DALLAS - The Securities and Exchange Commission has formalized its investigation of Halliburton Co.'s accounting practices, the company said.
The decision, announced late Thursday, expands a probe the SEC began in May.
The accounting issue concerns a 1998 policy change, when Dallas-based Halliburton began counting cost overruns as additional revenue on some construction and engineering jobs, before the customer agreed to pay for the extra costs.
The change was made when Vice President Dick Cheney served as the company's CEO and was approved by Arthur Andersen, the company's former auditor.
This is something we have consistently pointed out in many earlier posts: the disproportionate treatment of Arthur Andersen, relative to the still-unindicted Enron executives, was always ultimately meant to protect not just George W. Bush but also former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney. They knew that the SEC would bear down upon Halliburton sooner or later, and what better way to destroy the accounting evidence than to shred not the documents but the auditor itself.
The entire administration reeks of cronyism and dirty tricks. What's the antonym of "meritocracy"? The Bush dynasty.
There is no such thing as context in Woodward's world, almost no history and absolutely no possibility that anyone would dare to try to mislead America's most famous reporter.
I am prepared to believe most of what's here; not that it actually happened, but that someone in a position of authority is willing to say it did.
From presidential investigator to empire stenographer in thirty years. Sad.
Scoop! Atrios traces the line from the Christian ultra-right to companies that supply proprietary voting machines. Read his take and be sure to check out all the links he provides.
$10,000 Reward for information leading to the identity of the Eli Lilly Bandit — the person who slipped the midnight rider into the Homeland Security Bill, shielding the pharmaceutical giant from lawsuits by parents who claim the company's vaccines caused their children's autism. (Relevance to Homeland Security? None.)
State Rep. Tom Craddick, who is expected to become the speaker of the Texas House in January, received tens of thousands of dollars in income from energy companies benefiting from a tax cut he sponsored in 1999, a government watchdog group reported Tuesday.
The tax measure, which provided a temporary severance tax exemption for marginal oil and gas wells in Texas, was championed by then-Gov. George W. Bush and was approved overwhelmingly by Texas lawmakers.
Craddick, R-Midland, who is in the oil and gas business, was the House sponsor. [...]
The watchdog group said Craddick's royalty payments included between $10,000 and $24,999 from Pioneer Natural Resources, which received a $1 million tax cut from the legislation.
Pioneer was created in 1997 in a merger orchestrated by former Bush business associate Richard Rainwater. Bush declared the tax break an emergency, which helped to speed up legislative passage of the measure. [...]
Craddick, who has announced that he has enough votes to be elected the first Republican speaker of the Texas House in modern times, had previously been criticized for his business ties.
Also in 1999, during a debate over electric deregulation, Craddick carried an amendment to give Cap Rock Energy an edge over other electric utilities in Texas. A year earlier, he had been paid $28,500 for brokering a separate business deal for the company.
Craddick's daughter, Christi Craddick, also received $30,000 in lobbying fees from Cap Rock in 1999, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported earlier this fall. Subsequently, a spokesman for the Craddicks announced that Christi would no longer be a lobbyist while her father was speaker.
I normally don't give a damn about Texas politics, except we're beginning to see that it is an incubator for the diseased politics wafting out of the White House. If Texas is the rough draft, how far can we sink as a nation?
By the way, how's that Enron/Cheney criminal investigation going?
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Law enforcement officials still cannot find more than 100 of 393 children reported missing from Department of Children & Families care, a report released Tuesday said.
Out the 103 youngsters listed on the report, 88 are being sought by law enforcement as missing children. Thirteen have turned 18 and are not being sought by law enforcement, the report said. Another turned 18 but is being sought as a missing adult and another, 17-year-old Marissa Karp, was found slain in August.
Gov. Jeb Bush started Operation Safe Kids in August, ordering DCF and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to find the children missing from state care, most of whom are believe to be runaways or taken by a noncustodial relative.
Bush called the operation a success in a statement released Tuesday, saying that in addition to locating most of the missing children it improved communication between DCF and law enforcement agencies.
Operation Safe Kids "has helped to establish a system that will better protect the children in our state," Bush said.
As part of the process, the state formed seven regional task forces to search for the children and make recommendations on how to better ensure children's safety.
Bush's order resulted from DCF scrutiny in the wake of the Rilya Wilson case. The 5-year-old Miami girl was missing for 15 months before department officials in April realized she was gone. She is still unaccounted-for.
Also unaccounted for is a shred of competence or moral fiber in any member of the Bush family.
Combine that with Junior's propensity to kiss the feet of faith-based hogwash peddlers who feel entitled to determine the birth control methods of everyone else. Meanwhile, in a more intelligent non-American universe, the United Nations has announced that birth control is a remedy for poverty.
What a difference a few decades make. The American war on poverty has devolved into Junior's war on the impoverished. It's not enough that they're down — we've got to pummel them with the full weight of the Republican party, its formidable assets, its clandestine agenda, its theocratic leanings, its dubious leadership, and its fundamental racism.
Merry Christmas, poor people, from the GOP. Here's a swift kick in the teeth. Try not to bleed on our money too profusely.
Meanwhile, Scott D. Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, continues construction on his 24,000-square-foot megamansion in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Sullivan was indicted on charges that he conspired to hide billions of dollars in losses at the company.
[...] Mr. Sullivan is regularly seen zipping around town in his silver Range Rover on his way to inspect that $15 million construction project, which includes an 18-seat movie theater, a private art gallery and a lagoon.
While Mr. Sullivan may not be safe from jail and civil lawsuits, his new home is secure; even if he is forced to file for bankruptcy, Florida's Homestead Act could protect the home and the land from creditors.
Of course his 24,000 square foot home is protected, with Florida's high-quality crony-protecting legislation. To endanger Sullivan's house, wouldn't the governor of Florida have to want to come after him really bad? But Jeb's distracted, busy feathering the nests of his brothers, the educational software genius and Silverado savings-and-loan leech* (Neil) and that other one, what's-his-name.
Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky. But this administration seems particularly proud of its skill in misleading the press, the public and Congress, when convenient. It has even hired Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter, both of whom were convicted of lying to Congress about Reagan-era aid to Nicaraguan rebels. (Mr. Abrams was pardoned. Mr. Poindexter's conviction was overturned because prosecutors relied on testimony provided under immunity granted by Congress.)
A White House aide who had told me one thing on the record a few weeks ago tried to persuade me over the weekend, not for attribution, that the opposite was true. I protested. His reply: "Why would I lie? Because that's what I'm supposed to do. Lying to the press doesn't prick anyone's conscience."
Now that's candor.
Political loyalty and message discipline aren't ends in themselves. Politics is not just a sport. It matters. Differences over economic policy aren't just about whether the Republican team wins or loses to the Democratic team. They are about the best way to use the power of government to see that our children and grandchildren live better than we do.
It's bad enough when your opponents exercise power they're earned. But when they abuse power they haven't earned except through nepotism and chicanery, the result is the destruction of American ideals and a basic disrespect for the people and institutions — including the press — that make this country great.
In keeping with the all-politics, all-the-time characterization, the rush to distance itself from the fundamental racism of its own party reveals Junior's administration for what it is: a hollow lie from the bratty son of another one-term liar elected by playing the racism card way back in 1988.
Charities, utilities and government agencies across the country are reporting a surge in the number of people asking for help paying their heating bills, even as the Bush administration proposes a $300 million cut in the nation's biggest source of home heating aid.
The White House has requested $1.4 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, compared with $1.7 billion last year. Congress hasn't decided whether to adopt the cut, but critics said the proposal comes at the worst possible time.
Cutting the money could affect more than 500,000 people who rely on aid to pay utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Director's Association, which represents state officials who administer LIHEAP grants.
"They will either shut their program early, when they run out of money, or cut benefits," spokesman Mark Wolfe said. "It is colder than last year. Unemployment is higher ... We are starting to hear from some states that their caseloads are going up."
Heat for me but not for thee... This is compassionate conservatism in action. Perhaps we should encourage the poor to move to a warmer climate like Texas, where we can more easily incarcerate and kill them.
2002 will be colder than 2001, and every year thereafter will be still colder until we throw the energy industry out of the White House.
President Bush is enacting by executive fiat key pieces of his divisive "faith-based initiative,'' including one that lets federal contractors use religious favoritism in their hiring. [...]
Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said religious groups would be allowed to discriminate in hiring while other groups could not.
"It's not equal treatment,'' he said. "It's special treatment for religious groups. ... In essence, the government is going to be funding religious discrimination.'"
Divisive indeed. Junior's a divider, not a uniter, as head of HR for the American Christian Taliban.
"The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today [12/10/02] said it is offering free legal advice to booksellers in the state who receive subpoenas or search warrants seeking disclosure of customer purchase records. [...]
"The ACLU’s action comes in response to the USA PATRIOT Act, which has given federal law enforcement agencies new tools to demand records from booksellers. Passed in 2001, the PATRIOT Act empowers the government to obtain records of a person’s book purchases as part of an intelligence investigation, without evidence that the buyer is suspected of committing a crime.
"In recent years, there has been an increase in subpoenas to bookstores demanding evidence about customers’ reading habits. In one notable incident, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr demanded that Barnes & Noble and Kramerbooks in Washington, DC divulge information regarding all purchases by Monica Lewinsky. Booksellers in Washington state, ranging in size from Amazon.com to the small Arundel Books in Seattle, have received subpoenas to disclose customer records."
Given the amount of Amazon and other bookselling that takes place through blog referral commerce, and the extensive electronic identity residues that remain, it makes sense for every person who reads or writes a blog to support the efforts of the ACLU.
North Korea recently disclosed that it has a program to make nuclear weapons from highly enriched uranium, in violation of its international agreements, but the United States has taken pains to defuse any sense that it is planning an immediate confrontation over the issue. That policy is in contrast to the administration's approach with Iraq, where the Bush administration has threatened military action to disarm President Saddam Hussein if he does not voluntarily dispose of any weapons of mass destruction.
To qualify the distinction between its posture on Iraq and North Korea, it stands to reason that either (1) the administration has specific material evidence against Iraq that it refuses to share with UN weapons inspectors, leading them and the rest of the world as well as the American people on a wild goose chase, or (2) the administration is pursuing a secret agenda of its own, probably related to the needs of the energy industry and the legacy of Bush presidencies.
Asked if Yemen was a state that sponsors terrorism, [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said: "No ... We now know that in fact Yemen has been a friend and partner in the global war on terrorism.''
And yet Richard Clarke, NSC Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 1992-2001, feels otherwise, in a report from Frontline:
I think there were two things going on in Yemen [in the FBI investigation following the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole]. The first thing was the government of Yemen didn't want us to know all the details; in part, because that would reveal that some low-level people in the Yemeni government may have been part of the conspiracy; in part, because it would have shown that the Yemeni government didn't really have control over a large section of Yemen; in part because it would have shown that Yemen was filled with terrorists from a whole variety of different organizations. So Yemen didn't want to cooperate fully, didn't want us to see everything that was there.
The other thing that was going on was that you had an U.S. ambassador [Barbara K. Bodine] who wanted to be fully in control of everything that every American official did in the country, and resented the fact that suddenly there were hundreds of FBI personnel in the country and only a handful of State Department personnel. She wanted good relations with Yemen as the number one priority.
[FBI counterterrorism expert] John O'Neill wanted to stop terrorism as the number one priority, and the two conflicted. Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, State Department, the Defense Department -- almost all of us thought that John O'Neill was doing the right thing.
From the same set of interviews, we hear the following from Clint Guenther, Former FBI Agent NYC – Counterterrorism:
Q: Now we know the connections. There were connections between some of the individuals there in Yemen and the Malaysian meetings and some of the [9/11] hijackers. There were dots to be connected. What did we lose by, months before 9/11, having to pull out the best people [O'Neill's team] to investigate the case, having to pull them out of Yemen?
A: That's hard to say, what we lost. We could've lost a lot. We could've lost the intelligence that could've connected that dot to the World Trade Center. I don't know that to be a fact, but a lot of the Al Qaeda people are coming out of Yemen. A lot of the Yemenis are involved. I think if we could have had better investigative effort over there, had been able to build the confidence of the local law enforcement, we may have been able to find people, interrogate them, and get a lot more intelligence that would have shown us something going on.
In its so-called war on "terror," the administration protects Yemen and Saudi Arabia, ignores North Korea, and mobilizes all of its resources against Iraq.
Could this make any less sense? There is no doubt that there are real threats facing this country, and that the administration has yet to demonstrate it is remotely capable of addressing them.
Here's their report showing that, instead of paying taxes, CSX supplemented its $934 million in pretax U.S. profits over the four years with a total of $164 million in tax rebate checks from the federal government. Noted at Eric Alterman's Altercation.
The 40-page opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, in the suit brought by the General Accounting Office against Vice President Cheney*, ruled that the GAO, which conducts hundreds of investigations into government affairs each year, has no personal or institutional right to bring almost any suit. Analysts said this means the agency might face trouble in enforcing its requests for information from any federal department. [...]
The case was randomly assigned to Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President Bush last year. [...]
"[A] Republican judge has decided that, once in office, Bush and Cheney can operate in complete secrecy with no oversight by Congress," [Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)] said.
The score is Walking Cadaver 1, GAO 0. But keep your eye on Judicial Watch's lawsuit against the Cheney Energy Task Force.
*For the issues surrounding these events: "Wednesday, January 9, 2002 – The White House told Congress in a letter released yesterday that Vice President Cheney or his aides met six times with Enron Corp. representatives last year, including a session two months before the energy trading company made the largest corporate bankruptcy filing in American history. [...] One of the staff meetings occurred six days before Enron announced actions that reduced its shareholder equity by $1.2 billion.
"Cheney met for half an hour on April 17 with Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chairman, according to a Jan. 3 letter by David S. Addington, the vice president's counsel. The letter was written in response to a Dec. 4 request by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, who released the correspondence." {link}
Intentionally or not, Lieberman spent the fall doing the Republicans' bidding. His stature gave the President's policy on Iraq the shimmer of bipartisanship; his leadership on homeland security led to a political debacle and policy failure for the Democrats. (After the election, the final version of the bill, which Lieberman voted for, basically adopted the President's position.) I asked him whether he was uncomfortable serving simultaneously as a punching bag and a cheerleader for the Bush White House. "It's odd," he said without emotion. "It happens in politics."
Al Gore created not just one presidential monster (by botching the post-election campaign) but possibly two with his lousy choice of running mate, another faith-based hypocrite.
Add that to Vice Chairman's J. Clifford Baxter's death which was ruled a suicide but may actually have been something more sinister. Reminders as to who he was:
"Cliff Baxter complained mightily to (then-CEO Jeff) Skilling and all who would listen about the inappropriateness of our transactions with LJM," Sherron Watkins wrote. LJM is one of the partnerships apparently used to keep a half-billion dollars in losses off Enron's books. The same letter warned, "We will implode in a wave of accounting scandals" unless Enron changes its practices. [...]
[Baxter] Sold 577,436 shares for $35.2 million.
Awful lot of fishy "suicides" floating around the Enron folk. Twice as many as Vince Foster as of today. Looks like Junior's friends are blurring the lines between Texan good ol' boy networks and The Sopranos.
The synchronized character of a two-party shake-up has become even more appealing upon further reflection. Third-party tickets tend to hurt one party or the other, but with a candidate from each side such a ticket could hurt both at once, and would send a message to both the Republican and Democratic parties that their old tricks are not working anymore. We the People really need political and legislative solutions to actual problems, not just smokescreens and demonization.
That is, of course, only if we're still bothering with such formalities as elections in 2004.
*The only blog with a nice Dubuffet graphic in the masthead.
News4 has learned the son of a gun activist was arrested Wednesday night and charged with an apparent road rage shooting on the George Washington Parkway.
Police believe David Michael Keene, 21, shot a gun from a BMW on Sunday afternoon. The bullet shattered the window of a Mercedes Benz and became lodged in the driver's seat, just inches from the driver's head. [...]
News4 has learned Keene is the son of David A. Keene, who is on the board of directors for the National Rifle Association. Keene is also a conservative political consultant and lobbyist who has worked in the White House and in Congress.
I miss Chelsea! I want American leaders to have good kids!
With a new war likely on the way, her essay provides a timely set of insights into wartime suffering and how it is usually depicted, often manipulated, and never understood.
That's like saying, "If you set aside support for the Taliban, the intelligence failures of 9/11/01, the anthrax attacks on Democratic senators, the casino-toilet economy, job loss for millions, the disappearance of billions of citizens' 401(k) and IRA dollars, the non-prosecution of accounting and corporate deviants, the Leave-No-CEO-Behind fundraising, untold damage to America's reputation internationally, the Pharmaceutical Homeland Security legislation, oil exploration in Alaska and the redrock Southwest, the incessant erosion of civil liberties, the parallel legal system for 'terrorists,' the continued existence and influence of Al Qaeda, and the Cheney-led secret energy cabal, the record of the Bush administration is really very good."
It's fun to watch corporate toadies fighting. However, no doubt the replacement robot will be worse than the original.
"Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization,'' executive director Anthony Romero said. There are now 330,000 dues-paying members, 50,000 of whom joined after the [9/11/01] attacks.
The group has been in the thick of legal challenges to the government's broadening anti-terror powers.
Last week, in response to an ACLU lawsuit, the government agreed to tell the group by mid-January which documents it is willing to release about its increased surveillance activities.
Especially notable among the new enthusiasts are conservatives who once thought the ACLU represented everything that was wrong with the left.
"They are very useful and productive force in jurisprudence,'' said Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.
Conservatives such as Hyde are mindful of the history of an organization that was lonely in its defense of positions now accepted as universal: Blacks who suffered spurious prosecutions in the 1930s, Japanese interned in the 1940s, books banned as obscene now regarded as part of the literary canon. [...]
"When you have the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country saying either you're with me or against me, and that your tactics aid the terrorists, that rubs people the wrong way,'' Romero said.
That includes conservatives who bridle at government intrusions into privacy.
Whatever happened to the conservative calls for less, and less intrusive, government? Invasions of privacy will affect not only liberals, but also South Park Republicans, Log Cabin Republicans, and all the other cutely named (and unnamed) factions that have something personal to hide from the electronic gaze of Ashcroft and/or Poindexter.
No matter who's in power, liberal or conservative, some official is always disapproving of something you're doing – whether it's political, aesthetic, financial, or sexual – and that's why we Americans invest part of our identity in having this wonderful thing called privacy.
What kind of social hell are you waiting for? Join the ACLU. Right now.
...a summary of the strategic capabilities plan and a raft of other Pentagon and armed forces documents made available to The Times make it clear that the new approach now includes other elements as well: the management of public information, efforts to control* news media sources and manipulation of public opinion.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception and "influence operations" as basic tools in future wars. According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare policy, military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten public awareness; promote national and coalition policies, aims, and objectives ... [and] counter adversary propaganda and disinformation in the news."
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological attacks and public affairs. A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare's goals as "destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation." These goals are referred to collectively as "D5E." [...]
Since reporters cannot travel into parts of Iraq and other places in the region without military escort, what they report is generally what they've been told.
And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the casualty list.
That is bad news for the American public. In the end, it may be even worse news for the Bush administration -- and for a U.S. military that has spent more than 25 years climbing out of the credibility trap called Vietnam.
*It's much easier to control news sources when the FCC's overlord Michael "Son of Colin" Powell gives the thumbs-up to media monopolies. See the post below.
Colin Powell's son, Michael, is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC traditionally has limited the number of newspapers, radio stations and television outlets that a company can own in any given metropolitan area. These rules have been relaxed over the past 5 years. Now Chairman Powell is interested in eliminating the restrictions.
Byrd's Brain points out that the deadline for public comments is January 2, 2003 (PDF file).
For Christmas, Republicans want unrestricted media monopolies in every market. Will you help them get their wish?
The White House has decided that several thousand political appointees across the federal government will be eligible for cash bonuses, abandoning a Clinton-era prohibition that grew out of questionable practices in the first Bush administration.
Administration officials said the policy shift, ordered by the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., earlier this year but never publicly disclosed, seeks to correct the inequity of political appointees' working side by side with civil servants who routinely receive bonuses.
The new policy is being instituted at many federal departments, and a few agencies have already begun distributing awards of several thousand dollars each to political appointees. For example, the Justice Department has given bonuses to political appointees who were deemed to have played important roles in counterterrorism* and the Sept. 11 investigation, officials said. [...]
For the first time in eight years, cabinet-level officials and agency chiefs have been authorized to approve annual awards of up to $10,000 — and possibly more — for the influential senior attorneys, policy advisers, confidential assistants and other appointees who are brought onto their political staffs. Awards can total $25,000 — or higher with approval from the White House.
Here's an extra fifty grand, Henry, for helping out with Pinochet, bombing Cambodia, and legitimizing the administration's lack of a grasp on Al Qaeda. In Junior's world, crime has a whole new payscale.
*In the private sector, the Vice President of Counterterrorism would be receiving a pink slip instead of a cash bonus after the fuckup of 9/11.
Former Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine? Former interim FBI director Tom Pickard? Did you receive your retroactive bonuses yet? Meanwhile, John O'Neill, the FBI counterterrorism expert who knew, is still dead, along with nearly 3,000 others.
Death for the competent, bonuses for the toadies. It won't fly as a slogan, but it's making a hell of a party platform and an administration policy.
According to a transcript on the Department of Defense website, Rumsfeld told reporters:
"And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence*. You may recall that. And 'oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.' I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."
A search of the Nexis database indicates that no major U.S. media outlets-- no national broadcast television news shows, no major U.S. newspapers, no wire services or major magazines-- have reported Rumsfeld's remarks.
Henny Penny? I'll give you the corpse? What exactly are the media reporting these days, besides Jennifer Lopez's diet?
*The new Pentagon group was created "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations.”
Watching the watchers. What would Total Information Awareness of John Poindexter begin to look like? Cryptome starts the ball rolling with aerial photographs of his house and other personal information that deserves to be disseminated because, after all, he is a past convicted felon (via his Iran-Contra participation) and a present public menace (as Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office). According to prevailing right-wing logic, because he does not consider himself a terrorist, this invasion of his privacy shouldn't bother him.
The original impetus for Cryptome's story was an article by Matt Smith in SF Weekly. Link via Boing Boing.
I bet there's a lot of story behind the new CFO story. Since I'm getting hits from dynegy.com, here's an invitation: Email me your version of what's really going on at Dynegy (click "say hello" in the right column) and I'll post it here anonymously.
Let me know who's who on the board and what happened to all your 401(k) money.
Retracing your steps, I googled the same terms and found the site dedicated to the case against the Dynegy 401(k) plan:
The Complaint alleges that during the Class Period the defendants breached their fiduciary duties when they were made aware of numerous facts that made Dynegy stock an inappropriate investment for the Plan. [...]
This case was filed against: Jane D. Jones, Robert D. Doty, Jr., Andrea Lang, Sheli Z. Rosenberg, Patricia M. Eckert, Charles E. Bayless, Michael D. Capellas, Glenn F. Tilton, Charles L. Watson, Stephen W. Bergstrom, Daniel L. Dienstbier, Jerry L. Johnson, H. John Riley, Jr., Joe J. Stewart, J. Otis Winters, Darald W. Callahan, and John S. Watson[...]
The above site, with the appropriate name of erisafraud.com, is apparently the production of a law firm:
Keller Rohrback and its co-counsel serve as lead or co-lead counsel in a class action on behalf of employees in 401(k) litigation involving the following companies: Enron, Providian, Williams Companies, Xerox, CMS Energy, Dynegy, Duke Energy, WorldCom and Lucent. Additionally, Keller Rohrback is involved in 401(k) litigation with respect to the following companies: Global Crossing, BellSouth, Conseco and Household International.
We are not affiliated with any of the parties, or their accounting firms or legal representation. We are just a guy who follows the story. So why do we care? Because corporate misbehavior has stolen a fortune from the small investors of this country, us included. Add to that a political environment which indicts an accounting firm (Andersen), protects its political-contributor clients (Enron upper management at large), and exacts restitution from neither, and the worst forms of corruption and financial mayhem become commonplace, as indeed they have.
Meanwhile, Lay's lawyer Michael Ramsey seems confident that his client will have "some pretty good answers" for charges against him, according to the Houston Chronicle. Unbelievably good, no doubt.
Never forget that privatization of Social Security was a scheme whose net effect would have been to siphon off even more than the billions already lost by normal people. A Republican scheme, that is.
All hail St. Bibiana, patron saint of hangovers. Here's hoping you had a nice holiday weekend after a rotten November.
Also known as St. Vivian, St. Bibiana is also the patron saint of epilepsy, epileptics, hangovers, headaches, insanity, mental illness, mentally ill people, single laywomen, torture victims, and the diocese of Los Angeles, California. [Link courtesy of the delightful and alluring mimi smartypants, who "firmly believes that beauty should be convulsive."]
The Bush administration announced plans today to loosen environmental safeguards for national forests by speeding up decisions that open public lands to logging and drilling.
The proposed regulations, which closely track recommendations by the timber industry, would reduce the scientific and environmental reviews required when 15-year master plans are developed for the nation's 155 national forests and grasslands.
Public input would be restricted, and form letters and pre-printed postcards would be disregarded. The proposal, which is now open for public comment, will not take effect for at least nine months.
The 10-member commission will be evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees. As Bush demanded, the president will name the chairman [i.e., Kissinger] and it will take at least six members, in most cases, to approve subpoenas.
Kissinger falls right along the line on which Poindexter squats. Cambodia. Iran. And now a new set of international crimes du jour.
UggaBugga on terrorism insurance as a form of corporate welfare:
Let us say at this point that we think insurance is rational and worthwhile. It is, historically speaking, an idea that's been useful to society for about 400 years. However, for reasons unknown, some on the right howl that insurance for people (unemployment, retirement*) is a variant of socialism (which it isn't). Yet they cheer insurance for businesses.
Impossibly epic in its ambition to depict a universal tale of money, love and power, the series is the ancestor of such current distant relatives as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and even (bear with me) The Sopranos.
Die Walküre, the individual opera, is the original source of the "Ride of the Valkyries," one of the most overused pieces of music in the history of media. Besides serving as the background for countless commercials, it is perhaps most famous as the score behind the helicopter attack sequence ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") in Francis Ford Coppolla's Apocalypse Now.
Working without collaborators, Richard Wagner wrote every word and every note of music in the Ring operas. Despite his philosophical and egomaniacal shortcomings, he created a vast and pioneering work that will last for millennia. And the Lyric Opera production is as great as the ambition behind the opera. James Morris as the god Wotan and Jane Eaglen as his warrior daughter Brünnhilde radiated loyalty, affection and power both dramatically and musically. Sublime.
Much more than any other work of art I can recall, The Ring is an immersive experience, not unlike being lost in a foreign country or taking LSD. Even a wonderful book you can speed up or slow down. Not so here – Wagner controls the tempo. You have to let go and allow the opera to take you where it wants to, and if you do you might be rewarded. As an enormous meditation on money, power, family, lust, war, ambition, and finally love, The Ring is among the most mature entertainments the world has ever known. The only other contemporary entertainment that dissects love and power among the endomorphs quite so dramatically is, or course, The Sopranos.
The best recommendation I can give is that I've attended this particular production twice before (did I mention that the opera is five hours long?) and that I will see it again in a couple of years when Lyric Opera mounts the whole Ring series at once. Seventeen hours of opera in a single week. Seventeen glorious hours. Hojotoho!
Postscript: On March 16, 1988, Poindexter was indicted on seven felony charges arising from his involvement in the Iran/contra affair, as part of a 23-count multi-defendant indictment. As of 2002, he is a Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office, according to his resume, found in Google's cache. The resume also mentions "an attempt to begin rationalization of U.S. relationship with strategically important Iran."
The Rittenhouse Review presents a lengthy and thoughtful examination of how the nasty, back-stabbing character of high school cliques shapes the world of blogging, journalism and even the obsessions whirling around Al Gore.
Reliably brilliant. You can take the occasional day off from blogging, J.C., if there's more of this in your cupboard.
All [plaintiffs' lawyers, regulators and short-sellers] hoped to take Mr. Beatty's information and benefit from it, in different ways. Some, he says, assured him his assistance would earn him big money. But no such payout has materialized, and now, unemployed and in financial stress, he is feeling betrayed. "They all said they wanted to help me," he says. "I was dumb. I fell for it." […]
Still unable to find a job, Mr. Beatty blames not so much the weak economy and energy-sector layoffs as his former employer. In August, the Beattys became so sure they were being watched and harassed that they loaded a rented van and moved to a small town in the Midwest. It's all far from the ending they expected when Mr. Beatty decided to take on the company.
"What did it accomplish?" asks his father, Jerry Beatty, an administrator at the Iowa Supreme Court in Des Moines. "I have a lot of reservations about what he did because I'm thinking about his family and security and employment. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just himself, but he's got three children and a wife." […] In September 2001, they filed for bankruptcy.
[...] One year ago, after Dynegy briefly moved to take over troubled Enron Corp., Dynegy publicly portrayed itself as above the kind of questionable deals that brought down its larger crosstown competitor. It also said energy trading on DynegyDirect, its small rival to EnronOnline, had risen 20% since Enron's crisis began, in a "flight to quality."
Mr. Beatty, who had rotated through DynegyDirect, was skeptical. He still had a password for the system, so he took a look. What he saw seemed odd: The volume increase was based on four huge trades. Even stranger, these were two pairs of simultaneous trades that canceled each other out. They provided no apparent economic benefit but made volume look much bigger.
He printed out the trading records and took them to his boss, Anthony Carrino, a divisional vice president. "Keep quiet," he says Mr. Carrino responded. Mr. Carrino, who has left Dynegy, didn't return a call seeking comment.
A few weeks later, Mr. Beatty was among management trainees invited to lunch with Dynegy's president, Stephen Bergstrom. The group chatted about the turmoil from Enron's failure, and then Mr. Bergstrom casually mentioned that Dynegy was beginning to restrict access to many of the internal files on its shared computer drive. He added that the process wasn't finished yet, according to Mr. Beatty. Mr. Bergstrom, who has left Dynegy, declined to comment.
Mr. Beatty, already suspicious because of the trades he'd discovered, was curious about what the files might contain. When he looked, he found nearly impenetrable descriptions of a highly complex arrangement involving special-purpose vehicles and bank financing. It was Project Alpha, a deal that exaggerated cash flow from operations and cut taxes but was all but impossible for outsiders to fathom from Dynegy's public reports.
Mr. Beatty says he went to Mr. Carrino and was again told to keep quiet. He did so, Mr. Beatty says, but grew queasy about Dynegy, beginning to feel that company posters extolling integrity were hypocritical.
The theme of this story (and many others of current import): Shut up and let us steal. Hypocritical is far too small a word to describe the geniuses who run the energy industry in Texas, and the morons* they support.
The nine million acres of federally-owned lands covered by America’s Redrock Wilderness Act should be off-limits to oil and gas exploration—leaving over 14 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Utah open for drilling or other extractive uses.
This extraordinary American landscape is more precious that the fuel inefficiency of the ordinary American SUV, and demands preservation by civilized society.
Why it's dangerous to walk in the USA. Almost 5,000 people per year die in the US simply because they are pedestrians. And yet there's no $38 billion Cabinet-level Department of Sidewalk Security. Makes you wonder which side Bush and Lott and the rest of them are on.
Montreal's Expo67 was "a spectacular success, many say it was the last great World's Fair," according to Portage, where I found this fascinating site. As a wee child who attended the fair, I remember many of these odd pavilions demonstrating how cool architecture could be in a Jetsons-style future, and how tres cool Canada is.
HU'S ON FIRST (We take you now to the Oval Office.)
George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?
Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
George: Great. Lay it on me.
Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.
George: That's what I want to know.
Condi: That's what I'm telling you.
George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes.
George: I mean the fellow's name.
Condi: Hu.
George: The guy in China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The new leader of China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The Chinaman!
Condi: Hu is leading China.
George: Now whaddya' asking me for?
Condi: I'm telling you Hu is leading China.
George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?
Condi: That's the man's name.
George: That's who's name?
Condi: Yes.
George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.
Condi: That's correct.
George: Then who is in China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir is in China?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Then who is?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.
Condi: Kofi?
George: No, thanks.
Condi: You want Kofi?
George: No.
Condi: You don't want Kofi.
George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N.
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi?
George: Milk! Will you please make the call?
Condi: And call who?
George: Who is the guy at the U.N?
Condi: Hu is the guy in China.
George: Will you stay out of China?!
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi.
George: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.
(Condi picks up the phone.)
Condi: Rice, here.
George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?
Supergenius J. Craig Venter plans to create new forms of Republican voters in a dish in his ultra-top secret laboratory. Recently returning from his guest appearance as the insane genetic engineer on South Park (the favorite TV show of "South Park Republicans"), Venter's newest venture was reported by the Washington Post:
The project raises philosophical, ethical and practical questions. For instance, if a man-made organism proved able to survive and reproduce only under a narrow range of laboratory conditions, could it really be considered life? More broadly, do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms*?
...Scientists don't usually announce their experiments in advance, but Venter said he felt this one needed to be brought to the attention of policymakers** in Washington, since it could create a new set of tools that terrorists or hostile states might exploit to make biological weapons. "We'll have a debate on what should be published and what shouldn't," Venter said. "We may not disclose all the details that would teach somebody else how to do this."
Decoding the genome gives fresh meaning to "political science." Like most research, this research sounds incredibly important and valuable – to the researchers. The rest of us: fucked.
*That vote GOP and work for subminimum wage.
**Nonbipartisan.
George Monbiot's "The covert biotech war" in The Guardian. The article details the use of invented, fictional people such as "Andura Smetacek" who use the Internet to accuse critics of GM of "terrorism," the new description of any activity that CEOs and Republicans don't like.
Ruling for the first time in its history, the ultra-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review today gave the green light to a Justice Department bid to broadly expand its powers to spy on U.S. citizens.
"We are deeply disappointed with the decision, which suggests that this special court exists only to rubberstamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants," said Ann Beeson, litigation director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the American Civil Liberties Union.
(...)
Today’s decision comes on the heels of a White House announcement of a new system being developed at the Pentagon that would be able to track every American’s activities. The so-called "Total Information Awareness" program will create -- according to Pentagon officials -- the infrastructure for the most extensive electronic surveillance system in history. Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire has dubbed the program "a supersnoop’s dream."
"Its a real mind-blower," said the United States' poet laureate, Billy Collins, who was at the dinner. "Poetry has always had the reputation as being the poor little match girl of the arts. Well, the poor little match girl just hit the lottery."
Those who ask for nothing but are favored by the whims of Republican plutocrats receive enormous fortunes, and those of us who ask for simple things (like honest election recounts, protected wilderness areas, parity with Canadian medical coverage, democracy, etc.) get nothing. Worse than nothing.
bad things provides this mindfuck from Science Magazine, for which I lazily couldn't figure out the site registration (emphasis added):
1) To avoid getting advice that is discordant with the administration's political agenda, the secretary [of HHS, Tommy Thompson] disbanded the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee and DHHS's Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, both of which were attempting to craft solutions to the complex problems accompanying genetic testing and research; solutions that apparently conflicted with the religious views of certain political constituencies.
2) To ensure that the department would get no unwanted advice from its environmental health advisory committees, the secretary has stacked them with scientists long affiliated with polluting industries. Fifteen of the 18 members of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) have been replaced, many with scientists that have long been associated with the chemical or petroleum industries, often in leadership positions of organizations opposing public health and environmental regulation.
It will take generations to undo the pluto-theocratic damage that Junior's administration is wreaking upon us all.
Last night's show featured imperialism-journalism critic John Pilger who has written a book entitled The New Rulers of the World. His insights are fascinating, particularly his critique of the internalized distinction Americans journalists unconsciously draw between "people who matter" and "people who do not matter." (E.g., the 3,000 September 11 US dead versus the non-Al-Qaeda Afghan civilians, probably more in number, who died in retaliation.)
I can't even remember what show this replaced, but I'm sure glad. It appears promising.
UPDATE: The post below, originally posted on 11/22/02 for James of The Rittenhouse Review, won't archive correctly so I'm posting here too.
He's back. James Capozzola (hmm, I never noticed those initials before) returns from his break at The Rittenhouse Review.
Here's your bundt cake, James. No MSG, BHT or LGF. Courtesy of iVillage where you can also find the recipe.
Lawyers for parents of autistic children suing pharmaceutical companies over childhood vaccines charged yesterday that a new section in the homeland bill -- passed on Wednesday by the House and now before the Senate -- would keep the lawsuits out of state courts, ruling out huge judgments and lengthy litigation.
(...)
GOP officials said the provisions are merely aimed at protecting companies working on life-saving products from being dragged into costly litigation by trial lawyers. Pharmaceutical companies were among the largest contributors to Republicans in this year's elections, while trial lawyers heavily backed Democrats.
Tom DeLay gets his piece of the pie:
GOP aides said the language originally offered by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), and now incorporated in the bill, gives Texas A&M the inside track in hosting the first university center on homeland security, to be established within one year. DeLay was elected Wednesday to serve as the House majority leader in the 108th Congress.
Republicans are now engaged in preemptive sucking-up:
Company spokesman Edward Sagebiel said Lilly was "surprised when the language was inserted" because it had not actively lobbied for it in recent months.
The previous president was impeached for being fellated and lying about it – can't we impeach this one for fellating and lying about it?
...I know no other country where the adjective "un" is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all "love" our country. How can one actually "love" something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?
...what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core of George Bush's support and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas church attendance is down dramatically in England it has never been higher in the United States whose strange fundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush's government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.
No wonder then that America has never had an organised Left or real opposition party as has been the case in every European country. The substance of American discourse is that it is divided into black and white, evil and good, ours and theirs.
