government contracts

A small group of bloggers....were invited to Blackwater Worldwide's headquarters....to get a "VIP Tour" of the facility. Read what they saw and said (includes pictures)

This is the second part of a post based on a Vanity Fair Article called Washington's 8-Billion-Dollar Shadow which is a long, but good read.

Now, in part I we learned that

* SAIC stands for Science Applications International Corporation
* They are possibly the largest US federal contractor
* They have friends in high places
* Many times their work is substandard
* They were instrumental in the lies which led to the Iraq War
* They see the "Global War (on some) Terror" as a great revenue stream

and

* they are really, really good at getting contracts

So, now. On to today. We left off with outrage about their role in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Okay, this is scary. That's a link to a really long article (even for Vanity Fair) on a company you probably never heard of, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Forget Halliburton, GE, Electric Boat, National Steel and Shipbuilding, Boeing, and Bechtel. These guys have the sweet deals, and the big cojones to go after more and more.

SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent.

Yes, they beat ExxonMobil by nearly a point in a year which has been called BigOil's best year ever.

A bill filed in the State House threatens to criminalize the normal and legal activities of hundreds of small business owners. House Bill 308 “State Contracts/ Illegal Immigrants” filed by Rep. George Cleveland would mandate participation in a voluntary federal program by everyone who enters into a contract with the State of North Carolina for “construction or repair work or for the purchase of apparatus, supplies, materials, or equipment”.

The Bill would increase the cost of running State Government by burdening businesses entering into State contracts with more red tape and legal liability. It would lead to employment discrimination against legal aliens and promote outsourcing to foreign companies not subject to United States immigration laws. Many small businesses will either shun State Contracts or increase bids to cover costs.

A congressman who heads a homeland security subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Doesn't that sound horrible? That must have happened a long time ago, right? Wrong.
Read more below!