Halliburton wins Iraq rebuilding contracts

by Trauma_Hound 27 Replies latest social current

• 

  rem

  JT,

  of course 1000's if contracts are handled the correct and proper way, but the fact is here in washington everyone knows RULE NUMBER ONE -- IT IS WHO YOU KNOW AND NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU KNOW

  in this case i can't say,but don't close your eyes like a jw and say ALL IS WELL IN PARADISE

  Of course there is a possibility that a shady business deal went down - that's possible and does happen in both government and private contracts. The problem is jumping to the conclusion that the deal was improper without evidence. The fact that Cheney had ties to this company proves nothing. Like I said, if the deal were improper, I'm sure Bechtel and the other bidders would be raising hell about it, don't you think?

  rem
• 

  Xander

  Yeah, cause we know how popular people that question the current administration stay, don't we?
• 

  rem

  Xander,

  Yeah, you're right. Employees of Bechtel would never know if their company was upset about unfair contracting.

  rem
• 

  Gamaliel

  This is interesting material. Naturally, this doesn't prove anything at all. It is EXACTLY the type of thing that many people suspected, however. All I know about Halliburton and Cheney is that the NYTimes says that Halliburton made illegal payments to him in the milion dollar range and I know of no response, and no retraction. I won't trust anything I hear about Halliburton and Cheney until that's cleared up. Unconnected people go to jail for things like this.

  I don't really find anything odd about it. I expect that all "connected" companies will get their chances soon enough. No matter who won this particular contract, we would have noticed that they were politically connected. Energy and oil companies were going to play in this arena sooner or later, anyway. This win will raise Halliburton stock: payments of $8+ billion in just 12-18 months and then the possibility of trying to raise the production levels to pump out a maximum amount of oil before handing it back. I'd guess that should be at least a 50% markup that feeds executive profits. Do you think they'll use any of the, say $4billion in potential profits to pay back those who already lost millions in the company's old retirement funds, or will it go into executive bonuses and options?

  It reminds me that our political leaders are just way too personally connected with friends in all business, not just the oil business. Same back during the Charles Keating (Savings & Loan) affair where billions of dollars were lost and yet several Reagan/Bush friends (and family) manged to keep profits and most hardly got a slap on the wrist. But this isn't a Republican thing. I can hardly believe the suggestion that because KBR's work in Bosnia was under Clinton, that this somehow tends to wash the hands of Bush/Cheney. Democrats and Republicans alike since Kennedy/Johnson have all found ways to personally benefit -- some more than others, of course.

  I just think it's funny to imagine that these war plans for Iraq must have included conversations like: "Well, how close are we on those contracts for cleanup? ...Halliburton? Good, good. ...$8 BILLION? Dick'll be happy to hear that. ...Oh, he's already known for 2 weeks? He never told me, all he's said for the last two weeks is that we should just tell the UN to get out and start this thing early."

  Gamaliel
• 

  Pork Chop

  Ah well, if a left wing rag like the New York Times says it then it must be true.

  Realistically, how many companies in the world can actually do something like this? There's just a handful and Halliburton is one of them. So they won they bid, so what. Given the baying hounds of the leftist media you can bet that whoever awarded this contract was pretty careful that everything was kosher.
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  Gamaliel

  I only mentioned the NYT because, in the words of Chirac (when the NYT accused him and France of business connections with Iraq a couple weeks ago) he said (on 60 Minutes): "the NYT is a serious paper." It's also the best we've got in this little town, but I'm sure it was carried elsewhere. It's also a profitable paper that would be a great lawyer's target if they reported slander. Does anyone subscribe to the full NYT archives? I'm starting to doubt myself, because I was also reading the Daily News a lot around the time of the last election.

  But on the real issue of this thread. I think you are right, the odds were pretty good already that Cheney's old company would get it. But I think it's too easy for people to say they've worked with government contracts or worked for Halliburton and therefore this RFP is on the up-and-up. I need to work nearly a decade to make a million dollars, and our CEO only 4 levels above me (3 for a while) made about 25 million last year PLUS he was hired with about 50 million in bonus/options exercisable over the next 4 years as incentive to keep him here. Suffice it to say, I don't know any of this guy's friends, I rarely see him in the building, when I do see him he's meeting with people I've never seen before. But I'm not so naive as to think that he won't figure out a way to get his friends involved with our contracts, in spite of any potential conflict of interests.

  When I was a consultant I bid on a contract for the NYC DHCR (government). Months before the contract was to be awarded, a company in Florida who had no interest in doing it themselves, calls me up and says that I won't be awarded the contract, but if I have people who can really finish the job, he will pick up the contract and sub it out to me. I said there wouldn't be enough money because I was planning on almost no profit just to get my first city contract. He said it wouldn't be a problem, it would be awarded with enough profit for both of us.

  I'd bet that people in the oil biz are just as apt to be greasing each other's palms.

  Gamaliel
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  outoftheorg

  Well good for Halliburton and their sub contractors. This way we will get a little of the cost of this war back to the US. Now if we can get the new Iraqi gov. to supply us with free oil for a few years, so much the better. We need to get refunded the 70 billion dollars or more this war will cost us. Then we need to have some control over the Iraqi oil. That will make 3 countries, Iraq-Norway-Russia that are not part of the oil cartel that sets the prices and the amount of oil they will supply.

  Is this war partly to control oil? Yes as it should be. Is it partly to give the western world a nation in the middle of the extremist Islamic world that would act as a power base, politicly and militarily for the western world? Yes as it should be.

  Outoftheorg
• 

  Pleasuredome

  US firm wins Umm Qasr deal
  

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2884701.stm
• 

  crownboy

  TH, surely the fact that Cheney got close to $40 mill. the year he left the company (despite having a lackluster year), and has not refuted the claims of receiving secret payments to date, makes this entire deal entirely above suspicion .

  As JT pointed out, it's all about who you know. (When I heard a couple of weeks ago that Halliburton was in the running for this contract, I was 100% sure they would get it. Surprise, surprise.) Unlike in private industry where "the best guy" is most likely to get a contract in this situation, the government need not be held to these standards necessarily (i.e: it's not Cheney and Bush's personal money at risk, so they need not be objective). As long as you can reach a minimal standard, it all depends on how much money you've given to your benefactors (in Cheney's case, close to $40 million).
• 

  rem

  Interesting:

  http://money.cnn.com/2003/03/28/news/companies/Halliburton/index.htm

  Halliburton, the energy and construction company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, is no longer in the running for a $600 million contract to rebuilt post-war Iraq, according to the United States Agency for International Development.

  rem