Jack Ass of The Week
This week's Jack Ass is the Halliburton Corporation. Accepting the award this week on behalf of his former company, is U.S. V.P. Dick Cheney, the former CEO of this company which has recieved numerous no-bid contracts since the invasion of Iraq began. Many people have written this off as a complete coincidence, but that's now getting harder to believe by the day. In a story broken by Aljazeera, investigated by Reuters and reported this evening on NPR, Halliburton is accused of gouging US taxpayers for the gas it's selling the military in Iraq.
Thank you sir, may I have another?
To wit:
"Halliburton Accused Of Gouging U.S. Taxpayers By Overcharging For Imported Gas (english)
Aljazeera (QATAR) 9:43am Thu Oct 16 '03
article#353756
"Halliburton billed the government an average price of $1.59 per gallon (3.7 litres), excluding the company's fee of 2%-7%, said Waxman. He said the average wholesale cost of gasoline during that period in the Middle East was about 71 cents a gallon, a figure an oil industry source told Reuters was accurate. That meant Halliburton was charging more than 90 cents a gallon to transport fuel into Iraq from Kuwait. 'When we checked with independent experts to see if this fee was reasonable, they were stunned,' said Waxman, adding a reasonable transport cost would be 10 to 25 cents per gallon, especially as the US military was providing security."
This kind of blatant profiteering, of course, cuts to the heart of why some people are suspicious about why we're in Iraq in the first place. That aside, my suggestion to Cheney and Company would be: if you're going to make money off of a situation that's killing a handful of people a day try to keep from getting so greedy about your prices that we notice you're ripping us off. Soulless arrogance is hard for your marketing department to sell. Now even the Army (which answers to Cheney) is asking that the contract be filled by someone else.
"What? I thought you were used
to getting ripped off at the pump."
So, Mr. Cheney, I understand that you want your retirement stock in Halliburton to do well, but gouging the very taxpayers that are dying to keep the contracts coming in Iraq makes you and your former company, Halliburton, complete jackasses.
