If half of it is true what a great bargain.....the shareholders of Haliburton are getting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cJlJudDtVE
This is not a problem that is limited to Iraq. Every part of that video can be related to local government and local corporations.
But Halliburton and its subsidiaries have become world champions at feeding at the public trough. What's going on in Iraq dwarfs any other examples of that. And saying everybody does it doesn't excuse it.
But it is not limited to governmental contracts, I worked for a Fortune 100 company that raped and pilliaged clients, including other divisions, on cost plus projects operated in a similar fashion. The waste was not limited to only cost plus either.
Personally, I thing that Halliburton is just one of many. The media focus is just on them rather than another.
In the company for which I worked at one time we would get governmental requests for quotation for parts. Things like bearings are very expensive to manufacture specifically due to set up and the like but very cost effective if you use an existing design with comparable abilities. We got requests that were exactly to the specification of standard parts but were a very small fraction of an inch larger or smaller on the outer or inner diameter. The set up cost alone to manufacture the new part would more than pay for the part and since everything was being designed and built specifically it would have been easy to incorporate the standardized parts. One case in particular required the manufacture using a process which was illegal in the US but the requirement specified no foreign made components. I never found out how they dealt with that problem.
