"Cheney and Bush want privacy for their conversations, but not for anyone
else's." --Tony Mauro in USA Today, Feb. 27, 2002
Since September 11, Vice President Dick Cheney has kept a low profile. For
months, he rarely appeared at all, emerging only to sell his political ideas on
CNN or to dismiss allegations of corporate wrongdoing. Even now, Cheney mostly
stays in a "secure location," ready to spring into action if President Bush is
attacked.
Unlike most politicians, Cheney actually enjoys working in the background. By
his own account, he doesn't relish campaigning, and he's hardly a natural
spokesman, but Cheney excels at assembling and managing teams of people to "get
stuff done."
Since he and Bush arrived at the White House, Cheney has managed to accomplish
quite a bit. He's met with the heads of oil, gas, and nuclear power companies,
assembled their "wish lists," and turned them into a new national Energy Plan.
Cheney's close relations with folks like Ken Lay of Enron have made this one of
the most corporation-friendly administrations in history.
In this issue of the MoveOn Bulletin, we take an in-depth look at Dick Cheney.
It's not surprising that Cheney is avoiding the limelight: an SEC investigation
is under way on accounting practices at Halliburton, the company he ran, and
Congress's investigative body is still trying to determine how much of the
Energy Plan he organized was shaped by oil, coal, and nuclear energy executives.
Given his key role in determining the policy and practice of the Bush
administration, an understanding of Cheney's history is important.
When Cheney was Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, his code name was
"Backseat." Perhaps these days President Bush's nickname suits him better: for
Cheney, it's "Big Time."
ONE LINK
"[S]triking another blow for freedom from government interference, Mr.
Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting
from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import
Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr.
Cheney joined the company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans."
Molly Ivins' article, "Cheney's Mess Worth a Close Look" is online at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0610-03.htm
CHENEY IN NUMBERS
- Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635
- Increase in government contracts while Cheney led
Halliburton:91%
- Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that
occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)
- Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of
Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7
- Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give
congressional investigators: 13,500
- Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney
presidential campaign: $1,800,000
HALLIBURTON DAYS
"[W]hen I was Secretary of Defense, my biggest problem was with the
Congress of the United States.
Now that I'm chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, my biggest problem is
the Congress of the United States." --Dick Cheney, during an address to the
Export-Import Bank Conference, May 8, 1997.
Cheney was asked to assume the helm of Halliburton in 1995. As one of the
largest global providers of equipment and services to the oil industry,
Halliburton needed a chief executive who could ensure that the company had the
government's full support. Cheney's close connections to top government and
industry decision makers made him perfect for this role.
In a debate with Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in 2000, Lieberman
noted that Cheney had done well for himself as CEO of Halliburton. Cheney
responded flatly, "I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to
do with it." But even a glance at Cheney's tenure at Halliburton suggests
otherwise.
During his five years as CEO, Cheney nearly doubled the size of Halliburton's
government contracts, totaling a whopping $2.3 billion. He convinced the
Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another
$1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers. As exposed in the article below, some of
these loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized
crime.
http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm
Cheney's rule at Halliburton was characterized by a ruthless geopolitical
strategy that put aside political beliefs whenever they were inconvenient. In a
number of cases, Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported or even ordered
human rights violations and broke international laws. Consider the following
examples:
* Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S. terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a
foreign subsidiary of Halliburton company Brown & Root to perform millions of
dollars worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was fined
$3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney wasn't leading
Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries' sales to Libya continued
throughout his tenure.)
* Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial
Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates,
Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73
million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. (See http://gwbush.com/spots/postpage.html
for a Washington Post article on the matter.)
* In Burma, Halliburton joined oil companies in working on two notorious gas
pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report, "From
1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in
support of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes due to
forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by the
companies as security guards for the pipelines. One of Halliburton?s projects
was undertaken during Dick Cheney?s tenure as CEO." (The full report is linked
to below.)
Halliburton is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission
for Enron-style accounting practices that took place while Cheney was CEO.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/business/30HALL.html
More on Cheney and Halliburton:
For an extensive briefing on Halliburton and Cheney's foreign policy impact,
check out this well-written and thorough report:
http://www.earthrights.org/halliburton/report.pdf
Cheney made $36 million at Halliburton in 2000 alone. Thesmokinggun.com has his
tax returns to prove it:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/dicktax1.shtml
Cheney's Role in 9/11 Put on Center Stage by British
MP 9-19-3
Cheney Gets 'Deferred' Salary from Halliburton.
He claimed that he had purchased an insurance
policy to guarantee payments but he receives checks from Halliburton each
year. His lucrative stock options, he says, were placed in a charitable
trust, but who is the beneficiary of the charitable trust? I trust
that Cheney has learned to whom he should be charitable. And many
Americans are gullible enough to believe the flim-flam man.
A LOT OF ENERGY
"Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a
sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." --Cheney, in a
speech in Toronto, Canada, May 1, 2001.
The ongoing fracas over Cheney's Energy Plan ties together many of the themes of
his working life: his corporate alliances, especially with energy companies; his
view of oil as integral to U.S. foreign policy; and his insistence on secrecy
for the activities of the Executive branch.
On May 16, 2001, Cheney revealed the results of months of meetings of his Energy
Task Force: a national energy plan. President Bush had established the Task
Force in January 2001, under Vice President Cheney's leadership. (See
http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/
for the final plan.)
The plan essentially made Cheney's statement about 'personal virtue' national
policy. It put a premium on exploring for and extracting more oil, and proposed
that the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve be used for this purpose. While it
paid lip service to alternative energy sources, its recommendations focused
almost exclusively on the need for more "energy supply" -- more oil, more
nuclear plants, more coal.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, "the Bush plan would provide
no short-term relief for Americans struggling to pay their gasoline and electric
bills this summer. And, over the long-term, it would increase pollution, despoil
the environment, threaten public health and accelerate global warming. Moreover,
it would have no impact on energy prices, and no practical effect on U.S.
dependence on foreign sources of oil. Who would benefit? The oil, coal and
nuclear industries that shoveled millions of dollars into Bush campaign
coffers."
Shortly before the Plan was revealed, controversy arose. On April 19, 2001,
Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI) wrote to the General
Accounting Office (GAO), asking it to investigate the Task Force. According to
the GAO, "The congressional investigation of the task force was prompted by news
reports that the task force had met privately with major campaign contributors,
such as Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron, to discuss energy policy. According to
these reports, major Republican contributors attended private sessions with Vice
President Cheney and the task force met secretly with other contributors in
formulating the President's National Energy Policy."
In response, Cheney's counsel returned a letter, refusing to disclose whom
Cheney and the Task Force had met with and even who was on the Task Force's
staff. The GAO made a formal demand for information; Cheney rebuffed it, citing
Executive Privilege. It's worth noting that the GAO wasn't even requesting the
minutes of the Task Force meetings; it merely wanted to know who the Task Force
met with, and when.
In late August 2001, a Los Angeles Times article exposed the connections between
Cheney's Task Force and Bush's campaign contributors. The article described how
the final report adopted verbatim a global warming policy suggested by the U.S.
Energy Association (an energy industry group), how language was altered to favor
Halliburton, and how a company called Peabody Coal and its affiliates gave more
than $900,000 to the Bush campaign and "gained extraordinary access" to the Task
Force. (See
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0826-02.htm for a copy of the
article.)
As Enron collapsed, Cheney continued to refuse access to the documents of the
Task Force. In February 22, 2002, the GAO filed suit to obtain the documents,
some of which have since been turned over. But large questions about the
circumstances under which the Bush Administration's energy policy was formed
remain. The evidence indicates that the final product was a gift for the energy
industry from Cheney, their former colleague.
More on Cheney and the Energy Plan:
The GAO's comprehensive timeline of the Cheney failure to turn over the Task
Force documents is viewable at:
http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=60
You can search the documents that Cheney was ordered to
make public at:
http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/taskforce/tfinx.asp
You can read NRDC's "Slower, Costlier, and Dirtier: A Critique of the Bush
Energy Plan" at:
http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/scd/execsum.asp
"With so many new international crises erupting every day, it is hard to detect
any clear forward direction to American U.S. foreign policy. At times, it
appears that providing a response to the latest upheaval is about all that
Washington can accomplish. But beneath the surface of day-to-day crisis
management, one can see signs of an overarching plan for U.S. policy: a strategy
of global oil acquisition." --Michael Klare, Pacific News Service:
http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=61
Satire: Cheney's 10 energy tips
http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=62
MORE ABOUT CHENEY
The White House's official page on the Vice President:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/
A short, and perhaps too sweet, biography that captures the highlights of
Cheney's career:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/cheney1.html
The Christian Science Monitor offers a little more background on Cheney, prior
to the 2000 election. "Cheney's connections and influence are seen everywhere
these days - giving rise to talk that he's CEO to Bush's Chairman of the Board.
Most people around Cheney probably suffer from something like Rolodex-envy."
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/12/20/fp1s2-csm.shtml
A PBS Newshour report on Cheney's management style and personality.
http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=63
ABOUT THE MOVEON BULLETIN AND MOVEON
The MoveOn Bulletin is a free, biweekly email bulletin providing
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Thursday, July 11, 2002
Edited by Eli Pariser
(eli.pariser@moveon.org )
The world gets crazier and crazier everyday, doesn't it? The world that many
of us thought was there, isn't. The bottom has dropped out of everything. The
illusions have been revealed, we have found out who has been pulling the strings
behind the scenes. Millions have lost their jobs, have mortgage
problems, and
foreclosure. What can be done? Amazingly, we have been mislead. We have been
taught that we can control government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild
dynasty, Mayer Amschel Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government
of a nation over 200 years ago. He said, "Permit
me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its
laws." Get
the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation's banks and money system.
It's all about 'commerce'. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for
each individual. Not only does this end
personal debt, it places the people first in line
as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don't wish for
you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A
New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles, an informational study. Is
your credit rating bad for reasons that seem out of your control? There are
ways of credit repair,
so you can men those broken fences too. Do you want to keep your children protected
from outside forces, there are ways of protecting
your children. Do you want
to keep your sons and daughters free from 'the draft'? Check this out.
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