Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Katrina Repair Contracts

Halliburton? I'm shocked! "Shocked" I tell ya..... Mycos ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Click2Houston.com - News - Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Katrina Repair Contracts: "Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Katrina Repair Contracts POSTED: 6:45 am CDT September 6, 2005 WASHINGTON -- A Halliburton Co. subsidiary that has come under fire for its reconstruction work in Iraq has begun tapping a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and Marine facilities that were battered by Hurricane Katrina. The subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc. of Arlington, Va., was awarded the competitive bid contract last July to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters. Jan Davis, a spokeswoman for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, said Sunday that KBR will receive $12 million for work at Naval Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Station Gulfport and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. It will receive $4.6 million for work at two smaller Navy facilities in New Orleans and others in the South. The company has provided similar work after major disasters in the United States and abroad for more than 15 years, including in Florida after Hurricane Andrew. But KBR has been at the center of scrutiny for receiving a five-year, no-bid contract to restore Iraqi oil fields shortly before the war began in 2003. Houston-based Halliburton has reported being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-related government work during 2"

Jose Padilla and he Death of Personal Liberty

These are the words of Scalia, perhaps the most conservative man to grace the bench of N. America. Below; his opinion when he isn't being directed by the WH to decide otherwise. "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of theExecutive." Judge Antonin Scalia Hah!! And the right has the balls to speak about "activist" judges being a left-wing phenomenon! The hypocrisy is mind-numbing. But then again, hypocrisy is the hallmark of the right-wing. They claim to be against government intrusion in personal lives. That is of course unless they don't agree with who you pray to, or what you do to get a buzz on, who you like to have sex with, etc. But for some reason, they seem to be entirely incapable of distinguishing the unfairness of this. That they should be able to use the force of the government to make people screw the "right sex", or take the right pills to make themselves feel better is perfectly acceptable, but when it comes to their lives and these same decisuions, "Get out of our lives!!" Mycos ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jose Padilla and he Death of Personal Liberty: "Jose Padilla and he Death of Personal Liberty I had to sit down when I heard the Padilla case had been settled. I literally felt sick to my stomach, like I was gasping for air. The case of Jose Padilla is quite simply the most important case in the history of the American judicial system. Hanging in the balance are all the fundamental principles of American jurisprudence including habeas corpus, due process and "the presumption of innocence". All of those basic concepts were summarily revoked by the 3 judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court. The Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration which claimed that it had the right to indefinitely imprison an American citizen without charging him with a crime. The resulting verdict confers absolute authority on the President to incarcerate American citizens without charge and without any legal means for the accused to challenge the terms of his detention. It is the end of "inalienable rights", the end of The Bill of Rights, and the end of any meaningful notion of personal liberty. Cont......

Sep 9, 2005

Think Piece: Blasphemy About New Orleans

Great piece. Well worth the time to read. Mycos ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Black Commentator - Think Piece: Blasphemy About New Orleans - Issue 149 - September 8 2005: "This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt: You don't know me. But I know you." cont.......

Need Transportation? Send soldiers. Need a doctor? Send soldiers....

Why do they always respond with force? Do they not know or care about the root cause of anything? Is the solution to every grievance the lower classes have simply one of not enough police presence for them to realize that they should either shut up "or else"? Mycos Excerpts: An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of theboulevardboulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States. At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention CeSuperdomeSuperdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

New Orleans: The Opening Salvo In The Class War

Face it people. The upper class in America, as it is represented by families such as the Bushes, Cheney's, Robertson's, the board members of The Carlyle Group, have now quit even pretending to be for the common man. The lack of response to Katrina was not mismanagement, it was a willful act of extreme neglect. Murder. There are numerous reports coming in about how different groups who attempted to do the right thing and bring aid to the people of NO, both before and after the storm, were TURNED BACK! NGO's tried to help, but were told that they could not help and were turned back. They were prohibited from doing what seems natural to you or me. But that's the thing, what is natural to real people is not what is best for the upper class in America. They rule and they are going to keep it that way. It does not matter who and how many poor people they put out of work or send off to die in war. It's all being set up to accomplish one thing and one thing only...to make money for the companies that furnish the arms that destroy, and then to fund the reconstruction efforts afterwards. To their way of thinking, to hell with the people who get killed doing it. You heard "Babs" Bush? This worked out well for the poor! Don't you get it? We're poor anyhow. The upper class really thinks that we're happy if we have an army tent or sleeping bag to curl up in. To them, our lives....our job on earth....is to work tirelessly at making America's millionaires into billionaires. And that we should be happy to do it at minimum wage! This is the fact! Look. Dick Cheney, before he was tapped for the Vice-Presidency, was the chairman of Halliburton, a company that makes it's money off the spoils of war --- literally. Whatever has been wrecked, spoiled, destroyed, burnt or battered during a military campaign is then repaired by Halliburton. So Dick Cheney takes the VP position, lies about his divestiture of his Halliburton stock, and then he and Bush immediately start a war in Iraq. Big money!! You think it just coincidence? Hey! It's only because of the Downing street memos that we now know they were planning war even before 9/11. Why? Money for Dick and friends. Remember, Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract for the reconstruction of Iraq. It been the plan all along. OBL simply provided them with an excellent means by which these men could disguise their original intent (Project For A New American Century. PNAC Look it up) Since acquiring the White House, they've been able to use America's military and financial reserves for their own to plunder. And they have been doing an extraordinarily admirable job of it, with billions and billions of dollars missing in Iraq on top of what they were awarded legally! (and I use the word "legally" in the broadest definition of the term possible). They took away your ability to investigate their criminal actions using the cover of terror attacks to pass the Patriot Act. Clearly now you know that it was not to enhance the infrastructure of America in the event of a disaster. N.O. proved that. It was to stifle dissent about what the neocons were doing to enrich themselves. Nothing more. People!! This is class warfare. The gloves are off. They have been off for quite awhile now. The media has done an excellent job of covering up for this fact, a fact that becomes blindingly obvious once you allow yourself the possibility of considering that it might be true. Please consider it. But it's time to fight back. This administration and the neocons, the robber barons & corporate pirates who have been milking the people for their very last dollar (that's what social security "reform" is really about) will send you and your kids to die in foreign countries. If your to old or frail to go there, they'll rob you and leave you to die as they have now started to do in NO. These people are killers. Protect yourself the best way you know how. Mycos

MURDER OF NEW ORLEANS

FOX has long been the leading apologists for the Bush regime, and without question the the number-one reason that Bush has not yet been impeached. One day they will be held to account for their part in the atrocities committed. But that is neither here nor there now. But what is happening now is that even the suckers over there are seeing the reality of the incompetence, the utter disregard this administration has for people of the lower classes, both black or white. They are now engaged in the murder of the population of NO and they are doing it right under your noses. What I see occurring now is an organized attempt to either displace and/or kill the poor of New Orleans. If there are any lawyers out there, you had best start planning for a massive class-action suit against the government because I am sure there exists evidence of a deliberate effort to destroy whoever and whatever is left of a city with a long history of organized resistance.

Mycos

New Orleans on a hair-trigger

Is anybody sure what kind of ammo the "authority" half of this battle is using? I want to see someone, anyone who has been shot with a different calibre weapon before I fall into line with the "re-establishing order amid chaos" meme. There was the one report from a hospital of the docs being sniped at. This was during the height of the bad press the government was getting. Sorry, but I've learned to be extremely cynical. There is no more perfect excuse to turn this around and place the blame on the "looters" than such a report. I want proof before I buy in. There will be deaths that I will now call murder , unhesitatingly. Mycos ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ New Orleans on a hair-trigger: "New Orleans on a hair-trigger 'Stop the car right now,' reporter told. `Back up, or I'll shoot' By Tim Harper WASHINGTON BUREAU 09/02/05 'Toronto Star' -- -- NEW ORLEANS - I wheeled the car around and headed back to the scene of the shooting, looking for Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk, when the officer turned, spotted me and pointed the shotgun right at the windshield. cont...... "