Investment-fund web: CIA, Cheney, Whole Foods, everybody

First the bottom line: if you’re a publicly traded company, your shares are selling in the same web that predators control.

If you put your money in a huge investment fund, you’re in that web, too.

For example, take the Vanguard Group. It’s the world’s largest mutual fund company. Corporations, smaller funds, and individuals place their money into the pot, and Vanguard takes it wherever it wants to go.

With 14,000 employees in offices in the US, Europe, and Asia, Vanguard manages $2 trillion in assets.

At the moment, it’s the biggest shareholder in Monsanto, the biggest in Halliburton, the second biggest in Facebook, the third biggest in Whole Foods, the second biggest in Hain Celestial Foods, and the biggest shareholder in the largest defense corporation in America, Lockheed Martin.

Ready for a little head-spinning whiplash? To get a more personal glimpse of the inter-connected spider web of investment funding, here are a few Dick Cheney connections that Maggie Burns, writing in The Progressive Populist (2003), pointed out. Then I’ll add my own.

Dick Cheney headed up Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. As US Vice President, he had to divest himself of his stake in the company. The exact figure is hard to pin down, but he put somewhere between 18 and 87 million dollars in the Vanguard Fund. Well, it just so happened that Vanguard, in that general time period (2003), was the 10th largest mutual-fund investor in Halliburton. So Cheney, indirectly, still had a stake in in his former company.

Cheney, of course, was a key figure in launching the war in Iraq. His old outfit, Halliburton, scored an open-ended, no-bid $2 billion federal contract for work in Iraq.

In 2003, the 8th largest shareholder in Halliburton was Deutsche Bank. Who had worked in a prominent position at Deutsche a few years earlier? Alvin Buzzy Krongard, who would become the “number three man at the CIA under Bush.”

There is much to say about Krongard (search articles re insider trading just before 9/11). Here I would point out he was a moving force, along with CIA Director George Tenet and Norm Augustine (Lockheed Martin), in creating In-Q-Tel, a CIA front company designed to fund new technologies in the private sector.

In-Q-Tel bankrolls the development of these technologies so the US intelligence community can turn around and utilize them.

How did a little start-up called Facebook get its bankroll?

Jim Breyer, head of Accel, attached a $13 million rocket to it, and nothing has ever been the same.

Earlier that same year (2004), a man named Gilman Louie joined the board of the National Venture Capital Association of America (NVCA). The chairman of NVCA? Jim Breyer.

Gilman Louie happened to be the first CEO of In-Q-Tel.

That’s not the only connection between Jim Breyer and the CIA’s man, Gilman Louie. In 2004, Louie went to work for BBN Technologies, headed up by Breyer. Dr. Anita Jones also joined BBN at that time. Jones had worked for In-Q-Tel and was an adviser to DARPA, the Pentagon’s technology department that helped develop the Internet.

Just to add another thread to the spider web, who is the 4th largest shareholder in Deutsche Bank today? The Vanguard Group.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This is what “they’re well-connected” means.

In the world of investment funding and shareholding, it’s about connections.

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com