It's 2020, weeks before the pandemic, and an infamous war-profiteer is welcomed in as they set up their booth at the Winter Career and Internship Fair. No, it's not Boeing (this time), it's Halliburton. 

Halliburton has a seemingly endless affinity for immorality. It doesn’t waste its time with corporate theatrics because it has no shame.  In March,  hundreds of multinational corporations made the obvious and moral choice to withdraw their operations— and thus their support—from Russia’s imperialism in Ukraine in favor of corporate imperialism elsewhere (sigh). Halliburton stuck it out for weeks, ready to profit off the rapidly mobilizing Russian war machine.

Halliburton has a long history of war profiteering. During the Iraq war, they served as Dick Cheney’s private money laundering scheme. They faced a smidgen of accountability after being convicted for covering up their complicity in the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil-spill catastrophe.

And yet, despite all this, the UW Career Center welcomed their recruiting efforts at the most recent in-person career fair. Of course, many of the Center’s “regulars” for career events are companies that in a better world would be on trial for murder. Boeing, the weapons manufacturer, Palantir; ICE's private surveillance tool—look on any UW career-related website, and companies tied up in the most horrific of injustices take the cut. Why is UW funneling students into these industries? Be boundless perhaps?

Published April 12th 2022