Bush/Cheney bail out
Halliburton—they should be ashamed

BY ED FELIEN

A pig is a marvelous animal, but never come between a pig and dinner. They will trample down fences, fight viciously, move quickly and persevere with obsessive dedication in pursuit of food. All they care about is dinner.

The unparalleled greed of Bush and Cheney is so remarkable it rivals the uncomplicated and subhuman aspirations of a hungry pig in pursuit of its next meal.

No doubt at the urging of the President of the Senate, Dick Cheney, Senator Arlen Specter has begun hearings on the Asbestos trust fund bill. The bill would establish a $140 billion trust fund paid for by the asbestos industry to compensate the more than 2 million victims of asbestos poisoning. Susan Vento, the widow of Bruce Vento, the former congressman from St. Paul who died from asbestos poisoning, said, “This bill was already a bad bill for asbestos victims. It has now become considerably worse.” (Star Tribune, June 8, 2006) Now the chair of the Committee to Protect Mesothelioma Victims, she said the revised bill would “cruelly and coldly” force victims to settle for reduced compensation before they die.

And who is the biggest beneficiary of this new bill? Why, Halliburton, of course. Halliburton has more than 200,000 asbestos lawsuits pending against it. Only $1.6 billion of that is covered by insurance. Halliburton estimates its liability at $2.2 billion, but Wall Street analysts say it’s closer to $4.5 billion. The new legislation would limit that liability to $450 million.

Cheney was CEO of Halliburton in 1998 when he purchased Dresser Industries for $7.7 billion. Dresser had been owned and controlled by the Bush family since the 1920s. There is no record of loads of cash trading hands, so we can reasonably assume the Bush family ended up with $7.7 billion in stock in Halliburton. That’s a lot of stock. They probably control Halliburton. What Halliburton got along with Dresser was Dresser’s liabilities in the form of the 200,000 asbestos injury lawsuits. Wall Street was not amused. The stock immediately took a hit of $4.5 billion.

But George and Dick, once they got elected in 2000, immediately went to work to try to save the company. A multi-billion dollar no-bid contract to reconstruct Iraq was a good start. Also, it didn’t hurt that Halliburton got exclusive rights to sell Iraqi oil. Then, when tragedy struck in New Orleans, Halliburton was given most of the contracts for cleanup. The Bush-Cheney Presidency has been very, very good to Halliburton.

You would think that would be enough. Surely by now they have more money than they can possibly spend in ten lifetimes. But, now, they want to take billions away from asbestos victims, widows and orphans.

They are completely without shame or moral principle.
But Congress is complicit in all these subsidies to Halliburton.
During the Second World War, Harry Truman was a senator from Missouri. There were Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a Democratic President. Truman was appointed chair of the Senate Committee on Investigations and, in the middle of the war and without regard to whose toes he might be stepping on, he held hearings on war profiteering by defense contractors. He called war profiteering treason.

Norm Coleman is the chair of the current Senate Committee on Investigations. Why hasn’t he investigated Halliburton? He has had no difficulty investigating the U.N. and the Oil for Food program with Iraq. Why can’t he investigate where the billions of dollars the American taxpayers have given to Halliburton have gone? Why haven’t other members of Congress demanded that investigation?
Where is the press in all of this? Isn’t it worth telling the American public that the President of the United States lied about the reasons for going to war in Iraq and his company is the direct beneficiary of that conflict and those lies? How many more lives must be lost, how many billions of dollars must we continue to give to these pigs before they are satisfied?

I realize that these remarks may seem intemperate. I can only hope I have not done irreparable harm to the reputation of pigs.