Justice For Jaime Leigh Jones? Follow

Except they just happened to be in a country where no particular law was in place, what with the war and the deposed government and all. So you know, we were occupying Iraq. Is US law for a US company in a US-occupied country that hard to imagine?

Edited, Sep 18th 2009 5:04pm by AshOnMyTomatoes

Did you even read the thread at all, or did you just look at the last few posts, see Jophiel say something, and decide it was some liberal talking point that required an essay?

Note that there is a correct answer to this question.

Edited, Sep 18th 2009 6:17pm by CBD

Amazing how your reasoning is now flawless, that you can intuit something apparent to a ten year old, and behave appropriately for an adult who should be able to make good judgments, that you make the exact same observations in this case that anyone else has in our other case, when it can't incriminate something that you don't like.



This is incorrect.

I see gbaji's point. I still hate Halliburton.

Does ****-drinking mean urine-drinking, or drinking to become drunk? I only ask because of your silly British slang.

Right. Just like the US military can't be held to US law when they're outside the country, right? Oh, that's right... that's retarded because everyone knows they're still responsible to the US laws through the US Military code of conduct.

Coalition Provisional Order 17 (signed by Paul Bremer) removed any authority from the Iraqi government to press criminal actions against US contractors. Given this, it was indeed the responsibility of the administration to ensure that criminals within the body of contractors be prosecuted by the US. Instead, Bush left a giant gaping loophole in the laws, allowing criminals from Halliburton, Blackwater and other agencies go scot-free because they were too fucking stupid to realize that these guys had no laws they were bound by. This wasn't the only case where this happened and it wasn't fixed until Blackwater shot up a bunch of guys (and even then the DoJ said it couldn't apply the news rules retroactively).

I'm sorry... who was president when CPO #17 was enacted?


Again, it was Varus who first brought Halliburton into the Acorn discussion. So maybe you should look to your right and ask.


Which made it all the funner to watch Varus squirm and cry "Acorn!" over and over instead of just admitting that Halliburton's actions, as a company were compeletely fucked up.


Well, we have Halliburton employees, paid with tax-payer dollars, gang raping and kidnapping women while on the job in Iraq and we have the corporation of Halliburton using tax-payer dollars to shelter and protect these gang-rapists and attempt to suppress investigations into their actions. These guys were living in and acting in a tax-payer funded Halliburton compound. This wasn't as though they clocked out and went to their own privately owned houses in the suburbs and took up gang raping -- they were Halliburton employees 24/7.

Sounds to me as though my tax dollars are going to pay and help gang rapists with the blessing of Halliburton.


You mean, if the Best Buy employees were being kept in a Best Buy compound, administered by Best Buy and then the woman in question was held by Best Buy employees, threatened with losing her Best Buy job while other Best Buy employees tampered with the evidence of her rape and then the corporate administration of Best Buy tried to suppress her case?

It's just like if that happened? Ok, I can agree with that.

At this point I got bored with your spinning and twisting to say how Acorn's really worse and it's much more appropriate to strip Acorn of funding but giving hundreds of billions of dollars to people who implicitly condone gang rape through their direct inaction is okay.

Edited, Sep 18th 2009 5:53pm by Jophiel

The answer lies inside all of us.

Inside our bladders, to be specific.

Genocide.

So you ignored everything but the OP to throw yourself up on a cross about because OV was clearly trying to trick you. Got it.

In my opinion, there was nothing wrong with your original statement that I quoted. I was merely amused that you felt the need to rehash the first several posts in this thread as though you had some fantastic new insight when you really just droned on and didn't say anything noteworthy.

I'm not defending Halliburton's actions, nor the actions of their employees.



Irrelevant. Are you suggesting that Bush deliberately contrived those conditions and rules specifically to allow employees of a Halliburton subsidiary to commit rape? If not, it's irrelevant then isn't it?



No. Omega's OP specifically asked this question. Anna also made a nearly identical argument in another thread by bringing up GOP members who had committed sex crimes.

Shall we go through each of the various threads on the board right now and find all the examples of liberals defending Acorn by essentially arguing that it's wrong for conservatives to be upset because of something else done by some other organization? It's a childish response Joph.




And why pray-tell, is it suddenly of monumental importance for you to force Varus, right now, to admit that Halliburton is a bad bad company?


It's a distraction. You don't want to talk about Acorn, so you look for other topics to talk about involving conservative connected organizations doing things they shouldn't be doing. Yes. Varus stupidly fell into the trap by "defending" Halliburton. But that does not make the entire line of reasoning any less ridiculous.


Acorn's actions are wrong. Halliburtons actions were wrong. However, right now, we're talking about what Acorn is doing, right? I'll ask again: If there wasn't currently a huge uproar about Acorn, would we be talking about Halliburton? yes or no?





I'm not in any way defending the actions of those employees of Halliburton, nor any illegal actions the company itself may have engaged in.


Stop pushing the strawman on me Joph. I'm not buying it. I am *not* defending Halliburton.




And I am way past tired of your spinning that somehow because there's some other utterly unrelated case out there, that we should just ignore what Acorn is doing.

That's what this is really about, right? Why else bring it up?

Edited, Sep 18th 2009 4:17pm by gbaji

Boy, I can't say enough times that I'm in support with the action against Acorn, can I? I mean, I could shout it from the rooftops and you (and Varus!) will still cling to some delusion that I'm trying to defend Acorn.

I mean... seriously? That's the best you can do? Willful ignorance of reality and just talk over and over and over again about how I'm defending Acorn? Are you illiterate or just intentionally lying here?

Because we already know you can read at least a little.

Every single one of them? 5 random people, in 5 random cities, in 5 random Acorn offices, all happen to have the exact same moral disfunction? Also, that's not a motivation. A motivation requires that they personally get something. People don't normally risk breaking the law in order to benefit other people. They break the law to benefit themselves in some way.

I'll grant that there's a ridiculously slim possibility that these people happen to have some perverse desire to see as many people used in child prostitution rings as possible. Um... But I'm going to go with Occam's Razor here, and stick with the far more likely explanation that something in their work training or job environment encouraged them to do this sort of thing or somehow made them think that getting people signed up for aid was more important than making sure that the claims were accurate.


You know. If we're looking for reasonable and likely explanations that is.




Yes. But their job is supposed to require them to care. That's what you keep missing. Their job is to determine eligibility for financial aid. That 5 of them so blatantly violated the very purpose to which they're supposed to be working towards indicates something else at work.


Look. Can we all acknowledge that if you set up certain conditions, you can increase the likelihood of something happening? Just as Joph correctly points out that a combination of factors involving the legal condition of Halliburton contractors can result in an increased likelihood of said contractors committing crimes (cause they think they can't get caught or punished), a combination of factors which reward quantity of aid handed out with no checks for quality will tend to encourage workers to hand out aid in fraudulent ways?

It's not really so much about Acorn specifically as the need to close these loopholes. When the Abu Graib abuses occurred, the investigation showed that a lack of training time and confusion over rules involving treatment of prisoners created a situation in which some guards abused the situation. The training problems were fixed. The command responsibility structure was fixed. It's the process of finding the problems and correcting them that is important. In the case of Halliburton, hopefully said investigation will lead to better oversight of companies put in similar positions in the future.


While I'm sure there are some rabidly frothing at the mouth Acorn haters among my fellow conservatives, for the most part what concerns us that this sort of thing is similarly caused by the structure of the system itself. Every single level of our process for handing out financial aid in this country tends to encourage fraud. We tend to put those who are must passionate about the issue of helping the poor in charge of the money. They want to increase the size of the funding programs as much as possible. Both parties use the number of people served methodology to prop up their humanitarian credentials. We saw that with the sub-prime housing issue. Despite the fact that the Bush administration and a number of Republican members of Congress had expressed serious concerns about how the money was being accounted for at Fanny and Freddie, it did not stop those same politicians from banking on how well these programs were helping poor people become first time homeowners. Heck. I think Bush even made a point of it in one of his speeches.


My point is that when you create a system in which every party gains if everyone just looks the other way, you can't be surprised when things go awry. And when things do, we should do the hard thing of looking into the situation and trying to fix it. In terms of the financial aid, not only do the politicians involved have a vested interest in maximizing the amount of aid handed out, but the organizations they use to farm out the task of signing people up for said aid also have a vested interest in increasing that number as much as possible. And of course, the recipient of the aid has a vested interest in receiving it. When the people getting the aid, and the people signing them up for the aid, and the people handing out the money for the aid are all collectively pursuing the same objective, there is no check on the system. No one's looking to make sure that we're only giving help to those who really need it. Who would? Republicans don't want to because they open themselves up to easy retaliation as "hating the poor". Democrats don't want to because they've tied these programs into their own campaign promises. More money means they're doing their jobs. Organizations like Acorn certainly wont. Whether for altruistic reasons or out of some desire for political influence, their overriding objective is to sign up as many people for financial aid as possible.


What we have is a set of conditions which are rife for abuse and fraud. So of course, there is abuse and fraud. We can duck our heads into the sand and insist that this was just this one person, or these 5 people, but I think that's missing the point. Regardless of why each individual did what they did, the nature of the beast makes it easy to make that choice in the first place. If we care to any degree about making sure that we're accurately targeting financial aid, then we ought to do something to correct this. As I pointed out in another thread, wasteful spending in this area only hurts those truly in need. Conservatives want these programs to be as small as possible. Fraud makes them cost more than they should for every dollar of legitimate aid. This is not just a liberal or conservative issue. We ought to be in agreement on this. If you are a Liberal, you should be aware of the Conservative goal to minimize the size of the programs and seek to get the most bang for the buck possible. And heck. If these programs could be shown to be cost effective and efficient at actually helping the poor, Conservatives might be a lot less opposed to them in the first place. There's a feedback relationship to the whole thing. The more fraud, the less money conservatives will allow to be wasted *and* the fewer of the dollars remaining get to those actually in need. The less fraud, the more willing conservatives are to allow funding *and* the more dollars of those spent help those truly in need.


You'd think this would be a no-brainer. And, as I said, it's not ultimately really about Acorn. They just happen to be the organization in question. There are other issues with Acorn as well, but they're pretty similarly structured and have similar problems. The real problem is much bigger than that one organization though. It goes to the very process we use to fund federal programs, the motivations of those who should be acting as gatekeepers (same issue with Freddie/Fannie btw), and the lack of will to create any sort of effective oversight.


Yes. We should do this with organizations like halliburton as well. Um... But we are. The Wartime Contracting Commission was created to do exactly the kind of investigation into not just the specific problems with Halliburton, but the issue of private contracting as a whole. It's job it to make recommendations as to how to fix the exact problems we're talking about. The OP, and many posts following have implied that somehow no one's looking at this or addressing it, but that is not the case.

My question is: When do we do this with federal funding for financial aid programs? When do we do this for federally funded housing programs? We do this when the target is connected in some way with conservatives, but apparently not when it's connected to liberals? Why? If both are wrong, then isn't it wrong to give one a by, while going full throttle on the other?


You'll be hard pressed to find nany Conservatives (maybe Varrus excepted, but he really doesn't count), who'll argue that the case of Jones isn't tragic, shouldn't be investigated fully, and that structural problems with our contracting system should be addressed to try to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again. Yet it's surprising just how high a percentage of liberals want to treat what is going on with Acorn as just isolated incidents and oppose tooth and nail any sort of examination of the broader issue of how we farm out funding for government programs. That is the real problem. The actions of these specific Acorn employees are just symptoms of that larger issue.