PEP, November 2006: BUSHONOMICS: Blood for oil

Four years into the Iraq War, we can easily identify the winners and losers.

One big loser is former dictator, Saddam Hussein, now on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity that could lead to his execution.

The people of Iraq are suffering with their infrastructure in ruins and an unstable, new government that can’t seem to stop ethnic strife from dragging the country into civil war.

The people of the United States have been duped into sending their brave sons and daughters and billions of dollars that are urgently needed for health care and education into a war based on President George W. Bush’s lies.

And the ultimate price has been paid by as many as 600,000 Iraqis who have been killed, many in the invasion and more since, the 20,000 U.S. troops injured physically and mentally and the nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers who have returned home in body bags.

But compensation has soared for chief executive officers at oil companies and military contractors since the war began four years ago, says “Executive Excess 2006,” a report from Boston’s United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

The top 15 U.S. oil chief execs doubled their pay from 2004 to 2005 to an average of $32.7 million a year, compared with $11.6 million for all CEOs at large U.S. companies.

The CEOs at the top 34 defense contractors now get double the compensation they got in the four years leading up to 9/11. Together they earned almost $1 billion since 9/11, which the report points out is enough to employ more than 1 million Iraqis to rebuild their country.

Americans face high prices at the pump and huge heating oil bills, but since Bush came to office in 2001, the top five U.S. oil companies have recorded profits of $342.4 billion. The Iraq contracts of Halliburton, the firm formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, are an estimated $11 billion.

“While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” said Cheney.

“Very clearly the only two groups to benefit from the war are the oil companies and the defense contractors,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and the former senior vice president of the World Bank in an interview with Public Employee Press.

— GNH