I'm not sure this diary is necessary - we all know Cheney's got real problems in the ethics department. But I think that Cheney needs a little attention once in a while, so I'll do it anyway. I have always wondered what the hell was up with Cheney actually receiving a "deferred salary" and stock options from Halliburton while acting as VP, but this article in Truthout.org (titled See Dick Loot) really brought it all back to me with sledgehammer force. (
http://www.truthout.org/...). If nothing else, I hope this diary will cause you to read the article, which I think deserves wide play.
More...
Here's a bit of history. I used to work for Schlumberger, the oilfield's "Big Blue" as a Field Engineer, overseas. That includes about 4 years in the Middle East. It's an oil service company, not an "oil company", just like Halliburton was. We Schlumberger guys had to be Electrical Engineers, or Physicists, or at least highly technically educated, plus we had to be in shape for the rigors of the job. We'd be stationed in some hellhole city (sometimes a nice one, like Alexandria, Egypt, or Cartagena, Colombia) and take our big blue and white trucks out to the wellsite when needed. The trucks were packed full of electronics to measure various parameters down in the drill hole. We had a cable on the back of the truck that was several thousand feet long, wrapped on a drum. It had 7 conductor wires, spiralling around each other, all wrapped in wire "armor" to give it strength and resistance to the hostile elements in a drill hole a mile deep, or more.
We'd attach a sonde (or a "tool", for those that didn't like fancy French words) at the end of the cable, lower it to the bottom of the well, and then bring it up slowly with the truck engine and a special transmission with forward and reverse gears that could be operated out of the back of the truck. The tool would send signals up the cable, which went through a complex electronic "panel" and into a camera which recorded the signals on film. At the time Schlumberger was the biggest single user of Kodak film. Since then they've gone all digital. The tools were various: resistivity, sonic, nuclear. Each measured the porosity and permeability of the rocks down there, and the potential for oil. Of course, you had to do some calculating.
Schlumberger had stuck a lot of research into their equipment and they were the best. An honest day's work for an honest day's pay. (Sometimes the days were 48 hours long, or 72, since once you shut the drilling rig down to take measurements, the oil company was losing money, so speed was of the essence.) A tough job. But the company was extremely ethical. We were told to never give any indication that we would be willing to give bribes to get work, no matter which country we were in. Why would we - we were the best. And something I really liked was that engineers from any part of the world were paid the same amount, no matter their country's living standards. I really hated to see Indonesian roughnecks being paid $10/day by the oil companies for the same work that Americans got $100 for. Schlumberger was then, and for all I know is now, an extremely classy outfit.
All this is by way of introducing Halliburton. They had big red and grey trucks. Whenever we were finished logging a well, the oil company would stick "casing" in the well, which was pipe that was just slightly smaller in diameter than the borehole. Then Halliburton would come in and cement the casing in place. Their claim to fame was gigantic pumps that would pump cement down an annulus between the casing and the borehole, thousands of feet down into the ground. Let me tell you, when their pumps were running, you definitely wanted to wear earplugs. Again, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, although not as interesting technically as Schlumberger (to me). (For those who are wondering how you can put steel casing into a borehole and still produce oil, that's where Schlumberger came in for a second visit. We'd use explosives, shaped charges, to blow holes into the casing and into the rock. Then the oil would flow through those holes. I got to be quite the little explosives expert.)
So when I started reading about ethical, hardworking, old Halliburton being involved in all sorts of dirty dealings in Iraq, I was quite mystified. One day I came across an article in the New Yorker (I think) that explained it to me. (I don't have a link, several months ago.) What happened? In a nutshell, Brown and Root happened. B&R had quite different beginnings. They started as a construction company in Texas. They pulled all sorts of things to get construction contracts. (I'm not quite sure how Kellogg got into their name, but it's known as "Kellogg, Brown, and Root" or KBR, these days.) They grew into quite a powerhouse by making deals, any sort of deals, with politicians. Eventually Halliburton merged with KBR and kept the Halliburton name. But it was really a reverse takeover - KBR is now the master, with its, shall we say, rather unsavory history.
All this would be a minor footnote in American corporate history, if not for Cheney's involvement. Dick "Show Me The Money or I'll Shoot You In The Face" Cheney was one of the "crazies" kept in the White House basement back in the Reagan days. Then one day he popped up as CEO of Halliburton. Now here's a company with a long and storied history, and one day a no-name functionary is their CEO? Wow. But quite clearly he promised them that he'd be able to get bigger, better, deals with the government, due to his contacts. And really, there's not much wrong with that, at least under the current system. I mean, seriously, how are you going to prevent a guy with a wealth of experience in government going to a private company and using his experience to talk to the right people and get work? Ain't gonna happen, not now, and not in any remotely foreseeable idealistic future.
What is really really wrong is when some guy goes from private industry into the government and uses his experience to smooth the company's way into government work. What is even wronger, absolutely wrong, crazy wrong, is when that guy uses his experience to continue actually making money from the private company while in his public office. That's just...crazy. But it's happening right now, with the Vice President of the United States of America. Cheney is actually making more money from Halliburton than he is as VP. That's right, folks. Read that again. Ethics, shmethics. From "See Dick Loot":
Cheney had much more at stake than pure altruism in making sure Halliburton/KBR obtained so many no-bid contracts in occupied Iraq. Despite his claims of not having any financial ties to Halliburton, the fact is that in both 2001 and 2002 he earned twice as much from a deferred salary from his "old" company as when he was CEO.
Also:
By the end of 2002, Cheney owned at least 433,000 unexercised Halliburton stock options worth over $10 million. And that was before the invasion of Iraq, when the games really began.
In March 2003, the month the invasion began, Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract worth $7 billion from the Pentagon. The blatant awarding of this "reconstruction" contract to Halliburton even led Representative Henry Waxman to comment, "The administration's approach to the reconstruction of Iraq is fundamentally flawed. It's a boondoggle that's enriching private contractors."
And also:
Aside from the aforementioned awarding of no-bid contracts worth billions of US taxpayer dollars, as early as December 2003, the US Army found out Halliburton was overcharging the government $61 million for fuel transportation and $67 million for food services in Iraq. I remember being in Baghdad when this occurred - seeing the enormously long gas lines at petrol stations whilst knowing Halliburton, not only failing to provide Iraqis with their own petrol, was even charging the US taxpayer three dollars per gallon for fuel that local companies could have imported for under one dollar.
And:
Note that on May 31, 2004, an Army Corps of Engineers email revealed that Cheney's office "coordinated" Halliburton's multi-billion dollar Iraq contract. Cheney, like most common criminals, denied having anything to do with the no-bid contract.
I have to ask: What the hell is this? How did the US go from Harry Truman, who wouldn't sully the office of the President by even making money from memoirs of his time as President, to this?
The article has much much more. Read it. And then do what you can to raise your voice in protest. This is...crazy.