Bush-Cheney have been really, really good to Halliburton 6/11/2007 6:53:16 PM
Halliburton has made billions under Bush-Cheney through government contracts and its practices of overcharging and waste. Why don't the U.S. taxpayers seem to notice or care? Since Bush/Cheney came to power, Halliburton's contracts from the government have increased 600 percent. This includes more than $10 billion in Pentagon contracts; many of these contracts have been awarded to Halliburton without the process of competitive bidding. Halliburton's 2006 profits were $2.348 billion. Its overall profits have gone up more than 368 percent under the Bush/Cheney regime.
Bush/Cheney have been extraordinarily good to Halliburton!
In turn, Halliburton has a consistent pattern of overcharging for its services. In Iraq, it has been shown that Halliburton hired Iraqi laborers to do manual labor at $5 a day, but then charged the U.S. government over $50 a day for each worker. An analysis of waste and overcharges by contractors in Iraq reported Halliburton was responsible for some $2.7 billion.
Now Halliburton is moving its headquarters to Dubai, where it will be out of reach from any investigations of its misdoings should a Democratic President be elected.
Halliburton is only one of many corporations to feed their greed under Bush/Cheney. Privatizing government functions, i.e. awarding lucrative contracts to private corporations to perform functions and services once done by government workers at much lower costs, has increased by 86 percent under Bush/Cheney so that corporate contracts now total almost $400 billion a year. There are now more workers doing federal jobs under corporate contracts than there are people employed directly as federal government employees. This system of corporate contracts under Bush/Cheney is a flagrant rip-off of the American taxpayers. Contracts are awarded without bidding, contracts are awarded without verifying the cost estimates provided by the contractors, the work itself is poorly monitored for quality or even to verify it is provided as contracted. We all know how privatizing Walter Reed Army Hospital turned out. Private companies have been awarded contracts at eight times the IRS's cost to collect certain taxes for the IRS, with their profits to be $330 million over the next decade. The list of excesses goes on and on...
Why do the American taxpayers stand for being raped by Bush/Cheney and their corporate pals? Are the taxpayers that uninformed about the situation? Do they simply not care? Have they been so thoroughly brainwashed by the Republican Party that they will tolerate any amount of corporate corruption? I can't figure out why there is no public outcry to stop this stealing from us.
(For more details on this subject, check out The Hightower Lowdown, Halliburton Watch, or Iraq for Sale.)
