Cherry Bomb John Mellancamp youtube

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KBR, LBJ and Dick Cheney
December 24, 2003 Current criticism over Halliburton's lucrative Iraq contracts has some historians drawing parallels to a similar controversy involving the company during Lyndon B. Johnson's administration.

Nearly 40 years ago, Halliburton faced almost identical charges over its work for the U.S. government in Vietnam — allegations of overcharging, sweetheart contracts from the White House and war profiteering. Back then, the company's close ties to President Johnson became a liability. Today — as NPR's John Burnett reports in the last of a three-part series — Halliburton seems to be distancing itself from its former chief executive officer, Vice President Dick Cheney.

The story of Halliburton's ties to the White House dates back to the 1940s, when a Texas firm called Brown & Root constructed a massive dam project near Austin. The company's founders, Herman and George Brown, won the contract to build Mansfield Dam thanks to the efforts of Johnson, who was then a Texas congressman.

After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the mid-1960s, newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson's political campaign.

More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root was a part won a $380 million contract to build airports, bases, hospitals and other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" — as they were known — for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.

Brown & Root also became a target for anti-war protesters: they called the firm the embodiment of the "military-industrial complex" and denounced it for building detention cells to hold Viet Cong prisoners in South Vietnam.

Today, Brown & Root is called Kellogg, Brown & Root — a Halliburton subsidiary better known as KBR.

Harken Energy wikipedia
HKN, Inc., formerly known as Harken Energy Corporation, is a small American oil and gas production company, with ownership interests in other production companies. The company is headquartered in Southlake, Texas, near Fort Worth. There is a second office near Dallas, in the town of Paris. The total number of employees varies. It is at approximately 20 in 2009. Shares with the stock symbol HKN trade publicly on the

[edit] History
The company began as an unprofitable collection of Texas oil wells for investors seeking tax write-offs.[1]

In 1986, Spectrum 7 was bought by Harken for $2.2 million[citation needed]. After the sale of his company, as part of the deal, George W. Bush would serve on Harken's board of directors. Having a board member whose father was the Vice-President of the United States (at that time) should benefit any company. George W. Bush remained on the board through 1993 and was also paid fees as a consultant.[2]

In 1987, Talat M. Othman joined the board of the company and served as the chair of the Audit Committee.

Aloha Petroleum was sold in a controversial deal in which Harken's equity stake in Aloha was turned into a loan, thereby disguising financial loses.[citation needed] This questionable accounting technique, which can serve to inflate profits, was also used by Enron. It helped result in the infamous 2003 Enron scandal, when the fifth largest corporation in America at the time suddenly collapsed into bankruptcy.

[edit] Insider trading allegations
Harken has attracted attention because of the role played in its affairs during the 1980s by George W. Bush, later the President of the United States. While a member of the company's board of directors, Bush sold stock in Harken on the 22nd of June, 1990, shortly before the company announced substantial losses.[3] This transaction resulted in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of probable insider trading.

See also: George W. Bush, business and early political career and George W. Bush insider trading allegations
A Harken transaction associated with the endowment fund of Harvard University has also been questioned; see Harken Energy scandal and the Harken board member from Harvard, Michael R. Eisenson.

The controversy is discussed in the 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11. In another documentary, Orwell Rolls in His Grave, one of the responders, Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity said that his organisation brought this controversy on April 4, 2000, 7 months before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, but the mainstream media "chose not to report the story".[4]