----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Denton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005 4:18 PM Subject: Re: Bitter Fruit
On 11/30/05, Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >The corruption in Iraq reconstruction and security is currently > >estimated at ten times that of the oil-for-food scandal. > > Well, let's see. All of the oil sales were controlled by Hussein and that > totaled about 2 million barrels/day. In 2001-2002, oil prices were in the > $25 range, so lets just say an even 15 billion year. The security and > reconstruction outsourcing clearly isn't 150 billion/year, so how can that > be true? Who did the estimating? >I am heading out but want to answer this quick point. Are you >claiming the total dollars that Saddam received was corruption? The >oil-for-food scandal corruption and bribery is estimated at around 4% >of that. In the sense that only those people who went along with corruption were allowed to bid. I'm not sure how much they were paid as a fraction of the total take, but allowing Hussein to control who got to buy the oil resulted in, virtually, the whole program being corrupted. If you want to talk about $ amount with the corruption, then I think you would have to find how much US government officials were paid by companies in order to get deals. If the corruption is as widespread as you say, then you should be able to find ambassadors and the like being paid 150k for "work" they didn't do. There is also, I think, a difference between taking money from a cruel dictator to influence your country's foreign affairs with respect to that dictator and taking a private sector job in your own country afterwards/before. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
