At the top, four of
Bush’s cabinet secretaries are former CEO’s of giant TNCs. Vice President Dick
Cheney ran Halliburton that now has a $500 million contract of putting out the
oil fires in the oil fields of Iraq; Paul O’Neill, the treasury secretary headed
Alcoa; Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary ran General Instruments; Don
Evans, the Commerce Secretary, ran Tom Brown, an oil and gas company. No
President since Eisenhower has had more than one CEO in the cabinet. Eisenhower
had two.
Even lower down there
is an infusion of corporate types. National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice,
was a director of the oil giant, Chevron; Thomas White, the secretary of the
Army, was formally the head of the trading arm of Enron; James Roche, secretary
of the Air Force, came from Northrop Grumman (a leading arms manufacturer);
Gordon England, secretary of the Navy, comes from another arms manufacturer,
General Dynamics; Andrew Card, Bush’s Chief-of- Staff, was once the top
Washington lobbyist for the car industry.
Former Shell Oil CEO
Phillip Carroll will be appointed as the US Czar of Iraqi Oil. In fact, earlier
too, in Afghanistan, the US installed Hamid Karzai, a former consultant for the
oil giant Unocol, as the chief. It also appointed Kalmay Khalilzad, another
former Unocol consultant, as special envoy — the latter’s writ as special envoy
has now been extended to Iraq.
Ironically, Rumsfeld
traveled to Iraq in 1983 and 1984, at the behest of the then Secretary of State,
George Shultz (who has for the larger part of his time been head of the giant
TNC, Bechtel Corporation). Rumsfeld’s hidden agenda was to win Saddam’s support
of a Bechtel-built oil pipeline to run from Iraq via Jordan to the Gulf of Aqaba.
This is the same Bechtel, which built Saddam’s ‘dual use’ chemical industry. A
week back, it is the same Bechtel that has been given the $600 million
mega-contract to build Iraq’s entire infrastructure. All these contracts have
been handed out without any transparent and competitive process whatsoever. It
is crony capitalism at its peak.
Finally, the new
chief of Iraq, referred to by the US media as the ‘viceroy’, Jay Garner (with a
plan to supervise 23 ministries, all headed by US top brass and each of the
heads of Ministries assisted by 3 assistants and 8 advisors — all American) is
an ex general of the army and a current arms dealer. Garner is on leave from the
company he works for, L-3 Communications, which is a defence contractor for the
Pentagon. It has an annual revenue of $4 billion — some of the missiles dropped
on Iraq were fro technology supplied from Garner’s company!!!
