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Sick Workers Hope to Hang KBR with Its Own Tax Loophole
When the American team arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2003 to repair the Qarmat Ali water injection plant, supervisors told them the orange, sand-like substance strewn around the looted facility was just a "mild irritant," workers recall....But the chemical turned out to be sodium dichromate, a substance so dangerous that even limited exposure greatly increases the risk of cancer. Soon, many of the 22 Americans and 100-plus Iraqis began to complain of nosebleeds, ulcers, and shortness of breath....
Now, nine Americans are accusing KBR, then a subsidiary of the oil conglomerate Halliburton, of knowingly exposing them to the deadly substance and failing to provide them with the protective equipment needed to keep them safe.
But the workers, like all employees injured in Iraq, face an uphill struggle in their quest for damages. Under a World War II-era federal workers compensation law, employers are generally protected from employee lawsuits, except in rare cases in which it can be proven that the company intentionally harmed its employees or committed outright fraud.
KBR is citing the law, called the Defense Base Act, as grounds to reject the workers' request for damages.
But the company's own actions have undermined its case: To avoid payroll taxes for its American employees, KBR hired the workers through two subsidiaries registered in the Cayman Islands, part of a strategy that has allowed KBR to dodge hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes.
That gives the workers' lawyer, Mike Doyle of Houston, a chance to argue to an arbitration board that KBR is not an employer protected by federal law, but a third-party that can be sued.
The whole horrid story is worth a read.
Josh
Zachary
This KBR story is in a perverse way possibly good news . Recall that while that "Captain of Industry " Richard C Cheney was at the head of Haliburton it bought Wayne Dresser with all the associated claims that went with the asbestoes suits . Fast Forward today with the KBR
clowns that leave themselves exposed by their incredibly greeding aspirations to maximize the war profiteering- hoisted potentially by their very own third party petard -- the sodium dichromate appears to be a willful exposure to those KBR employees.
Gee it makes me wonder what US Attorney General John Edwards might do with this third party formerly known as the American Company KBR . The point to me now is there should be multiple opportunities such as this to right wrongs come 2009 .
Which also underscores why the Democrats must kisss and make up with both campaigns going to full tilt GOTV boogie for our nominee. We simply must win the general election in 2008 .(Make no mistake McCain will simply be a third term for Bushcheney- I say this with immense regret as a former volunteer in Texas for McCain in 2000.. John sadly now "walks on the darkside with all the other aspens whose roots are intertwined " Did you all see that Scooter got disbarred ?!!)
March 25, 2008 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It obviously depends on who got to pick the arbitration board, but I shouldn't be surprised if the IRS, even in its current debilitated state, were watching these legal arguments fairly closely. KBR is pretty much barred from claiming one status for workers in one set of legal documents and another status somewhere else.
March 25, 2008 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Considering today's news that "the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2041... The reserves in the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital benefits are projected to be wiped out by 2019" I think those hundreds of billions of dollars KBR owes the system should be gone after in a BIG way.
Only in this administration could a corporation expect to "have it's cake and eat it, too."
March 25, 2008 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
When are corporate folk going to realize that corporations are legal entities existing only is laws and laws exist only in governments . . . And are not magic.
KBR must be be forced to sever all government contracts or operate American corporation. War profiteering must be squelched.
March 26, 2008 7:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
What a country.
We manouver 95% of our people into work-based health insurance. Health care gets taken over by corporations starting in earnest in 1980. The loose confederacy of board-certified professionals and practitioners goes corporate, supplanting bean-counters to lead an enslaved group of doctors and nurses. Medical costs soar higher, faster than anything except maybe modern oil.
Corporations then manouver to change every law about providing health care, stiff the govt. on payroll and SS and Medicare taxes, and raid your pension while they're at it. Oh, and they probably declared bankruptcy so they could fire everybody, strangle the union, and terminate pensions. SOP since buuush walked in.
Corporations go after our biggest pools of money...and guess what....they are all commonwealth-everyman pools of money. The govt. treasury, vastly outspending the rest of the world militarily, so the biggest war-profit guzzlers are of course making a killing with their fine-tuned business skills....plundering our military budget. Next big Pool....SS. There is always IRAs and 401Ks to manipulate and skim. Nothing like every working american putting all their money into corporate hands (tax free!), paycheck by paycheck. I am sure those Big Finance types will do what is right for avg. Joe! Such a great system, we should privatize SS and put all our huge pool of cash in these honest Buzinezzmenz Hands! Sure!
Every american, with his face stuck on an Oil/Gasoline nipple....that's a pretty large Pool. Suddenly the forces of supply/demand aren't so important when there's a killing to be made, a US govt. so sympathetic and malleable to the oilmen's interest that there is no crime that they can commit where they will be held to account. Why make money hand over fist, when you can triple that with oilmen in the Prez and VP chairs?
Basically, you live in a country of laws and the constitution (at least every american DID) unless you work for a corporation. Then all bets are off, your constitutional rights do not apply, they OWN you and can snoop on you, and demand drug tests and loyalty oaths and non-competition pacts, cut off your healthcare, whatever.
And Corporations these days do not make money by making goods, products, services, or making better mouse-traps.
They make money by swindling. Government contracts, defense spending, war-profiteering, union busting, fee raising, making sure all our money get's scooped into huge piles which they end up over-seeing. Then they steal it all, pin it on one or two patsy's, and lawyer their way out of it. Hell, under this administration you prob. won't even get a letter of reprimand.
Corporations are now the root of all evil. They are SuperPredators stalking the American Landscape and devouring everything in their paths. Sure, there was always some rich bastards ruining it for everyone throughout history. But it was small-time compared to these Global juggernauts. They are behind our new Police States, our surveillance society. Eye Retina Recog, Face recog, biometrics, dna, health insurance DNA and medical opportunities....all of this being leveraged by HighTech Behemoths whose sworn Corporate Oath is to wage inhuman wars on the populace. Their only goal is to suck the juice out of everyone of us until all that is left is a dried husk.
Anyone wish to claim otherwise? Anybody want to tell me how comptetion is good, and that corporations are only providing services that greedy, fat, lazy couch-borne americans are too stupid to do for themselves? Anyone else want to tell me about how finance/commerce is just another natural law, overseen by the invisible guiding hand of universal goodness and tranquility?
June 17, 2008 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Amen.
June 17, 2008 12:20 PM | Reply | Permalink