Halliburton: A Handy Guide to How They Have Sodomized American Taxpayers

I know it's hard to come up with random facts during those political water cooler debates at work. As a public service, allow me to offer these handy facts about Halliburton, the company that Dick Cheney used to run before he became vice resident.

Didja know that...

1. ...Cheney still receives deferred compensation from Halliburton, but insists he has "no role in the awarding of contracts"?

2. ...to avoid paying its fair share of corporate taxes, Halliburton has subsidiaries incorporated in such places as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama, Liechtenstein, and Vanuatu? Can you say "corporate tax shelters"?

3. ...Halliburton adamantly denies that its offshore subsidiaries are used to shift income out of the U.S. (but it's indisputable that *somebody* is limiting Halliburton's tax liability).

4. ...When Dick was their CEO, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax-sheltered locations ballooned from nine in 1995 to 44 in 1999. The result? A dramatic drop in Halliburton's federal taxes, which fell from $302 million in 1998 to less than zero in 1999. In fact, they got back an $85 million refund '99.

5. ...That same year, Cheney and Halliburton received $2.3 billion in government contracts and another $1.5 billion in government financing and loan guarantees.

6. ...But, let's be fair. Under Cheney, Halliburton did give a little sumfin' sumfin' back to America. They paid $2 million worth of fines for consistently overbilling the Pentagon. Despite all this, the company has continued to be awarded massive government contracts, including a new 10-year deal with the Army that, unlike any comparable arrangement, comes with NO LID on potential costs.

7. ...In the early 90's, when Dick was defense secretary under Dubya's daddy, he hired the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to determine what military functions could be outsourced to private profit-making companies. Brown & Root came up with a ton of ideas in "a classified study" and was handed a lucrative contract to implement its own plan.

8. Dick took over as CEO of Halliburton in 1995, and the defense contracts kept on coming. When he returned to civil service as vice resident in 2001, no firm was better positioned than Halliburton to cash in on the billions of dollars in contracts that resulted from the war on terror and war with Iraq.

9. Halliburton is bound so intimately to the defense establishment, it might as well be an adjunct to the military, but didja know its subsidiaries have done work with countries the U.S. has accused of supporting terror?

10. The Pentagon recently examined allegations that the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root overcharged the government by $61 million for gas imported into Iraq from Kuwait. They also checked into Halliburton charging $68 each for $12 sheets of plywood. Their excuse? Hey, it's dangerous working in Iraq!

11. Last week the company quietly acknowledged that at least one employee had participated in a $6.3 million kickback deal with a Kuwaiti company. That money has reportedly been repaid to the government.

12. Halliburton is a private, profit-making multinational company with no particular allegiance to the U.S. government, other than the fat contracts they get from the Bush pirates.

13. With Dick at the VP wheel, Halliburton has extraordinary influence over national defense policies. They get no-bid contracts, the contracts they get are sealed under the guise of "national security," and the law makes no provisions to deny contracts to companies that have been proven to defraud the U.S. taxpayers, as evidenced by the fines they've paid for price gouging.

Dick Cheney is not available for interviews and he rarely makes speeches. He hides because he cannot face the questions someone ought to be asking him.
We are getting fucked, folks, and my clairannoyance tells me unless we cry rape, the fucking will get a whole lot worse.
Bush and Dick have already run us $560 billion in debt. If you're keeping score, that's the biggest deficit in American history.

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