The Shock Doctrine: The Clintons and the Cheneys [View All]

[Joanne98]

In the Balkans, where Clinton deployed nineteen thousand soldiers, US bases sprang up as mini Halliburton cities: neat, gated suburbs, built and run entirely by the company. And Halliburton was committed to providing the troops with all the comforts of home, including fast-food outlets, supermarkets, movie theatres and high-tech gyms. Some senior officers wondered what the strip-malling of the military would do to troops discipline-but they too were enjoying the perks. "Everything with Halliburton was gold-plated," one told me. "So we weren't complaining." As far as Halliburton was concerned, keeping the customer satisfied was good business-it guaranteed more contracts, because profits were calculated as a percentage of costs, the higher the costs, the higher the profits. "Don't worry, it's cost plus," was a saying made famous in Baghdad's green zone, but the deluxe war spending was pioneered during the Clinton era.



In the mid-nineties, Lookheed began taking over information technology divisions of the US government, running it's computer systems and a great deal of it's data managment. Largely, under the public radar, the company went so far in this direction that, in 2004, The New York Times reported, "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it...It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the US census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft.



It made for a powerful husband and wife team. While Dick was steering Halliburton to take over the infrastructure of warfare abroad, Lynne was helping Lockheed to take over the day-to-day running of the government at home. At times husband and wife found themselves in direct competition. In 1996, when the state of Texas announced that corporations could bid to run it's welfare program-a contract worth $2 billion over five years-both Lockheed and the IT giant Electronic Data Systems, which boasted Dick Cheney as a board member, bid on the contract. In the end, the Clinton administration intervened and halted the auction. Though it was generally an enthusiatic supporter of out-sourcing, deciding who was eligible to receive welfare was determined to be an essential role of government, not suitable for privatization. Both Lockheed and EDS cried foul, as did the Governor of Texas, George W Bush, who thought privatizing welfare was a terrific idea.



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