This beautiful image represents Halliburton's stock price over the last 18 months. Quick translation into english: if you owned $1,000,000 worth of stock in July of 2002, before the invasion of Iraq became imminent, you now have about $3,000,000.
Dick Cheney's exercisable stock options, which he of course retains even though it's a clear conflict of interest, total about $40 million in the form of 3 separate batches of 433,333 shares of stock.
Well, they DID total $40 million. It's worth closer to $100,000,000 million now. The added value comes mostly from stock price increases related to the company's KBR subsidiary which, through an open-ended contract (both in term and amount) that was not open to competitive bidding, supposedly provides the army with supplies and reconstruction services. I say "supposedly", of course, because KBR is currently under investigation by the Justice Department for billing the government for phantom supplies that were never delivered and grossly overcharging on supplies that were – not that $7 per gallon of gasoline is excessive.
I'm aware that everyone basically already knew (or assumed) Halliburton was on the receiving end of some shady deals involving Cheney, but I thought it would be fun and enlightening to see in concrete terms how much money it's put in his own pocket, notwithstanding all the other leeches outside of public domain. He personally made in excess $30,000,000 off the decision to go to war. But you'd be a foolish liberal, and also a terrorist, to claim that the lure of that much money would color his objectivity.
Have some fun with Cheney and all his friends on ginandtacos.com's neocon bingo – a faith-based bingo initiative intended to promote abstinence in the Third World.