Bush Ally Bets On Iraq Failure
Why isn’t anyone talking about Krugman’s Friday column in the NYTimes about Hunt Oil signing a separate oil development deal with the Kurds, undermining the Oil Revenue Sharing Agreement that Prime Minister al-Maliki was trying to get through the Council of Representatives?
Krugman writes “Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.”
“Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.”
“…what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.”
“…what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.”
“The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.”
Oil, it’s all about oil.
September 15th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Southern Halliburton University
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=196
The Hunt Oil/Halliburton Connection
And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid
– Dick and Lynne Cheney’s Christmas card inscription, 2003 (both claim membership in the UMC)
Long-time SMU trustee (since 1976) Ray L. Hunt is head of the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, one of the largest independent oil corporations in the world. He is a Bush friend and a central figure in bringing the Bush think tank proposal to SMU (Personal communication, 2007). Hunt is the son of flamboyant Texas oil tycoon, H.L. Hunt, who was a staunch supporter of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society. In 1948, Fortune magazine labeled H.L. Hunt “the richest man in the United States” (Texas State Historical Association, 2007). Ray L. Hunt, an under-the-radar power player, inherited much of the Hunt Oil fortune in 1974 when his father died. Forbes recently identified billionaire Ray Hunt as one of the richest men on the planet (Dallas Business Journal, 2007).
Ray Hunt is a longtime financial backer of the Bush family. He raised money for the elder Bush and served as the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee for George W. Bush in 2000 (Bryce, 2005). According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Hunt and his spouse have donated more than $460,000 to Republican state campaigns, while his company and its employees contributed more than $1 million to Republican causes between 1995 and 2002 (Grimaldi, 2002). He gave $100,000 toward the 2001 Bush inaugural festivities and one of his corporations, Hunt Consolidated, gave another $250,000 toward the Bush 2005 presidential inaugural gala (Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, 2007). In addition, Hunt donated a whopping $35 million toward the Bush library/think tank to secure additional property for the project (Schutze, 2006).
One month after 9/11, Bush honored his friend Ray Hunt with a seat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), and he was re-appointed in January 2006 (Bryce, 2005). According to the White House, this board operates to offer the president “objective, expert advice” on the conduct of foreign intelligence (Wolffe and Bailey, 2005b). Hunt, with international business interests, has access through PFIAB to intelligence that is unavailable to most members of Congress. This group is privy to the most current and sensitive information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the military intelligence organizations, and several others sources (Bryce, 2005). PFIAB operates in complete secrecy. According to Salon magazine, members of this oversight board “are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and unlike other public servants who work for the president, there is no public disclosure of the PFIAB members’ financial interests” (Bryce, 2005).
Several experts are persuaded that Hunt’s position at PFIAB could easily benefit both Hunt Oil’s worldwide energy interests and Halliburton, which has been awarded billions of dollars worth of no-bid, cost-plus contracts in Iraq by the U.S. government (Bryce, 2005; Wolffe and Bailey, 2005). Hunt has been on Halliburton’s board of directors since 1998, when Dick Cheney was running the company and serving as an SMU trustee (1997- 2000). Interestingly, soon after Hunt joined the Halliburton board, he was placed on its compensation committee, where he helped determine Cheney’s pay package (Bryce, 2005). In fact, in 1998 Hunt’s committee decided that Cheney deserved a $3.78 million bonus (Bryce, 2005), and in 2000 he got $33.7 million award when he joined the Bush campaign (Bryce, 2000).
Halliburton has outdone even Enron in using offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. By 2005, Halliburton had 58 offshore subsidiaries in Caribbean tax havens (Turnipseed, 2005). In 1998, the year Hunt joined Cheney at Halliburton, the company paid $302 million in taxes. In 1999, with the use of offshore tax havens, Halliburton paid no taxes and even received $85 million in refunds from the IRS (Turnipseed, 2005). Halliburton also utilized its offshore companies to contract services and sell banned equipment to Iran, Iraq, and Libya — something that would have violated federal law if Halliburton had not used offshore subsidiaries (Turnipseed, 2005). New York City Controller William Thompson said that profits made by Halliburton from states that sponsor terrorism, such as Iran and Libya, is nothing short of “blood money” (Halliburtonwatch, 2007).
Despite using tax havens and earning millions in profits from rogue states like Iran, Halliburton experienced financial distress. In late 2001, according to Fortune magazine, after a series of financial debacles and billions in asbestos-related liability claims, Halliburton stock plummeted to $8.50 a share, and Wall Street worried about the corporation’s survival (Elkind, 2005). Halliburton’s fortunes changed dramatically with the onset of the “war of choice” in Iraq. Before the war, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of utilized contractors; by 2003 it was number one. The company has been awarded at least $11 billion in government contracts since Bush took office (Mayer, 2004).
And Ray Hunt has become an even richer billionaire. In March of 2003 Halliburton stock was valued at $20.50 per share and by March of 2007 it was worth $64.12 per share (Rich, 2007). According to the Forbes list of the World’s Richest People in 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war Ray Hunt was worth $2.3 billion (Forbes, 2003) and by 2007 his fortune had grown to $3.5 billion (Dallas Business Journal, 2007). Both Hunt and Halliburton have been winners in the Iraq war. To provide perspective, the $1.2 billion increase in riches in four years by Hunt is greater than SMU’s total endowment garnered since 1911 (SMU, 2006).