Halliburton strikes again
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe Columnist  |  March 1, 2006

HALLIBURTON'S LATEST outrageous withdrawal from its ATM (American
Taxpayer Machine) cries out for the Great Communicator. Back in 1976
when Ronald Reagan first ran for president, he stoked the anger of
largely white audiences with brutal exaggerations of the undeserving
black and brown poor.

He talked of a ''welfare queen" in Chicago who collected $150,000
under 80 different names. It turned out that she collected only $8,000
under four names. In a Florida campaign stop, Reagan bemoaned how
hardworking people wait in line at grocery stores while a ''strapping
black buck" purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps. It was code
language in Florida, where Reagan's Republican state campaign manager
told The New York Times, ''We are wasting our time to get black people
registered."

Reagan said of a housing development in East Harlem, ''If you are a
slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a
20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play
room, and the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities."
Less than one-sixth of the 656 units had a kitchen or living room with
a high ceiling, the rent would have been four times more, and the pool
and gym were a community center for 200,000 area residents, mostly
Latino and African-American.

Reagan won the presidency in 1980 partially on that attack on the
poor. His lasting imagery led to sweeping cutbacks in welfare under
President Clinton, a Democrat, and in the current budget cuts to the
poor by Republican President Bush. But Halliburton, one of our
greatest cheats of the last quarter-century, continues to skip to the
head of the grocery line for tax bones as the poor continue to be axed
to bare bones.

Even though an Army audit determined that $263 million of charges by
Halliburton were exaggerated or unjustified on its $2.41 billion
no-bid contract for fuel deliveries and oil equipment repair in Iraq,
the Army said it will pay all but $10.1 million of it. The Times
reported Monday that the decision to withhold only 3.8 percent of the
charges in question is far below the average of questionable charges
that are withheld. That average has ranged between 56.4 percent and
75.2 percent over the last three years.

Audits and averages rarely matter with Halliburton. While Reagan
galvanized the middle class against laundry rooms for the poor,
Halliburton is the company whose subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root,
charged you and me $100 for a bag of laundry and $45 for a case of
soda in Iraq.

During Reagan's tenure, Halliburton and KBR agreed to pay $750 million
to settle a lawsuit over letting costs of a nuclear power plant in
Texas skyrocket five times to $5.5 billion. Halliburton exported
oil-field equipment to Libya despite a US trade ban. It ended up
paying $3.8 million in fines. The government said some of the
equipment Halliburton shipped could have been for nuclear weapons.

It is the company that had to pay $7.5 million in fines to settle with
the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting practices in
the late 1990s that boosted its bottom line. Vice President Dick
Cheney was Halliburton's CEO at the time but was not charged with any
wrongdoing. It is the company that had to pay back the government on
separate occasions $6.3 million, $11.4 million, and $16 million for
kickbacks and overcharges on fuel deliveries and meals for troops in
Kuwait and Iraq.

Halliburton has admitted to $2.4 million in bribes to the Nigerian
government in exchange for favorable tax treatment. None of this
matters with a company that spent $1.4 million over the last decade,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics, to get friendly key
Republicans into office and has its former CEO as vice president. The
reason the Army capitulated on its own audit is that everyone knows --
without anyone having to say it -- the cost of criticizing Cheney's
former company.

Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps' top contracting officer, was
demoted last year after saying the no-bid, multi-billion-dollar
contracts to Halliburton represented ''the most blatant and improper
contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional
career."

It is no small accident that Greenhouse happens to be a black woman. A
quarter-century of presidents and the media made black women the face
of welfare queens. When a black woman blew the whistle on some of the
worst of our white welfare kings, it was still the black woman who was
treated like a fraud.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
-George Santayana (1863-1952)
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