Halliburton's Humble Past
Just on the heels of Dick Cheney's convention speech, we now learn that TSKJ, the consortium of which his former firm Halliburton is a part, once discussed bribing Nigerian officials to secure a government contract.

My friends, if this doesn't lay bare the stakes in this election, I don't know what does. To think that a wonderful firm like Halliburton, which now enjoys unprecedented access to multibillion-dollar no-bid government contracts, once was so hard-up for work that it considered buttering up a cash-poor country like Nigeria simply chills me to the bone. Keep in mind that Nigeria's gross domestic product currently ranks only 50th in the world, well behind such economic powerhouses as Peru, Algeria and Bangladesh. Can you imagine if Halliburton had to depend on a country like this for its government largesse? Next thing you know, they'd be cutting price-fixing deals with Albanian goatherders!

Let us pray that we never return to the Dark Ages, when American conglomerates in search of special favors were forced to knock on the back door of the Third World. Let's keep bribery where it belongs: in the good old U.S.A.!

- posted by Colin A. Faver