The lies just go on and on.
So…the better Haliburton does…the more their stock goes up…the more Cheney makes.
How can this man sleep?
If you invest funds with a mutual fund company, you have no control over which companies they buy.
Vanguard probably has dozens of funds. Each fund may own some or none of Halliburton. So saying “Cheney has ties” to Halliburton is no more accurate than saying he has ties to any one of the hundreds of other companies Vanguard mutual funds own stock in.
Also each fund usually has a low percentage ownership in a specific company. For example a one billion dollar fund might have 1% of its assets in Halliburton. Aggregated over ALL funds they own millions of shares of Halliburton, but they also own millions of shares of hundreds of other companies.
Of course he’s got ties - Halliburton pay him up to $1million a year.
You have no idea what mutual funds are, do you Reeder?
Any evidence of that, or are you just wanting to prove you can read Yellow Times?
My understanding is that Cheney declared on his disclosure statement that he receives between $100,000 and $1,000,000 a year from Halliburton in “deferred compensation”. This is very old information from a Tv documentary that I saw. A simple google search of halliburton still pays cheney shows lots of sources including The Guardian but no Yellow Times. The allegation was not denied by Cheney in the documentary.
Cheney’s investments in Vanguard seem to all be money market funds, bond funds, and treasury funds. No funds that hold corporate stocks. Here is the link to Cheney’s 278. Look for yourself.
As for, “…Given the size of Vanguard’s stake in Halliburton, it is hard to imagine a mathematical possibility that Cheney’s assets are unconnected to Halliburton’s fortunes…”, that statement is amazingly stupid. I am not suprised in the least that a moron like Reeder would link to an ‘article’ that is so easily disproven.
You wanna provide linkage or you want me to take your word for it? “Deferred compensation” sounds to me like they’re paying him for work he already did … like he had a salary of a million a year but he gets it paid out at 100k a year for ten years or something, so he has “income” long after he quits.
Okay, never mind, I found it myself. He gets about 180k a year; it’s for work he did from 1995-2000. By spreading it out it saves taxes.
http://fuller.mit.edu/peace/cheney_halliburton.html
http://us.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/04/09/cheney.halliburton/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/politics/main575356.shtml
Can’t say I think it’s a great thing, but it’s legal, he’s not being paid for anything other than work he already did, and since he has an insurance policy on the money, he has no stake in Halliburton’s success or failure. Having said all that, it looks bad. He should have taken the money in 1999 and just paid the damn taxes.
Reeder:
You have a vast ignorance about how these things work. Vanguard has roughy 200 billion dollars under management. They have dozens of funds.
Some, like the S&P 500 fund must own Halliburton as it comprises that index. That fund by itself explains roughly half of Vanguard’s Halliburton position.
In most Vanguard funds that hold Halliburton the position is likely to be a fraction of 1% of the value of the fund.
Can you show that Cheney owns the funds that owns Halliburton?
Can you show that the position is not incidental?
Can you show thay Cheney is exercising control over the fund management and influencing its purchase of Halliburton?
Yeesh. Speaking as someone who thinks the whole no-bid contract Haliburton got in case of a war with Iraq stinks to high heaven: trying to “prove” Cheney has financial ties to Haliburton because he invests through a mutual fund company that happens to also invest in Haliburton is an utter pile of wank, unless you can categorically prove that Cheney’s portfolio holds Haliburton stock.
Which Reeder obviously cannot. What an idiot.
Probably the same way I do: on waterbed filled with the blood of innocents covered in a quilt lined with hundreds.
Nice to have the old Reeder back, eh?
He does have stock options, however cite. He has retained control of them, despite a pledge during the 2000 campaign to “forfeit” the options (cite. He currently says he plans to donate the proceeds (after tax) to charity.
There are a few questions which raise my eyebrows:
Doesn’t “forfeiting” options mean you pledge not to exersize them, rather than donating the proceeds?
Which charity are you planning to give to?
If you wait until you have lost your office to exersize the options, what will foce you to live up to this pledge?
Why don’t you just give the options to the charity now?
Does it constitute a smoking gun? Probably not. Is it more than a little suspicious? Absolutley.
My own feeling is that a no-bid contract, such as Halliburton’s, is problematic, even without these ties to Cheney. The fact that Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO should make everyone sensitive to the appearance of unseemly activites. The Bush admin should activly demonstrate Halliburton is not being given special favors. Quite the opposite is happening.
I think in a previous Reeder thread Reeder accidently showed that the no bid contract was actually bid… which was kind of funny.
For me, it’s the willingness to accept the appearance of impropriety that’s puzzling. Whether or not there is an actual conflict of interest is irrelevent if it appears that there might be one. Why a politician would want the attention and bad press is beyond my comprehension. We expect our leaders to lead by example. It would be a simple thing for Cheney to divest himself of this stock or mutual fund and thus quiet the critics (regardless of whether or not he has a right to hold the fund). It’s an indication of the arrogance of the man that he chooses not to do so. The press and the public have a history of reacting badly to politicians who thumb their noses at them, but for some reason the behavior continues unabated.
As I’m always telling my employees when they get on a high moral horse about a contractor: “Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?”
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It didn’t dawn of them that people would hate them so much that they would abandon all reason and deliberately misrepresent what they did, just for the value of trying to make them look bad.
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No. It’s an indication fo the irrational blind stupidity and malice of the hateful stupid little people that are just looking for excuses to validate their hate.
When they can’t find it in reality, they make it up.
This is an entirely made up indictment of Cheney. There is nothing wrong morally or legally with Cheney’s mutual fund holdings.
This issue deserves a little more than a nose thumbing. The attack is pure slander.
After eight years of having the entire nation watch the Republican party gleefully play “let’s slam the Clintons for whatever excuse we can hang on them,” I find this verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry hard to believe – unless you want to claim everyone in the Bush Administration was asleep or comatose during that time…
Okay, I’ve asked this before, and I’ll ask this again: I’m very puzzled by the insistence of Cheney’s critics that a current monetary tie to his old company has to exist for them to condemn him. Couldn’t it just be cronyism (i.e. “hey, old buddy, how’re you doing - here’s a nice fat contract for old times sake. See you on the golf course; maybe you could get me a yacht for my next birthday as a thank-you”)? If you really wanted to “smear” Cheney, couldn’t you do it that way? Or are his critics more concerned with actual legal corruption?
Hope I’m being clear in my question here…
And I think that you’re either mis-remembering, or you know, just makin’ stuff up.