halliburton

Today's wingnutopia outrage of "why to hate Hagel" is brought to you buy that bow-tie wearing dweeb, Tucker Carlson's, conspiracy tabloid, The Daily Caller:

A pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas candidate for the Iranian presidency, a man linked to Iranian-controlled front groups, brought former Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel to speak at Rutgers University in 2007, according to another professor on campus.

Hooshang Amirahmadi, who led Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies when Hagel came to campus, is the founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He arranged for Hagel’s speech on March 2, 2007, the faculty source told The Daily Caller.

Why that must mean that Hagel supports terrorism! Why can't we have good ole' Republicans anymore, like Dick Cheney, who would never do anything to help Iran!

Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.

But Cheney was just protecting capitalism by setting up offshore companies in the Cayman's so that they could circumvent sanctions against Iran in the 90's and sell them highly profitable nuclear parts.

Apparently selling parts to develop weapons of mass destruction to terrorist regimes is a sign that you are strong against terrorism. Well, at least to the pea brains of the Republican Party.

And let's not forget another Secretary of Defense and how much he opposed our former enemies:

Not even a year ago many in the Republican Party were pushing for Haley Barbour, aka Boss Hogg, to run for President. Imagine if he did and this came out:

GOP power broker Haley Barbour's lobby shop, BGR Group, represents a Russian bank that has financed a company that helped build Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, according to corporate documents and lobbying disclosure records. The bank is owned by a secretive oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, who has met at least twice with White House officials in the last few years, according to visitor logs.

Barbour, one of the most influential Republicans within the party, considered a bid for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination and has been speculated about as a possible vice-presidential pick. Last year, he called Iran "the number one threat to peace and stability."

So while the GOP beats the war drums against Iran, one of their key players is actually helping Iran gain the reasons for such an attack. Amazing how these Republicans work.

Of course such actions are no stranger to Republicans. In the 90's, when Dick Cheney was running Halliburton and we had numerous sanctions in against Iran, Cheney's company was doing the exact same thing. It must really be a Republican thing; make money from the "enemy" and then send our children in to fight them in a war. These guys make Mr. Scrooge look like Mother Theresa.

The news that a judge has allowed the case of Jamie Leigh Jones against Halliburton/KBR to move forward has come at a very interesting time.

Jones has accused co-workers at Halliburton/KBR of kidnapping and rape. Normally you would think this kind of case would immediately become a prosecutorial matter, yet Halliburton was able to stop Jones from doing anything saying she had to go through “arbitration”.

So what makes the timing so interesting? Well Halliburton/KBR receives billions in taxpayer dollars, a far cry more than ACORN ever has. Not once did we hear any Republicans demand that taxpayer money be cut off from the company. Not once!

This is a case of a company that has apparently tried to cover up a brutal gang raping of one of their female employees. That is a lot worse than anything ACORN is being accused of, yet the Republicans find this totally disgusting action acceptable.

And again – the right is trying to make President Obama out like he is the founder and CEO of ACORN. No he isn’t, but remember who the CEO of Halliburton was? Dick Cheney, right before he became vice-president. And as vice-president he made millions off of his stock options from Halliburton – stock that went up because of the Iraq War.

Here’s the new outrage from the right. President Obama signed a book deal for an abridged version of “Dreams From My Father” aimed at middle school aged kids. Basically the published will do the book and Obama will sign off on the final copy. For this, Obama gets $500,000. The deal was reportedly in the works way before he even took office.

I guess Obama shouldn’t be making money off of previous deals now that he is in office. That is wrong and something that Republicans would never do.

An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year, RAW STORY can reveal.

Oh that was in 2005, so “last year” refers to 2004. But I guess it is fine for Cheney to make money off of a war that he championed for. I mean seriously, wars don’t cost money and lives like a children's book does.

John Boehner wants Bush to cut off all federal funding to ACORN

Boehner said his office had determined that ACORN had received more than $31 million in direct federal funding since 1998. He said the group had likely received far more indirectly through federal block grants to states and localities. "Immediate action is necessary to ensure that no additional tax dollars are directed to ACORN while it is under investigation," he wrote Bush.

So shouldn't the same apply to federal contractors who are under investigation? How about Halliburton, KBR or even Blackwater? If we are going this far, how about members of Congress or the administration who are under federal investigation? Karl Rove and Scooter Libby continued receiving tax payer funds while under federal investigation. Ted Stevens has to.

Boehner is acting like this "investigation" is a done deal and the verdict has been reached. I believe Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer should fire back with the recommendations I listed above. Let's see how many Republicans on Capital Hill continue to work when they no longer get paid, or how many contractors continue working in Iraq without their pay.

This is totally disguising and needs investigated now:

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

If you think this is O.K. then you are a monster - period. An investigation needs to be done by Congress and if this story proves true, Halliburton must be dissolved. Considering Bush said he was against Saudi Arabi's treatment of a rape victim, he should also support this action. Who knew what and when? Those are the big questions.

This is a really interesting story that is thankfully gaining attention. Halliburton announced this weekend that they will be moving their corporate headquarters from Houston, Texas to Dubai. There are a lot of questions surrounding this move - the biggest on their taxes. Halliburton generates a large portion of their income from U.S. contracts and will now pay far less taxes to the U.S. Our new Democratic Congress does not seem very happy about it either:

Time’s Karen Tumulty comments on Halliburton’s plan to move its headquarters from Houston to Dubai: “Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.” She also reports, “Henry Waxman is already planning to hold a hearing on this, an aide tells me.” 

Patrick Leahy has also been vocal on this move:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told ABC News it was “an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers.”

There should be great concern with this move. Halliburton does a lot of support work for our troops. Should we let this work be handled by a company located in Dubai? This has the same stink on it that the ports deal had.

The key issue of next week's elections is Iraq and a hopeful start to oversight of the disaster Bush got us into. Now we find out that the administration gets rid of the only person who was conducting oversight in the war.

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

Yes - how dare we go after the corporations. We are expected to serve for them and our soldiers are to die for them. Fuck everyone - as long as the upper echelons of our country are doing good.

I don't know about you, but I definitely have had enough of this deadly Republican greed. We have been in Iraq as long as we were fighting WW2 and that war had a hell of a lot more oversight than Iraq ever will.