Halliburton story -- should I be pissed?

[Cocoa]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/261527_jackson03.html

Halliburton's latest outrageous withdrawal from its ATM (American Taxpayer Machine) cries out for the great communicator. Back in 1976 when Ronald Reagan first ran for president, he stoked the anger of largely white audiences with brutal exaggerations of the undeserving black and brown poor.

He talked of a "welfare queen" in Chicago who collected $150,000 under 80 different names. It turned out that she collected only $8,000 under four names. In a Florida campaign stop, Reagan bemoaned how hard-working people wait in line at grocery stores while a "strapping black buck" purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps. It was code language in Florida, where Reagan's Republican state campaign manager told The New York Times, "We are wasting our time to get black people registered."

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Reagan won the presidency in 1980 partially on that attack on the poor. His lasting imagery led to sweeping cutbacks in welfare under President Clinton, a Democrat, and in the current budget cuts to the poor by Republican President Bush. But Halliburton, one of our greatest cheats of the past quarter-century, continues to skip to the head of the grocery line for tax bones as the poor continue to be axed to bare bones.

Even though an Army audit determined that $263 million of charges by Halliburton were exaggerated or unjustified on its $2.41 billion no-bid contract for fuel deliveries and oil equipment repair in Iraq, the Army said it will pay all but $10.1 million of it. The Times reported Monday that the decision to withhold only 3.8 percent of the charges in question is far below the average of questionable charges that are withheld. That average has ranged between 56.4 percent and 75.2 percent over the past three years.

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