Remarkable Achievements of the Bush Administration, No. 425
Comments: 1
To say that Bush and the grownups he’s surrounded himself with have some serious problems is something of an understatement. It’s constantly amazing how this administration was ever elected. Oh, wait a minute; they weren’t.
Arianna Huffington has a truly damning column in today’s Salon talking about Bush and Cheney’s corporate tax evasion:
The White House’s credibility problem
During [Cheney]’s time as the company’s No. 1, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax-friendly locations ballooned from nine in 1995 to 44 in 1999. The result? A dramatic drop in Halliburton’s federal taxes, which fell from $302 million in 1998 to less than zero – to wit, an $85 million rebate – in 1999.
At the same time they were hard at work stiffing U.S. taxpayers, Cheney and Halliburton were happily feasting at the public trough – the company received $2.3 billion in government contracts and another $1.5 billion in government financing and loan guarantees.
Meanwhile, Joe Conason picks up on a Bloomberg story about the Bush campaign’s use of Enron and Halliburton private jets during the Florida coup d’etat (oops, I mean recount):
Imagine the manufactured outrage if it were discovered that Al Gore had been chauffeured around on an Occidental Petroleum jet, after all the wailing about his family’s ties to that benighted firm. Guess what? Bloomberg News reports that the guest passengers on the Oxy jet were Bush-Cheney politicos. There are still more interesting names on the list of companies that provided executive jets to the Bush effort in November 2000 aside from Enron and Halliburton. Among them are Reliant Energy, under federal investigation for manipulating energy prices in California; Anadarko Petroleum, whose executives enjoyed special entrée into Cheney’s Energy Task Force; Tom Brown Inc., another oil outfit whose former CEO Donald Evans is now the Commerce Secretary; MBNA, the consumer-credit mammoth whose bankruptcy “reform” legislation is now being pushed by Bush; and, rather weirdly, Sallie Mae, the enormous financial services group that specializes in packaging and marketing government-backed student loans.
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.08.06 (Tue) • 15:11
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Posted by Editor 2003.05.06, 18:57
The ParodyTimes is a satirical online newspaper features news and event from a world remarkably similar to our own. Don’t miss the articles and pitures of the iraqi minister of information, George W Bush, Tony Blair etc
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