Follow the Yellow Brick road......
Crony Capitalism Goes To War
By Arianna Huffington
Quick quiz: What's the most exclusive club in America? How about the
Augusta National Golf Club, whose 300 members withstood the slings and
arrows of Martha Burk with nary a scratch earlier this month? Or maybe
it's the U.S. Senate, where a seat at one of the historic roll-top
desks
can go for as much as $60 million?
Nope, not even close. Our proud democracy's most select body is the
tiny
group of contenders invited to bid for capitalism's crown jewel: The
Iraq
contract.
Talk about cozy. Sneaking a peek through the blackout curtains the
Bush
administration has used to cloak the awarding of contracts to rebuild
Iraq
is like catching a glimpse of a very special incest episode of
"ElimiDate": a bunch of muscular, cash-drunk, hand-picked corporate
Lotharios vying for the affection of their governmental kissing
cousins.
The relationship between those doling out these fantastically valuable
deals and those receiving them is so intimate taxpayers should demand
that
the participants be checked for STDs before the first mega-buck check
is
left on the dresser. An orgy of unsafe corporate intercourse has been
going on.
For full impact, this column should be a flow-chart. Like the ones the
FBI
uses to show the inner workings of a mafia crime family. But instead
of
illustrating the interrelationships of the Soprano crew, this chart
would
lay out the connections that guaranteed that the big winners in the
post-Saddam sweepstakes would be those two ultimate Washington
insiders,
Halliburton and Bechtel Group.
We all know about Halliburton and its former CEO in the very highest of
secure and undisclosed places, Dick Cheney. But the Bechtel chart is
really Byzantine -- starting with George Shultz, former Bechtel
president,
former Reagan Secretary of State, and currently both a Bechtel board
member and chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Then there is Jack Sheehan, a senior VP at Bechtel and a member of the
Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. And then we have chairman
and CEO Riley Bechtel, who in February was appointed by Bush to the
hoity-toity President's Export Council.
Of course, using access, influence, and positions of ostensible public
service to make a buck or two -- or, say, 680 million of them -- off
Iraq
is nothing new to the fine folks at Bechtel. They offer their
customers
the most precious commodity of all: experience. Back in the 1980s, the
company wanted to build a pipeline to carry oil from Iraq to the
Jordanian
port of Aqaba -- a project ardently supported by the Reagan
administration, which included Shultz and a fellow Bechtel alumnus,
Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger.
Backers of the Bechtel pipeline lined up a veritable Who's Who of
former
Reagan-Bush power players to push for the scheme, including former
Secretary of Defense and CIA chief James Schlesinger, former National
Security Advisor William Clark, former National Security Advisor Robert
McFarlane, and former Attorney General Edwin Meese. I guess the
thought
being that all that political star power might help people forget
Saddam's
annoying little habit of gassing people.
And even though he wasn't on the Bechtel payroll, one of those working
hardest to convince the Iraqis to hop into bed with the company was the
macho man himself, Don "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Antiquities"
Rumsfeld.
While working as Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East in 1983,
Rumsfeld met with Saddam personally and tried to convince him to sign
on
to Bechtel's pipeline pipe dream.
And Rummy isn't the only current administration official with a close
encounter of the Bechtel kind on his CV. Andrew Natsios, administrator
of
the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency responsible
for
handing the lucrative Iraqi rebuilding contract to Bechtel, used to be
in
charge of overseeing Boston's "Big Dig," a massive highway project
managed
by Bechtel that went from a projected cost of $4.5 billion to an actual
cost of $14 billion.
In a scathing letter sent to Natsios, the Massachusetts Inspector
General
called Bechtel's handling of the Big Dig "an invitation to fraud, waste
and abuse." Apparently, this amounted to a sterling recommendation in
Natsios' eyes because, three years later, when the time came to draw up
the very short list of companies invited to bid on $1.5 billion in Iraq
contracts, he didn't hesitate to include the old gang at Bechtel. Hey,
what's a little "fraud, waste and abuse" among chums?
In today's business-loving Washington, a propensity for playing fast
and
loose with taxpayer money clearly qualifies as "no harm, no foul." It
certainly hasn't hurt Halliburton, which, despite being fined $2
million
for routinely overbilling the Pentagon, continues to land hugely
profitable government contracts -- like the $2.2 billion it scored to
provide troop support in the Balkans. According to a GAO study, the
company boosted its bottom line by charging the Army $85 for plywood
that
cost $14, and racked up profits by cleaning the same base offices up to
four times a day.
It goes without saying that everyone involved in these cushy deals
denies
any impropriety. In fact, they are downright offended by the
suggestion
that these contracts -- bid on by a very select group of well-connected
companies, and awarded based on secretive, unexplained criteria -- were
anything but on the up and up.
"We won this work on our record, plain and simple," crowed Riley
Bechtel
in an email to employees, making it sound as if their record of
scheming
and insider dealing was something to brag about. And a spokesman for
the
company assured reporters that Bechtel had not "attempted to bring any
political pressure to bear." They didn't have to. When the fix is in,
no
one has to remind the referee to count to 10 when the chump takes his
dive. It's all done with a wink and a nod. And sometimes not even
that.
The perfect explanation for how this all works came from none other
than
Our Man in Baghdad, retired Gen. Jay Garner. When asked about his
uncanny
success as a businessman following his long military career --
especially
how he helped Sy Technology boost its government contracts from $8.5
million in 1999 to $46.8 million in 2001, with much of that business
coming from the Army division he used to run -- Garner replied: "I do
not
go to friends for business. I get business from my friends, but it's
not
solicited by me." Don Corleone couldn't have put it any better.
Here's another way of looking at the process: "The purpose behind the
abuse," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), "was so that cronies of
the
president could win the spoils of political gain for themselves."
Although Grassley's description suits the Bechtel pact to a tee, he was
actually talking about Bill and Hillary's Travelgate.
Let's hope Sen. Grassley -- or anyone on his side of the aisle -- can
muster a similar fit of indignation over a case of crony capitalism
that
makes Travelgate seems like a tempest in a Teapot Dome.
------
Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How
Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining
America." For information on the book, visit
www.PigsAtTheTrough.com
If you have questions or comments, contact Arianna at
arianna@ariannaonline.com |
