(5/17/2005) Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton for five years. Before that he had been working in a variety of high level government jobs for thirty years, starting with the Nixon administration and continuing through the first Bush administration. During his five years at the helm of Halliburton he earned over $50 million dollars in compensation. Since returning to government to serve in the current Bush administration Cheney has continued to receive millions of dollars in compensation from Halliburton. During the past four years Halliburton has received billions of dollars in government contracts, including some billion dollar non-bid contracts for it's work in Iraq.

Most all of those facts could normally be explained as justified and common business deals, but in Cheney's case this is not so easily done.

In Cheney's case it appears that his excessive compensation from Halliburton is really just a payoff for his thirty years in government pushing an extreme right-wing pro-corporate, anti-middle class, anti-environment, and anti-government agenda. And his continued compensation from Halliburton is a major conflict of interest since the federal government continues to award huge contracts to Halliburton.

There are also the issues of Halliburton's bad behavior while Cheney was running the company. Halliburton was accused of cooking the books with the help of Author Anderson, paying bribes, human rights violations, dubious dealings with Saddam and Iraq, bad business deals resulting in negative net income and job layoffs, and doubling its political contributions with almost all that money going to Republicans.

Since Cheney has returned to government his old company Halliburton has been accused of overcharging the government, under protecting its workers, providing poor quality services to the American soldiers in Iraq, and war profiteering.

In fact, Halliburton and it's subsidiaries have been the number one beneficiary of government contracts to rebuild Iraq. That fact calls into question the reason we went to war in Iraq in the first place. The death of over 1,578 American boys and the spending of over $300 billion dollars is a big price to pay for cronyism. And the Bush family's connections with big military contractors makes that question even more pronounce.

When people talk about a bad situation they often like to say, "The devil is in the details", and that saying is certainly appropriate when talking about Halliburton and it's connections to our government, and to Vice President Cheney.