Ranting to /dev/null

Long expected response

Okay, I've finally had enough time to muse about the discussion of Bush that happened last week. What follows is, I hope, a fairly detailed economic analysis of the assertion of the claim that "We went into Iraq for oil" and that Bush and Cheney are major shareholders in, among others, Halliburton, Brown & Root, and Fluor. The original discussion is found mostly here.

David J. Lesar, not Dick Cheney, is Chairman of the Board and CEO of Halliburton. Furthermore, Dick Cheney has indeed divested himself of all holdings in Halliburton, as evidenced on their last financial statement available here, or, at least, he is not in the top owners of the company. Public Halliburton reportings show no ownership by Cheney of a size that merits reporting, and they report holdings as low as a few thousand shares.

A judge is currently considering dismissing the case filed against Halliburton for corporate misreporting of earnings, as can be seen here.

Also, Halliburton has owned Brown & Root since at least 1998. George W. Bush cannot be a chief shareholder in Brown & Root because as a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton, Brown & Root is not publicly traded.

Concerning Bush himself, his publicly available financial reports indicate that most of his money is in bonds, money markets, mutual funds, and high tech stocks. He owns a total of 700 shares in the oil and gas industry, worth (at the time of reporting) $16,835 that paid a dividend of $112. The shares are in the Cabot Oil and Gas Group. This doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that one would start a war over. No Halliburton stock is owned by George W. Bush. I did some investigation in to Fluor: Bush is not on any of their boards, and owns no stock in the company. He does own a good amount of Lucent, Intel, Microsoft, and Ericsson stock, but no oil-related stock.
Any "connections" between Bush and Cheney on one side, and Halliburton and its subsidiary Brown & Root are purely personal, not financial.

But what about campaign contributions? The numbers don't add up there either, if you read OpenSecrets. The Oil/Gas industry comes in at number 8 on the list of top industry contributors for the 2000 campaign cycle, and thus far they rank 13 in the 2004 cycle. In 2000, none of the top 20 individual corporation sponsors are oil related, and the same is true for 2004. Now, Bush’s prescription drug plan? That’s a quid pro quo, as his largest contributors have been retirees, both in 2000 and for 2004. But neither they, nor lawyers, nor big financial institutions, his three top contributors, have any interest in foreign oil in particular or foreign war in general. Retirees probably don’t care one way or the other – though they are probably more likely to support the war than not – lawyers have no interest either way, and big financial institutions actually have a lot to lose in wartime. Stock prices don’t do as well when people are nervous, and wars make people nervous. You can say that the war in Iraq was about oil, but the numbers just don’t add up. There really isn’t a vested interest for anyone here, at least not vested enough to stake one’s presidency on it. Call Bush what you like, but he’s nothing if not shrewd. Or at least his advisors are, and he listens to them. Plus, if Bush catered so much to the oil industry, why has he earmarked millions for R&D on hydrogen-powered cars?

Finally, there's the fact that we really don't need Iraqi oil. This country has plenty of oil reserves in Alaska, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico. If he really wanted to give oil companies a break, he'd relax internal regulations on oil extraction that would make it cheaper to produce oil domestically, rather than have them pay for shipping it halfway around the world.

You can say that Bush and his associates are owned by oil all you want, but until you or someone else can produce actual documents with actual numbers to support your thesis, you're basically just ranting. I've got plenty of numbers that indicate that if the Bush administration is owned by anyone, it isn't the oil industry, it's old people, who, in my opinion, are a lot scarier. Big Oil may be more polluting, but old people are more likely to run you over at the crosswalk.

Posted by ryan at August 7, 2003 02:42 PM | TrackBack