Redstate

No?

Anderson's significant other is Lou Reed. Lou wrote NASA favorite, "Satellite of Love."

And he is the author of the proleptic ode to the astronaut, "Ride, Sally Ride."

On a more serious note, NASA's expenditure for this kind of thing is plain goofy. Laurie Anderson is entertaining and smart, but an appropriation for her work? Loni Anderson, I could see, but Laurie?

Performance artist Laurie Anderson burst onto the popular music scene with her early '80s single, "Oh Superman," and is perhaps best known for her stage work, "USA."

Karen Finley is a leftish loon now contributing to the Huffington Post.

NASA's expenditure for this kind of thing is plain goofy

Better that than another 10-page pamphlet, available from the Government Priniting Office for five cents, called "Space and You."

the $20K that NASA is (inappropriately) spending for a performance artist, against the amount that the Republican Study Committee spent to issue their report.

The President needs a line-item veto to be able to knock out this and all of the other park that goes to waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.  Of course, that will only leave congress people like Denny Hastert, WV Bird, Trent Lott, and those other feeders at the pork barrell trough howling like stuck pigs.

Illustrators and artists are very important to NASA and I really don't want to see their contributions to NASA be line-itemed out of the budget.  They're a tiny fraction of what NASA does, and it seems awfully goofy to be harping on them at a time that the entire prospect of manned space exploration (OK liberals, HUMANED space exploration) is in jeopardy because of a lack of public interest and opposition in Democratic circles to the President's agenda.  I think this is shooting the wrong people, frankly.

The RSC's cost was negligible, since they're already set-up to do this sort of thing, as compared to $20K for a woman who said things like this:

STATEMENTS BY LAURIE ANDERSON IN INTERVIEWS DURING TIME AT NASA:

*    "Congress is the jocks and they're always saying how terrible it is that NASA spends their money on all this stuff."

*    "As sad as I am about being in the United States these days, NASA is genuinely exciting."

*    Suggested to a NASA engineer while touring NASA facilities, "Have you ever thought of a different set-up?...I'm on a quest against rectangles."

*    "...I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior."

*    "I am and always have been a snob."

*     "I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA."

*    "I met many astronauts, and they seemed so out of place."

A real gem there.

A Presidential line-item veto wouldn't have stopped this since it happened well after apportionment and was approved at the bureaucracy level.

And aren't in the same league as Byrd when porkbarreling is the topic.

Sure, she's a little loony.  And Karen Finley is the female Dennis Hopper on Pluto.  But making NASA look like a bunch of pocket-protector engineers and smelly dudes who only care about their propulsion systems engineering and who don't give a damn about art, I think, is a mistake right now.  

Lose too much more popular support for NASA and we're going to be funding robotic explorations forever.  Maybe that's the point.  

The artist in residence position was not specifically authorized by Congress.

Even though the BUDGET goes on for 15-20K pages I do not believe it gets to the level of detail that this line item of NASA's proposed list of expenditures.

Look at all the money the IRS spends on PR ads.  Other Government agencies do all kinds of PR stuff including sponsoring the Tour De France. The Post Office does a lot of advertising.  

The page about her has the feel of being written by somebody with an agenda.

The 2 pieces of work they talk about are interesting.  One talks about creating a theatrical piece.  That must have been some type of initial feasibility study, because you don't create a touring theatrical show for $20K.  The other job was to create a film for an Expo.  That, too, could have taken more than $20K to do.

Notice how they talk about other things she did while doing projects for NASA:

*    Preparing for her violin tour;

*    Taking long walks around Europe to create an audio diary for French radio; and

*    Composing music for a Japanese garden for the 2005 World Expo.

Why is this relavent? These quotes are there to make her look like she was bilking the taxpayer, not doing serious work for NASA. Was NASA disappointed with her level of effort? Did she deliver a quality product? The piece doesn't say. If she did who cares if she composes music on the side.

Also the quotes they decided would make her look bad. These quotes say nothing about the subject being discussed (what she did for NASA), they are only there to make her look stupid. None of the footnotes were easily available online. I wonder if this is all she said, or did they go into her interviews looking for Valley Girl quotes that would make her look bad:

*    "Congress is the jocks and they're always saying how terrible it is that NASA spends their money on all this stuff."

*    "As sad as I am about being in the United States these days, NASA is genuinely exciting."

*    Suggested to a NASA engineer while touring NASA facilities, "Have you ever thought of a different set-up?...I'm on a quest against rectangles."

*    "...I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior."

*    "I am and always have been a snob."

*     "I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA."

*    "I met many astronauts, and they seemed so out of place."

The facts here seem to be that NASA employed a part time nobody to do some creative work at a very low wage. Then some congressman thought it would make him look like one of the high school's cool kids going after NASA by sliming a part time actress.

It may be that NASA paying somebody $20K to do creative work is a bad idea. However that position can be taken without launching a thinly veiled personal attack on a part timer that can't defend herself. At least a congressman with an IQ above room temperature could manage it.

It IS a hit piece, written by someone with an agenda. Obviously. The piece you object to is talking points by the Republican Study Committee, the conservative policy group of the House Republicans. (Chairman Mike Pence, R-IN, is a star.)

But Laurie Anderson can defend herself quite well, backed up as she is by the New York arts elite. She's a freakin' star of the performance arts crowd, which means sounding stupid is part of her job description.

That with $6,000 hammers, $50,000 toilets, and $25,000 coffeemakers, that the $20,000 spent on 'outreach' is insignificant?

Sure, 20K here, 20K there, it all adds up to big bucks I know.

It looks like Laurie Anderson is a little better known than I thought, I don't tend to move in those circles.

But my point stands: A debate about the level of NASA funding, and even a debate about the level of funding for outreach and multimedia projects is a healthy thing.  However an argument that relies totally on making the opposition look like a government bilking idiot is not one that's well thought out.  

And it especially shouldn't have the term "Republican" attached to it.

But come on, 20k is less than a drop in a bucket.  There is no better way to demonstrate one's fundamental unseriousness about cutting the budget than by offering an amendment banning NASA performance artists.  It'd be like someone who smokes 4 packs a day saying they're cutting down by one cigarette a year.  Actually, even that analogy is probably pretty generous in proportion.

We could never address the small offenses, because there will always be greater offenses which should be addressed. We cannot eliminate the $10,000 hammer, because in comparison, the $200 million Weapons System X is worse.

Leave space exploration to private citizens.  Keep tax dollars out of it.  The sooner NASA is disbanded, with its defense aspects merged into DoD, and the rest sold off, the better.

Let the Harvards of the world, with their massive endowments, fund robotic science missions.  Let the Richard Bransons of the world, with their daring and business sense, further explore manned flight.

NASA was useful in its day, but we no longer need it.  So let's cut the waste.

Yes they're already set up but they could be doing something useful instead of cherry-picking stupid expenditures in order to embarrass government agencies, such as NASA.

I would say Krempaski is making a general statement "this is how our dollars are being spent" as if ALL of our dollars are spent on such frivolous pursuits, which is completely specious.

And by the way...Count Chocola wants to completely do away with Social Security, not just create private accounts...so he's completely out of the mainstream...

I can think of fewer better expenditures of negligible amounts of money than pointing out stupid expenditures by bureaucracies. I didn't ignore opportunity costs, but this seems like a perfect, and perfectly-in-line expense for the RSC, so nothing else could have been done with that small amount of money that would have been more worthy than pointing out NASA stupidity. So this satisfies opportunity cost principles.

No, he wasn't saying ALL our dollars are spent on frivolous pursuits, I can guarantee he would approve of certain expenditures (e.g. JDAMs, B-2s, M1-A2s, body armor, etc.) , but he did show one instance of a frivolous -- and stupid -- expenditure of our money. Your generalization was also stupid.

I don't recall saying anything about Count Chocola so i'll ignore your last sentence.

Meanwhile, voters in Indiana re-elected Chocola by a 9 percent margin. They must be completely out of the mainstream, too. Why, I bet they're so far out of the mainstream they think paying $20,000 to Laurie Anderson for NASA performance art is frivolous.

Stupid, stupid Hoosiers.

I always have been and will be a huge fan of the work NASA does. As a home schooled missionary kid living in Central America, I would write and get in the mail huge packest of glossy photos, pamphlets and other materials that got me all excited about being an astronaut.

But reality is anytime you have government funded work, its going to be inefitient, there is going to be abuse of the system, and waste like this example.

I would privatize the whole thing! I wonder how long it would take for private owners to make the whole operation profitable? Everyone wants satelites in space. Everyone is doing high-end research that could be conducted in zero-G environment. Sell the whole thing (NASA) to private investors, and let the initiative and strength of the market forces propel the USA to the future of space exploration.

We could never address the small offenses, because there will always be greater offenses which should be addressed.

And the harm in addressing greater offenses instead of minor ones would be ....

Is there anything preventing private investors from starting up their own space exploration corporation now?  I ask out of genuine curiosity.

I like the Republican Party that speaks for limited government and fiscal responsibility.  The Republican Party that worries about what's going on in my and your bedrooms (or on a negligible amount like $20K being spent to promote the wonders of space travel and exploration) is not my Republican Party, sir!

How dare you, sir, defend pettiness!

You know how Giuliani cleaned up NYC before he became "America's Mayor" post-9/11? By going after the "pettiness." He made it clear that petty larceny and prostitution and small drug dealers would not be tolerated.  Because if you develop a culture that doesn't tolerate the small crimes, the bigger crimes will go away.  I'm from Youngstown, Ohio, the lesson is the same vis a vis the mob.

Likewise, addressing the stupid, small costs that jack up the budget for absolutely ridiculous reasons (promoting NASA may or may not be a good goal, this method by this gal is stupid) and dealing with behaviors that are harmful to society and therefore the state, is definitely within the realm of good governance.

Frankly, if Congress were to go through the myriad stupid, tiny expenditures in bureaucracies and outlaw each of them one by one, that would be fine with me since a) it would mean they weren't passing new, larger (and also stupid) expenditures, and b) it would, in agregate, save the taxpayers money.

There have been very real benefits we've gained from NASA as a country:

• Development of new technology. (this from last month for example)
  
• Advances in cutting edge physics (which lead to even further new technologies)
  
• Advancing human knowledge of the universe
  
• Potential protection from catastrophe (asteroid mapping)
  
• Gaining prestige in a pissing contest between the US and the Soviets

Now the only one of those things that isn't relevant today is the last one.  Am I right to guess that that's the only one you saw as ever worthwhile?

See Xpress, Armadillo, X Prize, Virgin Galactic, etc.

There is, at the moment, absolutely nothing preventing private investers from getting into space.  But the private sector prefers to allow the government to maintain the necessary infrastructure to launch satelites and pocket the profits from those satelites.

Economically, its in the best interests of the companies making money off space to let you and me shoulder the burden of maintaining the infrastructure necessary to let them make that money.  I suppose some people might see that as an argument for eleminating NASA, the old "let them pay for their own lift" argument.  But its a false argument.  NASA provides a wealth of scientific and technical information to anyone who wants access to it.  This, in turn, allows private scientists to benefit from what would otherwise be kept as corporate secrets.

I'm all in favor of private exploitation of space, but its utterly silly to claim that NASA is an example of government waste and abuse.  The grandparent poster simply wanted to spout his "privatize everything" mantra, and I'm going to use this as an opportunity to spout my own "privatizing everything is stupid" mantra.

The simple fact is that the government does an excellent job in many areas.  Take the interstate highway system, for example.  The roads budget is about $29 billion.  That works out to around $107 per person in the US.  I recently drove from Amarillo TX to Washington DC (not too directly, I went through St. Louis and Kokomo IN to get there, visited relatives along the way).  I traveled on toll roads in both Oklahoma and Pennselvania.  The toll roads were better maintained than some of the government roads I traveled on, but not as well maintained as some of the other government roads I traveled on.

The point however is that between Tulsa and the state line its 88 miles.  It cost me $3.35 to travel that 88 miles.  That's $0.0380681818/mile (call it around 3.8 cents per mile).  If my entire trip of (about) 3600 miles had cost me that much I'd have paid $137 for just that one trip.  You'll note that the $137 I'd have paid for one trip is greater than my share of the highway funds.  I don't even think about how much I'd be paying for toll roads in town if the whole road network were privatized.

So, when jmsierra said

But reality is anytime you have government funded work, its going to be inefitient, there is going to be abuse of the system, and waste like this example.

He was either a) lying, or b) ignorant.  I'll be generous and assume that he's ignorant.  The government, oddly enough, is not magically inefficient.  In fact, it seems to do some things better than the private sector can manage.

You can ride a rocket where cost cutting will ensure you a safe ride. What a joke!

I wouldn't have spent 20K this way, but hey, I think spending $150 to see U2 is way too much. Compared to the gargantuan waste for the war on drugs, 20K is "chump change".

While NASA's hiring of an artist in residence is silly, for Congress to spend one millionth of a second considering a bill forbidding such a thing is absurd.

I bet the DOD loses 20k in pilfered staples every year. Out government is hemorraging money and this is how Rep. Chocola spends his time? Its so perverse - like a foundering airline that thinks its going to save itself from bankruptcy by eliminating the olive from the salad of the in-flight meals.

Those parts of NASA that I don't call to have merged into DoD have better private substitutes:

• Defense agencies like DARPA can develop defense technology, too.

  
  

  Beyond that, I trust the patent system, and the profit motive it's based on, to harness science into technology.  The Internet, for example, is faster and more useful in private hands than it would have been under continued government control.




• Private research labs do plenty already.  For example, Caltech already runs JPL.  Let them continue to do the research portions of its work without government involvement.




• How is "human knowledge of the universe" different from advancing science, which was the previous point?  In any case, our research universities do a lot.  We don't need NASA.




• As a defense item, the asteroid watching part of NASA's work could continue in the Defense department.  I think space dominance is something we need to keep, and to be blunt, space asteroids are a great excuse to develop space weapons.

NASA was useful for catching up with and passing the Soviets, yes.  But the industry it started has grown well beyond it, so we just don't need it anymore.

Every minute Congress spends on cutting spending, is a minute not spent raising spending and taking more power.

I miss the days when Speaker Gingrich and the Republicans spent lots of time trying to pare government back.

Maybe this is the first step on the road back to reducing government.  Why not take the low-hanging fruit first?

but its purely symbolic. This is not the sort of thing that's going to bankrupt this country. Its Medicare that's going to do that. This is pretty much the same Congress that compounded the problem with that apalling Medicare Reform bill a couple years back so were I you, I wouldn't be holding my breath vis the turning of any corners.

If your goal is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, and you spend money to highlight said examples of waste, fraud, and abuse - what's the problem again?

Oh, that's right - you'd probably prefer no oversight at all.

that is unaccounted for in Iraq...I think it's a few orders of magnitude more important that combing through the appropriations of Agencies looking for something which sounds embarrassing.

$20K come on give me a break..as John Stossel would say.

Chocola may be in the mainstream in Indiana...but only in a state like Indiana...

And I doubt he ran on deep-sixing Social Security, or that he will in 2006.

Some people don't seem to understand that because you win an election it doesn't mean that anything and everything from that point on is "PRE APPROVED" and not subject to critism...even if the issue was never mentioned during the campaign.

You know (or should know) that there will never be enough privately funded research to keep pace with what NASA is doing today.  NASA gets some of the best and brightest engineers and physicists from around the world-- not because of the pay scale or market factors, but because of the scope and scientific importance of what they are doing.  The EU is about to open an enormous government funded particle accelerator ([CERN http:\www.cern.ch]) that will attract many of the world's brightest scientists who may have otherwise come to the US.  If we shut down NASA tomorrow, we'd have the same kind of brain drain that Russia had in '91.    

NASA-spinoff technologies (dialysis machines, CAT, MRI, cordless power tools) are usually developed as tools to achieve goals that would be privately cost prohibitive.  There isn't a privately funded research group today that could afford to send a man to the moon, or build and launch a Hubble telescope.  And it was these types of Herculean tasks that prompted so much of the technology that we take for granted today, and that continue to provide technology that we will take for granted in the future.

Beyond this, it's hard for an amateur physics nerd like myself to explain why it's important to find out where we came from and where we're going, to find other earth-like planets, to determine what spacetime is made of.  It's especially hard to do this to someone who feels space to be nothing more than another place we need to put weapons.  If it helps, try to think of the kind of weapons we could make by studying black holes or maybe even He or even oxygen fusion bombs.  

If that's not enough, try to at least empathize with that basic human drive for exploration and knowledge-- if not for a few government funded expeditions 500 years ago, you might still be in Europe.

$9 billion?

I smell a well-deserved troll rating in your future.  

you can read all the audits here.

been paying attention to the news...The Coalition Provisional Authority cannot account for, that's right, $9B.  As Rod Nordland, Newsweek reporter, stated on C-SPAN Sunday, the Coalition Provisional Authority was staffed by young zealots with no diplomatic or administrative experience, but impeccable political support for republican causes.

They botched it and there is $9B missing.  Republican Susan Collins or Olympia Snow should be having an investigation and calling for committee hearings but have not.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,145848,00.html

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. occupation authority in Iraq (search) was unable to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to government ministries, which lacked financial controls, security, communications and adequate staff, an inspector general has found.

The U.S. officials relied on Iraqi audit agencies to account for the funds but those offices were not even functioning when the funds were transferred between October 2003 and June 2004, according to an audit by a special U.S. inspector general.

The findings were released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., (search) special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. Bowen issued several reports on the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S. occupation government that ruled Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004.

so you're basing all this on a report by that bastion of journalistic ethics, Newsweek. A report about the CPA, which has been defunct for going on a year now. A report about some missing money that is soooo bad, that it can't even motivate two RINOs to conduct hearings....  

and we're supposed to be concerned by this?

move along, people, nothing to see here.

I initially read the audit after it hit the news.  It's much ado about nothing.  The money didn't disappear it was simply spent without a proper auditing trail so after the fact it was impossible to adequately(in the view of the auditors) assemble a paper trail.  It was Iraqi money not U.S. and it was spent by the Iraqi ministries.  Really, the audit is a better read than media regurgitations.

Would that sort of explanation satisfy your company accountants...Well the money's not really lost, it's just unaccounted for and that's no big deal...

It's just $9Billion....You're not serious are you that this doesn't matter..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48543-2004May22.html

When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.

...

Rod Nordlund is an excellent reporter who has spent many months in Iraq and because something happened a while back is no argument for not finding out the whereabouts of the missing $9B.  We're not talking chump change here we're talking billions of dollars.

I'll grant you that $9B missing is disturbing -- mind you all we know is that we don't have accurate records of where it went, we don't KNOW that it went to nefarious purposes.

But we KNOW that $20K has been WASTED on this promotional program put on by a ninny.

NOW, since the orginal post was wasteful spending at NASA and the only reason the missing $9B came up is because you decided to interject that non sequitur implying that those of us who think wasteful spending at NASA somehow don't care about the missing $9B, I don't see how we all of a sudden are required to meet you on the merits of your claims...  If your point is that these are both examples of money going somewhere without oversight and both should be dealt with, fine. But to hijack a thread like that is the classic behavior of a troll.

Start your own thread if you want to complain about $9B missing. Don't hijack another thread.

Another tactic of a troll: take one part of a responder's post (and not even the more important part) and attack that.

WHO CARES whose money it was if the only reason it's considered "lost" is because Western-style record keeping wasn't done so there's not a paper trail adequate to satisfy the auditors, but, in point of fact, it was spent properly and the evidence bears that out?

Write a diary about it.  See if anyone comes by.  This is hardly a reflexively pro-Bush site where scandals are discretely swept under the rug. if your argument has merit it will be discussed.  If not, it won't.

what the hell they're talking about.

The audit was solely of DFI(Development Fund for Iraq) monies.  The DFI was setup by the United Nations to manage revenues from the Iraqi oil industry.  The appendix of the audit even notes UNSCR 1483.  And that over $19 billion of the DFI funds were from repatriated Oil For Food accounts and oil exports.  But even if you didn't get that far into the audit it conveniently says this in the Executive Summary(page ONE, paragraph ONE!!):

Therefore, this report does not address the CPA management or use of U.S. appropriated funds.

No, it does matter.  The audit stands on its own.  The CPA relied on inadequate oversight by fledgling auditing committees.  It allowed ministries to allocate funds not consistent with the UN mandate.  It was a boondoggle.  A boondoggle in Iraq.  You idioticly brought up "opportunity costs" inherent in the investigation of the Republican Study Committee into NASA spending.  What exactly is a group committed to "advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives" going to do by investigating something entirely separate from the HoR?  

burns about a gallon of jet fuel every 100 yards, the Blue Angels burn about 123 gallons of fuel every mile they fly so lets make it a nice round number and say they spend $200 in fuel alone for every mile flown.  If they fly 100 miles they have spent, in fuel costs alone what NASA spent on Laurie Anderson's project.

Messed up my math, should be about a gallon every 1000 yards so they need to fly 1000 miles to burn 20K worth of fuel.  Still a lot though considering they do 70 shows a year.

and save all of the man-hours needed to comb through a budget and find those individual tiny expenditures.  Of course, then you'd have to deal with Senatorial Hall of Shame member Trent (formerly of the CCC and now in the anti-anti-lynching brigade) Lott

toward the line that separates intellectual vapidity and trollism.

Be careful, young jedi. The path you are traveling leads inevitably to the dark side.

You are not out of the mainstream.

Oh, wait, now you've decided to call Indiana out of the mainstream, changing the terms of reference, moving the bridgeposts under which the trolls lurk.

Unfortunately, these practices you employ are not out of the mainstream.

Krempasky:"Oh, that's right - you'd probably prefer no oversight at all. "

No I would not prefer no oversight.  That's a strawman argument.  And the fact that I do want oversight on the missing $9B proves it.

As for the hijacking a thread charge.  I don't see how that holds up to any logical examination of the original post and Krempasky's comment.

BTW, threads start out and branch anyway.

money, but those funds were in the control of the United States, not Iraqis and that money, now unaccounted for, will MOST LIKELY have to be MADE UP by U.S. taxpayers as the rebuilding needs are now greater than ever.

And it's not just "western accounting" that's the problem, although that's the cover story. The money simply can't be accounted for PERIOD and guess which company was in the hoard receiving that money? Do you suppose it might have been Haliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root? We know it was American Corporations because the Bush Administration shut out Iraqi companies and other international companies from France, Germany, etc. from getting these contracts.

The Coalition Provisional Authority was incompetent and open to corruption because of the idiotically ideologically driven nature of the young incompetents hired to run it and the corporate chicanery of those receiving the funds.

posts something, there was no requirement to prioritize the points made in the post and only question the highest priority points.  Pardon me for being so dense. ;)

The evidence DOES NOT BEAR OUT THAT IT WAS SPENT PROPERLY.  There is no evidence of how it was spent.  The cover story is that IT WAS SPENT PROPERLY but if you were accused of mismanagement would you admit yes, "I really screwed up" or would you rationalize that you were only trying to meet important needs and didn't have time to keep track of where the money went?

Internet troll,

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the context of the Internet, a troll refers to a person who makes inflammatory or hostile comments, which by effect or design cause disruptions in discourse, or a post made by such a person. Trolling can be described as a breaching experiment, which, because of the use of an alternate persona, allows for normal social boundaries and rules of etiquette to be tested or otherwise broken, without serious consequences.

That is definitely not me.  I am raising real, important debate points about an important issue; government corruption.

for the snarky tone of my posts.  I just have very little patience for someone who fixates on a topic and cares enough about it to debate it in public who also shows absolutely no sign of looking beyond the newsprint.  Have you yet read the audit report?  Granted, I'm an account who has taken part in audits so maybe my pain threshold is higher than normal but you really should read it.  It says explicitly(really, really explicitly several times, in fact) that the inadequate oversight was in the Iraqi ministries.  The audit knows the money went to the ministries just not exactly where it went afterwards.  It even includes a note about how the CPA advisors were to handle oversight--something like "let the Iraqis do as much as they can and keep us informed."  Within the ministries the CPA took a hands off approach.  That is the main point brought up by the audit and the source for the lack of transparancy.  And the problems within the IIG ministries were not unique to CPA oversight; they were still persistent when KPMG audited late last year.  Trying to pin some conspiracy bunk on the CPA ignores the larger issue--a systemic problem that will takes years(decades?) to solve.

And your contention that the unaccounted for money has to be replaced by US tax payer money is only true if the $8.8 billion was sunk down a hole.  If the ministries did as they said--hand the money out to the budgeted allocations--then it went into the Iraqi economy.

And we don't know it was strictly American companies.  AFAIK the restriction to American-only contracts pertained only to US funds.  For nearly a year the CPA allocated almost exclusively from the DFI.  The audit report even notes a construction company named Rasheed being granted a contract by the Iraqi ministry.  Now you could make the argument that whatever inefficiencies existing in the CPA's management of DFI were inherent in everything else they did but the audit report would be a major roadblock to that line of thinking.

Not even going to respond to the last part.  If you're comfortable tarring an awful lot of American, British, French, Bahranian, etc. people with an ideological brush then run with it.

to the KPMG audits if you ever get around to reading the SIGIR one.  

The G years in NYC certainly improved life here considerably. howver it was the big crimes that unnoticed and multiplied.  Wall Street was (and still is to a lesser degree) out of control.  It was E. Spitzer who did something about it, not Rudy.  

Face it, buying a dimebag of pot and getting away with it does not lead to the overwhelming arrogance required for say, insider trading.  Only bad parenting allows an individual to think they are more important than ten thousand families that hold stock in a company.