.:. Da Blog .:.

Kerry, Cheney and Halliburton: None Dare Call it Fascism

Sen. Kerry, along with apparently many other Americans, is suffering from the misconception that the Vice-President of the United States has been fixing no-bid contracts for Halliburton. The Congress of the United States has looked into these allegations and determined that they have no basis in fact. Given Mr. Cheney’s historically close ties to the government-contracting giant, accusations of this nature were perhaps inevitable. What is most disturbing is the dangerous naivety they reveal.

John Kerry likes to remind voters that Dick Cheney is still receiving substantial payments from Halliburton while he has been in office. In the same breath he points to recent contract and billing disputes between Halliburton and the Federal Government as if mere rhetorical juxtaposition constituted proof of correlation. The clear implication of Mr. Kerry’s remarks is that Halliburton is paying large amounts of cash to the Vice-President in order to insure favored treatment and enable limitless opportunities for unsupervised graft at taxpayer expense. This might provide an oversimplified plot line that Kerry can sell to voters suspicious of crony capitalism; unfortunately it is a fiction whose promulgation masks a far more profoundly deplorable reality.

Vice-President Cheney has indeed been receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation as part of his “retirement” package from Halliburton. These payments are not, as Sen. Kerry suggests, bribes; but rather are a far more common American tradition, the tax dodge. If Mr. Cheney had accepted a single lump sum payment upon retirement from his role as CEO of Halliburton, his tax obligations would have been astronomical. Dick Cheney’s behavior is a resounding example of why Candidate Kerry’s policy of raising the marginal tax rate of the upper 2% won’t work. Once you are making millions of dollars a year, you can afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees required to create trust funds, foundations and deferred compensation packages custom designed around the latest iteration of the tax code. That a lifelong Republican politician has an aversion to taxation should come as a surprise to no one.

To hear Sen. Kerry tell it, Halliburton was just a little oil drilling company from Texas until Dick Cheney entered the White House. Regrettably, nothing could be further from the truth. A closer look at Halliburton reveals an over thirty-year relationship with the Pentagon that was born in the era of Lyndon Johnson. Halliburton has spent the better part of four decades grooming Defense Department personnel to move seamlessly back and forth between their company and government. They hire retired generals and other officers responsible for procurement and logistics to enable them to develop unique suites of services for the United States military. This is how it works: a general at the Pentagon works with Halliburton to develop a request for a proposal. Halliburton submits the perfect response to the RFP. The general signs off on the contract for the Pentagon. The general retires and goes to work for Halliburton fulfilling the proposal he designed to “outsource” his own job. The general is generously compensated by Halliburton, allowing him to make more money in a few years than he made during his entire military career.

This practice reached its epitome when Dick Cheney moved from Secretary of Defense to CEO of Halliburton. As Secretary of Defense, Cheney advocated a leaner, meaner post Cold War military in which “outsourcing” was a key component. As CEO of Halliburton, it was Mr. Cheney’s role to procure the very same new contracting opportunities he had just created in his former position. Surprise, surprise, he was very good at it. However, there is more to running a Fortune 500 than golfing with your buddies at DOD and securing the inside track on government contracts. While Cheney was heading Halliburton, there were problems with inadequate management and fulfillment of contracts government and otherwise. The company was mired in litigation that was compounded by persistent “accounting irregularities.” These “irregularities” were not limited to the billing department. Halliburton repeatedly overstated earnings estimates and eventually irritated stockholders with its fraudulent practices. By the time most of these mismanagement problems came to light, Dick Cheney had “retired” with an unprecedentedly generous package that was so large that he could not “afford” to accept it all at once. It seems clear that while at Halliburton, Dick Cheney behaved in a fast and loose fashion that was characteristic of the era, but that today would get him thrown in jail by his own attorney general, or at the very least, hauled up before Congress to answer embarrassing questions or plead the fifth like his friends at Enron.

Over the last forty years Halliburton has joined the ranks of an elite group of government contractors whose very existence has become essential to the maintenance of the defense of the United States. Companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Rand and now Halliburton have become virtually indistinguishable from the Department of Defense itself. Few would dispute that if all these companies disappeared overnight, this would present a severe impediment to the adequate defense of the nation. The question is what should the nature of their relationship to the government be? Once a private company becomes too “important” to fail, then how is it to be held accountable?

Any company that does billions of dollars worth of high risk contracting with the Federal Government is going to run into hundreds of millions of dollars worth of billing “disputes.” The complexity of the tasks at hand, along with the highly charged political atmosphere in which procurement decisions are made, is guaranteed to yield this result. It is hard enough to determine the real value of goods when the government is buying tangible hardware like airplanes. It is harder still when it is purchasing “services” like those provided by Halliburton. While hawkish Republicans may like to refer to the “market” to determine the price of goods, that calculus simply does not apply to companies that have a defacto monopoly on the goods and services that they provide. Halliburton is just such a company. Thanks to forty years of revolving doors between it and the Pentagon, as well as with the White House’s of both parties, we are now dependant on it to do things that were formally done in house. The cost of completely reorganizing our military infrastructure as well as the time that it would now take to revert is prohibitive, not to mention politically untenable.

The problem is one whose name neither of the major political parties dare speak. There is a word for a system in which government subsidized, privately held monopolies are regulated and contracted by the state. Invariably, in such a system there is always a revolving door between the management of these companies and the government that enables and oversees them. With that revolving door comes conflicts of interest, waste of resources and with them an inevitable distrust of government and corporations. What is the name of that status quo system that none dare speak? Fascism.

Until socialist leaning Democrats and laissez faire capitalist leaning Republicans are both willing to acknowledge that they have promised their constituencies one thing and delivered another, the status quo will remain. It should concern all Americans, left and right, that our military industrial complex is defacto a fascist system. I use this word advisedly and with no intent of hyperbole. Let me make it clear that I do not think that the patriotic Americans who comprise our military are anti-Semitic, sadistic, power crazed, thugs. Rather, I believe that they are, like the rest of Americans, victims of a system that has been created over several decades by Republican and Democrat administrations alike, beneath the radar of the American people in general. Most of us have yet to experience the jack-booted totalitarian tyranny associated with this word. But in a time when we are told to fear the invisible enemies without and within, when our government argues to suspend habeas corpus and finesse the Geneva Conventions, the prospect of a fascistic military industrial complex should at least give one pause.

Jihadist terrorism presents a real threat to the security of this country. It is likely to continue to do so for at least the next couple of decades. It has been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents in our lifetimes. But state sponsored militaristic totalitarianism has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people over the same period of time. Terrorist thugs can harass but not defeat the United States. What can defeat us is the indefinite tolerance of a fascistic infrastructure in the name of a War on Terror. Liberty can be lost with the stroke of a pen, but it takes the shedding of blood to regain it from a totalitarian. The price of maintaining our Liberty is vigilance not only against enemies from without, but also from our own fears and profiteers within.

Sen. Kerry would better serve the country if he would tell the American people what he would propose as an alternative to Halliburton-style fascism, rather than simply taking the cheap shot at Vice-President Cheney’s guilt by association with it.

--------------------------
This is, of course, a Joe post. It was summarily deleted by FreeRepublic.com within 5 minutes of posting. I guess it's just not "republican" enough for them. The truth is tough.

posted by Lori @ 11:59 AM