Mainstream Media never disclosed who the Armstrongs are

[Paranoid Pessimist]

Sidney Blumenthal reports out

The world of Texas royalty

Both the vice-president and the deputy chief-of-staff, as it happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, a major Texas power-broker since it was founded in the 19th century by the family of James A Baker III, the former secretary of state and close associate of George HW Bush's.

Katharine Armstrong took up lobbying after her recent divorce. Her contracts include Parsons, a construction firm that has done work in Iraq, among others. Her business partner, Karen Johnson, a close friend of Rove's, does extensive business with the state department, the US Agency for International Development and defence contractors. But Armstrong's protestations to news media that she does not lobby Cheney should probably be taken at face value given her background.

Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes – those of Armstrong and King – that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage printed Debrett's Texas Peerage, featuring "the aristocrats of Texas", with the King family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon.

John B Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighbouring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Harding. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong's brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin's wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0218-26.htm

[TomInTib]

1. You think Cheney is obsessed with privacy? The Armstrongs and

Klebergs demand it.

They are absolutely untouchable.

[Burried News]

2. Great article with hypertext links. nt

[stillcool]

3. More 1%'ers

the government elite...how cozy.