Liberal Mantra

Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton ~ Give it a Rest!

Published by Papa Giorgio

What do you know — former Halliburton subsidiary KBR really is in bed with the White House, just like the liberal media shrieked for 8 years:

  • KBR Inc. was selected for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011 for military support services in Iraq, the Army said

(Right Wing News)

The Halliburton mantra is getting to a fever pitch, again. This is merely the Left fear mongering about things it knows nothing about, that is, hard work and the companies and people behind that hard work. Another thing Democrats seem to know nothing about is that both President’s Johnson and Clinton used Halliburton via no-bid contracts:

Dallas, Texas – Brown & Root Services (BRS), a business unit of Halliburton Company (NYSE: HAL), has been selected to continue its services as the premier logistics support provider to U.S. forces deployed in the Balkans region. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Transatlantic Programs Center announced today that it awarded the logistics support services contract, which becomes effective on May 28, 1999, to Brown & Root Services for a period of up to five years. Contract value is estimated up to $180 million per year, with a maximum value of $900 million if all four option periods are exercised. The one-year contract has four one-year options that can be awarded at the government’s discretion.

My question is this, “could any other company have bid on the no-bid contracts?” Edwards is always parroting about allowing others to bid for contracts! This is similar in thinking that anyone but Red Adaire could put out the oil well fires after the First Gulf War. They were a no-bid contract.

An L.A. Times op-ed of April 22 said, “Halliburton Received No-Bid Contracts During Clinton Administration For Work In Bosnia And Kosovo.” An October 2003 article in the (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer quoted Bill Clinton’s Undersecretary Of Commerce William Reinsch as saying,

“‘Halliburton has a distinguished track record,’ he said. ‘They do business in some 120 countries. This is a group of people who know what they’re doing in a difficult business. It’s a particularly difficult business when people are shooting at you.’”

There are two very large companies that could have done a lot of what Halliburton could do, one company is Brown and Root, and the other is Bechtel. Brown and Root was bought by Halliburton a long while back, and Bechtel is just an engineering firm as is Black and Vetch. In fact, the GAO came out and stated that only Haliburton could do the job… and get it done on time. No other company could have done this. Again, this same scenario happened in Bosnia with Clinton. All this is politicking by the Democrats to try and confuse the electorate.

An excellent article by The Heretical Librarian reads thus:

One of the most disgusting and ridiculous myths circulated by Bush haters is the idea that the Iraq campaign was launched as a way to enrich the Halliburton Corporation. For one thing, the notion that Halliburton is rolling in the profits in Iraq is ludicrous. As Slate noted in April:

So far, the Iraq war hasn’t proved much of a boon for Halliburton’s shareholders. Because of incompetence, the chaos of working in the war zone, and a contract that limits profits, KBR’s margins on its hazardous work are pretty marginal.

On March 9, the Washington Post reported that Halliburton made $85 million in Iraq in 2003, out of expenditures of $3.6 billion, a profit margin of less than 2.5%. Hardly what most people would consider to be “war profiteering”. (go to bugmenot.com if you need a name and password for the Post article)

Back in July 2003, Byron York pointed out in National Review that Halliburton is a long established government contractor, and that critics “overlook Halliburton’s extensive history of defense work for earlier administrations. Indeed, far from having a ‘troubling’ past, one could argue that Halliburton was a favorite contractor of the Clinton Pentagon.”

…read more…

The Facts on Halliburton, By Michael P. Tremoglie
FrontPageMagazine.com 10/8/2004

To partisans of a liberal, radical, and Democratic Party background, Halliburton is synonymous with evil, the symbol of cloven-footed, corrupt capitalism.

According to the these activists, Halliburton is the treasonous corporation of which VP Cheney was formerly CEO — treasonous because the company is reaping profits from the war in Iraq as our bravest young men are dying.

Both John Kerry and John Edwards have picked up on this. Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry recently said, “the only people George Bush’s policies are working for are the people he chooses to help…They’re working for drug companies. They’re working for oil companies…and they’re certainly working for Halliburton.” Edwards likewise inserted this issue into this week’s vice presidential debate.

It has been a reigning motif of the conspiracist Left that has slowly gained the mainstream acceptance of the man who could be the next president — and the man who could be the frontrunner in the 2008 presidential race.

The Left has been on this theme for quite some time. According to an article by Carl Hiassen, in the April 25 edition of the Miami Herald, “Dick Cheney had gotten the war he wanted. One year later, it’s costing us a staggering $4.7 billion a month, or about $157 million per day. A hefty chunk of that is being spent on support services provided in Iraq by Halliburton, the Texas company that Cheney ran before joining the Bush ticket in 2000. Cheney says he has severed his ties to Halliburton and had nothing to do with the lucrative no-bid contracts awarded to the firm. Not everyone is persuaded that the connection is merely coincidental.”

All this rhetoric echoes the words of the revolutionary Marxist journal International Socialist Review (ISO), which has made reference to the “corporate invasion of Iraq by large U.S. corporations like Halliburton.”[1]

Why do leftists demonize Halliburton? What proof exists of their claims of corruption? What exactly has Halliburton done to profit from American military casualties? Indeed, have they profited from military casualties? Is there a special relationship between the Bush administration and Halliburton so that the company receives contracts without observing the normal bidding process?

It is certainly true that during a two year period Halliburton’s revenue from Defense Department contracts doubled. However, that increase in revenue occurred from 1998 to 2000 – during the Clinton administration.

In 1998, Halliburton’s total revenue was $14.5 billion, which included $284 million of Pentagon contracts. Two years later, Halliburton’s DoD contracts more than doubled.

Regarding the Iraq contracts, Halliburton was accused by Democrats of receiving special “no-bid” contracts because of Cheney’s influence. One advertisement by the Democrats charged, “Bush gave contracts to Halliburton instead of fighting corporate corruption.”

FactCheck.org an organization which ascertains the validity of political campaign advertisements researched this accusation. According to FactCheck,

“The Bush administration is doing a fair amount to fight corporate corruption, convicting or indicting executives of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco International, Worldcom, Adelphia Communications Corporation, Credit Suisse First Boston, HealthSouth Corporation and others, including Martha Stewart. The Department of Justice says it has brought charges against 20 executives of Enron alone, and its Corporate Fraud Task Force says it has won convictions of more than 250 persons to date. Bush also signed the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002, imposing stringent new accounting rules in the wake of the Arthur Andersen scandal.”

When Factcheck.org checked the facts about allegations by Democrats that there was a scandal because of the “no-bid” contracts awarded to Halliburton they stated,

“It is false to imply that Bush personally awarded a contract to Halliburton. The ‘no-bid contract’ in question is actually an extension of an earlier contract to support U.S. troops overseas that Halliburton won under open bidding. In fact, the notion that Halliburton benefited from any cronyism has been poo-poohed by a Harvard University professor, Steven Kelman, who was administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Clinton administration. ‘One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded…who doesn’t regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd,’ Kelman wrote in the Washington Post last November.” (Emphasis added.)

The Center for Public Integrity another public interest group also investigated the purported scandal of the Halliburton “no-bid” contracts. They wrote:

In Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) has been awarded five contracts worth at least $10.8 billion, including more than $5.6 billion under the U.S. Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) contract, an omnibus contract that allows the Army to call on KBR for support in all of its field operations. When the Army needs a service performed, it issues a “task order,” which lays out specific work requirements under the contract…From 1992 to 1997, KBR held the first LOGCAP contract awarded by the Army, but when it was time to renew the contract, the company lost in the competitive bidding process to DynCorp after the General Accounting Office reported in February 1997 that KBR had overrun its estimated costs in the Balkans by 32 percent (some of which was attributed to an increase in the Army’s demands). KBR (obtained) the third LOGCAP contract in December 2001…[I]n November 2002 the Army Corps of Engineers tasked KBR to develop a contingency plan for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq…[O]n March 24, 2003, the Army Corps announced publicly that KBR had been awarded a contract to restore oil-infrastructure in Iraq, potentially worth $7 billion. The contract KBR received…would eventually include 10 distinct task orders. KBR did not come close to reaching the contract ceiling, billing just over $2.5 billion…The contract was awarded without submission for public bids or congressional notification. In their response to congressional inquiries, Army officials said they determined that extinguishing oil fires fell under the range of services provided under LOGCAP, meaning that KBR could deploy quickly and without additional security clearances.

Neither the Center for Public Integrity nor Factcheck.org determined anything sinister about Halliburton’s no-bid” contracts for the Iraq war. Two nonpartisan, nonaligned, public interest organizations have investigated the Halliburton allegations and found them to be specious allegations made for purely political purposes.

An L.A. Times op-ed of April 22 said,

“Halliburton Received No-Bid Contracts During Clinton Administration For Work In Bosnia And Kosovo.” An October 2003 article in the (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer quoted Bill Clinton’s Undersecretary Of Commerce William Reinsch as saying “‘Halliburton has a distinguished track record,’ he said. ‘They do business in some 120 countries. This is a group of people who know what they’re doing in a difficult business. It’s a particularly difficult business when people are shooting at you.'”

If Democrats want to investigate a scandal involving Iraq they should devote their efforts to the UN “Oil-for-Food” program instead of Halliburton. However, they will not because Saddam Hussein is not a candidate in this presidential election.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Internation Socialist Review, “Iraq, Palestine, and U.S. Imperialism“

A former police officer, Michael P. Tremoglie recently published his first novel, A Sense of Duty. His work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Human Events, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has a Master of Science degree from Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia.

Women Earn More Than Men-About 8% More-All Things Equal (Liberal Mantra’s)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is partly an import from a previous post dealing with this topic via my old blog, and partly an update. In my original post entitle, Glass Ceilings, Veteran benefits, and Other Liberal Mantras, I chronicled the following:

The Glass Ceiling

President Clinton said that women make .73 cents on every man’s dollar. He used this as a campaign issue to try and smear Republicans. Kerry said that women make .76 cents on every man’s dollar, and likewise used this stat as a political smear. The question then is this, are these two persons correct?

YES! If you compare all men to all women, then yes, there is a disparage. This stat doesn’t take into account a few things. It doesn’t consider the fact that women tend to choose the humanities when entering college and men seem to choose the hard sciences. So by choice women tend to choose professions that pay less. Not only that, when you compare Oranges to Oranges, you get something much different than expected, or that we would expect from the liberal side of things. If a woman and a man have had the same level of education and have been on the same job for an equal amount of time, the woman makes $1,005 while a man makes $1,000, a difference of $5 dollars every thousand dollars a man earns.

Thomas Sowell is the most well written on this subject. In fact, in his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, he devotes a whole chapter to this topic. In one area he points the following out, and keep in mind that in most countries mining or other hard-labor jobs are much more the norm than in America:

…various countries’ economies, there are still particular industries today where considerable physical strength remains a requirement. Women are obviously not as likely to work in such fields as men are— and some of these are fields with jobs that pay more than the national average. While women have been 74 percent of what the U.S. Census Bureau classifies as “clerical and kindred workers,” they have been less than 5 percent of “transport equipment operatives.” In other words, women are far more likely to be sitting behind a desk than to be sitting behind the steering wheel of an eighteen-wheel truck. Women are also less than 4 percent of the workers in “construction, extraction, and maintenance.” They are less than 3 percent of construction workers or loggers, less than 2 percent of roofers or masons and less than one percent of the mechanics and technicians who service heavy vehicles arid mobile equipment.

Such occupational distributions have obvious economic implications, since miners earn nearly double the income of office clerks when both work full-time and year-round 20 There is still a premium paid for workers doing heavy physical work, as well as for hazardous work, which often overlaps work requiring physical strength. While  men are 54 percent of the labor force, they are 92 percent of the job-related deaths.

He goes on to point out that this volunteerism of choices continues onto Ph.D.s,

Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on women and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence— as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants. Even as the proportion of women receiving Ph.D.s rose dramatically from the 1970s on, male-female differences in the fields of specialization remained large. As of 2005, for example, women received more than 60 percent of the doctorates in education but less than 20 percent of the doctorates in engineering.

He then goes on to point out that do to life choices based on being close to family [kids], and choices made around work and family:

The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked fill-time and were from 40 to 64 years old— that is, beyond the child-bearing years— men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.30 But, despite the fact that women in this category earned more than men in the same category, gross income differences in favor of men continue to reflect differences in work patterns between the sexes, so that women and men are not in the same categories to the same extent.

Even women who have graduated from top-level universities like Harvard and Yale have not worked full-time, or worked at all, to the same extent that male graduates of these same institutions have. Among Yale alumni in their forties, “only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men,” according to the New York Times. It was much the same story at Harvard:

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30’s and 40’s.Women vs. Men Entering College

In fact, as of a few years ago, women make more of the enrollment statistics in college, but will, through life choices, spend less time on the job that they went to school for than their male counterparts. All this brings me full circle to a great article that updates the above via the Wall Street Journal. They point out that much of the emphasis on this are by special interest groups that want to fix the problem — in my mind’s eye — with outdated thinking that no longer fits the evidence. This is much of the left’s “padded” thinking mind you! the WSJ’s article, entitled,There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap: A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men, is a great update to the above:

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women’s Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.

In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn’t be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.

Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

…(read more)…