Your Tax Dollars At Work or Corporte Welfare Queens Slurp it up

The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a contract extension valued at more than $58.3 million for a space-based infrared system being developed for missile warning and defense.

A new Army contract worth up to $5 billion will provide commercial satellite terminals and associated services to all federal agencies, including those handling domestic disaster relief and homeland security missions.

First six of 18 surplus former Netherlands Lockheed Martin F-16AM/BM fighters for Chile leave Europe

Cape residents who received utilities in the SW-1, SW-2 and SW-3 assessment areas paid as much as $5,040 per month to Kellogg Brown and Root and eventually MWH Constructors Inc. after KBR defaulted on its contract to rent nine pickup trucks used by its inspectors. That's $560 per month for each truck — one was listed as a 1987 pickup truck worth about $1,200 according to auto value services. The rental payments were paid to Halliburton Inc. and included payment for Texas property taxes.

ACCOUNTING shell games are being used by top U.S. officials to hide some taxpayer costs of the increasingly disastrous Iraq war.
A recent federal audit found that a State Department agency knowingly withheld information from Congress about skyrocketing construction overruns. The U.S. Agency for International Development hid overruns by listing them as overhead administrative costs, The New York Times reported.
For example, a children’s hospital in Basra was to be built for $50 million. In April, contractor Bechtel told USAID officials the project would cost $98 million, because of rising security costs and other problems. Later that month, USAID officials told Congress that costs were still expected to be $50 million.

Three utility companies spoke before an infrastructure panel of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, seeking relief from a pool of federal hurricane aid, known as Community Development Block Grants, allocated to Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

CHICAGO, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Sales of U.S. high-fructose corn syrup to Mexico will increase when the market opens to free trade in 2008, said an executive at Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the world's largest producer of the sweetener used in soft drinks and candy.