Dicking Katrina Workers
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We really need a stronger, more specific word than "Dicking" here. Even more specific than "Cheneying" because that applies in too many places and ways. This is a bit of greed Ebenezer Scrooge would have been embarassed to claim:
A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed.
Okay, we have people hiring illegals despite the fact that there are innumerable people, local residents, in desperate need of work. And this is unskilled labor we're talking about, not, oh, cardiac surgery. So perhaps these are small-time companies, themselves hard up for work, cutting corners to get back in business? Yeah right:
Tovar had 83 workers cleaning the Navy base under a broader, $12 million contract held by KBR, a firm owned by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton.
So on the one hand it is a small local company, itself not in a position to fight back real hard. They're getting dicked too. But what's the source of the Dicking? Well duh!, it's Dick! Dick's "former" company, they're careful to say. Which Just Happens to get every no-bid, "emergency/ disaster/wartime/battlefield/whateverthefuck" contract that comes down the pike. And this despite repeated proof from everyone from eyewitnesses to auditors that they behave the same everywhere. Work not done, costs doubled and tripled, work "outsourced" to subcontractors of untrackable provenance, who either don't do the job or do it and don't get paid. As in for instance this case:
An Army Corps spokesman said he wasn't aware of any problems with payments. A KBR spokeswoman wouldn't provide details about the base cleanup, referring inquiries to the Navy, which referred questions about subcontractors back to KBR.
It's a long story but go read. Might want to keep an extra dose of your blood pressure medicine to hand if you take such. And it being Sunday, you might want to meditate on what the response to this story might be by certain Saviors who are on record as becoming hot-tempered by the misbehavior of moneychangers.
