Oh really. Here's part of an article in "Slate," on a) how much Halliburton's been getting out of Iraq so far, b) what a lousy manager Cheney was at Halliburton. It quotes that hotbed of liberalism, "The Wall Street Journal:"
The Cheney Curse
The veep hasn't helped Halliburton. He has hurt it.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003, at 1:50 PM PT
Last week, Halliburton, the oil-services and construction company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, surprisingly warned that its earnings for the current quarter would be 15 percent lower than estimates. You'd think that Halliburton would be thriving. After all, oil prices are high, and the company has received giant—if controversial—contracts to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq. The no-bid prewar contract it received to work on Saddam's oil fields has, according to the Wall Street Journal, gushed $1.3 billion of revenues thus far. The company also won a competitive bid for a $1.4 billion contract to support military personnel.
Here is a strange fact about the well-connected company: Dick Cheney hasn't helped it. In January 2001, if you bought stock thinking that Cheney's ascension would be a boon to Halliburton, you made a bad bet. Since January 2001, Halliburton has underperformed both the Oil Services Index and the S&P 500—although it has outperformed both indexes over the past year.
It turns out that as much as Halliburton has benefited from having Cheney in government, it suffers from having had him in the executive suite before then. As CEO, Cheney was less an operations manager than a deal-maker, a boldface name who opened doors, especially abroad, and sealed huge contracts. But several of the deals he struck proved to be ill-advised and questionable and, ultimately, damaging to the company and its shareholders.
Halliburton attributes its earnings shortfall to problems in joint ventures and high legal fees—both of which can be laid at Cheney's feet. Cheney midwifed the Barracuda-Caratinga Project, which is gnawing a hole in the company's balance sheet. Under the $2.5 billion deal, announced in January 2000 when Cheney was CEO, Halliburton was supposed to develop two offshore oil fields in Brazil by December 2003 and April 2004, respectively. But the project has turned into a fiasco, with huge cost overruns and bad schedule misses. As of June 30, 2003, the project was 75 percent complete—and more than a year behind schedule. By that date, Kellogg, Brown and Root, the responsible subsidiary, had already recorded a pretax loss of $345 million on the project, with the possibility of greater losses to come. The miserable experience has caused the current management team to cease making fixed-price bids on giant projects.
Gee. I'll be darned. Look the stuff up. "Slate," also has a good article on Halliburton's problems when the pension fund for the NYPD/NYFD tried to block their having being awarded a fat set of no-bid contracts, especially in view of their having invested in Iraqui oil--through a Cayman Islands dummy corp--BEFORE the War.
Huh. I's be gosh-darned.
I'm sure Rush Limbaugh said the same thing a week ago and its just being parroted back into our faces.
