Blood Bath

Halliburton reported it's fiscal year 2010 results by blowing away all expectations. The company improved on the top line and the bottom line and every line in between. The deep water services company enjoyed an 80% increase in revenue in its North American unit alone despite the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact it was Halliburton’s cost-cutting methods which both had a hand in the company's gigantic profits increase and the Deepwater disaster itself. In short the slurry cement which was used to plug the gap was just too soupy.

After an exploration well is drilled, cement slurry is pumped through a steel pipe or casing and out through a check valve at the bottom of the casing. It then travels up the outside of the pipe, sheathing the part of the pipe surrounded by the oil and gas zone. When the cement hardens, it is supposed to prevent oil or gas from leaking into adjacent zones along the pipe.

As the cement sets, the check valve at the end of the casing prevents any material from flowing back up the pipe. The zone is thus isolated until the company is ready to start production.

The process is tricky. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most-important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period.

Halliburton has been accused of performing a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.

In its statement, the company said: "Halliburton originated oilfield cementing and leads the world in effective, efficient delivery of zonal isolation and engineering for the life of the well, conducting thousands of successful well-cementing jobs each year."

The fact that the company is a serial offender means that the statement is clearly delusional or that it is comfortable with lying.

But Halliburton’s fortunes do not rise and fall based on the slurpyness of cement slurry. It and it’s creepy CIA subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root KBR are politically connected and deeply enmeshed defenses contractors, nothing less. But it was in the business of politics and the politics of the war of aggression against Iraq, where Halliburton won big. During the Cheney Bush era when Halliburton's CEO was co-President of the United States the company was awarded multibillion dollar bid-less oil and construction contracts. It built the American Embassy of Halliburton in Iraq, widely reported as the largest embassy in the world. Halliburton profiteered from the war by doing what had traditionally been considered to be government work, work that included keeping the troops fed, sheltered and in communication with friends and family back in the states.

But Halliburton did the work in slipshod fashion at exorbitant prices, shortchanging the client and doing shoddy work in every area according to the GAO report. The MO was established long before the slurry cement never dried.

In the report, GAO examined numerous facets of Halliburton’s contract with the U.S. military to provide essential services to the troops in Iraq. GAO found significant problems in almost every area, including ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, insufficient training of contract management officials, and a pattern of recurring problems with controlling costs, meeting schedules, documenting purchases, and overseeing subcontractors.

That poor performance in every area had no impact on any one of the company's contracts as Halliburton’s man in the White House continued paying dividends and in the war for profit, Halliburton continued to profit, at everyone else's expense. That is what war profiteers do. The company scored $80 million in blood bonuses for doing work of murderously poor quality.

The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated, 24-year-old Green Beret, who was electrocuted while taking a shower at a US base in January 2008. His death, the result of improper grounding for a water pump, has been classified by the US Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) as a "negligent homicide." Maseth's death had originally been labeled an accident. Bonuses were paid to KBR in 2007 and 2008, after CID investigators had officially expressed concerns about the quality of KBR's electrical work. For its part, KBR denies any culpability for the electrocution deaths.

On Wall Street where competition is a sin Halliburton reached nirvana long before even the megabanks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. With profits grown by insider connections and bid rigging, and then protected with bribes and intimidation this company remains untouched by either the consequences of it’s actions or the global economy imploding around it.

At its core Halliburton is what the best on Wall Street strive to be. A sociopathic profit machine, raping without passion, murdering openly, and ruthlessly crushing it’s critics all in the maniacal furtherance of its self serving bottom line.

After Jamie Lee Jones was gang raped by fellow KBR employees and stuffed into a storage bin for three days to shut her up she naturally tried to file charges, instead she was forced by contract to arbitrate.

On Wednesday, after fighting tooth-and-nail in the lower courts to keep the case from going to trial, KBR announced that it was dropping its Supreme Court appeal in the case. (The company actually withdrew its petition to the court on March 11, according to KBR spokesperson Heather Browne. This was less than two weeks after it was awarded a new $2.3 billion logistics contract by the Army.) Jones, who says she was raped by coworkers and then imprisoned in a shipping container for three days by KBR staffers who wanted to keep her complaint quiet, had been barred from pursuing her sexual harassment case in the courts by a provision in her employee contract: The fine print said all such issues must be resolved via the company’s own binding arbitration process.

Was Miss Jones really raped or not? No one in the government seems to care; justice comes down to the fine print. Who knew that redressing gang rape could be so neat. Who knew you could sign away your rights, any one of them.

But rape is only a part of the business model. In fact the human trafficking and forced prostitution subdivision is one of its best unknown off-balance-sheet entities, generating trillions off the books for its board members and major shareholders. Message to all of the sick pedophiles in the government who can pay, Halliburton will provide.

Halliburton has since washed its hands of KBR, but not of the blood of three of it’s drivers. Three Americans it recruited and hired to work for it in Iraq and then with callous disregard recklessly dangled them out to die. The company showed once again that human life -- someone else's -- makes an easy right off. If the death of Sgt. Maseth was negligent homicide this was within epsilon of murder.

Three KBR truck drivers were killed that day. They are Keven Dagit, 42 (in truck 3), of Jefferson, Iowa; Christopher Lem, 40, (in truck 1) of Lyndon Station, Wisconsin; and Sascha Grenner-Case (in truck 4) of Sierra Vista, Arizona. Wheeler, who lives in Arkansas, was shot and barely survived. Two other drivers, including Terry Steward (in truck 2) of Idaho, were also injured.

So, with blood on it's hands and murder in it's heart Halliburton stuffs it pockets with the last bloody cent and then as the rats do first it abandons ship.

Although Halliburton will still be incorporated inside the United States, moving its corporate headquarters to UAE will make it easier to avoid accountability from federal investigators. The company has proven adept at using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent restrictions on doing business in Iran and to elude responsibility for paying benefits to former employees.

Having left the country the real question that remains is, when will Halliburton turn it's malice and mercenary armies back inward, toward Americans? Preparations have been made. This war exporting company has already build numerous FEMA camps and FUSION centers under REX 84, on the taxpayer dollar, but the real expense has yet to be felt. Those Fusion centers are admittedly monitoring political activities of Ron Paul in Florida and put the ACLU on a terror list in Tennessee. But no one is suspected of criminal wrong doing. So, it is spying on Americans openly, without resistance therefore with the consent of the American people.

The problem with stopping Halliburton is not that there is nothing anyone can do about it, but that there aren't enough who want to and by the time the necessary critical mass is attained to prevent martial law and slaughter in the streets it will probably be too late.