Who Let the Dogs In?

by Molly Ivins

  Despite repeatedly claiming his company would not do business with Iraq—he was defense secretary during the Persian Gulf War—Halliburton racked up $23.8 million in sales to Iraq in ’98 and ’99. It did so by using two European subsidiaries, so Halliburton was not directly violating the sanctions against Iraq. Hey, it was business.

  And striking another blow for freedom from government interference, Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Cheney joined the company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans. Cheney also specialized in getting government contracts for the firm. During his five years as CEO, Halliburton got $2.3 billion in contracts, compared to only $1.2 billion in the five years before he took over.

  Most of the government work was done by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root, the construction firm, thus reinstating a fine old Texas tradition. Brown & Root was Lyndon Johnson’s major money source: It was to LBJ what Enron was to George W.

  This brings to mind a famous story from the Kennedy-Johnson campaign in 1960 relished by Texans. It’s after the election, and the Democrats win. Kennedy and Johnson are sittin’ in the Oval Office the first day, and the phone rings. It’s the pope of Rome (Texans used to specify “of Rome,” lest you should confuse him with some other pope) on the phone. He says, “John, my boy, the Vatican roof is leaking something fierce, we were hopin’ y’all might fix it for us.”

  “Of course, Mr. Pope, sir. Just let me check with my vice president. Lyndon, the pope’s on the phone and wants to know if we can fix the Vatican roof for him.”

  “That’s fine with me,” says Johnson. “Just make sure Brown & Root gets the contract.”

  Nice to see tradition reassert itself.

  June 2002

  Hypocrisies

  It’s the little things, the itty-bitty things. It’s the little things that really piss me off.

  SONG BY ROBERT EARL KEEN

  GOSH, SILLY US, getting in a swivet over war and peace. The president is on vacation! He’s giving interviews to Runner’s World, not Meet the Press. He and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld didn’t even talk about Iraq during their meeting at Crawford. It was all the media’s fault. We were “churning,” we were in “a frenzy.” Heck, Bush himself has never even mentioned war with Iraq, much less going it alone.

  We don’t have to worry, so party hearty, and try not to make a big deal out of the fact that Bush’s lawyers are now claiming he can launch an attack on Iraq without congressional approval because the permission given by Congress to his father in 1991 to wage war in the Persian Gulf is still in effect.

  Since that’s all cleared up, here are a few little nuggets you might like to chew on:

  • Bush went to Pennsylvania to meet with the nine coal miners rescued earlier this summer to congratulate them. He also cut the budget for the Mine Safety and Health Administration by $4.7 million out of $118 million total: enforcement was cut, as were mine inspections for coal dust (which causes black lung disease), and the chest X-ray program was cut entirely. Bush filled five of the top positions at MSHA with coal industry executives.

  • Earlier this month, the Associated Press used a computer analysis to dig up some interesting news about congressional spending patterns. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, tens of billions of dollars in federal spending have moved from Democratic to GOP districts. Last year, there was an average of $612 million more spending for congressional districts represented by Republicans than by Democrats. AP also reports that when Democrats last controlled the House and wrote the budget, the average Democratic district got $35 million more than the average Republican district.

  That’s quite a shift, and the AP says the change was “driven mostly by Republican policies that moved spending from poor rural and urban areas to the more affluent suburbs and “GOP-leaning farm country. . . . In terms of services, that translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps.”

  Now one could take the attitude of Majority Leader Dick Armey, who was quoted by the AP on this subject as saying, “To the victor goes the spoils.” On the other hand, that means more government subsidies are going to people who need them less. The recently passed farm bill, a subject on which I find myself in complete harmony with the National Review, weighed in at $190 billion, a grossly disproportionate share going to corporate farmers: Ten percent of farmers will get 69 percent of the subsidies, according to The New York Times. President Bush signed the $190 billion horror and then made a great show, at his public relations event in Waco, of vetoing $5 billion in what he deemed was unnecessary spending in the homeland security bill.

  • The media have achieved such a perfect he said–she said knot of confusion on the story of Bush and Harken energy, it would be a wonder if the public ever gets any of it straight. Even though the Center for Public Integrity has posted the relevant documents from Harken on its website (www.publici.org), the news has been buried under a scrum of pundits shouting, “It’s old news” or “Is not, it’s new news.” All I can say is, if Slick Willie Clinton had ever eeled out from under information like this, Rush Limbaugh would’ve had a heart attack.

  Just for the record, George W. Bush had not just one but four Harken stock transactions worth more than $1 million during the time he was on the board. And in each case he was months over deadline in reporting the matter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Second, newly posted documents show that Bush, who claims he had no idea Harken was in trouble when he dumped his stock in late June 1990, was in fact warned twice: Harken’s CEO sent him a memo on June 7 predicting that Harken would run out of money before the end of the month and that it would then be in violation of numerous debt agreements.

  Even more egregious, Bush was clearly involved in the phony Aloha Petroleum deal. Aloha was a Harken subsidiary that was sold to a partnership of Harken insiders at an inflated price, a perfect little gem of an example of the kind of fake, pump-the-bottom-line transaction later perfected by Enron. Bush’s business career is a small-scale model of exactly the corrupt corporate practices now under fire.

  In case you missed the theme here, it’s hypocrisy.

  August 2002

  More Hypocrisy

  EXCUSE ME: I DON’T want to be tacky or anything, but hasn’t it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a “murderous dictator” is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?

  When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oil-field supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer “prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists.”

  So if Saddam is “the world’s worst leader,” how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he to could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?

  In 1998, the United Nations passed a resolution allowing Iraq to buy spare parts for its oil fields, but other sanctions remained in place, and the United States has consistently pressured the U.N. to stop exports of medicine and other needed supplies on the grounds they could have “dual use.” As the former secretary of defense under Bush the Elder, Cheney was in a particularly vulnerable position on the hypocrisy of doing business with Iraq.

  Using two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, Halliburton helped rebuild Saddam’s war-damaged oil fields. The combined value of these contracts for parts and equipment was greater than that of any other American company doing business with Iraq—companies including Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount, General Electric. They acted through foreign subsidiaries or associated companies in France, Belgium, Germany, India, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt, and the Netherlands.

  In several cases, it is clear the European companies did no
more than loan their names to American firms for the purpose of dealing with Hussein. Iraq then became America’s second-largest Middle Eastern oil supplier.

  This story was initially reported by the Financial Times of London more than two years ago and has since been more extensively reported in the European press. But as we have seen with the case of Harken Energy and many other stories, there is a difference between a story having been reported and having attention being paid to it (a distinction many journalists have trouble with). Thus the administration was able to dismiss the new information on shady dealings at Harken as “old news” because not much attention was ever paid when the old news was new.

  When Cheney left Halliburton, he received a $34 million severance package despite the fact that the single biggest deal of his five-year career there, the acquisition of Dresser Industries, turned out to be a huge blunder since the company came saddled with asbestos liability.

  Halliburton, America’s No. 1 oil-services company, is the nation’s fifth-largest military contractor and the biggest nonunion employer in the United States. It employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide and does over $15 billion a year. Halliburton under Cheney dealt with several brutal dictatorships, including the despicable government of Burma (Myanmar). The company also played questionable roles in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Somalia, and Indonesia.

  Halliburton also had dealings with Iran and Libya, both on the State Department’s list of terrorist states. Halliburton’s subsidiary Brown & Root, the old Texas construction firm that does much business with the U.S. military, was fined $3.8 million for reexporting goods to Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions.

  If you want to know why the Democrats didn’t jump all over this story and make a big deal out of it, it’s because—as usual—Democrats are involved in similar dealings. Former CIA director John Deutsch is on the board of Schlumberger, the second-largest oil services firm after Halliburton, which is also doing business with Iraq through subsidiaries.

  Americans have long been aware that corporate money has consistently corrupted domestic policy in favor of corporate interests, and that both parties are in thrall to huge corporate campaign donors. We are less accustomed to connecting the dots when it comes to foreign policy. But there is no more evidence that corporations pay attention to anything other than profits in their foreign dealings than they do in their domestic deals.

  Enron, as usual, provides some textbook examples of just how indifferent to human rights American companies can be. Halliburton’s dealings in Nigeria, in partnership with Shell and Chevron, provide another such example, including gross violations of human rights and environmental abuses.

  No one is ever going to argue that Saddam Hussein is a good guy, but Dick Cheney is not the right man to make the case against him. I have never understood why the Washington press corps cannot remember anything for longer than ten minutes, but hearing Cheney denounce Saddam is truly “Give us a break” time.

  September 2002

  The Clinton Wars Continue

  WATCHING SOME DIPSTICK the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives—and I don’t think this guy actually spends a lot of time tête-à-tête with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest thoughts to him—I wondered, “Lord, when are these people going to get over it?”

  I think the answer is never, because most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that’s sort of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to twist it around so it’s their fault, not ours.

  So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life because of what Sid Blumenthal calls “this perverse episode,” the scoundrel time.

  Just last week, The Wall Street Journal, reminded of the Vince Foster suicide by Mrs. Clinton’s new memoir, Living History, wrote a nasty, callous, defensive editorial. It’s a classic of the genre of exculpating yourself by blaming others. Since Foster named The Wall Street Journal in his suicide note, you might think the paper would, if not acknowledge responsibility, at least have the common decency to express some regret.

  I had to force myself to start Blumenthal’s book, The Clinton Wars, because I’m still exhausted from the whole megillah, but then I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s perversely fascinating. The year this country wasted on the impeachment was the most tawdry, the nastiest, the ugliest, the sorriest chapter I’ve ever seen in politics.

  I watched it from my vantage point in Texas and naturally concluded—as did everyone else in the country with a lick of common sense—that everyone in Washington, D.C., had completely lost their minds.

  I’m still ambivalent about it. The late, great Billie Carr of Houston—a woman who had taught the baby Bill Clinton how to do politics when he came over to Texas in 1972—was invited to the White House in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky mess. Billie got all gussied up, sashayed up to Clinton in the receiving line, and said to him, “You dumb son of a bitch.” Thank heavens, I always thought, somebody said to him exactly what every American wanted to say. (Clinton started laughing as Billie proceeded to tear him a new one, and said, “I knew you were gonna do this, Billie.”)

  On the other hand, Clinton is one of the most brilliant natural politicians I have ever observed—I put him in a category with Lyndon Johnson and the late Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock. That his presidency could have been so seriously damaged by what was, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy is a horrible indictment of politics in our time.

  The most depressing thing about Blumenthal’s book is that it keeps reminding you that these nasty little ideological zealots set out from Day One to commit the Politics of Personal Destruction. They had no honor, and they had no shame. They were just out to get him any way they could, and when sex proved a convenient route, they used it—hypocrisy, be damned.

  Blumenthal, who was in the center of that cyclone, has accomplished something remarkable—he has actually written a rather detached account of it all. If I had been that close to it—and received that much personal abuse—I doubt I could write without anger, even now.

  A couple of times Blumenthal cites some advice Hillary Clinton gave him: “Remember, it’s never about you. Whatever you think, it’s not about you.”

  This is not to say there is not some score-settling in this book: The number of reporters who allowed themselves to be used by Kenneth Starr and his ideological wrecking crew is a depressing tally in itself. Blumenthal shames the press corps simply by being meticulous himself. “Here is what he would have found if he had bothered to check . . .” is his general method. I found only one error in the book—it was George W. Bush who repeatedly failed in the oil business, not his father, who made $6 million back when that was real money.

  The Clinton Wars has been criticized for not being more balanced about the flawed presidency—the Clintons themselves are almost entirely blameless in this account. But if that’s what Blumenthal had set out to do, he would have written some other book.

  I’ve heard many people say, “But they made it so easy for people to attack them.” That may be true, but it’s still blaming the victim, isn’t it?

  The Clinton wars reflect no credit on anyone, but I still think it was journalism, or what passes for journalism these days, that most disgraced itself. We should all be required to read this book.

  June 2003

  The Failures of 9/11

  THE CONGRESSIONAL REPORT by the committees on intelligence about 9/11 partially made public last week reminds me of the recent investigation into the crash of the Columbia shuttle—months of effort to reconfirm the obvious.

  In the case of the Columbia, we knew from the beginning a piece of insulation had come loose and struck the underside of one wing. So, after much study, it was determined the crash was caused by the piece of insulation that came loose and struck the underside of the wing.

&nb
sp; Likewise in the case of 9/11, all the stuff that has been blindingly obvious for months is now blamed for the fiasco.

  The joint inquiry focused on the intelligence services, concluding that the FBI especially had been asleep at the wheel. And that, in turn, can be blamed at least partly on the fact that the FBI, before 9/11, had only old green-screen computers with no Internet access. Agents wrote out their reports in longhand, in triplicate. Although the process is not complete, the agency is now upgrading its system: many agents finally got e-mail this year.

  My particular bête noire in all this is the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), which distinguished itself by granting visas to fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, who never should have been given visas in the first place. Their applications were incomplete and incorrect. They were all young, single, unemployed males, with no apparent means of support—the kind considered classic overstay candidates. Had the INS followed its own procedures, fifteen of the nineteen never would have been admitted.