Corporations in Costume

by CKR

Halliburton: oilfield trucks with lubricants, drilling mud, logging equipment.

Fluor: chemical plants under construction.

Bechtel: nuclear plants under construction.

Kellogg Brown and Root: catalytic cracking towers at refineries.

Those images still float in my mind when those names appear in the news, even though we now know these companies largely for their government contracts. A sign that I’m getting old, that I can recall when large American companies actually produced something.

But Halliburton opens its webpage with “Oilfield Technologies and Services.” In fact, click where you will on that page and others, you won’t find anything about the Iraq war. Not even a Government Services Division.

Kellogg Brown and Root's webpage has a photo not unlike my mental picture. They call themselves KBR now, in the mode of KFC and KSM. They’re more forthcoming about their Government Services Division, with a header photo that has to be somewhere in the Middle East. According to Wikipedia, KBR is no longer a part of Halliburton.

Bechtel, according to its website, still builds nuclear plants. It also touts project management, which can include everything from generating detailed PERT charts and budgets to sitting back and watching the government contracts flow through. It’s shyer than KBR about its government activities, dividing its “Services” link into “Competencies” and “Markets,” the latter of which contains “U.S. Government Services.”

Fluor’s photo also connects with the picture in my head. It’s up front about its government business, which it divides and subdivides under “Industries and Services.” It’s got contracts with the DoD, DOE, DHS, DOL, DOS (building those fortress embassies!), and foreign governments too. Most of the categories aren’t clickable; can’t tell if that’s because the business isn’t there of if they’d have to kill us if they told us.

So which is the mask? Is the government business hollowing out the real stuff? Or does the real business give the corporations a basis for making government work better?

Boo!