Contractors Who Allegedly Scammed Government Announce Huge Profits

Contractors Who Allegedly Scammed Government Announce Huge Profits

www.huffingtonpost.com

You Can Be a Patriot Or a Profiteer... But You Can't Be Both

This week, the three military contractors that do the most business with the Pentagon announced their quarterly profits for 2012. Their profits continue to grow while they push Washington, D.C. to protect their budgets at the expense of the rest of us.

Here’s the breakdown so far for this year:

Lockheed Martin: $668 million
Northrop Grumman: $506 million
Boeing: $923 million

(visit the link for the full news article)



Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Would you like more proof the Iraq war is a scam?
War Profiteers - Names & Evidence
More Evidence of Corporate War Profiteering

The quarterly returns are in, and several of our biggest military contractors at the epicenter of the Military-Industrial-Complex have posted profits of nearly one-quarter billion to nearly one billion dollars each. Not bad for 3 months of work.

You might think, "that's great, profitable companies are good for the economy," but here is the caveat - several of these companies stand in violation of the False Claims Act, designed to curb "war profiteers" from cheating the military and us, the citizens, from being taken to the cleaners by fraud and abuse by military contractors.

The article references a few highly-relevant quotes of previous presidents;

“I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 22, 1940.

“Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering the dust.”

-- President Abraham Lincoln.

Outrage at war profiteering during this period (the civil war) led to the passage of “Lincoln’s Law,” officially known as the False Claims Act. The False Claims Act is the very same law that two of the companies listed above, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, allegedly violated through price-fixing and double-billing the taxpayer, leading to their having to pay roughly $20 million in the first quarter of 2012 to settle suits brought by the U.S. government.

These companies know the penalties for getting caught are chump change, and push the waste, fraud, and abuse to the point they do get caught, since that guarantees they left no money on the table, and it's cheaper to pay a paltry fine and buy off Congress with millions in lobbying.

Report: $60B waste in Afghanistan, Iraq

And yet, despite this historical lack of patience for war profiteering, and despite the current record showing gross misconduct and waste, the U.S. government keeps shoveling taxpayer money at these huge corporations. Could it be that the more than $5 million in campaign donations and $33 million in lobbying dollars so far this election cycle from the military contractors keep Congress intentionally ignorant of the problem?

“There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]... ;that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism.”

-- President George Washington


PS: this is nothing new, posts on this site have consistently noted the level of fraud and scamming by some of these same contractors in Iraq (Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc.), even when the lead investigator (Stuart W. Bowen, Jr.) into this fraud was FIRED and sent packing back in 2006 for coming too close to revealing the truth in this.

Would you like more proof the Iraq war is a scam? (ATS)

www.huffingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)