| The invasion of Iraq was, at least in part, about the profits of US oil companies and support industries for the oil industry and the military. It provides an opportunity to privatize Iraq's natural resources for the benefit of U.S. corporations. |
| Bush administration officials and recipients of military support and reconstruction contracts contend that these companies are awarded lucrative, no bid contracts because they are best suited to the required tasks. They claim it's just a coincidence that they are heavy contributors to the Bush campaign, the Republican party, etc. But that isn't the point. The question isn't whether these companies were awarded these contracts because they were best suited to the job. The question is whether the invasion of Iraq was undertaken so that there would be contracts available that matched the expertise of these companies. Did Bush start a war to generate work for his financial supporters? This President could have chosen any number of issues to emphasize and pursue during his presidency, including energy independence, environmental responsibility, health care reform, working conditions, etc. Instead he happens to have selected a quest that will create enormous financial opportunities for companies that are major contributors to his party and campaigns, as well as close associates and even relatives of administration officials. The White House on Wednesday [May 5, 2004] asked Congress for an additional $25 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…reversing course on its plan to wait until after the election to seek more money. With an additional $25 billion, the war's total cost so far would exceed the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a cost study by Yale University economist William Nordhaus. At $174 billion, the Iraq conflict would be approaching the inflation-adjusted, $199 billion cost of World War I, a level the war will almost certainly pass next year. Source: Washington Post via Dallas Morning News - "$25 Billion More Requested To Fund Wars" 5/6/04 With oil revenues likely to come in below the costs of reconstruction, …the US Export-Import Bank, a government trade promotion agency , has launched a campaign for a securitization of future Iraqi oil receipts to pay for the reconstruction work of foreign contractors. ..No Coincidence then, that a trade lobby featuring the likes of Pentagon favourites Halliburton and Bechtel is also pushing the plan….The plan is deeply controversial. It is not at all clear that military occupation confers any right to sell off future oil production. Source: The (UK) Observer - "Pipe dreams Of Iraqi Oil" - July 13, 2003 "It is outrageous that the poor people of Iraq will be lumbered with billions of dollars of debt that will be used to boost the share prices of Wall Street financiers and US constructions giants. "said Anne Pettifor, head of the Jubilee Plus debt relief campaign, warning against "using the instrument of debt to control Iraq" after it leaves. Such a motive was behind the way Germany was treated after 1918, provoking resentment that eventually encouraged the rise of Adolph Hitler. The plans will complicate a conference on Iraq's existing $120 billion debt, which the US wants European powers to cancel. Source: The (UK) Observer - "Outrage At Use Plan To Mortgage Iraqi Oil" -- July 13, 2003 Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more under a contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of engineers without competitive bidding, according to newly available documents. The Size and scope of the government contracts awarded to the Houston-based company in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than previously disclosed. Independent experts estimate that up to one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors. Source: Dallas Morning News "Iraq Contracts Could Bring Halliburton More Than $1.7 Billion" - The Washington Post -- 8/28/2003 $15 million - Value of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq with taxpayer dollars $80,000 - Amount an Iraqi businessman spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from doing it Source: Time Magazine "Notebook" 10/27/03 Since March, Halliburton has been charging the US government excessive prices. As of October 19, 2003, Halliburton had imported 61,304,091 gallons of gasoline from Kuwait into Iraq, a distance of approximately 400 miles. The US government has paid Halliburton an average price of $2.65 per gallon. According to energy experts, the cost of buying and transporting fuel from Kuwait to Iraq is less than $1.00 per gallon, meaning that Halliburton is charging US taxpayers, more than double what is fair. It only costs the Iraqi oil company, SOMO, 97 cents per gallon to import oil from Kuwait to Iraq, for example. Reports released today indicate that a department within the US government can buy and transport fuel for less than half the cost that Halliburton is charging. The situation becomes even more appalling when one considers Halliburton’s sale of oil to Iraqis at a price between 4 to 15 cents per gallon, meaning that American tax payers are subsidizing 90% of these inflated prices. At a time when millions of Americans are out of work and many working families cannot make ends meet, the American people are paying unjustifiable profits for gasoline sold in a country with the second largest oil reserve in the world. It isn’t just the American tax payers who are footing Halliburton’s bill. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, $600 million from the Development Fund for Iraq, the program which succeeded the UN-run Oil for Food Program to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, has gone to pay Halliburton for its services. Thus, not only are hard-working Americans paying for Bush’s sweetheart deal with Halliburton - so are the vulnerable Iraqi people who are meant to be the recipients of the development fund. Source: ApolloAliance.org -- Bush’s Investment Plan: Profits for Halliburton: Nothing for Workers -- By: Bracken Hendricks and Skye Perryman -- November 6, 2003 The U.S. government is paying the Halliburton Co. an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what some official agencies are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show. The Iraqi state oil company and the Pentagon's Defence Energy Support Center import fuel from Kuwait for less than half of the cost per gallon charged by Halliburton, according to government records. Iraqi's state oil company, SOMO, which also imports gasoline from Kuwait, pays 96 cents a gallon, which includes the cost of gasoline and transportation costs. The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center is also importing gas from Kuwait, paying between $1.08 and $1.19 per gallon. …Haliburton receives 26 cents a gallon to cover overhead costs and its fee, according to documents from the Army Corp of engineers. "That's a monopoly premium," said Phil Verleger, a California oil economist and president of the consulting firm PK Verleger LLC. "That's the only term to describe it." [In October] it was estimated that Halliburton was charging the U.S. government and Iraq's oil-for-food program an average of about $1.60 a gallon for fuel that was available wholesale in the Persian Gulf region for 71 cents. Figuers provided recently to congressional investigators by the Corps [of Engineers] show that Halliburton was charging as much as $3.06 a gallon to bring fuel from Kuwaitt into Iraq in late November [2003]. Gasoline imports have been one of the largest costs of the Iraqi reconstruction effort. Although Iraq sits on the third-largest oil reserves in the world, the demand for fuel has outstripped production. Nearly $500 million has already been spent to transport gas, benzene and other fuels into Iraq, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. And of the $87 billion supplemental financing package for Iraq operations that President Bush signed into law last month [Nov.],…$690 million [is] appropriated for gasoline and other fuel imports into Iraq in 2004. The fuel is sold in Iraq for 5 cents to 15 cents a gallon. Source: Dallas Morning News -- "Halliburton's Iraq Fuel Charges Soar" by Don Van Natta Jr. -- Dec. 10, 2003 [I]n a little noticed announcement, Bush's man Bremer, who issues his dictates from Saddam's old office, cancelled all local elections. Bremer has decided that what Iraqis really need now more than the chance to chose their government is an armed and unchallengeable strongman, himself. We know Iraq is free because Mr. Bush explained, he has just appointed Iraq's "governing council." The puppet show, our president told us gleefully, "is now meeting regularly." ..."Democracy," Mr. Bush wagged his finger, "will take time to create." Indeed, it's only right that free and fair elections in Iraq should wait until after free and fair elections in Florida. And THAT is not scheduled until after 2004. Source: Greg Palast - " BLAIR PART II: THE UNICYCLE OF EVIL AND POPPY'S BOMB" -- July 18, 2003 Halliburton and others on a list of those with contracts for reconstruction and security in Iraq and Afghanistan have been large political contributors, mostly to Republican candidates, Mr. [Charles] Lewis [director of the Center for Public Integrity] said. Many of the companies also have former employees who are government officials or board members who formerly held government jobs, said Mr. Lewis. "Those companies contributed more money to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush -- over $500,000 -- than to any other politician over the last dozen years," Mr. Lewis said. Among the center's findings:
Source: Dallas Morning News - "Study links politics, Mideast contracts" by Richard Whittle - 10/31/03 House Republicans stripped the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision which would have held companies holding contracts with the U.S. government criminally accountable for price gouging. Once again, the Republicans have failed to hold businesses accountable. Source: Bush Investment Plan: Profits for Halliburton, Nothing for Workers -- By: Bracken Hendricks and Skye Perryman 11/6/2003 The entire Gulf War during the early 90s cost the U.S. around $4 billion. The current Iraq invasion is costing about that much per month. [B.B.C./UK Guardian reporter Greg] Palast ... managed to get a hold of 100 pages of the State Department's secret "Iraq Strategy," dealing with the "postconflict" economy of Iraq, written long before we were told there'd be a war there. Quoting the State Department's document, Palast reports that their "strategy" lays out a detailed 270-day schedule for grabbing all "asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially those in the oil and supporting industries." He says what this tells us is that "if Bush didn't go into Iraq for the oil, he sure as hell ain't leaving without it." Source: www.gregpalast.com "Every Reason to Be Paranoid: It's actually worse than you think" by Gary Singh -- April 23, 2004 David Wilson, a Halliburton employee charged with delivering supplies by from Camp Cedar II in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda, just north of Baghdad, between November 2003 and March 2004… explained that his supervisors didn't care what was being transported, so long as the trucks drove as many times as possible from one end of the country to the other. "Sometimes they would have five empty trucks, sometimes they would have a dozen. One time we ran 28 trucks and only one had anything on it. There were several times when we had empty trucks both on the way to Anaconda and then on the way back to Cedar II," he said. "As every other trucker working on those convoys will tell you, KBR had virtually no facilities in place to do maintenance on these trucks. There were absolutely no oil filters or fuel filters for months on end. I begged for filters but never got any. I was told that oil changes were out of the question. KBR removed all the spare tires in Kuwait. So when one of our trucks got a flat tire on the highway, we just had to leave it there for the Iraqis to loot, which is just crazy. I remember saying to myself when it happened, 'You just lost yourself an $85,000 truck because of a spare tire.'" Another former Halliburton employee, Mike West, said he was paid despite the fact that he had no work. "I only worked one day out of six in Kuwait," he explained. Likewise, when West got to Camp Anaconda in southern Iraq, he says that he didn't have any work to do. Nor did most of the other 35 workers. The supervisors told them to walk around and look busy. Then they went to a camp in Al Asad, where they had only one day of work out of five days. They were told to bill for 12 hours of labor every day. Marie de Young, who...was hired in December to help oversee Operation Iraqi Freedom contracts in Kuwait... says that Halliburton paid the Kuwaiti subcontractor La Nouvelle $100 per bag for laundry services -- four times more than they were paying elsewhere. That added up to more than $1 million per month. Halliburton housed workers at the five-star Kempinski Hotel for $10,000 per employee per month. At the same time, soldiers were required to live in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The military requested that Halliburton employees move into the tents, but they refused, De Young said. Source: "Halliburton whistleblowers say millions wasted in Iraq -- Is contracting giant 'looking busy' in Iraq to bilk taxpayers?" by Pratap Chatterjee - CorpWatch 6/21/04 via WorkingForChange.com USLAW's [US Labor Against the War] campaign is aimed at unmasking the occupation's economic agenda, the hallmarks of which are privatizing Iraq's state-owned factories and workplaces (still the employer of most Iraqi workers); enforcing salaries that begin at $40 a month to attract investment from foreign corporations; and imposing a 1987 decree banning unions in state-owned plants, while prohibiting advocacy leading to "civil disorder." The campaign highlights connections between the war abroad and Bush's war on labor at home, through common policies such as a ban on union organizing (enforced within the Department of Homeland Security) and privatization. Iraq's new unions want to rewrite the country's labor laws to guarantee their right to organize, bargain and strike while preserving historic protections for national healthcare, housing and education. Their proposals challenge the CPA's free-market reforms, like its decrees this past September privatizing state enterprises, allowing foreign ownership and unlimited repatriation of profits, imposing a 15 percent flat tax and abolishing housing and food subsidies for workers. Bremer's "new constitution" forbids any replacement caretaker government from changing these measures. Source: "Solidarity in Wartime" by David Bacon - The Nation website 6/10/04 [T]he Bush administration, in a modern version of Britain's earlier efforts, has built its occupation and control of Iraq around a strategy to privatize the largely publicly owned Iraqi economic infrastructure, selling it to the highest bidding multinational corporation and allowing designated Iraqis to buy into the program. The Bush administration made it clear from the outset that it wanted Iraq to be a model unregulated free trade zone in the Middle East. In September 2003 the Provisional Authority issued an order making all Iraqi industries subject to sale to foreign owners and allowing international investors low-tax and virtually unregulated freedom to buy Iraqi industries and to take the profits out of Iraq. The oil industry was not included on the list because of the sensitivity of the issue. Nonetheless the privatization initiative is still in play, slowed primarily by the fact that few companies wish to invest in Iraq while the situation is so unstable, unless they have the type of guarantees that US contractors like Halliburton have gotten, virtually ensuring big profits. In April, US appointed Iraqi ministers have discussed ways to encourage foreign banks to locate in Iraq and, significantly, promoted the privatization of Iraqi water. Imagine selling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to Bechtel, one of the biggest for-profit water operators in the third world, and giving them permission to sell the water back to unemployed Iraqis. [W]e can play an important role in assuring that whatever Iraqi political formation results from this process includes a labor movement with full rights, operating under internationally recognized ILO [International Labour Organisation in Geneva ] conventions, fighting to help Iraqi workers fend off multinational companies seeking low wage havens in the Middle East -- helping them make sure that Iraqis, not these multinationals, get to determine the shape of their national economy. Source: "History Repeats Itself: Iraq, Labor Rights and Democracy" by Gene Bruskin, USLAW Co-Convenor - 5/8/04 [T]he intention of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to privatize hundreds of state-owned enterprises will exacerbate the already deplorable situation of working men and women in Iraq. In addition, efforts by Iraqi workers to organize in order to respond to their meager wages and lack of workplace standards have been strongly discouraged by the CPA. The stated intention of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to privatize hundreds of state-owned enterprises which provide the bulk of jobs in Iraq will exacerbate all of these problems, causing additional massive job loss and further deprivation and hardship for Iraqi workers and their families. Efforts by Iraqi workers to organize to remedy these problems have been discouraged by the CPA, if not met with out-and-out resistance and repression. Leaders of the Unemployed Union of Iraq have several times been arrested and then released without charge. On Dec. 6, 2003, U.S. soldiers raided the headquarters of the Iraq Federation of Trade Unions, ransacked the office, confiscated the files, arrested eight of the leaders, and then released them the next day without charge. Most alarmingly, the Coalition Provisional Authority is enforcing a 1987 Saddam Hussein law prohibiting unionization and collective bargaining in the public sector and state-owned enterprises which employ 70% of the Iraqi workforce. Source: CONGRESSMAN SAM FARR - 17 th Congressional District of California - News Release April 29th, 2004 via www.uslaboragainstwar.org A new deepwater port was constructed on the Persian Gulf, Umm Qasr. From its piers Iraq began to ship the goods from ... factories to buyers in other countries throughout the region. The port became a symbol of progress and independence. Today Umm Qasr has become war booty. It was the first Iraqi enterprise to be turned over, not just to a private owner, but to a foreign one. Even before US troops reached Baghdad, in Washington DC the Bush administration gave the concession for operating the port to Stevedoring Services of America, a politically-connected firm handling cargo around the world. Privatizing Umm Qasr began the transformation of the Iraqi economy -- from one based on nationalization and production for an internal, domestic market, to one based on ownership by transnational corporations, sending their profits out of the country. To Iraqis, instead of a symbol of national pride, Umm Qasr now represents a new era of foreign domination. The free trade ideologues of the Bush administration see the occupation of Iraq as a beachhead into the Middle East and south Asia. Their first objective is the transformation of the state-dominated economy of what was once one of the region's wealthiest countries. A free-market Iraq will then set new ground rules for the rest of the area, much as the North American Free Trade Agreement first helped to transform Mexico's economy, and then became a prototype for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. On September 19, the CPA published Order No. 39, which permits 100% foreign ownership of businesses, except for the oil industry, and allows repatriation of profits. Order No. 37, issued the same day, suspended income and property taxes for the year, and imposes a 15% flat tax on individuals and corporations from 2004 onward. Rightwing ideologues haven't been able to get the US Congress to pass a flat tax proposal despite years of trying, but Iraq has become their playground. Iraqi workers look at the prospect of privatization with dread. Dathar Al-Kashab, manager of Baghdad's Al Daura oil refinery, predicted that privatization would have an enormous effect. "A worker starting here today has a job for life, under the old system," he explains, "and there's no law which permits me to lay him off. But if I put on the hat of privatization, I'll have to fire 1500 [of the refinery's 3000] workers. In America when a company lays people off, there's unemployment insurance, and they won't die from hunger. If I dismiss employees now, I'm killing them and their families." Unemployment in Iraq hovers around 70%, according to the country's new unions. There is no unemployment benefit or welfare system. There is a Union of the Unemployed, which has held marches and demonstrations demanding jobs and benefits. It's leader, Qasim Hadi, has been repeatedly arrested by the occupation troops. Meanwhile, the CPA set a new salary schedule for Iraqi workers in September - Order 30 on Reform of Salaries and Employment Conditions of State Employees. This lowered the bottom wage rate from $60 a month to $40, and eliminated all previous house, food, family, risk and location subsidies. In 1987, Saddam Hussein issued a law declaring that workers in state-owned enterprises (which includes most Iraqi workers) had no right to organize unions or bargain. On the Umm Qasr docks and in factories and refineries throughout the country, unions were effectively banned. Today the US occupation authority is still enforcing that 1987 law. This is another gift to prospective new private owners of Iraqi enterprises. If workers there have no legal union, no right to bargain, and no contracts, then privatization and the huge job losses coming with it will face much less organized resistance. On June 5 CPA head Paul Bremer put another weapon into the anti-union arsenal -- Public Notice Number One, prohibiting "pronouncements and material that incite civil disorder, rioting or damage to property." The phrase can easily be interpreted to mean strikes or other organized labor protest. Anyone who violates the decree "will be subject to immediate detention by Coalition security forces and held as a security internee under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949" (in other words, as a prisoner of war.) On December 6, US occupation forces then arrested eight members of the executive committee of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, and took them into detention. Although they were released the following day, the organization was expelled from the building where they had their offices. Jassim Mashkoul, director for internal communications for the IFTU, says that "at the beginning, we thought our situation might be better after we got rid of Saddam Hussein. But it hasn't been."Many factory workers are less diplomatic. One worker at the state leather goods factory in Baghdad explained that "we must change this law that says we don't have to right to a union. If the law doesn't change, we'll change it anyway, like it or not. We are the people." "Life has gotten much worse," said another, pointing emphatically into the air. "Everything is controlled by the coalition. We don't control anything." Most of these specific CPA decrees are unarguably violations of international human rights standards. Conventions 87 and 98 of the International Labor Organization, guaranteeing freedom of association, makes the continued enforcement of the 1987 ban on unions illegal. Convention 135, preventing retaliation against workers for union activity, makes the arrests of union leaders, and their expulsion from their offices, illegal as well. The CPA refuses to comment on these violations. Yet in an especially Orwellian moment, George Bush declared in his January State of the Union speech that US intervention in Iraq would promote the formation of free trade unions in the Middle East. In Iraq, where Um Qasr was the nation's pride and a source of its wealth for decades, its conversion into a business for the benefit of a Seattle firm and its stockholders was a fundamental human rights violation. By extension, so was the occupation itself, which enforced privatization at gunpoint. Source: "WHOSE HUMAN RIGHTS IS THE OCCUPATION DEFENDING?" by David Bacon - April 15th, 2004 - from www.uslaboragainstwar.org "There's money in them war machines, Ain't this a bitch? People, let's stop the war!" (from "People, Let's Stop The War", Grand Funk Railroad - "E Pluribus Funk" 1972) "Spill the wine Take that pearl" (Eric Burden and War) |
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| Comments | Contributor | Date Submitted |
| what will it take to get halliburton in line and why doesnt bush do something.if it where anybody else they would be in jail.if bush would breakdown the contracts so as little businesses could could get a shot at the contracts instead 1 big powerful co dictating and controling these contracts it would be more effective and less corupt. thank you craig bachman | 5/9/2005 | |
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