Fact check my balls...

I'm getting a little discouraged by factcheck.org. They do some good work but really seem to stop short of fully exploring the issues. Here, they debunk the implication in a John Kerry ad that Dick Cheney had a financial interest in Halliburton while serving as veep. Basically, it offers evidence that Cheney had his salary and bonuses stretched out, and got most of what he was owed before he was sworn into office. The measly rest (which could pay off my credit card debt an college loans ten times over), as it says, was really just salary deferred a while to save him on his taxes. (I'm really glad that loophole exists, by the way.) But he earned it before coming to office, and even took out an insurance policy so that even if Halliburton went under, he'd still get his money -- so he could say that he had nothing directly to gain or lose by the success or even utter failure of the company. (Of course, if he asked his old friends and connections throughout the industry to craft, say, the policies that would be regulating them, then one might think that Halliburton gained plenty from Cheney in return for their political support and backing of his campaign.)

The interesting part is the rest of what Cheney gets, something in the ballpark of $8 million in stock options. Of course, if the company does well, the stocks are worth even more. The web site absolves him of responsibility because it points out that he signed a legal agreement to disburse any after-tax profits made from the sale of the stocks to charity.

It's great that he's giving his money to charity. However, who says that having a financial interest in something required that a person had to gain from it and not spend the money right away? Is there a set time period that the person must hold onto the cash before it can be considered "gained?" Is it only unethical if the money is spent on material goods or services? (A free-marketer like Cheney would never try to argue that point.) Is he insulated from attacks because he has a broker make the decision on when exactly to sell the stocks? Cheney chose where the $8 million goes. Whether it were to wind up in his pocket to be spent later, recycled into the market, or donated to charity, and whether he's made up his mind what to do with it before he gets the money or afterwards, it's still unethical. Just because the money will be spent as soon as it's made doesn't mean he can get no benefit from Halliburton doing well and those stocks going up.

Let's take a deeper look at his charities. One of the charities is a cardiac institute named after -- you guessed it -- Richard B. Cheney. Another is Capital Partners for Education , described on factcheck.org and the charity's web site as giving financial aid for students to attend private and religious schools. (A quick glance at the list of schools shows that half are religious.) I'm not bringing this up to doubt the helpfulness of these charities or to cast aspersions onto Cheney's motives -- I can believe that he truly feels these are important causes. But one could still say he "gains" by seeing an institution named after oneself succeed. And liberal folk like me could object to choosing to spend money sending poor D.C. kids to religious schools while the rest of the poor D.C. kids just suffer because of policy failures at the highest levels -- how about spreading the money around in a way that benefits all kids, buying books for all the school children without a rich benefactor? Certainly this is nitpicking and unfair, but my point remains: he chose where the money went, on some level he may be benefiting from the use of this money.

That's a benefit of being rich, you get to fund the things you think are worthy of being funded. Most of us don't have $8 mil to throw around, and if we did we wouldn't necessarily choose the same charities as Cheney. The choice of how to spend your money is the benefit of having more than you need, and whether it was ultimately used for good or ill purposes, it was still a conflict of interests to hold stock in Halliburton. He could've sold it all prior to become V.P., given the money to charity then, and therefore the places he liked would have had no direct gain from Halliburton's success or failure during the Bush-Cheney administration. (This wouldn't change the fact that he'd worked there a while, made friends, strengthened contacts with the industry, and no doubt saw things more readily from their point of view when he helped craft policy. But then, almost half the voting populace knew that and supported him for office regardless.) Instead, he chose to link the futures of the institutions he cared about with the success of a company he had the job overseeing.