are pretty chilling. Regulations require extensive preparation and analysis of potential hazards with signoffs by qualified engineers at each step. Part of the analysis is a detailed drawing of the project's piping and process flows. BP's were incomplete, which prompted a member of the BP team to alert BP officials to the risk that they could be assumed to be complete, leading to a complete failure of the system. According to the Truthout article, 85 percent of the drawings did not receive engineer approval.

Eighty-five percent. Stunning. And there's more.

Even worse, 95 percent of Atlantis' subsea welding records did not receive final approval, calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30 times worse than the one that occurred after the explosion on Deepwater Horizon last week.

The rest of the story is at Truthout. Go read it. It's chilling all on its own, but when read in the larger context of the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch disaster, Goldman Sachs revelations, Wall Street meltdowns and SEC shenanigans, the abject failure of conservative "small government, no regulation" philosophy is truly on parade for everyone to see.

Late-night editorial comment:

The Masseys, Halliburtons, BPs, and Wall Streeters do it because they expect to do it and get away with it. They do it because for 30 years we've listened to the drumbeat of a cadence: Profits over all. As the cadence quickened, the media joined the parade, morphing from objective observer to drum major. The beat grew louder. With each decibel increase, their arrogance and power grew stronger. In 30 years, the John Birch society has transformed from pariah to mainstream. How far will we let them go before we get out in the streets and "take our country back"?

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Three weeks ago, CBS 60 Minutes revealed Iran's continued success in acquiring sensitive, weapons-related U.S. technologies despite the American regime of sanctions. Now, the New York Times has documented a long list of multinational American companies receiving billions in federal contracts while they were doing business with Tehran.

If that seems like an ironic turn of events for right-wingers taking a hard line towards Iran, it should. After all, Mitt Romney's brief divestment crusade backfired when it turned out his old company was doing deals with the mullahs. And Halliburton CEO turned Vice President Dick Cheney was opposed to the Iran sanctions before he was for them.

Even as the Obama administration is seeking tougher UN sanctions to press Tehran into curbing its nuclear program, "of the 74 companies The Times identified as doing business with both the United States government and Iran, 49 continue to do business there with no announced plans to leave."

The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington's efforts to discourage investment there, records show.

That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves.

Among the U.S. contractors also profiting from Iran was Halliburton, which pocketed $27.1 billion from American taxpayers between 2000 and 2009:

Halliburton, former Vice President Cheney's old company, provided oil and gas drilling services to Iran through foreign subsidies. After a political furor erupted over the work, the company announced it would do no new business in Iran, and it exited the country altogether in 2007. While still operating in Iran, Halliburton won huge contacts from the federal government, including a no-bid contract to restore Iraq's oil sector, as did its subsidiary at the time, Kellogg Brown & Root.

As Perrspectives detailed three years ago, Halliburton had side-stepped the U.S. sanctions regime in place against Iran since the 1990's by using a Cayman Islands subsidiary. And what should come as a surprise to no one, CEO Dick Cheney opposed those very sanctions until, of course, he became George W. Bush's Vice President.

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I know I'm going to miss the Green Zone. Ah, good times! Just think back to when Paul Bremer and the rest of the hapless Republican incompetents first attempted to impose their neocon and libertarian fantasies onto Iraq's economic and social system:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 -- The walls of the majestic Republican Palace in Baghdad's Green Zone have been stripped bare. The vaults that secured American cash and classified documents are gone, and the cement blast walls that protected the front entrance were taken down this week. The U.S. military dining facility inside what was once the American Embassy served its last meal New Year's Eve.

"This is the end of the world as we know it," said Sgt. 1st Class Patrick McDonald, 47, who co-authored a guide to historic sites in the Green Zone. "It's not like everyone is shredding documents and fleeing Saigon. But we are stepping away from a building."

Saddam Hussein had the palace compound's main building decorated with giant busts of himself to demonstrate his hold over Iraq. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the palace came to symbolize the American role in the country, first as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority and later the U.S. Embassy. American civilians and troops held "salsa night" dances around the pool behind the palace before retiring to trailers sheathed in sandbags.

When the clock struck midnight on Wednesday, the U.S. returned the palace to the Iraqi government and relinquished formal control over the Green Zone, a heavily fortified six-square-mile enclave on the Tigris River where key U.S. and Iraqi bureaucracies are situated.

The handover is a sign of the shrinking footprint and influence of the United States in a country where it has lost thousands of lives and spent billions of dollars. For many Iraqis, the handover represents a significant step forward in their gradual reassertion of dominion over their own affairs.

"On January 1, we are going to control this," Adnan Karim, 22, an Iraqi soldier manning a checkpoint at one of the entrances to the Green Zone, said, beaming. "The U.S. will be here just as observers. It's a matter of pride."

As a rule, you’d think that military officials who question dubious contracts and protect the interests of taxpayers would be rewarded. Not in this administration.

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

Smith wasn’t, but his successors were. Army officials not only quickly removed Smith from his position, they also went outside the Army to consider KBR’s claims and then approved the payments with which Smith was uncomfortable.

Army officials told the NYT that they did reverse Smith’s decision, but they felt it was necessary to provide basic services to U.S. troops. “You have to understand the circumstances at the time,” Jeffrey Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command, said. “We could not let operational support suffer because of some other things.”

So, the only way to provide services to the troops was to approve $1 billion in payments for a Halliburton subsidiary that the company couldn’t substantiate?

VetVoice:

The Pentagon has provided $30 billion in contracts to KBR during the Iraq War. Apparently that's just the Basic Troop Support Package, however, because it's not enough money to keep the contractor from electrocuting a dozen troops in showers and elsewhere throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. [..]

The New York Times piece goes on to explain:

The Army has provided little detailed information about the electrocutions, other than to say late Friday that 10 soldiers had been electrocuted in Iraq. A House committee has also reported that two marines died similarly.

One former KBR electrician was quite frank about what's going on:

And Mr. Bliss, who saw a soldier standing next to him in Qalat, Afghanistan, receive a severe shock from an electrical box that was not supposed to be charged, said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues. They were "not giving the Army what it needed," he said, "and not giving the soldiers what they deserved."

The Nation:

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. "Right then my whole life was turned upside down," she says. [..NSFW description of Smith's rape]

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says.

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. "It's very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious."

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You really can't make this crap up.

CNN:

A U.S. House committee chairman has begun an investigation into the electrocutions of at least 12 service members in Iraq, including that of a Pittsburgh soldier killed in January by a jolt of electricity while showering.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday he has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to hand over documents relating to the management of electrical systems at facilities in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, died January 2 of cardiac arrest after being electrocuted while showering at his barracks in Baghdad.

If that isn't the very definition of troop-hating criminal negligence, I don't know what is. Who here thinks anyone will pay a price for this? Other than Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, this is...

(h/t Nathan)

Photo and more via ABC:

A mother of five who says she was sexually harassed and assaulted while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq is headed for a secretive arbitration process rather than being able to present her case in open court.

Barker's attorneys had argued that Halliburton/KBR had created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at their camps and that sort of condition is not the type of dispute that she could have expected to be within the scope of an arbitration provision.

District Judge Gray Miller, however, wrote in his order that "whether it is wise to send this type of claim to arbitration is not a question for this court to decide." Read on...

BushWorld justice at work, folks. Jamie Leigh Jones, who claims to have been gang raped by KBR employees, then held in a cargo container against her will, is still fighting for her day in court. She has testified before the House Judiciary Committee about her experiences and has started a website for other people who have been the victim of crimes while working for contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nicole predicted that O'Reilly would come after NBC after the Bill O'Reilly Puppet Theater earlier this week. On Thursday, O'Reilly went one better and upped his long-standing obsession with NBC to their parent company, General Electric, by ranting about a former NBC correspondent's allegations that G.E. has ties to the bin Laden family and is doing business with Iran (I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if the allegations are or were true. So what's that say about the Bush family, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney or Haliburton? Or for that matter, what about Billo's boss Rupert Murdoch's doing business in Cuba among a ton of other questionable business practices? Glass houses much, Billo?).

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When GE CEO/Chairman Jeffrey Immelt did not respond to his show's questions regarding the matter, Billo got his falafel in a bunch and did the same thing he has done so many times before and sent his goons out to ambush him. This time, they caught their victim while he was seated at a table having dinner and the minions (apparently taking lessons in bully journalism from Billo) have to push and shove their way in past the restaurant staff so they can poke the mic and camera in his face.

Immelt's in a totally different league than your average run-of-the-mill Billo ambush victim. Methinks the Big Giant Head just might have bitten off a bit more than he can chew with this stunt. * Note to Immelt - until you launch a hostile takeover bid to acquire News Corp so you can have your revenge, you might want to learn the three magic words that are guaranteed to keep Billo's stalker Mini-Mes at bay and their footage off of the TV next time.