Don't Let Cheney Off the Hook!!

[BurtWorm]

He's the cold-blooded fucker at the "heart" of the heartless Bush administration's corporate takeover of American democracy.



http://www.earthrights.org/halliburton/report.doc


HALLIBURTON’S DESTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT

EarthRights International
September 2000

Halliburton’s Destructive Engagement
By Kenny Bruno & Jim Vallette
Box as per bottom half of the pink one in Total Denial Continues.

EarthRights International thanks all of our supporters and funders, in particular The Beldon Fund, The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and The Turner Foundation.


Halliburton’s Destructive Engagement

Introduction

Before Dick Cheney was selected as George W. Bush’s running mate, EarthRights International (ERI) had decided to look into oil services giant Halliburton, where Cheney was CEO. The reason for our interest was Halliburton’s prominent role in a corporate coalition called USA-Engage, an offshoot of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) that has become an obstacle to democracy movements in the United States and in Burma, two countries where ERI works actively.

At the time, we did not know that while Cheney headed the company, Halliburton had done business with the notorious Yadana pipeline project in Burma – an environmentally damaging project on behalf of which, according to a U.S. federal court, egregious human rights abuses were committed, including murder, torture, rape, forced labor and forced relocation.

We did know that USA-Engage and the NFTC had become a serious obstacle to the Burma democracy movement. They opposed Burma sanctions. They opposed the Massachusetts Burma law, a selective purchasing measure modeled after laws that helped bring down apartheid in the 1980’s. They believed only in “engagement,” even for Burma, where the leader of the democratically elected ruling party, Aung San Suu Kyi, has called for sanctions to isolate and weaken the brutal military dictatorship.

They had also tried to undermine some positive expressions of democracy in the U.S., by attacking laws that helped citizens control how their state and local tax dollars were spent.

The work of these powerful corporate groups came to fruition last June, when the Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts Burma law. The corporations’ winning argument was that states should not be able to steer money away from the Burma dictatorship, because the federal government has already enacted sanctions against Burma that preempt state laws. But the same corporations also vigorously lobby Congress not to impose those federal sanctions.

The threat of USA-Engage is, as Jacob Heilbrunn put it in the New Republic, “the corporate takeover of foreign policy.”