[quote]
The first contracts for rebuilding post-war Iraq have been awarded, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s old employer, Halliburton Co., is one of the early winners.
My god! How strange, utterly bizarre, and what a coincidence!
Who could possibly have predicted that the administration would find out that the Vice President’s old company was the best one qualified to receive unspecified millions (perhaps billions) of dollars of government money to rebuild the same country that the administration is currently bombing?
I tell ya: it’s a small world. The coincidences never cease to amaze me.
Granted I am a Halliburton employee but might qualification have played a role here? Daniel buddy, we’ve got some pretty righteous experience in these matters.
Forgive me for cross-posting (refined), but here’s a wee limerick I just composed for another thread:
Poor GWB was in trouble:
“Though most of Kabul’s turned to rubble,
Bin Laden’s not found,
And Al Q’s gone to ground.
Get me PNAC on the double!”
So Dubya asked Perle “are you certain
Attacking Iraq will divert 'em?”
Said Paul Wolfowitz
“Sure, just blow them to bits.
Bonus: contracts for our Haliburton!”
“Very few oil wells have been set ablaze by Iraqis so far, in contrast to the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait set fire to more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells. Halliburton’s KBR unit was involved in putting out the 1991 fires.”
Halliburton apparently performed well the first time which was, incidentally, pre-Cheney.
Just wanted to mention that Boots & Coots has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, having previously squandered nearly all the enormous revenues they earned putting out fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf war, so this couldn’t come at a better time for them. Word from a former employee I know was that they had been in negotiations with Halliburton to sell one or more of their business units, but that Halliburton was not highly interested.
One more random note: Boots & Coots representatives, as well as reps from other oil well fire-fighting oragnizations, were invited to a meeting at US Central Command headqurters in Tampa last October, to discuss contingency plans for fire-fighting following the invasion. Point, if any, being that none of these announcements exactly come out of the blue.
lieu, it’s possible that Halliburton is the best company for the job. But good goddamn if this administration doesn’t know the first thing about avoiding the appearance of impropriety. This isn’t the first time it’s looked like oil companies have gotten preferential treatment from their ex-cohorts in the White House, and it’s sure not gonna be the last.
If Halliburton had won the contract through a completely transparent process, that’d be one thing. But when we the taxpayers don’t even know how much money they’re getting, much less how they won the contract – when all we know is that Cheney is the second-most-important person in the administration that assigned them the contract – well, something smells funny.
I ain’t saying y’all are incapable. I’m saying that the White House shouldn’t remind me of Tammany Hall.
Besides the dirty political ties, of course, there’s the remotest of possibilities – infinitesimal, I say – that Cheney is still pally with his ex-coworkers at Halliburton, and that this friendship could unduly influence where my tax dollars go.
On reading more about that linked article, we find that of the companies mentioned, the Parsons Corp gave the greatest percentage of their political contributions to Republicans, at 61% of their contributions.
That is, except for Halliburton, who gave 95% of their contributions to Republicans.
Technically, no. Mr. Cheney hasn’t appeared in a proxy statement (SEC Filing DEF 14A) since 2001. (He has retained stakes in a handful of other companies, though.)
Um, why else would these companies give to specific parties unless they felt they were going to benefit?
However, this does seem a little, well, direct I must admit;)
What are the options? You can ban donations, in which case the taxpayer has to cough up for all those fantastic commercials, and little parties will get screwed so they don’t tread on toes by cosy rules about qualifying for state funding.
Or you can allow all the donations to be invisible ie total corruption…
Maybe visible corruption is the lesser of these evils.
Recently, there has been some serious moving going on in my office building. Some people were relocated to another office from a company we had aquired, resulting in extra space here at HQ. I heard they were looking to get some outside help from a moving company to handle most of the heavy lifting. I suggested a moving company I used to do part time work for. My brother also works there, and I’m still buds with the owner of the place.
This can’t be good. I work for Company X, but I used to work for Moving Company Y. Isn’t that a little questionable? Perhaps the owner of Y is giving me some money under the table for helping him get this work. Maybe I should be fired.
