Post by Kee on Apr 26, 2004 23:12:01 GMT -5
.....the expansion of the military industrial complex of the United States via the Christian favorite, George W. Bush.
Time to take a closer look at the Bush administration. Those he has chosen for high positions and those many, many connections of his and theirs.
You will draw your own conclusions. I hope you do, and it is my belief that no decent person would ever approve. Let's start with Cheney.
The top thirty-five private military companies are among the most profitable businesses in the country today. One of those is Kellogg Brown and Root, the legendary Texas company that bankrolled Lyndon Johnson's political career and is today a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation.
Immediately following the end of the American bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in June 1999, the United States simply seized from private owners a thousand acres of farmland at Uresevic in Kosovo, near the Macedonian border. Between July and October 1999, it built Camp Bondsteel in record time.
Kellogg Brown and Root built camp Bondsteel under contract to the army and continues to do everything there except perform military duties. Employing about a thousand former U.S. military personnel and another 7,000 local Albanians, the company delivers 600,000 gallons of water a day, supplies enough electricity for a city of 25,000, washes 1,200 bags of laundry, and cooks and serves 18,000 meals per day.
Brown and Root, long known in Texas for its political connections, was acquired in 1962 by the oil-drilling and construction company Halliburton. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense when Brown and Root first began to supply logistical services to the Army. According to an investigation report by Robert Bryce in the Austin Chronicle, Dick Cheney is the author of the idea that the military's logistical operation should be privatized. He was not trying so much to increase efficiency as to reward the private sector. He basically asked how private companies could assist the army in cutting hundreds of thousand of jobs. In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Brown & Root 3.9 million to produce a cpkmtyollified report detailing how private companies-like itself-could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later, in 1992, the Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkins, and Saudia Arabia.
After 1992 election, Cheney left the Defense Department, and between 1995 and 2000 he was the chief executive officer of Halliburton. Under his leader, Brown and Root (and remember they are a subsidiary of Halliburton) took in $2.3 billion in government contracts, almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before Cheney arrived. Halliburton rebuilt Saddam Hussein's war-damaged oil fields for some $23.8 million, even though Cheney, as secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, had been instrumental in destroying them. By 1999, Halliburton had become the biggest nonunion employer in the United States, although Wal-Mart soon replaced it.
During Cheney's term as Halliburton's CEO, the company advanced from seventy-third to eighteenth on the Pentagon's top list of contractors. Its number of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens also increased from nine to forty-four. As a result, Halliburton went from paying $302 million in company taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999.
Hang tight...there 's more, more, more. So much more............... [/b][/color]
Time to take a closer look at the Bush administration. Those he has chosen for high positions and those many, many connections of his and theirs.
You will draw your own conclusions. I hope you do, and it is my belief that no decent person would ever approve. Let's start with Cheney.
The top thirty-five private military companies are among the most profitable businesses in the country today. One of those is Kellogg Brown and Root, the legendary Texas company that bankrolled Lyndon Johnson's political career and is today a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation.
Immediately following the end of the American bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in June 1999, the United States simply seized from private owners a thousand acres of farmland at Uresevic in Kosovo, near the Macedonian border. Between July and October 1999, it built Camp Bondsteel in record time.
Kellogg Brown and Root built camp Bondsteel under contract to the army and continues to do everything there except perform military duties. Employing about a thousand former U.S. military personnel and another 7,000 local Albanians, the company delivers 600,000 gallons of water a day, supplies enough electricity for a city of 25,000, washes 1,200 bags of laundry, and cooks and serves 18,000 meals per day.
Brown and Root, long known in Texas for its political connections, was acquired in 1962 by the oil-drilling and construction company Halliburton. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense when Brown and Root first began to supply logistical services to the Army. According to an investigation report by Robert Bryce in the Austin Chronicle, Dick Cheney is the author of the idea that the military's logistical operation should be privatized. He was not trying so much to increase efficiency as to reward the private sector. He basically asked how private companies could assist the army in cutting hundreds of thousand of jobs. In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Brown & Root 3.9 million to produce a cpkmtyollified report detailing how private companies-like itself-could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later, in 1992, the Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkins, and Saudia Arabia.
After 1992 election, Cheney left the Defense Department, and between 1995 and 2000 he was the chief executive officer of Halliburton. Under his leader, Brown and Root (and remember they are a subsidiary of Halliburton) took in $2.3 billion in government contracts, almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before Cheney arrived. Halliburton rebuilt Saddam Hussein's war-damaged oil fields for some $23.8 million, even though Cheney, as secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, had been instrumental in destroying them. By 1999, Halliburton had become the biggest nonunion employer in the United States, although Wal-Mart soon replaced it.
During Cheney's term as Halliburton's CEO, the company advanced from seventy-third to eighteenth on the Pentagon's top list of contractors. Its number of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens also increased from nine to forty-four. As a result, Halliburton went from paying $302 million in company taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999.
Hang tight...there 's more, more, more. So much more............... [/b][/color]
