In the sixties, it was Brown and Root, the Houston-based contractor whose founders were buddies of Landslide Lyndon Johnson. Brown and Root got a lot of government deals, exclusive and non-bid, including the huge Cam Ranh Bay military base in (South) Viet Nam.
Herman Brown and Johnson went back to the fifties, where they combined for LBJ’s ascendency to the Senate thanks to box 13 and the rigged Texas election of 1952. The relationship remained cozy right to the end. Johnson’s war helped make Brown and Root wealthy beyond measure.
Brown and Root became an outfit named Halliburton and was later itself turned into a subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, spun-off two years ago. Such is high finance.
Something else about high finance: it trumps high politics.
Maybe you thought that with the election of a young, smart, progressive President, the country was through with the more excessive corruption of the Bush years. If so, you would have been wrong.
While Dick Cheney dodges criminal indictments around the rest of the world, makes speeches defending torture, and rakes in ‘deferred compensation’ from Halliburton, KBR, despite a record which entitles its executives to some long-deferred time in a federal penitentiary, continues to collect huge new government contracts and even “tens of millions of dollars in bonuses”, according to an article in Reuters.
As many as five U.S. soldiers have been electrocuted so far due to half-assed KBR work in Iraq. A Senate committee charged with looking into the scandal asked that the army, which continues to issue multi-million-dollar contracts to KBR, send a witness to testify about this. The army declined to do so.
A little history:
In February of 2007, the Defense Department’s Contract Management Agency issued a report on Halliburton/KBR’s work in Iraq which noted, in part: “Primary safety threat, theater wide, is fire due to the inferior 220 electrical fixtures found throughout Iraq. Improper installation (and) substandard equipment purchases...”
Nothing was done. In September, 2008, the CMA’s agency commander, Captain David Graff, wrote a letter expressing his outrage at the situation. “We cannot overemphasize the significance of the lack of sustained electrical support services being provided by KBR in Iraq to maintain the minimum life, health and safety standards in support of our (troops)”, Graff said.
The contracts have continued to this day. KBR was recently awarded a new $35 million deal for work in Iraq, including electrical work.
Last week, an electrical inspector hired by the army to review its U.S.-run facilities in Iraq, testified that 90% of KBR’s wiring in newly-constructed buildings was not done properly, meaning an estimated 70,000 buildings where troops live and work are not safe. “We found improper electrical work in every building we inspected,” Jim Childs told investigators.
So we’ve got what amounts to a criminal corporation which bought its way into a chunk of federal money at least as far back as the 1950s, operating pretty much like it owns the government. It identifies ‘needs’ –– created in the public mind and backed by the mainstream media –– which the government must fill, e.g. an invasion of a foreign country; then it monopolizes the field, buys a few members of congress, and snares a stream of lucrative contracts.
It does not have to actually fulfill these contracts. As the Government Accountability Office has reported, there are billions of dollars in war-related funds actually missing, unaccounted for, and there are more billions in waste because hundreds of major projects –– contracted for with Halliburton/KBR, Bechtel, and others –– have been abandoned unfinished. The profits must be sensational.
Corporations such as KBR answer to no one. Spokeswoman Heather Browne said, “KBR remains proud of the work it performs in Iraq. We remain committed to engaging in a transparent, and more importantly a fact-based, dialogue on this issue while pledging continued full cooperation and support to the military.”
Hey, those electrocuted soldiers? Shit happens. How’s that for “fact-based”?
William P. Utt, KBR’s chairman, said that the company was not expected to meet the U.S. electrical code. The codes used in buildings it maintains “throughout the war zone” (translation: the ones without the top brass) “were known and thought to be acceptable.”
More than a year ago, Halliburton/KBR got a government contract on some work right here at home, hundreds of millions to build “detention centers” where large numbers of people might be held against their will, i.e. imprisoned. Presumably, these are being built. The contract was let, according to the Bush administration, because it was believed that such facilities might be necessary to hold illegal immigrants or for “civil unrest.”
We are so bloody naive in America. The fact is that we are an empire, easily the most powerful and wealthiest in human history. We know this about Empires: they are intrinsically nests of murder and corruption. They couldn’t possibly be otherwise. Why would we think that?
Every empire eventually collapses internally because its powerful are too greedy and crazy to avoid sucking the life out of it. That’s what’s been happening in this country for at least sixty years but the predation has increased exponentially since the 1980s. Once it was discovered that the Savings and Loan industry could be looted without much penalty, it was wide open.
In California, executives of the public power company, PG&E, made a deal with Enron, shipped its profits to a “parent” corporation (also called PG&E), and in a single day voted its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses and then, in the afternoon, met with lawyers to plan a bankruptcy filing. Nobody went to jail.
Now the bankers are doing it. Not only are the big boys not being penalized, a couple of their guys, Geithner and Summers, are now running the economic policy of the Obama administration. Man, that is some serious hardball.
Talked with a fellow the other day who works with banks all over the country and has friends at the fed. He had this to say: over the next twelve months, the government is going to close a thousand banks. This will mean that a thousand small institutions, community banks, will be taken over. But don’t worry: your deposit’s safe because these banks will then be sold to Wells Fargo and Bank of America and Morgan Chase.
Think about the implication of this. Think about what it means and what the point is.
Here’s what it looks like to me: the banking system was looted by people who knew that what they were doing –– pimping every stupid loan possible in an escalating and wildly-inflated real estate market –– would eventually crash the system. But that was okay because they could get away with it and, AND, they could use the ensuing crisis to eat all of the little banks.
After all, Citigroup, those twisted thugs who spent four hundred million bucks of OUR money on “naming rights” to the Mets’ ballpark, is “too big to fail.” But you know a bank or two in your town which isn’t. You see, there are those ‘neighborhood banks’ which will be found to be “under-capitalized.” Why? Because they made construction loans on commercial properties which now, thanks to the crash, have nobody to occupy them.
Citigroup and the other criminals are, of course, the ones who are “under-capitalized”, and through their own intention. But they are “too big to fail”. They can do anything, take anything, fake anything, run everything. You and I are not too big to fail. It is perfectly acceptable if we are unemployed, so long as there aren’t so many unemployed it becomes necessary to use those Halliburton/KBR detention “facilities”.
One more small thing:
Corporations now employ their own armies. The Blackwater scandals in Iraq, where private thugs operated as death squads run by corporations, caused it to change its name but not its circumstances. The American government has done little to challenge this dangerous situation. In effect, we now have death squads killing people with, essentially, impunity; individual killers may occasionally be sacrificed if the public gets to noticing and objecting, but the deals are going on regardless.
Once any group is licensed to kill abroad it takes no time at all for these things to come back home. Ask John Kennedy. That was the last time a real threat arose to the way things were being run. Look at old footage of Kennedy going after the steel executives, the oil executives, the war-profiteers. It’ll make your hair stand on end.
