Halliburton Hallitosis
The connection the Vice President has to his former corporation is continuing to stay in the news . Most recently now for a Congressional Research Service reportCheney's Ties to Halliburton (washingtonpost.com). This report attracts the attention it has due to the VP's statements that he no longer has any financial ties to Halliburton, which the stipends he still receives from the company seem to argue against. All deferred payments from previous earned salary, statements made on the Vp's behalf claim. Not that they volunteered this information. The amount: $150,000 for last, this, and next year hardly measures against his Vice Presidential salary of $192,600. This occurs upstage, downstage a measurable portion of $87 billion is being organized into contracts for Halliburton by the United States Agency for International Development.
I suppose that Washington - this nations politics - like any other industry or institution must be allowed some degree of latitude for its ways and means of doing business. I sometimes sound things out on my sister Ann, or brother-in-law Al (lawyers both) and am surprised that they will often shrug their shoulders at what seems desperately malfeasant to me. I'm willing to go with the flow. I've known friends who would rail at the crooks in congress one moment then buy a stereo off the back of a truck the next. Some things can never be room temperature.
Still it seems to to me that VP Dick Cheney and his apologists are missing the point here, its not just that those $150gs trickling in might feed the flame of fondness in his heart for his old job. Which he left only when an exhausting search for a suitable running mate for Geo. W. Bush kept bringing his name to the top of the list. The trick there is to set your pen to the top of the sheet and write your name first. It is more that I have never heard him say that he isn't going back. It's the thought that Halliburton has Cheney's old desk, his credenza, and chair in storage someplace awaiting his return. These thoughts of mine turn on nothing sinister, sharp or moments brooding, simply on the Republicans current pains to rehabilitate the revolving door from vaguely sordid reality to positive selling point and career path aggressively owned. I remember reading a notion from Grover Norquist, I believe, around the time that Nicolas Confessore's K Street Project article appeared - that if they could get the revolving door greased up enough - they could go to the business schools and universities and recruit young and bright right-thinking types into short loss leader careers in congress, before they go off and and accept that big rock candy mountain of cash: selling public access and influence for private interest. If I believe that the comfort of a corporate chair lies behind and ahead of political office, sinister I am not bending.
The last question I have on this, and I wonder why I seem to have this concern to myself, is how Halliburton came to be such a diverse enterprise so exquisitely poise to receive these USAID contracts. Ready to go with the right expertise, equipment, and previous vetted contracts with the federal system. Often it is referred to as simply the only company one could go to. When you need to repair war damaged oilfields, or you need a tent city to house an army in the desert. When you need to repair infrastructure destroyed by a modern warfare doctrine that directs targeting infrastructure. The sort of hypermobile Multilayered airwar intensive military that was ushered into being by Dick Cheney and his assistants when he was Secretary of Defense in the elder Bush administration and championed through the following years (the document Rebuilding America's Defenses from the Project for the New American Century details this fairly well). Frontline did a program half a year ago describing how use of this military capability was elevated to the level of national security policy. Maybe it is just the everbourning skeptic within me, but there is something here that strikes me of the joke about the plate glass retailer found driving around at night with a bushel barrel full of bricks in his truck.
Well roll over Bechtel and tell Carlyle the news.
10:50:45 AM  ;;
|
|
