Tag: CPI

Evaluating the risk of corruption in your state government

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The State Integrity Investigation, a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International to measure the risk of corruption in every state, released full state report cards today. They include letter grades, reporter comments and research details, as well as each state’s rank among all 50 states.

See How Your State Ranks

The State Integrity Investigation is an unprecedented, data-driven analysis of each state’s laws and practices that deter corruption and promote accountability and openness. Experienced journalists graded each state government on its corruption risk using 330 specific integrity indicators. The Investigation ranked every state from one to 50. Each state received a report card with letter grades in 14 categories, including campaign finance, ethics laws, lobbying regulations, and management of state pension funds.

I’ve been a supporter of the Center for Public Integrity since it started over two decades ago. A source for serious research and journalist reports on the state of ethics in the United States and – the matching half of the equation – corruption.

Got this report in the morning’s block of emails and feel it should be up on every blog. Just as all politics is local, trying to change politics in this nation starts at the local level – if you want to take an active part in the process.

Read ’em and weep – or cheer. New Mexico surprised me by being 12th from the bottom. I wouldn’t have assumed we’d do that well. 🙂

US gave away Billion$ above and beyond value of war contracts

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Rumsfeld at meal run by Bush’s favorite concierge – KBR

The US government has wasted more than $30bn on private contractors and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade – more than 15% of the total spend – according to a bipartisan group charged with examining the issue.

The figure, described as “sobering but conservative”, illustrated the need for significant law and policy changes to avoid such waste in the future, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said.

The body, set up by a Senate vote in 2007 to mimic the work of a post-second world war commission that investigated waste, will submit its report to Congress on Wednesday. Submitted to the same people who approved the expenditures in the first place…

At least another $30bn could be wasted if the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are unable to keep US-run projects running after the US withdraws or simply choose not to do so, Christopher Shays, an ex-Republican congressman, and Michael Thibault, a former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency, wrote.

“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak inter-agency co-ordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees. Both government and contractors need to do better,” they said…

In a separate report, released on Monday, the independent Centre for Public Integrity thinktank said $140bn in defence contracts were awarded without competitive tendering last year – almost triple the sum in 2001…

The report will include 15 recommendations…most of which will be useless crap if Congress maintains business as usual – rubber stamping anything that has the words Homeland Security, Pentagon or Military in the title.

Why should the young men and women of America be required to risk life and limb, take a general pay cut, to go off and fight useless wars – while America’s corporations are guaranteed not only profits but super-profits for supplying the matériel to support the physical structure of those wars, create fresh death and destruction?

Security of U.S. Passport production is questionable

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The U.S. government agency that prints passports has for years failed to resolve persistent concerns about the security risks involved in outsourcing production to foreign factories.

“On a number of levels this is extremely troubling,” said Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. “Something like that ought to be produced only in the United States, under only the most rigorous security standards.”

Despite repeated assurances they would move production to the U.S., a key government contractor has continued to assemble an electronic component of the nation’s new, more sophisticated passport in Thailand…

The Thai factory was one of several concerns raised in an inspector general’s audit earlier this year that looked into the way the GPO is producing the new e-passport – a passport that is supposed to be impenetrable to counterfeiters because it stores information on an embedded computer chip that is tucked into the cover.

Experts agree that passport production is a critical homeland security concern, given that possession of an American passport can help a traveler bypass some of the stringent reviews conducted of those entering the U.S. from abroad. Ervin described the document as an EZ-pass into the United States, something officials say terrorists know all too well.

GPO’s inspector general has warned that the agency lacks even the most basic security plan for ensuring that blank e-Passports — and their highly sought technologies – aren’t stolen by terrorists, foreign spies, counterfeiters and other bad actors as they wind through an unwieldy manufacturing process that spans the globe and includes 60 different suppliers.

RTFA – and face up to the reality that years of incompetent management by fools like Bush and creeps like Cheney will take forever to unravel and get sorted. Outsourcing the components for something as significant as passport production to 60 companies around the world is the ultimate in corporate cronyism.

We probably need a special agency established just to investigate and correct the economic crimes and corruption the current administration inherited from the days of Republican control of our government.