Steve Peacock's U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor

Palestinian Justice Project-Contract Awarded by USAID

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently awarded a $24.5 million contract in a program whose stated aim is to "build a more effective and competent Palestinian justice sector that is accountable to the public and responds to citizens' needs."

According to the solicitation:

The program will support the Palestinian Authority's commitment to strengthen and reform government institutions, and will focus on supporting visible improvements in the delivery of services that contribute towards increased public confidence.

USAID noted that "Ethics and anti-corruption will be cross-cutting themes of the program."

Chemonics will provide the Palestinians with a combination of equipment, training, and various forms of "technical assistance" to accomplish program goals.

FOR MORE COVERAGE OF PALESTINIAN ISSUES, SEE THE MONITOR'S GAZA/WEST BANK PAGE.

FOR FURTHER REPORTING ON THE U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, PLEASE VISIT THE MONITOR'S USAID PAGE.

- See more at: http://www.tradeaidmonitor.com/gazawest-bank/page/2/#sthash.RTd5gauE.dpuf

Follow @tradeaidmonitor

U.S. Gives Palestinians $300 million in Contracts

My latest from WND:

The U.S. government recently awarded a batch of contracts worth up to $300 million to Palestinian construction companies, including a firm targeted in a Palestinian Authority corruption probe.

PA Prosecutor-General Ahmed al-Mughni, likewise, survived the investigation, having escaped a car-bomb assassination attempt related to his probe of Tarifi Contracting & Reconstruction Co., other companies and PA officials, the Jerusalem Post reported at the time.

Continued at WND.com...

Follow @tradeaidmonitor

Steve Peacock on the "Grit & Grace Radio Show"

The "Grit & Grace Radio Show" has invited me to discuss my recent reporting on foreign aid to the Middle East/North Africa. Hosts Jennifer Meadows and Josh Bernstein will grill me in response to several recent articles I had written for WND and have since re-posted (under agreement with WND) here at U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor (see "Have U.S. 'Investments' in Mideast Paid Off?" and "Feds Plan to Give Egypt Armed-to-the-Teeth Ships.")

The "Grit & Grace Radio Show," which is affiliated with ConservativeDailyNews.com, airs Tuesday and Thursday nights 8-10 p.m. (CST)/9-11 p.m. (EST). I'll notify Monitor readers when the specific show containing my interview is made available online.

Have U.S. 'Investments' in Mideast Paid Off? (WND)

My latest via WND. -- S.P.

Contradictory claims of total dollar figures for U.S. foreign aid circulate around the Internet, containing oft-repeated figures that may or may not reflect reality. In response to those conflicting claims, WND has compiled a list of significant U.S. aid totals based on a review of congressional and Obama administration documents and databases.

As the debate often focuses on whether the U.S. receives, in financial parlance, an adequate return on its investment, WND decided to first focus on arguably the world’s greatest hot spot, the Middle East/North Africa, or MENA, home to three of the top 10 recipients of U.S. assistance: Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.

Though the aid totals are significantly less for Saudi Arabia and Gaza/West Bank, we have included them due to the role that the Saudis and Palestinians play on the MENA world stage.

Continued at WND.com...

Follow @tradeaidmonitor

Former Federal Prosecutor Leverages Steve Peacock's U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor in Column

Many thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review Online for using U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor today as a supplemental resource in his article "Shhh, Don't Tell Anyone Hamas Won."

McCarthy, author of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, via the NRO piece linked to "Obama to Exclude U.S. Companies from $300 Million Palestinian Project" (Monitor, Aug. 17, 2012).

McCarthy, it should be noted, is not your average columnist. Indeed, check out his bio:

Andrew C. McCarthy was a top federal prosecutor involved in some of the most significant cases in recent history. Decorated with the Justice Department’s highest honors, he retired from government in 2003, after helping launch the 9/11 investigation. He is one of America’s most persuasive voices on national security issues and author of the bestsellers Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Currently, he is a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Pajamas Media.

I am honored that Mr. McCarthy has recognized the value of U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor, and  look forward to reading Spring Fever and his other works.

Sequestration-Related Cuts? Fed Spending Continues Unabated

The Obama administration recently issued warnings to contractors of potential sequestration-related spending cuts, but in the meantime federal spending continues unabated, domestically and globally.

Some of the apparently indispensable projects include a environmental public murals in Hebron and Jericho along with similarly themed summer camps and field trips for Palestinian children, alternative energy outings to Turkey, and assistance to mango growers and hotel operators in Pakistan.

The U.S. Agency for International Development said in a public notice that “due to the failure of Congress to reach a deal on balanced deficit reduction to avoid sequestration, the president on March 1, 2013, as required by law, issued a sequestration order canceling approximately $85 billion in budgetary resources across the federal government for the remainder of the federal fiscal year.”

USAID recently advised vendors that the agency “is taking every step to mitigate the effects of these cuts, but … it is likely that your company’s workforce, revenue, and planning processes may be affected.”

But that is not stopping USAID from reaching out to contractors to carry out its new $700 million global “ecological-governance” program.

The primary goal of the agency’s Restoring the Environment through Prosperity, Livelihoods and Conserving Ecosystems, or REPLACE, program is to strengthen the ability of governments and non-governmental organizations around the globe to provide climate-change mitigation and adaptation, seascape and landscape management, and other environmental and economic interventions.

Numerous other federal entities issued similar warnings via the FedBizOpps contractor database.

Despite the advisories, new projects continue to emerge while existing programs undergo expansion, from the seemingly inconsequential – such as a $79,000 U.S. Trade & Development Agency grant to send U.S. railway representatives on an exploratory mission to India – to initiatives on a multi-billion-dollar scale.

Most notable is the Department of Defense’s extended outsourcing of global counter-narcotics functions through its Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office, or CNTPO, a potential $15 billion contract vehicle that has enriched – and will continue to enrich – Blackwater Lodge & Training Center Inc.; Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems; ARINC Engineering Services LLC; Raytheon Technical Service Company; and Northrop Grumman/TASC Inc.

The report "DoD Prepares Follow-Up to $15 Billion Global Counterdrug Contracts" continues to be one of the Monitor's most regulalry visited articles, generating consistent visits and Google search hits nearly twenty months later.

The following list of federal procurement actions represents an additional snapshot of recent contracts, requests for proposals and other solicitations, both large and small. This nation-by-nation compilation is by no means comprehensive but is designed to enlighten U.S. taxpayers about how the federal government is spending – or intends to spend – their money.

GAZA/WEST BANK

The creation of environmental-themed public murals, conducting student field-trips to “environmentally important sites” in Hebron and Jericho and holding environmental summer camps for Palestinian children are among programs that the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service intends to fund. And the USFS is procuring the services of the Palestinian Association for Child Arts and Culture to carry out these tasks for youth in the city of Hebron. The agency did not disclose the estimated cost.

Helping the Palestinian Authority to “build more effective and competent public institutions that are accountable to the public and respond to citizens’ needs” will cost $20.5 million under a contract that USAID awarded to Development Alternatives Inc.

U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor founder Steve Peacock initially broke the story on the project’s unveiling last April for WND.com.

PAKISTAN

Current efforts to improve the competitiveness of small- and medium businesses in Pakistan have been extended another 20 months, now that USAID has raised Chemonics International’s contract ceiling to $93 million. The current contract for the Pakistan Firms Project was slated to end April 15, but with a $2.5 million increase, Chemonics will continue to provide technology upgrades, skill development and other assistance to hotels, mango growers, knitted-garment manufacturers and other Pakistani enterprises through December 31, 2014.

TURKEY

Alternative-energy industry representatives are getting free hotel rooms and airfare to Turkey to explore ways to capitalize on the nation’s energy boom. The U.S. Trade & Development Agency is offering a $537,000 grant to carry out the Smart Grid Upgrades to the Teias Electricity Transmission Network Feasibility Study. According to the agency, “Turkey is facing a rapidly rising demand in the midst of its bustling economic growth. The Turkish government is consequently making a concentrated effort to explore alternative sources of energy, such as wind, hydro and geothermal power as a way of meeting this shortfall.”

Consequently, the Obama administration has decided that U.S. taxpayers should shoulder the burden of that trip to Ankara.

UNITED STATES

Under its Adult Education and Immigrant Integration project, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $1.3 million contract to World Education Inc. of Boston to design an initiative to “reduce linguistic, academic, and employment barriers for skilled and low-skilled immigrants and refugees, and to integrate them into the U.S. workforce and professions.”

A similar version of this article first appeared via WND.com on March 18, 2013. Under agreement with WND, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.

Palestinian Cop-Shop Contract Shrouded in Secrecy

Obama-West Bank tech project details limited

Palestinian police stations in the West Bank soon will undergo modernization of their information technology systems courtesy of the Obama administration, which is arranging to retrofit the law enforcement facilities with new IT equipment.

U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor has discovered, however, that details of the endeavor largely remain shrouded in secrecy.

The U.S. Department of State recently disclosed the $268,000 contract via the FedBizOpps database, where the Monitor located the award during routine research. Despite finding in the database Contract Award no. SGE50012C0109 – which merely refers to Solicitation No. SGE50012R0120 – an exhaustive search produced zero results for the solicitation and supporting records such as a Request for Proposals or a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition, or JOFOC , document.

The State Department either did not open the endeavor to competitive bidding or simply neglected to publicly make available – as required by federal contracting regulations – an initial solicitation for bids.

Even in the case of the contractor, Excellent Systems Inc., whose location is listed as “Al Falah Building-Fourth floor, Al Quds Street, Ramallah, West Bank” – the Monitor could not locate an Internet presence for the company.

A Google search for Excellent Systems produced a hit reading “Feb 17, 2006. … Our current focus is to implement web-based information portal systems, largely using Microsoft technologies. These are web sites either on the … www.excellentsystems.us/.”

Any attempt to click through to the site, however, only leads to the message “Directory Listing Denied. This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.”

The West Bank police project is unrelated to other – significantly more costly – U.S.-funded initiatives. As the Monitor recently reported, the Obama administration had separately committed $300 million toward West Bank and Gaza construction projects , expenditures deemed critical toward attaining the “success of a future Palestinian state.”

It is also separately slated an additional $750 million for what is known as the Infrastructure Needs Project Phase II.

The combined value of these initiatives equals about a quarter of U.S. Agency for International Development assistance to the Palestinians since 1994. Indeed, to accommodate the agency’s growing West Bank-Gaza portfolio, USAID recently began a recruitment campaign for a senior technical and policy adviser.

The position is designed “to help strengthen and advance infrastructure development and capacity strengthening,” according to a Personal Services Contract document. The selected individual contractor will serve as the administration’s “primary adviser” on such issues, which the document acknowledged are “often surrounded by an unusually high degree of political sensitivity, especially as they relate to potentially controversial, high profile Middle East peace process issues.”

The adviser will work with key stakeholders within the Palestinian Authority “to help build the institutions and foundational infrastructure of a viable, democratic Palestinian state living in peace and security with Israel.”

“President Obama’s goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a core United States (U.S.) national security objective and the long-term focus of the USAID West Bank and Gaza,” it added.

A similar version of this article originally appeared via WND.com Oct. 29, 2012.

Hurricane Sandy: Another Example of Why We Need to Invest More in America, Less Around the Globe (COMMENTARY)

I have an idea how we as a nation can better cope with the financial burden that nature has imposed upon us in this post-hurricane environment of devastation on the East Coast: Assess and then cancel various programs that U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency currently are carrying out or are planning to implement across the globe.

For the sake of full disclosure, I say this not only as a concerned taxpayer who continues to advocate streamlining (not the elimination) of foreign aid, but as a human being who lives one mile from the beach on the battered New Jersey coast -- someone who is doing significantly better than many of his Shore neighbors, but who is temporarily displaced nonetheless.

Before I continue, also keep in mind that this is less political -- insofar as partisan politics -- than it appears. Yes, the Obama Administration currently is executing the following initiatives. But as I've said before, it's a power thing, not an Obama thing. Such endeavors took place under Clinton and Bush, and in various forms will continue under future presidents.

Here we go:

Cancel the planned development of Ph.D. and masters degree programs for which USAID intends to fund in a Ugandan university. Use that money in schools across New Jersey, New York, or Connecticut. 

Cancel the nearly $1 billion in construction projects that USAID has planned for the Palestinians.  Use it to rebuild homes, businesses, and infrastucture destroyed during the hurricane. OUR hurricane.

Those business start-up projects in The Philippines? Cancel them. Most of the businesses in my area are closed, hopefully just temporarily. many, presumbaly, will go under. Tell the Filipinos they have to wait. 

The groundwater cleanup projects in for which USTDA paid the cost of U.S. industry reps to fly to China to boost that sector? Stop such subsidies, damnit. I'm guessing the groundwater between Seaside Heights and Point Pleasant (among other locations) could use some ameliorating. 

The list is seemningly endless. There are bigger and even more controversial projects, I am sure, the billions is no so-called "drug war" contracts among one of the more insane categories.

Oh, okay, just one more example (out of many). I know it amounts to peanuts, but the $322,000 that Department of State just spent on a 10-animal dog kennel in Iraq could have been used to rebuild damaged animal -- and human -- shelters here on the East Coast instead. Just sayin.' -- Steve Peacock

Obama Spending $300 Million for 'Palestinian State'

The Obama administration has released details of a plan to infuse another $300 million into West Bank and Gaza construction projects, spending it deems critical toward attaining the “success of a future Palestinian state.”

Despite combined U.S. and international donor-community efforts, a significant portion of the public infrastructure currently under Palestinian Authority control remains in need of expansion or repair, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Obama, through USAID, is stepping in to meet the need as a successful Palestinian state “depends upon an infrastructure system capable of providing basic services to a growing population,” the agency said in a Statement of Work released Sept. 24.

The Local Construction Project, or LCP, on the other hand, explicitly forbids the transfer of funds to PA-owned or controlled entities – though it likewise mandates that subsequent awards are given to local contractors, thereby excluding the participation of U.S. vendors.

Despite the prohibition against the awarding of contracts to government-affiliated firms, the PA indeed will directly benefit from the LCP.

While the bulk of the aid tentatively is slated for roads and local water-related projects, the construction and rehabilitation of municipal and local government infrastructure is permitted.

Other permissible projects include those benefiting health clinics and hospitals; wastewater treatment plant components and related infrastructure; and youth and sports facilities.

USAID also gave itself some additional flexibility by inserting a provision in the SOW allowing contract awards for: “Other related infrastructure construction programs, which may include any other infrastructure facilities identified as vital to the success of USAID strategic goals.”

Specifically excluded from project funding, however, are power generation and transmission infrastructure, large-scale wastewater treatment plant facilities and “provision of U.S. equipment and materials for the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian entities.”

Accompanying the document are updated U.S. government guidelines – known as Mission Order No. 21 – for ensuring that USAID-funded assistance “does not inadvertently provide support to entities or individuals associated with terrorism.”

Running concurrently with LCP infrastructure modernization are PA efforts to crack down on militants in the region, including those who are attempting to tighten their grip on Palestinian governmental and military affairs.

Indeed, as WND reported this past week, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party recently began targeting Hamas military installations in the West Bank while also contending with the alleged infiltration by Hamas of Fatah security forces.

The LCP initiative is the latest of several programs that the USAID Mission to West Bank and Gaza launched in the past year, adding to a $3.5 billion portfolio of initiatives that the agency has financed since 1995.

Earlier this year USAID handed out the first round of awards in a separate Palestinian infrastructure project worth upwards of $750 million. Unlike LCP, the Infrastructure Needs Project Phase II enabled multiple U.S. companies to secure construction contracts.

USAID also unveiled a project to “fix” the PA, as WND reported, embarking upon a search for contractors to help the Palestinians to enact laws competently and create good policies governing public services.

The continuing assistance from the U.S. government additionally ties into the Obama administration’s efforts to promote the U.S. role in financing “Palestinian development and building the future Palestinian state.”

As this writer also previously reported via The Revered Review, Obama, through USAID, launched a media- and public-outreach program to improve Palestinian opinion of U.S. policy, an effort that would help secure Obama a place in history for bringing statehood a step closer to reality.

This article originally appeared via WND on Sept. 30, 2012. Rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.

WND: Obama Spending $300 Million for 'Palestinian State'

My latest contribution to WND -- S.P.:

The Obama administration has released details of a plan to infuse another $300 million into West Bank and Gaza construction projects, spending it deems critical toward attaining the “success of a future Palestinian state.”

Continued at WND...