My fascination With Halliburton (by BigBadJohnny)

Vice President Chaney, quintessential quail hunter

Bringing what I perceive as a conflict of interests to the public attention motivates me to reprint these astounding posts.

Halliburton aquired Dresser Industries in 1998. Here is some interesting info about Dresser industries:
Dresser had been founded by Solomon Dresser in 1880, and taken over in 1928 by W.H. Harriman & Company, the investment bank owned by the descendants of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, himself a front for the British Royal Family. Under Averell and Roland Harriman, Dresser was a Skull & Bones shop, whose board included Bonesman and presidential father and grandfather Prescott Bush. Both Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush were directors of Union Banking Corp. when it was raided by Federal agents in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, for its dealings on behalf of Nazi Germany.

The Nation., NY - Jun 22, 2006
... Cheney personally negotiated the purchase of Dresser Industries--the deal was closed on a quail-hunting expedition--but he neglected to account for the ...

Amid all his other troubles, Vice President Richard Cheney is now stalked by a ghost from his past--the Richard Cheney who for five years was CEO of the Halliburton Company. When he left Halliburton in 2000 to become George W. Bush's running mate, the Republican ticket was touted as two tough-minded business executives running against wimpish politicians. "The American people should be pleased they have a vice presidential nominee who has been successful in business," Karen Hughes, Bush's then-communications director, enthused.
A rather different story is told by a class-action investor lawsuit against Halliburton, recently revived after languishing for four years. It describes Cheney as not much different from other corporate titans ensnared by accusations of fraud. Brushing aside facts and subordinates' warnings, CEO Cheney made a series of daring but wrong decisions that were disastrous for the company. The managerial incompetence was compounded by fraudulent accounting gimmicks that concealed the company's true condition. Cheney, however, relentlessly issued bullish assurances, hiding the losses and pumping up the stock price.

Hitlers War machine

More of the same!

Bush family history shows a dark past unseen by most
By Douglas Yates
The Bush family presents a record of war profiteers who use public office to gain wealth and advantage. Along the way, Bush family business cronies receive political access and legitimacy.
One of the most venal characters is Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather.
In 1942, Congress seized the assets of Prescott Bush and charged him with trading with the enemy. Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, were managing directors of the Union Banking Corp. of New York City. Allied with Brown Brothers Harriman, the largest private investment bank in the world, Bush and Walker were front men for Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen.
Thyssen, whose empire was founded on coal and steel, financed the rise of Adolf Hitler. Then as now, cloaking funds destined for subversion of democracies or weapons shipment was a useful tactic. To hide transactions and conceal ownership, Thyssen created a banking network. The first node was established in Berlin, a second in neutral Holland. UBC in New York was the linchpin.
Little more than a money-laundering office for Nazi operations in the United States, Bush, Walker and other confederates oversaw almost a dozen separate businesses. Acting with Thyssen's money, they aided the Nazi invasion of Europe by supplying resources for weaponry. In 1937, Bush set up a deal to help the Luftwaffe obtain tetraethyl lead to boost aircraft performance.
Americans first heard about Thyssen's American operations in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942, eight months after Pearl Harbor. The headline declared "Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank." However, the story did not identify Bush or Harriman as UBC executives.
After the war ended in 1945, investigators learned that Bush had extremely close ties to Thyssen and continued to work as his agent to the end. When hostilities ceased, Bush helped move Thyssen assets to Panama, Argentina and Brazil, all major destinations for the flight of Nazi capital.
In 1951, following Thyssen's death in Argentina, the U.S. alien property custodian released the assets of Union Banking Corp. Prescott Bush cashed out his ownership share for $1.5 million. (In 2004 dollars, that's more than $10 million.) He used it to fund a successful U.S. Senate campaign from Connecticut and launch his son, the president's father, in the oil business.
Other American companies that armed Hitler included General Motors, Standard Oil and Chase Bank. All were quietly sanctioned after Pearl Harbor; then government files were lost or forgotten. For 60 years, the full record of Prescott Bush's complicity in the Nazi war machine has been ignored or denied by participants and the U.S. media.
But no more. Documents relating to the seizures were recently uncovered in the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Confirmed by Dutch government sources, they show that Bush shipped tons of strategic resources to the Third Reich as Hitler prepared to invade Poland.
Despite this history, the news media continue to present a selective picture of the Bush family and its business connections. People who tried to show the warts were shouted down; in 2000, St. Martin's Press, the first publisher of "Fortunate Son," a George W. Bush biography, was forced to recall and destroy its inventory.
' .. lies send our troops to die far from home; war profits flow to favored industries in billion-dollar contracts.'
In private action and public policy, Bush family history reveals a pattern of war profiteering spanning four generations. It's a legacy of deceit and death. For the naïve and uninformed, the facts may be a slap in the face. For those who look closely, the sign is as clear as blood on snow.