Yesterday, MLive posted a story on the formation of the new Grand Rapids Black Chamber of Commerce. A similar story was aired on the local ABC affilate, WZZM 13.
In both stories, the creation of a Grand Rapids Black Chamber of Commerce is presented as the need for more diversity. Both Ken Harris (CEO of the MI Black Chamber of Commerce) and Bing Goei (former GR Chamber President) both cite the importance of having a Chamber specifically for the needs of Black Business owners.
Local lawyer and former Democratic Party candidate for the 3rd Congressional District Patrick Miles Jr. was quoted on MLive as saying that Grand Rapids is an entrepreneurial city. “But we know we need to do better and more to … draw on the best from people here to create more jobs, better jobs, better living conditions.”
While this may sound well intentioned, there is no clear plan about how it will create better living conditions, especially for Black people. According to the Kids Count Michigan 2011 report, “African-American children are seven times more likely to spend half or more of childhood in poverty compared with white children.”
Addressing the disproportionate level of poverty amongst Black children would seem to be an important focus for any such effort, yet there is no indication that this is what the new Black Chamber will put energy to. The Michigan Black Chamber of Commerce website doesn’t address these kinds of issues, but they do have a 5 Pillars of Service section. Included in these pillars are – access to capital, gaining more contracts for Black owner businesses, legislative lobbying and developing best practices.
The function of any Chamber of Commerce is to look out for the economic interests of the business community. At the national and local level, this means that the Chamber of Commerce will take action against worker rights and fight for deregulation, which often leads to more environmental destruction. There is no indication that any Chamber of Commerce will create better living conditions for people, no matter what the racial makeup is of the group.
Black liberationists would argue that in order for their to be economic justice for Black people that there first needs to be reparations paid to Black people for the amount of wealth that was stolen from their labor and property during slavery and Jim Crow America.
Other Black liberationists such as the late Black scholar Manning Marable would argue that African Americans should fight against the economic system of Capitalism. Marable’s book on this topic is must reading for anyone who wants to come to terms with why Capitalism can never eliminated poverty, particularly for Black America.
Lastly, it would be worth citing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who in the last few years of his life was increasingly critical of the wealth disparity in the US and even of Capitalism.
“We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry….Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism…here must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.”
The analysis that Dr. King and Manning Marable provide us should be reason enough to not see the creation of a Grand Rapids Black Chamber of Commerce as doing anything more than perpetuating an economic system that doesn’t care about the well being of most people.
Chomsky on Western attitudes about Arabs & terrorism
Noam Chomsky has written extensively on the issue of terrorism, particularly state terrorism in book such as Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony and the Rule of Force.
Seven Stories Press has just re-released his book 9/11 (with new chapters), a book that provided important analysis to counter the post – 9/11 cacophony that the US was attacked because the rest of the world hates democracy.
In this video by the British news agency The Guardian, Chomsky talks about Arabs, terrorism and state power. Chomsky is utilized by the foreign press on a regular basis, unlike the US press, which should tell us something about how the commercial media in this country operates.
Selling Islamophobia
(This article by Wajahat Ali is re-posted from CounterPunch.)
Exploiting fear, hysteria and ignorance has been a lucrative business for the Islamophobia network in America.
After a six-month-long investigative research project, the Center for American Progress Action Fund released a 138-page report, “Fear Inc: Exposing the Islamophobia Network in America”, which for the first time reveals that more than $42m from seven foundations over the past decade have helped empower a relatively small, but interconnected group of individuals and organizations to spread anti-Muslim fear and hate in America.
I, along with co-authors Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes and Faiz Shakir, expose this network in depth, categories it, trace the money trail to the donors, name the players in the network, connect the dots between them, and uncover the genesis of several fictitious threats such as the current “anti-sharia” fear sweeping the nation, as well as the protests of neighborhood mosques as alleged “Trojan horses” and incubators of radicalization.
We’ve defined Islamophobia as the following: an exaggerated fear, hatred and hostility towards Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political and civic life.
Healthy debate, disagreement and differences of opinion are a critical part of any civil society, and it is, in fact, necessary when discussing religion, race and politics. This report, however, targets those individuals who have clearly ventured towards poisonous extremist ideology and rhetoric by exploiting fears concerning terrorism and national security, as well general ignorance of Muslims, as a profitable vehicle to advance a hateful agenda.
The Islamphobia network in America is comprised of five categories:
• The money trail: a list of seven funders who have given nearly $43m to anti-Muslim organizations and think tanks.
• The Islamophobia scholars and policy experts: five individuals and their respective organizations that act as the central nervous system responsible for manufacturing the fictitious memes and fear-mongering talking points about Muslims and Islam. For example, Frank Gaffney’s neoconservative think tank, the Centre for Security Policy, has used its millions to misdefine sharia, or Islamic religious law, as the pre-eminent totalitarian threat to America, which radical Muslims will allegedly use to supplant and replace the US constitution. No religious Muslim scholar, let alone a practicing layman, would recognize this definition of sharia, which, in reality, deals primarily with personal religious observances, including practices such as charitable giving, prayer and honoring one’s parents, with precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism.
• Grassroots organizations and the religious right: new and existing activist networks and mainstream popular religious personalities disseminate these messages to their constituents and elected officials. The organization Act! For America relies upon Frank Gaffney’s anti-sharia memes and promotes this fictitious threat through their 573 national chapters and 170,000 members worldwide. Currently, 23 states are in process of considering anti-sharia bills.
• The media enablers: the mainstreaming of this fringe, extremist rhetoric is aided by media allies in network TV (Fox News), radio (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck), online magazines (World Net Daily, Front Page Magazine) and the Islamophobia blogosphere (Jihad Watch), which give Islamophobe talking-heads an influential pulpit to broadcast their misinformation.
• The political players: finally, these talking points end up as soundbites and wedge issues for politicians and, specifically, several 2012 Republican presidential candidates, such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, who all have jumped on the manufactured, fictitious “anti-sharia” bandwagon.
This fear-mongering rhetoric negatively affects our fellow Muslim American citizens and portrays them as perpetual hostile suspects, instead of our neighbors and allies. Currently, this has reached a crescendo resulting in certain communities attempting to curtail constitutionally protected rights and freedoms.
For example, we’ve witnessed grassroots organizations protest the construction of mosques, constitutionally protected houses of worship, in Tennessee, California and Brooklyn. In February, Muslim American families with young children attending a fundraising dinner in Yorba Linda, California were jeered by protesters who called them “Terrorists!” and told them “Take your sharia and go home, you terrorist lovers.” This was not the result of a spontaneous groundswell of public bullying, but rather a well-organized and highly effective effort orchestrated by principal grassroots organizations of the Islamophobia network, such as Act! For America, Stop Islamisation of America and state Tea Party groups.
For example, blogger Pamela Geller, the co-founder of Stop Islamisation of America and face of the manufactured “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy – which was neither a mosque nor at ground zero – clearly reveals her bias against Muslims when she equates practicing Muslims with Nazis: “Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?”
Brigitte Gabriel, the “radical Islamophobe” founder of the effective, anti-Muslims grassroots network Act! For America, believes a practicing Muslim “who prays five times a day – this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”
The Anti Defamation League has reviewed both of these groups’ rhetoric and actions and concluded they are simply promoting a conspiratorial agenda against Muslims under the guise of fighting radical Islam. This report exposes these alleged “patriots” for what they really are: the primary motivators of fear and bigotry in an economically uncertain and politically volatile climate that urgently needs less hate, division and fear-mongering. Instead, we desire a proactive, united effort towards moderation by embracing American values that protect our religious freedoms, ensure a vibrant, diverse democracy and sustain America as beacon of inclusiveness.
History has taught us that what’s happening to Muslim Americans right now is simply a remake. In the past, the characters were Jews, Irish Catholics, Japanese Americans and gays and lesbians. But America, despite sadly succumbing to hysteria in moments past, eventually – and sometimes grudgingly – tends to regain its moral compass and strive to become a nation resilient to fear and scapegoating.
Just like the McCarthyites before them, the individuals in the Islamophobia network revealed in the report should immediately cleanse themselves of their fear-mongering and ignorance, which may appear to offer short-term political gain but comes at the price of becoming the villains in our children’s history books.
Meet the New American Sweatshop
The activist group Cuentame has just released a new video that documents how the carwashes in the Los Angeles area are in many ways the new form of sweatshops in the USA.
The video was created to not only to raise awareness about this reality, but to get people in their own communities to investigate this issue. According to the Cuentame site:
“Carwash workers across the country are routinely abused, intimidated and exploited. They are subjected to obscene labor abuses and health hazardous conditions and often end up with severe kidney damage respiratory problems and nerve deterioration. Car wash workers are the face of the new American sweatshop.”
Last week, Michigan Senator Carl Levin returned from a 3-day trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with fellow Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Jeff Merkle.
The three Senators released a brief statement on what they learned in that brief trip to those two countries. The statement begins with a comment about the “professionalism of our troops and at the high morale they maintain.” This comment seems a bit strange considering that August of 2011 has seen more US troops killed in Afghanistan that in any other month over the last 10 years.
Levin’s statement goes on to say, “There has been militarily significant progress in Afghanistan since our last visits.” What the Senators mean by progress is their claim that some Taliban areas are now under US control and that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) have increased in size and capability. Levin made the same claim of progress in Afghanistan when speaking in Grand Rapids last February, but a report released by the Afghaistan NGO Safety Office said: “Foreign military assertions that security in Afghanistan is improving are intended to sway Western public opinion ahead of a troop withdrawal and do not reflect the reality on the ground.”
The ANSF is what Levin has been holding up as the golden egg in Afghan and his main justification for continued support for the US occupation in Afghanistan since the US military escalation was announced by the Obama administration in December 2009. However, there have been independent reports that challenge the viability of the ANSF and demonstrate that they are also responsible for human rights violations.
The statement is short on what they observed in Pakistan and emphasizes the efforts to go after “terrorists groups” and their “safe havens.” Levin also makes the claim that attacks against these groups have taken Pakistani lives, but the Michigan Senator fails to mention that US Drone strikes have also killed many Pakistani civilians. According to the group Voices for Creative Non-Violence, an estimate 740 Pakistani civilians have been killed by US Drone strikes. However, Levin is likely to dismiss these deaths as nothing more than mistakes, which was what he said to the Council on Foreign Relations last October.
This was not information that Senator Levin was likely to hear since he met exclusively with US military officials, US diplomats, Afghan military leaders and Pakistani diplomats. Indeed, it seems that Levin and his fellow Senators are using these brief trips to Afghanistan to justify the ongoing US occupation of Afghanistan and the militarization of the region.
War Resisters sentenced to 30 days in Federal Prison
Today it was reported that Max Kantar and Ahlam Mohsen were sentenced to 30 days in Federal Prison for their anti-war action last year in Big Rapids.
As we reported last August Michigan Senator Carl Levin was speaking at a Democratic Party meeting in Big Rapids when Kantar and Mohsen confronted Levin on his role in supporting war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and against the Palestinian people. One of the protestors read a statement and the other then threw a pie at Levin.
The Mlive story posted today presents the two war resisters as not knowing what they were doing. In addition the article cites the Judge on several occasions, but Mohsen and Kantar are never cited directly.
At one point in the article the judge is cited where he asked Kantar if, “perhaps the senator has done more reading than you have? … You assume you know more and you know the truth and he doesn’t.” It seems that one could easily say that the Judge is also making an assumption, since the statement by Mohsen and Kantar is very well written and sources, which indicates they are well informed on the issue of US war crimes.
One can not tell from the story whether or not Mohsen or Kantar spoke at the sentencing today, but the Press reporter didn’t bother to even provide background information on the war resisters and their motives, which can be found at the Campaign to Free Ahlam Mohsena and Max Kantar.
August is Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan
(This article is re-posted from Common Dreams.)
August has become the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan, where international forces have started to go home and let Afghan forces take charge of securing their country.
A record 66 U.S. troops have died so far this month, eclipsing the 65 killed in July 2010, according to a tally by The Associated Press.
This month’s death toll soared when 30 Americans — most of them elite Navy SEALs — were killed in a helicopter crash Aug. 6. They were aboard a Chinook shot down as it was flying in to help Army Rangers who had come under fire in Wardak province. It was the single deadliest incident of war being waged by Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces and insurgents.
On Tuesday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai used the start of a three-day Muslim holiday to plead with insurgents to lay down their arms and help rebuild the nation. Karzai wants Afghan security forces to take the lead in defending and protecting the nation by the end of 2014.
At a palace celebration, he also greeted eight boys and young men who had been asked to become suicide bombers, but then turned themselves in to Afghan authorities.
“Today we witness another good day for Afghanistan,” he said. “We have with us those children who were forced by the Taliban — or whoever was behind it — to commit suicide attacks. They (the children) were saved using their wisdom.”
He said five had been released to their parents, one was going to study in Turkey and authorities were still trying to find the relatives of the remaining two.
Karzai spoke on Eid al-Fitr, a holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, which is observed by millions of Muslims around the world. The month of dawn-to-dusk fasting and extended prayer began Aug. 1.
Violence is being reported across the nation despite the U.S.-led coalition’s drive to rout insurgents from their strongholds in the south.
At the same time, the U.S. military has begun to implement President Barack Obama’s order to start withdrawing the 33,000 extra troops he dispatched to the war. He ordered 10,000 out this year and another 23,000 withdrawn by the summer of 2012, leaving about 68,000 U.S. troops on the ground. Although major combat units are not expected to start leaving until late fall, two National Guard regiments comprising about 1,000 soldiers started going home last month.
Aside from the 30 Americans killed in the Chinook crash, southwest of Kabul, 23 died this month in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan, the main focus of Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces. The remaining 13 were killed in eastern Afghanistan.
Besides the 66 Americans killed so far this month, the NATO coalition suffered the loss of two British, four French, one New Zealander, one Australian, one Polish and five other troops whose nationalities have not yet been disclosed. One of the five was killed in a roadside bombing Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. No other details were released.
So far this year, 403 international service members, including at least 299 Americans, have been killed in Afghanistan.
The Grand Rapids Press and the 10th Anniversary of 9/11
Yesterday, the Grand Rapids Press began its coverage for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in the US. The article, headlined “America is mostly back to normal after 9/11 attacks, but should it be?,” was a perfect example of unexamined news.
The article begins by painting a picture of the collective mourning that took place in West Michigan in the first days after 9/11, but soon after that the reporter makes the claim that the US is back to “normal.”
The idea of the US returning to normal is never really explored in the article or substantiated by the Press. The reporter does cite a GVSU professor, Rob Franciosi, who claims that people in the US have remained unchanged despite of 9/11. However, the GVSU professor offers up nothing more than opinion. He doesn’t cite polls or research, which would verify his claims, just his opinion.
Besides the university professor, the Press reporter cites a former Hope football player who reflected on the meaning of 9/11 and a Hudsonville pastor. The Hudsonville pastor has been to the Middle East since 9/11 and does say that people here could have had an awakening after 9/11 but instead are caught up in “the rat race and material possessions.”
The only other source cited in the story was Jim Kristan, an Army veteran who is heading up a local 9/11 memorial service. The Press reporter presents Kristan as in “the minority” since he cares about what happened ten years ago. Kristan says what happened on 9/11 is all he thinks about, so much so that he painted his truck to reflect his feelings.
What is disturbing about the article was not so much the attention they gave to the man organizing the 9/11 memorial service, since that is to be expected. What seems problematic is both the unquestioning nature of the article and the lack of critical voices.
There have been plenty of people in West Michigan who have devoted a great deal of time and energy to fighting the US government responses since 9/11. People have organized and resisted the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. People have exposed and protested the US use of torture after 9/11. People have been part of all kinds of educational efforts to present information to counter the massive propaganda campaign by the US government.
People have examined US foreign policy and have attempted to challenge US hegemony in the Middle East. Local people have even been the subject of government surveillance and repression since 9/11 – Arab Americans, Muslims and dissidents. However, none of these voices are presented in the Press article, which presents the public as mere sheep.
If this story is an indication of the superficial reporting we will get surrounding the 10th anniversary of 9/11 then it is important for people to seek out other sources that will provide some substantive information on a broad range of critical issues.
Ten Years after 9/11
We are less than two weeks from the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and it is important that we take a step back and ask ourselves some serious questions about what has transpired in the US and abroad since the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001.
It is necessary to ask hard questions about the consequences of 9/11 since we can not rely on the commercial news media to honestly report on what the US has done with both its foreign and domestic policy since the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit 10 years ago.
In fact, the commercial news media will no doubt focus on memorial services and activities planned for 9/11 that will not move beyond what happen 10 years ago. We will be encouraged to mournfully reflect on the 3,000 lives that were lost on 9/11 in the US and then to offer up our support to law enforcement agencies and the US military, which continue to “defend our freedom.”
However, if you don’t get teary-eyed every time you see an American flag or have yet to succumb to putting one of those “Get r Done!” stickers on your car then you might want to honestly think about how the US government has responded since 9/11. The most costly responses have been the US occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, both justified by 9/11.
First, the US has spent a massive amount of money on war, occupation, surveillance and military aid around the world. According to the National Priorities Project, the US has spent $1.42 Trillion (and counting) just on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount does not include the current war in Libya or the US funding to Israel and all the other military activities the US has engaged in, all in the name of the War on Terror. The $1.42 Trillion translates into $28.5 billion in tax dollars that has left the State of Michigan to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The amount of tax money that has left Grand Rapids to fund these two wars is now up to $447 million (and counting). With all the budget problems at the federal, state and local level the American public might want to rethink the Pentagon’s budget.
Second, these military occupations abroad have resulted in an estimated 1,455,590 civilian deaths in Iraq and tens of thousands in Afghanistan. Add to that 4,474 US soldier deaths in Iraq and another 1,752 in Afghanistan and the death tool is staggering. In addition to the death toll there have been thousands wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Third, the US has not been able to defeat or significantly reduce al Qaeda operatives around the world. In fact, the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been the best recruiting tool that al Qaeda and other insurgent groups could have asked for.
Fourth, the US occupations abroad and support for repressive governments has actually led to a significant number of popular uprisings, particularly in the Middle East. These uprisings, called the Arab Spring by some, have demonstrated that the overthrow of dictatorships needs to come from the populations of those countries and that the US government has in no way been supportive of the generally non-violent uprising that want democratic rule.
Fifth, the US and its allies have not only condoned but actively engaged in torture as a matter of policy, like what has been documented in the jails of Abu Ghraib and Bagram or the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The use of torture will only contribute to growing anti-American sentiment and lead to further acts of violence.
On the domestic front there have also been ongoing consequences to the so-called US War on Terror. In general civil rights and civil liberties have been violated on a massive scale.
According to the ACLU, the laws that have been passed since 9/11 have taken away a significant number of previously constitutionally protected rights, particularly the right of due process and the right of privacy. The passing of the USA Patriot Act within days of 9/11 has been continued and revised on numerous occasions since 9/11. The language of the Patriot Act is such that people in the US who participate in civil disobedience can now be labeled domestic terrorists, which is just one tactic that the US government ha been using to suppress dissent.
We have seen the rise of collaboration between phone companies and the US government in order to spy on US citizens. We have seen the arrested and detention of those of civilians who have not been guilty of anything other than looking foreign and we have seen an increased level of censorship, both of critical voices in news media and critical voices in academia.
However, it has been the Muslim and Arab communities that suffered the worst in the US since 9/11. Thousands of Arabs and Muslims have been arrested, detained, questioned, deported and in some cases killed because of their suspected connection to global terrorism. There has also been in increase of hate crimes against Arab Americans and Muslims in the US, which have been fueled in part by the growing popularity of Islamophobia.
There is certainly a great deal more that could be said about the consequences of US policy since 9/11, but these comments will hopefully provide people with an opportunity to have informed discourse as the nation is in the midst of tenth anniversary of the 9/11 memorial mania.
(This article is re-posted from iwatchnews.)
As U.S. military deaths and injuries from roadside bombs escalated after the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon rushed to find solutions.
Competition is normally the cornerstone of better prices and better products, but the urgency of dealing with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, has been cited to justify a number of sole-source contracts to companies promising quick solutions over a decade of war.
One such company was Tucson-based Applied Energetics , which markets a futuristic weapon that shoots beams of lightning to detonate roadside bombs. The company won over $50 million in military contracts for their lightning weapon, all without full and open competition, even though there was another company marketing similar technology. Despite test failures, the company, in part thanks to congressional support, continued to get funding.
In August, the Marine Corps, which was on the verge of awarding the company yet another sole-source contract for the lightning weapon, cancelled the latest $3 million deal after the commander of the unit in Afghanistan decided it didn’t meet their needs.
In the meantime, a competitor, called Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems , an Indiana-based firm with its own lightning-based counter-bomb technology, says it’s had good results with only a fraction of the federal funding that Applied Energetics has received—$1.5 million. The company is preparing to test its technology at a military range. “We did our own development based on state grants” and federal funds, says Pete Bitar, the head of the company. “I cashed out my 401(k).”
The bomb fighting contract is a small example of a problem that’s been exacerbated by 10 years of war: awarding contracts without competition. While the Pentagon says its overall level of competition has remained steady over the past 10 years, publicly available data shows that Defense Department dollars flowing into non-competitive contracts have almost tripled since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. According to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News, the data shows that the value of Pentagon contracts awarded without competition topped $140 billion in 2010, up from $50 billion in 2001.
And despite repeated pledges to reform the process, non-competitive contracts are a hard habit to break. According to federal data, the Pentagon’s competed contracts, based on dollar figures, fell to 55 percent in the first two quarters of 2011, a number lower than any point in the last 10 years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
There are a number of legal loopholes that allow the Defense Department, as well as other federal agencies, to avoid competition and to select a single company to provide the desired goods and services. In some cases, there may be only one legitimate supplier of needed goods, or the government can argue that it has “an unusual and compelling urgency,” and that holding a competition would have a detrimental impact on government operations or national security.
But those exceptions have become increasingly abused, according to numerous studies. In fact, an analysis of over a dozen government reports and investigations, and interviews with eight former government officials and experts, found a number of concerns about DOD competition practices — attributable in large part to the past 10 years of war. Those include:
- The use of large umbrella contracts to purchase goods and services that could be competed individually, thus resulting in lower price;
- Justifying sole source contracts by citing an “urgent and compelling need,” when in fact the urgency stemmed from the agency’s lack of planning for requirements that have been known for years.
- Extending large contracts as a “bridge,” rather than re-competing them.
- An overall failure to utilize competition in cases that could result in cost savings and better performance.
These alarming trends have not gone unnoticed. Sole-source and other noncompetitive contracting practices at the Pentagon have been the subject of numerous investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department’s Inspector General, and the Commission on Wartime Contracting, among other government watchdogs.
The consequence, according to those investigative agencies and commissions: wasted dollars, lower quality goods and services, and in some cases, outright fraud.
Reports of limited and no-bid contracting, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, captured headlines in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, when companies like Custer Battles, later convicted of fraud , were given sole-source security contracts for security and reconstruction, including one worth $16.5 million to provide security at Baghdad International Airport. Among the accusations eventually levied against the company, which had no prior track record, was that it charged grossly inflated prices, in part by using fictitious companies to “lease” equipment to the government.
In his 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama railed against such contracts, accusing them of wasting taxpayer dollars, and promised to rein in such spending.
In 2009, President Obama followed up those campaign promises with a memo directing a broad overhaul of government contracting, including limits to sole-source and non-competitive contracting. “Excessive reliance by executive agencies on sole-source contracts (or contracts with a limited number of sources) and cost-reimbursement contracts creates a risk that taxpayer funds will be spent on contracts that are wasteful, inefficient, subject to misuse, or otherwise not well designed to serve the needs of the Federal Government or the interests of the American taxpayer,” the president wrote in the 2009 memorandum , citing reports by multiple government agencies. Moving back to full and open competition, the memo continued, could save the government billions of dollars. But in two-and-half years, the Obama administration has made no progress in competing military contracts.
Even the Pentagon’s senior leadership has acknowledged the problem: a 2010 memo by Undersecretary Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s senior procurement official, called for greater competition, along the lines of the earlier Obama memo, and promised the Pentagon would make its contracting process more open to competitive bidding. “Maximize the use of multiple-source, continuously competitive contracts,” a briefing accompanying the memo states.
However, campaign pledges and memos have made little headway in combating the problem. “The lack of competition in the Defense Department is a scandal,” said Charles Tiefer , a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and a member of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The ultimate question is whether non-competitive contracts are due to trends beyond the Pentagon’s control, such as the lack of qualified competitors and the urgency of wartime contracting, or whether they are the result of poor policies and procedures. The Pentagon maintains that its competition rates are lower because of the nature of the things it buys: large weapons and major systems that then have large follow-on contracts that must, by their nature, go to the original supplier. “These high-dollar non-competitive procurements significantly impact the Department’s overall level of competition to produce the 61.7 percent competition rate for FY2010,” says Cheryl Irwin, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
The GAO, in multiple decisions, has said that “failure to plan” for a procurement that results in an urgent need does not constitute a basis for a sole source competition, and has, on a number of occasions, sided with protesting companies that argue the only urgency was an agency’s failure to conduct a timely competitive procurement.
One report commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Industrial Policy and conducted by the federally-funded Institute for Defense Analyses appears to suggest it’s a systemic problem. “We found that the use of short-term contracts and modifications to fill the gap in services between the end of one contract and the beginning of the next is a significant source of sole source contracts,” the report concluded.
The study, which looked specifically at contracts for services, found that there wasn’t a lack of qualified companies; rather, nearly a quarter of the sole-source awards were justified based on “bridge contracts” that extended existing contracts without competition. “For sole source contracts there does appear to be a problem, not with the industrial base or with competition, but with DOD practices and policies,” the report concluded.
Noncompetitive, sole-source contracts are by no means unique to the Pentagon. Other agencies have been accused of giving short shrift to competition, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which awarded over half of its immediate post-Hurricane Katrina contracts without full competition, according to one congressional report. But based on total dollars, the Pentagon, according to publicly available data analyzed by iWatch News , lags behind all other major departments in competitive contracting. The Pentagon’s competition rate of about 61 percent places it will below other agencies. The State Department in 2010 competed almost 75 percent of its contract dollars, the Department of Homeland Security competed almost 77 percent, and the Energy Department competed 94 percent.
Nevertheless, sole source contracts, ranging from training to equipment, continue to be handed out on a near daily basis, often with little explanation beyond a stated “urgent requirement.” On July 18 of this year, DRS Technical Services of Herndon, Va., received a contract worth nearly $20 million for training and mentoring Afghan police.It was the only bid solicited for the contract, according to the Pentagon.
A spokesperson for Army Contracting Command said the sole source contract, which was actually for fielding communications equipment to Afghan police, was due to an “urgent requirement that necessitated an award to the incumbent DRS pending competition.” That same contract was also the subject of a 2009 DOD Inspector General investigation, which criticized the contractor’s and the Army’s inventory controls.
