NOW can we stop giving these criminals contracts?

Of all the government spending that teabaggers complain about, strangely missing is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that goes into the coffers of Halliburton (and by extension, of Dick Cheney, who still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his tenure there). Even when Halliburton receives industry contracts, it's because of taxpayer money squandered, as with its recently-announced contract to refurbish oil wells in Iraq for ExxonMobil-- wells that would not be available to them had George W. Bush and Dick Cneney not decided to invade Iraq. But Halliburton made plenty of money off of the BushCheney war adventure:


March 2003: Halliburton is awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure.

May 2003: Halliburton's Iraq and Afghanistan contracts are valued at $600 million.

December 2003: An audit shows that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $64 million.

May 2004: Then still a subsidiary of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root already has received $5 billion in LOGCAP (Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program) contract money. KBR has electrocuted American soldiers, given them tainted water to drink and spoiled food to eat.

February 2006: Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is awarded a $385 million contract to build temporary immigration centers. You know, the ones that the teabaggers think Obama built to hold THEM.

June 2010: Halliburton is awarded a rebuilding contract for Haiti following the devastating earthquake. There is currently a cholera epidemic in Haiti -- six months after Halliburton's contract is awarded.

And it isn't just the U.S. government for whom Halliburton does shoddy work, for it was the company behind the cement used to attempt to seal the bottom of the Macondo Deepwater Horizon well. And the company knew damn well that the cement was unstable -- and used it anyway:

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

And we all know how THAT turned out.