Squeezing Out the Little Guy in Stimulus Spending

Socialists like to do things big. They tend to go for big projects that make a splash. They also prefer to deal with big companies.

Apparently the stimulus projects are no exception. From the Billings Gazette of Montana:

KALISPELL - Across the nation, local firms can expect to lose billions of economic stimulus dollars to large multinational corporations, thanks to a government contracting scheme that puts paperwork speed ahead of community recovery.

In Montana, that means qualified building firms are out of the loop, while many millions in federal construction funding will go to a California company that recently earned a stern rebuke for its failures in Iraq - a war-profits scandal that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

"It's a farce," said Dewey Swank of Kalispell's Swank Enterprises. "It stinks of politics and big special interests."

Over the past several years, Swank has teamed with Montana-based CTA Architects to successfully design and build four federal border stations. Several more ports now are being built along the Montana-Canada line, thanks to the massive stimulus bill, but this time Swank and CTA didn't have a chance to bid.

That's because California-based Parsons Corp., of Pasadena, has mastered the expedited IDIQ contracting bid process.

Parsons, with 12,000 employees worldwide and revenues pushing $3.5 billion last year, is no stranger to IDIQ contracting, or to the controversy that comes with it.

The company entered Iraq in 2003, with just eight government contracts for reconstruction. But those few vague umbrella agreements eventually came to cover about 1,000 projects in 500 locations. Oversight was spread as thin as the contracts and, when projects stalled, taxpayer money hemorrhaged.

Question: Wasn't the Left howling angry at the Bush administration's contract awards process which went to firms like Halliburton (primarily because they were the only company qualified that was large enough to do the work) and Blackstone?

But here they are, doing the same type of contracts, and we suspect for largely the same reasons. They are in a hurry, and there are more than likely lobbyists aplenty for this mega-firms in Washington to make sure they are first in line at the trough.

Swank, for one, wonders why someone with Parsons' recent history is still winning government contracts, and then he answers his own question: "Someone's palm is getting greased."

In fact, Parsons ranked third among the nation's construction-services firms in terms of federal campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle, donating about $600,000 split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. The company also spent more than $1.5 million lobbying federal lawmakers between 2004 and 2008, with $305,000 shelled out during the 2008 presidential election year.

"That," Swank said, "tells me a lot about how things get done."

Jobs at Swank Enterprises have been trimmed by a third, victims of an economic recession fueled by firms deemed "too big to fail."

This is not going to stimulate the economy because these are not jobs that create permanent positions, if any. By consolidating projects into a vary narrow range of companies, it merely means that the big cats get fed, and the smaller companies on the food chain will continue to starve. It is corp-ocracy at its finest.

By concentrating on big contracts, the government is ensuring that small business -- the backbone of America's economy -- are left with the scraps from the table. It means that private projects are squeezed out as credit remains tight. The government is the player at the table with all the chips.

Have I mixed in enough metaphors? Whether it's being done by Republicans or Democrats, big government spending through socialist policies does not make for a healthy economy, even when the projects represent needed infrastructure.