WHERE'S CHENEY'S MONEY? DAVID HIRST WRITES

WHERE’S CHENEY’S MONEY?
Where is the most powerful man in the world, with the possible exceptions of Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin, putting his money? Vice President Cheney might have blundered on all counts international, but when I last looked his investment in Halliburton had reaped 8 times what he sowed. He is reputedly tight with his dosh and Planet Wall Street figures that whatever he has chosen it is based on more information than I, you, or the entire apparatus of Goldman Sachs could muster. Given, as we learnt from his constant and unprecedented interference occasioned by the CIA’s failures to initially find evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in that doomed search, it is reasonable to assume he has pursued all avenues to glean what he can from the secret treasury documents before making his investment. Now, as this information is public he can hardly buy gold. Not in his own name anyway. That would really scare the horses. So where has it gone? How does the man at the helm see things unwinding and what’s he doing with his readies?

Kiplinger Magazine has run an article on just this, and the incomparable Mike Whitney has got his teeth into it in an account that looks under the covers of the current Information Clearing House. The title “Cheney’s Betting on Bad News” gives the game away but you’ll be wanting the details. They are simple enough. The man who has been, and will be for another 10 months, king has some $25 million that specializes in short term municipal funds, a tax exempt moneymarket fund, and an inflation protected securities fund. All three are geared to inflation. Protection for the ravages to come when bread prices, those with wheat in them, double by next year. The rest he has rested in good “old Europe”. That’s what we used to call Europe until the aforementioned turned it into a term of derision. The amount is somewhere between $10 and $15 mill. And it is again in bonds that are comparatively inflation proof. The only thing the Veep can see on the horizon with surety is inflation. As Mike Whitney comments’ “This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the “Bush Economic Plan” is anything but a scam aimed at looting the public till." This is exactly what I said in Planet Wall Street last week. Whitney adds “It is also apparent that Bush-Cheney couldn’t have carried this out without the approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.” You can bet your remaining worthless bucks these moves are based on information the major trading housing would kill for and those guys kill for practice. Cheney is betting on Stagflation. Obama is talking to Paul Volker.

AT LAST A REAL ECONOMIC DEBATE - a great debate is beginning in the US. It is far too late and is almost of academic interest but also far too important to ignore for if anything is to be learnt and truly absorbed the citizenry may be in a position to mitigate the consequences of past action and avoid some of the ruin that lies ahead. The debate concerns the almost absolute failure of the financial press to challenge Greenspan’s free money policies while they were being enacted (2002-3) and why the press ignored the sub-prime danger signs even when the debacle was upon us. If, as Editor and Publisher asked this week, the US is on the edge of a “disaster” with a “financial Nuclear winter” waiting in the wings , “why were American news consumers among the last to know?” Funnily enough, and there is nothing funny about it, this “great debate” begins as the wars in the Middle East, while entering an extremely dangerous phase, are being consigned to page eight of the newspapers, given scant attention on TV and are hardly dominating the Presidential playground where the low and the mean (ingless) continue to dominate. In a way the two unmitigated disasters are flip sides of the same coin. But the “who lost the Middle East” question will not arise until we have a Democratic President, which I assume to be next year.In the meantime, as The New York Times commented his week, “the public have lost interest.”

BEWARE OF GLASS HOUSES Because while it is easy to see the mistakes other nations are making it is near impossible to see the ones at hand. The British press, as good as it gets, is a case in point. They were quick to see the folly of the war against Iraq and the economic crisis the US faces. Other papers did not join the scramble for war, and once it was launched took, like their readers, the politically unpopular position of opposition. The Guardian was joined by the Independent and even Murdoch’s London Times published some of the most important of the stories to challenge its base. In France and Germany opposition was rife and the Fairfax group in Australia published compelling truly anti-war stories that attained a suggestion of All’s Quiet on The Western Front.” But, returning to England it seems odd that the British press is revelling in the failures of the US media today while the members of a real estate conflagration that might eclipse that of the US glow brighter - yet the mood of merryEngland is…merry.

STREET FIGHTING PEOPLE Danny Schechter, quotes Larry Elliot, economic editor of The Guardian in London saying; "It is somewhat surprising, that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.” He must have missed the anti-globalization efforts in Seatlle although I remember The Guardian printing the route plans prior to a nasty anti glob. riot when I was in London in 1998. And the Economist buys into the question from another angle, If such a fraud was taking place, and if Wall Street’s financial crisis was on the edge of “disaster” with a “financial nuclear winter” waiting in the wings, why were American news consumers among the last to know? The US coverage of the war with Iraq has been almost as haphazard and triumphalist as the conduct of the war. The New York Times' Judith Miller, acting as stenographer for the spurious claims of the military, of the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfield element (the latter of whom was treated with something approaching idolatry by even the media elite)lead the march of folly. With the blessing of the NYT, and here Michael Gordon their military correspondent is as much to blame although he escaped unscathed, not having been part of the Wilson-Palme affair, the remaining Liberal media and Liberal elements in Congress, and even members of the United Nations fell into line. The challenge was never to get Murdoch or Rush Limbaugh on side but with the Times support came a validity for the war to destroy Saddam that the administration craved. When Cheney appeared selling the war he did so repeatedly in the days following a Judith Miller or Miller-Gordon exclusive.The whole-hearted backing of the Times laid the ground for a whole-scale application of the iron law that in war the first casualty is the truth. Amazingly, on the fifth anniversary the Times deemed that the reason for the increasingly sparse coverage of the war was a “decline in public interest.” This was the sort of reasoning I encountered when asking LA journalists why they took such little interest in the gang wars of downtown LA in and around 1990. Ten dead in one night yet no reports in the journal of reference. No-one, I was told was interested any more. They were weary of the war in their own city. Without media attention there was no political pressure on the major’s office and therefore no demands on the police. After all,the major was black. Senile but black. I once has a friend breathlessly confide to me that he had killed an African American while being robbed late at night a few nights before outside a well known Hollywood restaurant. Knowing I had some pretty good sources he wondered if I might see if he was being sought. The Times had not covered the story and there was no way I was going to call my contacts so I later told him there was no serious inquiry, knowing there would not be one. The public had long lost interest. But had 10 mothers who lost their kids lost interest? Had their brothers? Obviously not, but the African American community scarcely reads the LA Times. Alternatively,they might if someone was writing about the nightly street battles.

THE DEAD ARE NOT AS MANY?
If we look back almost a year and read the coverage of the 3,000 US personel or further to the 2,000th death in Iraq the coverage was, by comparison huge. Why is it no longer a big story? Americans have again grown weary, victory is not imminent and no-one likes to read of repeated defeat. And most of the dead are black, Hispanic and or white poor kids from small towns where the army is the major employer. Few people I know in LA knows anyone with family in Iraq. Go to rural America and almost every town has their dead heroes or brain dead equivalents and the Times, be it LA Washington or New York, have lost interest. Have the publishers, recognizing the enormity of what has occurred, that in 7 years the greatest super power has been reduced to beggary,that solutions associated once with nations like Argentina are in the offing, that US military, economic and technical might has been stolen or squandered – both infact - declined their duties? They have presided over a “lost decade” which while not yet a decade old is lost in a more profound way than the seventies - a terrible economic yardstick - and that although they were at the helm at the time, they failed to call in their editors and suggest all was not well, and that history is, at this very moment, looking at a veritable host of people to blame? Surely they, and their editors know that they will be found wanting, their utterances examined and, if the best they can come up with is “the public have lost interest” the future will not be kind to them. As President Bush prepares the censors for his presidential library and compiles the list of pardons while the lawyers contemplate if people can be pardoned for crimes we have yet to learn of, if blanket pardons are constitutional – they are not - the US corporate-media-publishing elite are contemplating their place in history.It is not a debate they will be anxious to see bloom but it has begun.
In the meantime, my dear associate Media Blab, mentioned recently the Guardian is again contemplating opening a US based edition which will no doubt peruse these matters with alacrity and discover things the US press may not wish to ardently er press.