The Daily Background

As you probably already know, two of my big issues are the misuse of our tax money, and how much of that tax money goes to over-charging private contractors hired by this Administration to do jobs which are normally done by government employees. If you’re interested in both of those, you’ll find this interesting too.

I don’t know if you remember, but a little while ago, Republican House Representative Duke Cunningham resigned from his position as on the House defense appropriations subcommittee and quit his job as a Representative from California’s 50th district. Now A Democrat named Francine Busby is running in an April 11th special election to replace his seat in Congress.

The reason why Cunningham resigned, was because he was indicted in a major bribery scandal, in which he personally accepted large bribes in exchange for setting up a particular private contractor up with more than 170 million dollars in government contracts related to the “War on Terror”. The name of the private company is MZM, Inc. It was/is owned by Mitchell Wade, who pleaded guilty on February 24th to bribery, after Cunningham also pled in exchange for implicating others to prosecutors, and testifying against Wade (there may yet be a few other Republicans implicated with Wade’s bribery as well).

So all of this is very bad. And MZM and Cunningham went under investigation in 2005. Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years and a 4 months recently, Wade has yet to be sentenced (the tentative date for his sentencing is in August, meanwhile he’s cooperating with prosecutors, which may lead to the indictments of others). But, as those involved in this have been found guilty, it would appear that everything ended up all right. Herein lies the problem. When the investigation was in full swing in summer of 2005, on June 28, the Pentagon ordered that no new contracts be awarded to MZM Inc, after it became more obvious what had happened. That sounds reasonable at the very least (after all I know I would have demanded money back).

However that didn’t guarantee the end of the stream of our tax money going to MZM Inc. However, less than a month later, MZM was taken “out of the doghouse” and allowed to bid on multi-million dollar contract work again.

In August of last year, MZM was sold to a private firm called Veritas Capital. MZM still is employed and receives contracts from the Pentagon. Most recently (days ago in fact), it recieved a quarter of a million dollar contract to gather intelligence (read: spy) on churches, mosques, schools, and other locations within the United States. Outrageous. Meanwhile, the company which Wade founded is still heavily tainted by his influence, because he hired hundreds of friends and appointed them all “senior vice presidents” of the company. And our money is still going to them. And Wade still owns an unspecified amount of stocks in the company, so when it profits, so does he.

MZM Inc is a symbol of what’s wrong with this government.

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Please read: A important note on posting this week

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Please read: A important note on posting this week

Filed under: Tax Money, Z-TDB Blog