JIM VALLETTE
Coauthor of the report “Halliburton’s Destructive Engagement” and consultant to EarthRights International, Vallette said today: “Newsweek reported yesterday that the current CEO of Halliburton asserts that Cheney knew of the accounting practices of the company employed during Cheney’s tenure as CEO — the practices that are now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Halliburton is also a corporate welfare king, a major beneficiary of government aid toward fossil fuel industry projects in developing countries — to the tune of at least $6 billion in government aid packages since 1992. Newsweek reports that Halliburton fell from $54.02 a share when Cheney left the company in 2000 to $13.52 last week, leaving Cheney $26 million richer than had he not cashed in then…. Cheney’s Halliburton also profited enormously from projects around the world that have been widely condemned for horrendous human rights abuses and massive environmental destruction. The numerous examples include doing business with the notorious Yadana pipeline project in Burma — an environmentally damaging project on behalf of which, according to a U.S. federal court, egregious human rights abuses were committed, including murder, torture, rape, forced labor and forced relocation.”
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PRATAP CHATTERJEE
Author of the article “Dick Cheney: Soldier of Fortune,” Chatterjee said today: “Cheney made a fortune of almost $30 million in just two years in the oil industry when he took over as chief executive of Halliburton — a fortune for a man with no previous experience in running a company, let alone an oil multinational. Cheney came with even better qualifications; he was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War and worked in the Washington scene for 25 years before he took the job with Halliburton. He brought with him a trusty Rolodex and his former chief of staff, David Gribbin, as chief lobbyist. In the last two years of their tenure, the pair notched up $1.5 billion in federal loans and insurance subsidies for Halliburton, compared to the paltry $100 million that the company received in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival. In addition, the company garnered $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts in that time, or almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before he arrived.”
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DOUG HENWOOD
Author of the book Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, Henwood said today: “Though Greenspan is noted for his inscrutability, you could have predicted what he said this morning: the economy is getting better, but risks remain; our financial and economic structures are wondrously flexible, but they’ve got some problems; … we need some new regulation, but not too much. He took note of recent corporate scandals — but forgot to mention that they developed under his watch, along with one of the great speculative bubbles of all time. And not only did he tolerate that, he even promoted it, by endorsing all the New Economy nonsense that was its intellectual justification. Nor did he say a word about the Fed’s internal worries that we’re facing a domestic replay of Japan’s long post-bubble slump — but that’s one reason the Fed is keeping interest rates so low for so long.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
