I have to admit that this week I have been both saddened as well as amused by all of the outrage about how lobbyists and corporate representatives are key players in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. It seems that people are actually surprised that an international trade agreement is in the works and the key players are not elected officials. I think back to 2007 and 2008 when the movie Zeitgeist was viral and people were actively involved in discussions on social media about a new world order and the dangers of a new North American trade agreement. Those people were labeled as conspiracy theorists, crackpots and fruitcakes by everyone from Bill Mahr to Rush Limbaugh. I remember the broadcast in which Bill Mahr actually had someone thrown out of the studio audience because they kept shouted out some 9/11 conspiracy theory. Crazy people :-) Of course then no one had heard of PRISM, ALEC, Bradley Manning, Eric Snowden or the Trans Pacific Partnership. However, in 2007 we did have stories like the following: WASHINGTON — Robert Raggio quit his $97,000-per-year government job as a financial manager for the Iraq reconstruction effort in September 2005. He said in his resignation form that he wanted to pursue other opportunities. That same day, Raggios newly formed company, Reviewer Management International (RMI), received a U.S. contract to audit $7.3 billion in Iraqi reconstruction spending, according to Army documents obtained by USA TODAY under the Freedom of Information Act. The $1.5 million contract was designed to help investigators fight fraud in Iraq. Now, Raggio is under investigation. Before he quit his government position, Raggio wrote the requirements for the federal contract at the same time he negotiated to obtain it for RMI, according to the documents. The Armys Suspension and Debarment Office suspended Raggio and his consulting firm from getting new government contracts in August amid an ongoing investigation into whether he violated conflict of interest laws. Army contracting officials began looking into the case after the governments Iraq reconstruction watchdog, Stuart Bowen, passed along an anonymous complaint his office received about Raggio, documents show. RMI was hired to create a database to track the $7.3 billion in Iraqi government money U.S. officials doled out — much of it in $100 bills shipped to the country on pallets — after the 2003 invasion. Federal auditors had uncovered a bribery scheme involving more than $8.6 million from the Development Fund for Iraq and wanted to determine if there was more corruption. But the Army failed to properly oversee Raggios contract and after nearly a year of work he delivered a database that was incomplete, unreliable and nearly unusable, according to a January report from Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The database couldnt meet one of its primary goals: allowing investigators to connect payments to the U.S. officials who made them, Bowens report said. RMI told investigators its database included more than 300,000 entries, but Bowens report described it as only a collection of records that were not audited or effectively connected to one another. usatoday30.usatoday/news/washington/2007-09-20-conflict_N.htm So if anyone is truly shocked by the problems with the Affordable Care website, the secrecy of the TPP or any of the myriad other weird political stories, they just havent been paying attention.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:49:32 +0000
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