Dick Cheney's career outline - Oil executive, member of the White House staff (1975-77), Wyoming representative (1979-89), Defense Secretary, (1989-1993), CEO of Halliburton Oil, (1995-1999)
Cheney in the U.S. Congress was the Strom Thurmond of the West, voting against:
The Equal Rights Amendment
Funding for Head Start
A resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison
Federal funding for abortion even in cases of rape and incest
Restrictions on plastic guns that could easily be slipped through airport security
Safe drinking water standards
Establishing the Department of Education
A waiting period for handgun purchases
The Panama Canal Treaty
Imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa (but he only voted against it ten times)
Cheney was U.S. Defense Secretary in 1989 when the U.S. invaded Panama and restored the traditional white European elite to power. According to the Panamanian Human Rights Commission, the invasion killed between two and three thousand civilians in Panama. He was also Defense Secretary during the first Persian Gulf War (1991), when the U.S. killed 200,000 Iraqis (Pentagon estimate) to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy.
While Cheney was still at the Pentagon, the Defense Department commissioned a Halliburton subsidiary - Brown & Root - to do a classified study on whether it was advisable to contract out more military work to the private sector. To no one's surprise the answer was "yes," and over the next eight years Brown & Root and another company were awarded 2,700 federal contracts, while Cheney got to serve as CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 1999, nearly doubling the value of the company's federal contracts while becoming fabulously rich himself. (Having had zero business experience did nothing to hold him back.) Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity explained the incest-is-best relationship between government officials like Cheney and the private sector:
"They [military officials] have classified clearances; they go to classified meetings; they're with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts; and their disclosures about their activities are classified."
In other words, the "free market" in action.
When Halliburton got to rebuild Iraq's oil industry after Cheney and Company destroyed it in the Persian Gulf War, Cheney expressed no reservations about profiting off relations with Evil Incarnate Saddam Hussein (so we were led to believe). Nor did he have any objection to Halliburton working with the repressive government of Burma, or with Chevron and Shell in Nigeria, another country with a chilling human rights record. At the same time, leaders like Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso were enriching themselves and their families with the revenues provided by Halliburton-built offshore oil platforms while brutally crushing their political opposition.
As soon as the U.S. took over Baghdad in 2003, a familiar team won out again as tens of billions of dollars worth of government contracts were awarded based on secret bidding arrangements. Hallburton subsidiary Brown & Root was selected to put out oil fires and handle other duties involving damage to Iraq's oil industry. Cheney's relation to the company was hardly coincidental.
Back in the mid-1990s Cheney had helped Halliburton avoid tax liability. During his term as CEO, Halliburton created dozens of dummy offices in offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands. The number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax havens went from 9 to 44 in the years Cheney was at the helm. Halliburton's federal taxes dropped from $302 million in 1998 to a negative $85 million, that is, the company got an $85 million rebate in 1999. At the same time, Halliburton received $2.3 billion in government contracts and $1.5 billion in government financing and loan guarantees. During his vice-presidential debate with Joe Lieberman in 2000, Cheney insisted that the government had had "absolutely nothing to do" with Halliburton's financial success. In other words, he claimed that $3.8 billion in government contracts, loans, and financial guarantees, had zero impact on Halliburton. Sure.
When he left Halliburton, Cheney received $13 million in severance pay and left behind millions of dollars in losses from bad investments, a spate of SEC investigations, and a pile of lawsuits. The value of Halliburton stock plunged.
When the GW Bush administration abandoned its campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, Cheney justified the betrayal on the basis that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant. Remember, Kamala Harris is deeply honored to have this lunatic's endorsement.
When Cheney was faced with a series of potentially ruinous asbestos-related lawsuits at Halliburton, the company decided it should lobby for a change of law rather than argue the cases in court. So Cheney and the company shelled out nearly half a million dollars to congressional candidates between 1997 and 2000, with $157,000 directed to 62 lawmakers who co-sponsored bills limiting the liability of asbestos manufacturers. Bribery loves a "free market."
At a fund-raising appearance in the summer of 2002 Cheney praised the White House's commitment to "more accountability for corporate officials." This from the man who charged the public $750,000 for work that actually cost Halliburton $125,000 when Cheney was CEO there.
When the state of California spun into financial disaster from a phony energy crisis arranged by Enron, Cheney's fingerprints were all over it. He had six meetings with Enron representatives, including two with CEO Ken Lay, the last one just six days before the company disclosed that it had vastly overstated its earnings. While Enron executives cashed out $1 billion in company stock just before the day of reckoning, their employees lost their pensions and their jobs - just in time for Christmas season.
Of course, all this pales in comparison to the vicious mass murder campaign Cheney and GW Bush unleashed on the people of Iraq in 2003, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians five years after Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponek had resigned their UN posts declaring Washington's pre-invasion Iraq policy "genocide."
So the questions are, why do plundering mass murderers like Kamala Harris, and why is she proud to represent them?
Sources:
Cheney's voting record: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec00/cheney_7-26.html
www.abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/Cheney_GMA000727.html
"Cheney at the Helm," the Progressive, September 2000.
Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Michael Parenti, Democracy For The Few
Arianna Huffington, Pigs At The Trough
Michael Lind, Made In Texas
Charles Lewis, 60 Minutes, April 27, 2003.
