One Percent Takers — War Profiteering

Cheney and Halliburton

Making a Killing in the Killing Fields of Iraq

 

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
—Major General Smedley Butler, USMC

“[Dick Cheney] wanted desperately to be president of the United States … he knew the Texas governor [George W. Bush] was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration.”
—Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, interviewed by ABC News, August 30, 2011

 

“In the five years he worked at [Halliburton, Dick Cheney] received $12.5m in salary. He also held $39m-worth of stock options when he quit the company in 2000 — a fortune for a man with no previous experience in running a multinational company. In addition, Halliburton’s board of directors voted to award him early retirement when he quit his job, even though he was too young to qualify under his contract. That flexibility enabled him to leave with a retirement package, including stock and options, worth millions more than if he had simply resigned.”
The Guardian, “Dick Cheney’s Halliburton: A Corporate Case Study”, June 8, 2011

“Brown & Root is a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services conglomerate that, until July 25, [2000] employed Dick Cheney as chairman of its executive board and CEO. Cheney has used his association with Halliburton and Brown & Root to enrich himself and gain political power. In August, Halliburton announced that it was giving Cheney a retirement package worth more than $33.7 million. That comes on top of more than $10 million Cheney has earned in salary, bonuses and stock options at Halliburton since 1995. In return for his pay, Cheney has helped the company attract government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The Texas Observer, “The Candidate from Brown and Root”, October 6, 2000

 

 

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