As far as your pro-corporate talking points, you can take those back to the right wing website you got them from. We've all watched the Bush cronies rape and pillage for 7 years. We've seen the truth of how morally bankrupt the corporate mindset is. Nobody believes the right wing corporate talking points any more.
We also know if a corporate CEO cares about anything other than maximizing quarterly profits, they will face lawsuits from pissed off investors and be immediately removed from those jobs.
Genetic Engineering are potentially MORE dangerous than nuclear accidents. One genetic engineering screw-up can permanently wipe out a species. One screw up fiddling with rice DNA and rice could be a memory.
marvin "...They want to improve the world..."
Oh Bullshit. A Corporate CEO gets caught actually giving a shit about anything other than next quarter's profit numbers and they are fired on the spot. Nothing matters but profit, profit, and profit.
Human beings screw a lot of things up. The only guarantee that can be made in science is that human being will screw thing up.
Nuclear power was such an unsafe technology, one human screw-up caused what we now call a "Chernobyl-sized" disaster.
One human mistake in genetic engineering could do something like.... maybe make wheat store the element arsenic in it's seeds. That's a screw-up most of humanity would not survive.
Oh, and please don't you dare EVEN suggest one single scientific study done during the Dubya White House counts. Mr. Dubya "I think we'll doctor the NOAA studies to hide global warming" lost his science card. Every bit of science done during Dubya White House gets re-done from square one.
Nuclear power was a fairly new technology. I remember lots of nuclear power advocates saying stuff just like your claims up there this article is a smear job, GM food is safe and organic isn't healthier.
Then Chernobyl happened.
Those nuclear power advocates suddenly vanished about a millisecond after the true nature of Chernobyl disaster really was.
GM crops are new science. Organic food is new as well. There hasn't been time for the science to get done determining whether GM crops are dangerous.
The fact that the jury is still out on the safety of GM crops does not mean GM crops are safe. The fact that the jury is still out on health benefits of organic food doesn't mean is isn't more healthy. It means the jury is still out and the answer isn't available yet.
Monsanto has enough money to keep enough lawyers on retainer to basically sue anybody over anything over and over again. If they lose, who cares. They judge shop enough, and they might hit one of Bush's far right extremist judicial appointment and win one.
It most certainly is true that farmer have always paid once for crop seed.
According to Monsanto.com, Monsanto has only been around since 1901.
Now... how long has cultivated agriculture been around?
"...archaeobotanists/paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. There is earlier evidence for use of wild cereals: anthropological and archaeological evidence from sites across Southwest Asia and North Africa indicate use of wild grain (e.g., from the ca. 20,000 BC site of Ohalo II in Israel, many Natufian sites in the Levant and from sites along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC). There is even evidence of planned cultivation and trait selection: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication. It isn't until after 9,500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale...."
Funny... not one bit of evidence anywhere Monsanto or any other agribusiness corporation was getting a single cent from farmers for 10-20,000 years of human history.
It most certainly is true that farmer have ALWAYS paid once for crop seed.
Also... Monsanto's claims on greater yields are not true.
"Monsanto claims that yield on its Bollgard Bt cotton will be up by 30 to 40 percent on conventional hybrids, and that pesticide use will be 70 percent down because Bollgard kills 90 percent of bollworms....Agricultural scientists Dr Abdul Qayum and Kiran Sakkhari conducted the first independent study on Bt cotton and released their report Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh: A three year assessment in 2005. The study involved a season-long investigation in 87 villages of the major cotton growing districts - Warangal, Nalgonda, Adilabad and Kurnool. It found against Bt cotton on all counts and was vital in getting the hybrids involved banned in AP:
* It failed miserably for small farmers in terms of yield; non-Bt cotton surpassed Bt by nearly 30 percent and at 10 percent less expense
* It did not significantly reduce pesticide use; over the three years, Bt farmers used Rs2 571 worth of pesticide on average while the non-Bt farmers used Rs2 766 worth of pesticide
* It did not bring profit to farmers; over the three years, the non-Bt farmer earned on average 60 percent more than the Bt farmer
* It did not reduce the cost of cultivation; on average, the Bt farmer had to pay 12 percent more than the non-Bt farmer
* It did not result in a healthier environment; researchers found a special kind of root rot spread by Bollgard cotton infecting the soil, so that other crops would not grow...."
Yes, the people that designed the crops should only get a one time payment. That is all that it is reasonable for any party to profit off the sale of crop seeds.
Society determines what is reasonable for a party to profit off, and what is not reasonable. For example, society determined it should be illegal for people to "negotiate" additional profit into the price of ice when the power goes out for an extended period of time.
Farmers have always paid once for crop seed. That's the way the transaction worked since the beginning of time. Monsanto and other agribusiness giants are trying to change the terms of the business. Well... sorry. We're happy with the terms of business exactly as it was for thousands of years. If Monsanto isn't happy with the way the business of selling seeds was done for thousands of years, Monsanto needs to find another business. We're more than capable of funding U. S. Government research on crops at Universities, etc that has no patent issues that will be available to all.
Do you see any U.S. Army corporate board meetings? U. S. Navy Stockholder meetings? Obviously not.
The building of the first nuclear weapons most certainly was smooth sailing. Did the 1st one work? Yep. The 2nd? Yep. The 3rd? Yep. The science / engineering world doesn't get any smoother than that.
The radiation effects experiment was a smashing success by the terms of how the experiment were defined and carried out. The military wanted to find out what would happen to people that got exposed to a lot of radiation. They military exposed a lot of people to radiation. Then the military tracked the effects.
You didn't see anyone in the scientific community throwing out results of the experiments, did you? Nope. Lots of government scientists analyzed the data collected on those experiments on human radiation exposure for decades to come.
Bernie Sanders was supposedly further left than whole damn Green Party combined, but Bernie Sanders has rolled over for the neo-cons just like the all the Democrats.
Not one Bernie Sanders filibuster since he was elected to the Senate. Not to stop torture. Not to stop the telecom immunity bill. Nothin'.
Right now, the primary obstacle to building a strong progressive 3rd party is Ralph Nader. There's going to be no building of 3rd parties as long as they remain focused only on Presidential candidates and campaigns. There will be no strong 3rd party movement without a heck of a lot of hard work building a real grassroots party structure down at the local and state levels, and getting new methods of voting like instant runoff voting in place.
Nader disappears most of the time when it's time to do the hard work of party building, and then parachutes in again when the cameras arrive.
Standard Nader stuff, though. Nader has a decades long history of letting others bust their ass on projects for years/decades, then Nader arrives just at the moment that the work begins to produce results, and then kick the other activists that did the work out of the way of his camera time.
Nader also has a long history of treating people who work for him like crud. Nader has a bad rep around DC because of all the lower level people he's treated like crud through the years.
Green Party isn't going anywhere until they free themselves of Nader.
The only thing separating Rupert Murdoch from pretty much duplicating every bit of damage William Randolph Hearst caused is Murdoch paving 1/3 of a coastal California county and building "La Cuesta Inquisición" (a.k.a. Murdoch Castle).
Then Jim Baker went to court for the Bushes, the vote counting stopped, and the Supreme Ct. handed the White House to the Bushes. Stealing Linux will be nothing compared to that.
"The Big Guys Work For The Carlyle Group What exactly does it do?
To find out, we peeked down the rabbit hole.
FORTUNE Monday, March 18, 2002
The Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C., buyout firm, is one of the nation's largest defense contractors. It has billions of dollars at its disposal and employs a few important people. Maybe you've heard of them: former Secretary of State Jim Baker, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, and former White House budget director Dick Darman. Wait, we're just getting warmed up. William Kennard, who recently headed the FCC, and Arthur Levitt, who just left the SEC, also work for Carlyle. As do former British Prime Minister John Major and former Philippines President Fidel Ramos. Let's see, are we forgetting anyone? Oh, right, former President George Herbert Walker Bush is on the payroll too..."
Google "class action comcast." There's 260,000 hits. Everyone and their brother is filing class action suits against comcast. Bound to be one you can add your name to.
These "cyber warriors" will spend the vast majority of their time hacking into the computers and tapping the phones of what is now 700,000 US citizens on the FBI watch list mostly because they are active in Democratic Party or Green Party politics.
Must defend America from the threat posed by senior citizen Quaker non-violence activists, right?
The guy that started off his posts on this thread like this...
Ritchie Boy: "...it's the Democrats who want to be taken care of by their mommy..."...is now whining about the "tone" his own crap attitude got back in response.
You talk like you did to other people, expect to be treated like a child.
Ritchie Boy is also now whining that he doesn't know the subject matter so he can't be responsible for not responding on-point. If Ritchie Boy doesn't know the subject matter, why is Ritchie Boy even responding to my original post in the first place?
Basically Ritchie Boy is a clueless right winger from someplace like freerepublic.com who is completely out of his depth here. He saw "GOP" in a post and dived in way over his head anyway. Then Ritchie Boy ran out of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly talking points he could cut and paste on this thread. That left Ritchie Boy with absolutely nothing to say other than personal insults, but incapable of shutting up because he's one of those "must-get-the-last-word-in right wing freaks" that stink up websites like freerepublic and littlegreenfootballs.
When you talk nuclear reactors, you've stepped into the realm of one of the most corrupt of all the Bush cronies, but yes the neo-cons as a whole are really are both this corrupt and this incompetent. For example, Paul Wolfowitz... the guy who was on camera on news outlets 24/7 before the war pushing the lie the Iraq War and Iraq reconstruction would pay for itself with Iraq oil proceeds, and was chased out the position of Pres. of the World Bank by all of Europe for corruption was just given another government job by Dubya last month.
"Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues..."
US Government Contractors low-balling (low-balled, low-balling - To underestimate or understate (a cost) deliberately) bids is standard operating procedure with US Government Contractors, and the worst of them lined up to donate campaign money to Dubya and his neo-con cronies. Bechtel is consistently one of the worst of the worst. Bechtel has been getting singled out for corrupt practices since the Truman Commission in WW2.
"Veteran observers of the klepto-plutocracy that has, lazar-like, long encrusted the American body politic were not surprised to see the hoary name of the Bechtel Group bobbing up in the swill of sweetheart deals now being doled out by the Corrupter-in-Chief for the "reconstruction" of his new fiefdom in Iraq. Decades before its comrade in cronyism, the Carlyle Group, made its meteoric, Bush-assisted ascent to global prominence, Bechtel had already perfected the dark art of milking intimate government connections for fat, risk-free contracts.
Last week, while the notorious coward George W. Bush --who walked away from his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War, a criminal act known as "desertion" when committed by lesser mortals --was basking in the man-musk of a shipload of sailors, reciting his usual lies about al Qaeda's "alliance" with Saddam Hussein, and weasel-wording his "victory" declaration to avoid taking full legal responsibility for the consequences of the war of aggression he had unleashed, Bechtel was quietly pocketing a secret, closed-bid, open-ended Iraq contract that could give them almost $700 million in taxpayer money before the 2004 election --with the alluring prospect of untold billions to follow, Mother Jones reports.
What's more, as the New Yorker reports, this public largess will also fill the coffers of a key Bechtel partner in Saudi Arabia --a well-connected global conglomerate that has also been a long-time financial partner of both George Bush I and George Bush II: the Bin Laden Group.
Bechtel, which has served Saudi royalty for more than 60 years, bristles with heavyweight kleptoplute connections. During the 1980s, current Bush warlord Don Rumsfeld acted as a paid shill for a Bechtel pipeline project in the Middle East, operating with the blessing of the Reagan-Bush administration's secretary of state, George Schultz --Bechtel's former president (and now "senior counsel" to the company). Rummy conducted a passionate two-year courtship of a certain Saddam Hussein, plying him with trinkets, blandishments and sweetmeats to win his lordly favor for a Bechtel-built line from Iraq to Jordan, according to national security archives obtained by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Rumsfeld's strenuous attempt to lay pipe with Saddam happened to coincide with the latter's most extensive use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war --gassing carried out with the exemplary assistance of U.S. military intelligence and technology provided by the Reagan-Bush administration and its "special envoy" to B
The cost of the War in Iraq is not $275 million a day we actually pay for. It's $275 million we are borrowing and going into debt for that isn't being figured into any actual year by year Federal Budget.
If given the choice though, I'd rather that money was spent on schools, bridges in Minnesota, health care for kids, infrastructure to start making biodiesel from algae, etc. than either the War in Iraq or nuclear reactor decommissioning costs.
Slashdot Mirror
"We have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen."
Wrong. It's clear I know more about genetic engineering than you do.
It's SCIENTISTS who have taken the lead in trying to slow down the introduction of GM foods until proper safety protocols are in place.
Here's a link to a Union of Concerned Scientists website with the basics of the risks of genetic engineering...
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_environment/genetic_engineering/risks-of-genetic-engineering.html
As far as your pro-corporate talking points, you can take those back to the right wing website you got them from. We've all watched the Bush cronies rape and pillage for 7 years. We've seen the truth of how morally bankrupt the corporate mindset is. Nobody believes the right wing corporate talking points any more.
We also know if a corporate CEO cares about anything other than maximizing quarterly profits, they will face lawsuits from pissed off investors and be immediately removed from those jobs.
Genetic Engineering are potentially MORE dangerous than nuclear accidents. One genetic engineering screw-up can permanently wipe out a species. One screw up fiddling with rice DNA and rice could be a memory.
marvin "...They want to improve the world..."
Oh Bullshit. A Corporate CEO gets caught actually giving a shit about anything other than next quarter's profit numbers and they are fired on the spot. Nothing matters but profit, profit, and profit.
One human mistake caused the Bhopal tragedy, too.
Human beings screw a lot of things up. The only guarantee that can be made in science is that human being will screw thing up.
Nuclear power was such an unsafe technology, one human screw-up caused what we now call a "Chernobyl-sized" disaster.
One human mistake in genetic engineering could do something like.... maybe make wheat store the element arsenic in it's seeds. That's a screw-up most of humanity would not survive.
Oh, and please don't you dare EVEN suggest one single scientific study done during the Dubya White House counts. Mr. Dubya "I think we'll doctor the NOAA studies to hide global warming" lost his science card. Every bit of science done during Dubya White House gets re-done from square one.
Nuclear power was a fairly new technology. I remember lots of nuclear power advocates saying stuff just like your claims up there this article is a smear job, GM food is safe and organic isn't healthier.
Then Chernobyl happened.
Those nuclear power advocates suddenly vanished about a millisecond after the true nature of Chernobyl disaster really was.
GM crops are new science. Organic food is new as well. There hasn't been time for the science to get done determining whether GM crops are dangerous.
The fact that the jury is still out on the safety of GM crops does not mean GM crops are safe. The fact that the jury is still out on health benefits of organic food doesn't mean is isn't more healthy. It means the jury is still out and the answer isn't available yet.
Monsanto has enough money to keep enough lawyers on retainer to basically sue anybody over anything over and over again. If they lose, who cares. They judge shop enough, and they might hit one of Bush's far right extremist judicial appointment and win one.
It most certainly is true that farmer have always paid once for crop seed.
According to Monsanto.com, Monsanto has only been around since 1901.
Now... how long has cultivated agriculture been around?
"...archaeobotanists/paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. There is earlier evidence for use of wild cereals: anthropological and archaeological evidence from sites across Southwest Asia and North Africa indicate use of wild grain (e.g., from the ca. 20,000 BC site of Ohalo II in Israel, many Natufian sites in the Levant and from sites along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC). There is even evidence of planned cultivation and trait selection: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication. It isn't until after 9,500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture
Funny... not one bit of evidence anywhere Monsanto or any other agribusiness corporation was getting a single cent from farmers for 10-20,000 years of human history.
It most certainly is true that farmer have ALWAYS paid once for crop seed.
Also... Monsanto's claims on greater yields are not true.
"Monsanto claims that yield on its Bollgard Bt cotton will be up by 30 to 40 percent on conventional hybrids, and that pesticide use will be 70 percent down because Bollgard kills 90 percent of bollworms....Agricultural scientists Dr Abdul Qayum and Kiran Sakkhari conducted the first independent study on Bt cotton and released their report Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh: A three year assessment in 2005. The study involved a season-long investigation in 87 villages of the major cotton growing districts - Warangal, Nalgonda, Adilabad and Kurnool. It found against Bt cotton on all counts and was vital in getting the hybrids involved banned in AP:
* It failed miserably for small farmers in terms of yield; non-Bt cotton surpassed Bt by nearly 30 percent and at 10 percent less expense
* It did not significantly reduce pesticide use; over the three years, Bt farmers used Rs2 571 worth of pesticide on average while the non-Bt farmers used Rs2 766 worth of pesticide
* It did not bring profit to farmers; over the three years, the non-Bt farmer earned on average 60 percent more than the Bt farmer
* It did not reduce the cost of cultivation; on average, the Bt farmer had to pay 12 percent more than the non-Bt farmer
* It did not result in a healthier environment; researchers found a special kind of root rot spread by Bollgard cotton infecting the soil, so that other crops would not grow...."
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/IndianCottonFarmersBetrayed.php
Yes, the people that designed the crops should only get a one time payment. That is all that it is reasonable for any party to profit off the sale of crop seeds.
Society determines what is reasonable for a party to profit off, and what is not reasonable. For example, society determined it should be illegal for people to "negotiate" additional profit into the price of ice when the power goes out for an extended period of time.
Farmers have always paid once for crop seed. That's the way the transaction worked since the beginning of time. Monsanto and other agribusiness giants are trying to change the terms of the business. Well... sorry. We're happy with the terms of business exactly as it was for thousands of years. If Monsanto isn't happy with the way the business of selling seeds was done for thousands of years, Monsanto needs to find another business. We're more than capable of funding U. S. Government research on crops at Universities, etc that has no patent issues that will be available to all.
Do you see any U.S. Army corporate board meetings? U. S. Navy Stockholder meetings? Obviously not.
The building of the first nuclear weapons most certainly was smooth sailing. Did the 1st one work? Yep. The 2nd? Yep. The 3rd? Yep. The science / engineering world doesn't get any smoother than that.
The radiation effects experiment was a smashing success by the terms of how the experiment were defined and carried out. The military wanted to find out what would happen to people that got exposed to a lot of radiation. They military exposed a lot of people to radiation. Then the military tracked the effects.
You didn't see anyone in the scientific community throwing out results of the experiments, did you? Nope. Lots of government scientists analyzed the data collected on those experiments on human radiation exposure for decades to come.
US Government Nuclear Weapons have worked exactly as advertised every time they have been used.
That's one.
The Invasion of Normandy actually went off a little better than expected.
That's two.
I guess that means you get to never bring up that poor attempt at debunking again.
The experience of violent death, and the experience of eating kimchi is kinda similar, after all.
Bernie Sanders was supposedly further left than whole damn Green Party combined, but Bernie Sanders has rolled over for the neo-cons just like the all the Democrats.
Not one Bernie Sanders filibuster since he was elected to the Senate. Not to stop torture. Not to stop the telecom immunity bill. Nothin'.
Right now, the primary obstacle to building a strong progressive 3rd party is Ralph Nader. There's going to be no building of 3rd parties as long as they remain focused only on Presidential candidates and campaigns. There will be no strong 3rd party movement without a heck of a lot of hard work building a real grassroots party structure down at the local and state levels, and getting new methods of voting like instant runoff voting in place.
Nader disappears most of the time when it's time to do the hard work of party building, and then parachutes in again when the cameras arrive.
Standard Nader stuff, though. Nader has a decades long history of letting others bust their ass on projects for years/decades, then Nader arrives just at the moment that the work begins to produce results, and then kick the other activists that did the work out of the way of his camera time.
Nader also has a long history of treating people who work for him like crud. Nader has a bad rep around DC because of all the lower level people he's treated like crud through the years.
Green Party isn't going anywhere until they free themselves of Nader.
"...introducing my Dissertation topic... "The Effects of the U MICH. HERCULES laser system upon tubas and grass athletic surfaces.""
The only thing separating Rupert Murdoch from pretty much duplicating every bit of damage William Randolph Hearst caused is Murdoch paving 1/3 of a coastal California county and building "La Cuesta Inquisición" (a.k.a. Murdoch Castle).
Then Jim Baker went to court for the Bushes, the vote counting stopped, and the Supreme Ct. handed the White House to the Bushes. Stealing Linux will be nothing compared to that.
Roberts. Alito. Scalia. Thomas. Kennedy.
"The Big Guys Work For The Carlyle Group
What exactly does it do?
To find out, we peeked down the rabbit hole.
FORTUNE Monday, March 18, 2002
The Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C., buyout firm, is one of the nation's largest defense contractors. It has billions of dollars at its disposal and employs a few important people. Maybe you've heard of them: former Secretary of State Jim Baker, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, and former White House budget director Dick Darman. Wait, we're just getting warmed up. William Kennard, who recently headed the FCC, and Arthur Levitt, who just left the SEC, also work for Carlyle. As do former British Prime Minister John Major and former Philippines President Fidel Ramos. Let's see, are we forgetting anyone? Oh, right, former President George Herbert Walker Bush is on the payroll too..."
http://www.carlylegroup.net/thebigguys.htm
So now the Bushes are going to send Jim Baker to court to steal Linux.
Google "class action comcast." There's 260,000 hits. Everyone and their brother is filing class action suits against comcast. Bound to be one you can add your name to.
These "cyber warriors" will spend the vast majority of their time hacking into the computers and tapping the phones of what is now 700,000 US citizens on the FBI watch list mostly because they are active in Democratic Party or Green Party politics.
Must defend America from the threat posed by senior citizen Quaker non-violence activists, right?
We don't need no corporate media. We've got the best political organizing tools in the history of mankind... the internet and cell phones.
The only method of protest that works is one that nails the powers that be where they can be hurt. The wallet.
Work stoppages work. Wide scale boycotts work.
Why. Because the only thing these greedy right wingers notice is someone threatening their money.
The guy that started off his posts on this thread like this...
...is now whining about the "tone" his own crap attitude got back in response.
Ritchie Boy: "...it's the Democrats who want to be taken care of by their mommy..."
You talk like you did to other people, expect to be treated like a child.
Ritchie Boy is also now whining that he doesn't know the subject matter so he can't be responsible for not responding on-point. If Ritchie Boy doesn't know the subject matter, why is Ritchie Boy even responding to my original post in the first place?
Basically Ritchie Boy is a clueless right winger from someplace like freerepublic.com who is completely out of his depth here. He saw "GOP" in a post and dived in way over his head anyway. Then Ritchie Boy ran out of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly talking points he could cut and paste on this thread. That left Ritchie Boy with absolutely nothing to say other than personal insults, but incapable of shutting up because he's one of those "must-get-the-last-word-in right wing freaks" that stink up websites like freerepublic and littlegreenfootballs.
When you talk nuclear reactors, you've stepped into the realm of one of the most corrupt of all the Bush cronies, but yes the neo-cons as a whole are really are both this corrupt and this incompetent. For example, Paul Wolfowitz... the guy who was on camera on news outlets 24/7 before the war pushing the lie the Iraq War and Iraq reconstruction would pay for itself with Iraq oil proceeds, and was chased out the position of Pres. of the World Bank by all of Europe for corruption was just given another government job by Dubya last month.
"Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues..."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/01/25/wolfowitz_appointed_chairman_of_arms_control_advisory_panel/
US Government Contractors low-balling (low-balled, low-balling - To underestimate or understate (a cost) deliberately) bids is standard operating procedure with US Government Contractors, and the worst of them lined up to donate campaign money to Dubya and his neo-con cronies. Bechtel is consistently one of the worst of the worst. Bechtel has been getting singled out for corrupt practices since the Truman Commission in WW2.
"Veteran observers of the klepto-plutocracy that has, lazar-like, long encrusted the American body politic were not surprised to see the hoary name of the Bechtel Group bobbing up in the swill of sweetheart deals now being doled out by the Corrupter-in-Chief for the "reconstruction" of his new fiefdom in Iraq. Decades before its comrade in cronyism, the Carlyle Group, made its meteoric, Bush-assisted ascent to global prominence, Bechtel had already perfected the dark art of milking intimate government connections for fat, risk-free contracts.
Last week, while the notorious coward George W. Bush --who walked away from his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War, a criminal act known as "desertion" when committed by lesser mortals --was basking in the man-musk of a shipload of sailors, reciting his usual lies about al Qaeda's "alliance" with Saddam Hussein, and weasel-wording his "victory" declaration to avoid taking full legal responsibility for the consequences of the war of aggression he had unleashed, Bechtel was quietly pocketing a secret, closed-bid, open-ended Iraq contract that could give them almost $700 million in taxpayer money before the 2004 election --with the alluring prospect of untold billions to follow, Mother Jones reports.
What's more, as the New Yorker reports, this public largess will also fill the coffers of a key Bechtel partner in Saudi Arabia --a well-connected global conglomerate that has also been a long-time financial partner of both George Bush I and George Bush II: the Bin Laden Group.
Bechtel, which has served Saudi royalty for more than 60 years, bristles with heavyweight kleptoplute connections. During the 1980s, current Bush warlord Don Rumsfeld acted as a paid shill for a Bechtel pipeline project in the Middle East, operating with the blessing of the Reagan-Bush administration's secretary of state, George Schultz --Bechtel's former president (and now "senior counsel" to the company). Rummy conducted a passionate two-year courtship of a certain Saddam Hussein, plying him with trinkets, blandishments and sweetmeats to win his lordly favor for a Bechtel-built line from Iraq to Jordan, according to national security archives obtained by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Rumsfeld's strenuous attempt to lay pipe with Saddam happened to coincide with the latter's most extensive use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war --gassing carried out with the exemplary assistance of U.S. military intelligence and technology provided by the Reagan-Bush administration and its "special envoy" to B
The cost of the War in Iraq is not $275 million a day we actually pay for. It's $275 million we are borrowing and going into debt for that isn't being figured into any actual year by year Federal Budget.
If given the choice though, I'd rather that money was spent on schools, bridges in Minnesota, health care for kids, infrastructure to start making biodiesel from algae, etc. than either the War in Iraq or nuclear reactor decommissioning costs.