Bayou Management, the collapsed Connecticut hedge-fund firm, never made a profit despite years of sunny reports to clients, and it mostly stopped trading securities in mid-2004 as its founders tried desperately to recoup losses with fanciful bets totaling $150 million -- all that was left of the $450 million it had collected from investors, authorities said.
Those details emerged as Bayou Management's two founders, Samuel Israel III and Daniel Marino pleaded guilty in federal court in White Plains, N.Y., yesterday to criminal-fraud charges.
[...]
Both were released on a $500,000 bond. Mr. Marino faces as much as 50 years in prison, while Mr. Israel faces as much as 30 years. Sentencing was set for Jan. 9.
[...]
The investigation was aided by a six-page "suicide note and confession" found on Mr. Marino's desk by a Bayou investor last month that provided a year-by-year account of the fraud and implicated both Messrs. Israel and Marquez, Stamford police say.
The scandal, which also has prompted civil lawsuits by investors, has raised questions about the investment advisers who steered clients' money toward Bayou.
How "independent" were those advisers? What about E. Lee Hennessee, a North Carolina Republican and yet another fervent Bush supporter who supposedly "vetted" Bayou for investors who invested tens of millions into the fraudulent fund? Shouldn't she, and the fees she took for such criminally negligent advice, be a part of this grand scheme of larceny?
Regular readers know that I harbor a special hatred for white-collar criminals. Their unique leverage over our lives, especially in a Shangri-La Ownership Society, makes them them deserving of extraordinary punishments and sentences that never seem to materialize. If a guy robs me at gunpoint for the fifty bucks in my wallet, he could go to jail for a substantial amount of time. But Ken Lay pumps up his worthless Enron stock, thereby decimating the life savings of thousands of employees and other shareholders in 401(k) and pension plans, and in over four years he has yet to go to trial.
I could get more excited about a death penalty if it involved the Lays, Marinos, Israels and Hennessees of the world. Not because they're Republicans, but because their actions are born of egomaniacal greed and are unquestionably evil.
Madison's Ray and Diane Maida say they were treated to an example of how President Bush just doesn't get it as the participated in the anti-war protest in Washington.
The Maidas, who lost their son, Mark, to a roadside bomb south of Baghdad last May, were standing outside the White House Monday morning when they saw a motorcade approach. The quickly donned T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of their dead son as an act of protest.
The president, spying the couple on the sidewalk from his limousine, smiled and waved.
"He was waving like a maniac," Ray Maida said. "He thought we were there to support him. He was clueless that we were there to show him the face of war."
[...]
"Nightline" is expected to air a segment on the Maida family in the near future.
As Forrest Gump would say, "Stupid is as stupid does." (Via Dan Froomkin at WaPo.)
"An act of blatant political partisanship" by "a rogue district attorney" and "a partisan zealot," Mr. DeLay said yesterday in a Capitol news conference, not long after announcing he would step aside temporarily as majority leader.
From hard experience, Mr. Earle was ready for that blast. In his own news conference in Austin shortly before Mr. DeLay's, Mr. Earle noted he has prosecuted 15 elected officials during his career, and 12 were Democrats. That reflects Democrats' long hold on power in Texas into the 1990s. Now, however, Texas Democrats don't hold a single statewide office.
As Mr. Earle put it yesterday, "We prosecute abuses of power, and you have to have power before you can abuse it."
[...]
...as Texas switched to a Republican state under Gov. Bush, Mr. Earle's more recent prosecutions of Republicans have made the Democrat a target for partisan counterattacks. Previously, Mr. Earle was best known for his unsuccessful prosecution of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, for alleged misuse of office and state employees when she was the state's treasurer before her election to the U.S. Senate. Like Mr. DeLay, Mrs. Hutchison dismissed Mr. Earle's indictment as partisan politics.
But Democrats remember the prosecutor's cases against some of their biggest names, including state attorney general and former congressman Jim Mattox, former Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis and former Supreme Court Justice Don Yarbrough. He also investigated former Comptroller and Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the late Democratic mentor of Mr. Bush. The case against Mr. Mattox, like that against Mrs. Hutchison, didn't result in conviction. Yesterday, Mr. Earle was asked about his "mixed record." He said "only a couple" public-corruption cases weren't successful; they "just happened to be the high-profile" Mattox and Hutchison indictments.
It's impossible for Republicans to claim partisan zealotry when eighty percent of Earle's prosecutions were against Democrats. Now, of course, one hundred percent of his current prosecutions would necessarily involve Republicans because they hold one hundred percent of statewide offices in Texas.
Meanwhile, I assume Bullock is burning in hell for his misguided mentoring of Bush.
You could abort every rich Republican baby in this country, and your white-collar crime rate would plummet. (Not to mention, there would be no one left to enjoy the repeal of the so-called "death tax.")
Damn right-wingers — always confusing race with class.
Q: So many of Calvin and Hobbes strips had some kind of moral/theological element that I wonder what your religious upbringing was and if it influenced that. (For instance, the "Love the sinner, hate the sin" strip as well as many Santa-related Christmas strips.) I'm guessing you were raised Catholic?
A: Actually, I've never attended any church.
Bet that wasn't the answer you were expecting, Suzanne Kaufmann of Charlottesville, Virginia.
See the post below this one for more insight into the power of pro-religious prejudice.
The curious lack of a perpetrator in the anthrax mailings — mailed exclusively to Democratic senators in powerful positions — is in some ways even more alarming than the fact that the same administration also managed not to catch Osama bin Laden. At least we know who he is and approximately what his motives are.
But why would an unknown quantity try to murder two Democratic senators? Would it be because of their strategic importance to the Judiciary Committee and the nomination process during an administration expected to name multiple nominees to the Supreme Court?
John Roberts, the Supreme Court nominee, is like many Americans in at least one respect: His investments aren't diversified enough to reduce risk and boost returns.
Roberts, in response to a Senate Judiciary Committee request, disclosed his finances in early August. His investments as of Aug. 1 included $1.6 million in stocks, $1.7 million in mutual funds and $1.4 million in cash.
Using the "X-Ray" portfolio-screening tool from investment-research firm Morningstar Inc.'s Principia database, MarketWatch analyzed Roberts' stocks and funds, and a combination of the top 50 holdings.
Several financial advisers were then asked about the results. They didn't know at first who they were judging, only that the subject was a 50-year-old father of two, with a house in an upper-class suburb and a professional career.
Their unanimous verdict: Roberts is overly concentrated in specific stocks, owns too many mutual funds and hasn't spread his wealth across different investment categories.
Plus, he has a lot of idle cash, no bonds and little international exposure.
"It's a very unbalanced portfolio," said Kevin Ellman of Wealth Preservation Solutions in Ridgewood, N.J. "It's a typical thing where people put together a high number of investments and they confuse that with diversification."
[...]
"The allocation doesn't make a lot of sense," said Roy Diliberto of RTD Financial Advisors in Philadelphia. "I certainly wouldn't have all that money concentrated in five stocks, all of which are very similar in nature and are going to plummet or rise at the same time."
The crucial importance of diversification — the most basic lesson in investing due to the hazards of overconcentration — also applies to the Supreme Court itself. All Justices who are "very similar in nature" will certainly "plummet or rise at the same time."
The Supreme Court is the American portfolio of justice. If we load it up with several ethnicities and genders but just one ideology, we are confusing superficial variety with true diversification of opinion.
This is the very essence of why neither party should pack the courts.
The Wall Street Journal's Question of the Day poll ("What do you think of the prison sentences given to former Tyco executives Kozlowski and Swartz?") was answered with Too Harsh 12%, Too Lenient 42%, and Just Right 45% as of this writing. The Journal's opinion page said, "...the outcome strikes us as just. Not because of their greed -- there's no law against lavish living yet -- but because of their crimes." The implied but unspoken fear is that such harsh treatment of American executives could eventually extend to other useless, parasitic devotees of lavish living: the ruling class of American media.
To any objective observer, it's obvious that the Tyco verdicts were not nearly harsh enough. Kozlowski was sentenced to a minimum of 8-1/3 years. The relative harshness or leniency can be determined by a simple comparison with other nonviolent crimes — take marijuana, for example. Though marijuana possession sentences vary widely by state, even today the average sentence for just having (not selling) marijuana in a state like Alabama is 8.4 years.
Let's review:
Victimless crime: 8.4 years Stealing $575 million: 8.3 years
Using marijuana possession with its number of affected parties (one) as the basic unit of sentencing, shouldn't Kozlowski's crime with its number of affected parties (thousands, at least) mandate a sentence of at least 8,300 years?
Fonseca is a bossa nova artist of impeccable taste, who has worked with such acclaimed Brazilian musicians as Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Vinicius Cantuaria, Gal Costa, and Virginia Rodrigues. This is his first solo US tour and he will be accompanied only by his guitar. According to his site, in the next few days he'll also appear in Columbus, Miami, Oakland and LA. His two US releases include Natural and the new Rive Gauche Rio, both of which are in highest rotation in Skimbleland.
If you enjoy mellow, subtle, intimately rich music, it doesn't get better than Celso Fonseca.
Let me list the negatives for the economy and the stock market, and then I'll address the pluses. The first negative is the huge military spending, both for peace purposes and war. Under a $400 billion-plus budget for a peacetime army, they are building a new fighter plane that is totally redundant and unnecessary and will cost us eventually hundreds of billions.
We don't get goods and services that are really important in our defense. That's true of the new submarines we are building in Connecticut and elsewhere, as well as the new aircraft carriers.
What would be more necessary?
A portion of it could be spent in better defense. Training young people in foreign languages is an area in which we are sorely lacking. That could make us much stronger by improving our intelligence and ability to infiltrate terrorist groups. The war itself is a war that occurred without any planning. The public is becoming increasingly disaffected with it, because we don't see any purpose in keeping our soldiers there. We are obviously unable to train the local people. We are spending huge sums every day to maintain the war, and we don't get any worthwhile goods or services or other offsetting asset.
Roughly 41 million people lack health care in this country. Some of the money spent on defense could be spent for that.
Then there is our school system, which is well below average, relative to the rest of the world. Any country that has a mediocre or worse school system is not going to be successful economically in the future. We should be paying teachers vastly more. We should only hire people to teach who are in the first third of their class, who not only know their subject matter, but also can inspire children to want to learn. Those people are not going into education today. They are going in to the law. They are going into engineering. They are going to Wall Street.
There is a dearth of public housing, and it takes eight to nine years between the time you apply for an apartment and you get it.
By inundating us with paperwork from the SEC, the government is failing to help businesses.
Then there's the greenhouse effect and global warming. Neglecting global warming is going to have the most incredible economic consequences -- mostly bad. Our farm areas will eventually be too warm to produce wheat and corn. The South will be even hotter.
Seth, you have raised many of these concerns in our past interviews.
I certainly have. But I do it because we as a country are very proud that our gross national product is up 4% or whatever on an annual basis. This is a great misstatement of the well-being of our economy. It doesn't take into consideration our depletion of capital, or the depletion of minerals, the depletion of fish, the depletion of raw materials or businesses that no longer exist. It gives a false picture. All it reflects is the amount of sales. If they sell oil at a higher price, why, that goes into the gross national product. The fact that you are using up an asset isn't accounted for. The disparity of income that has grown between the very wealthy and the poor is creating a bad situation.
It shocked me to see the July savings rate went into negative ground in the United States. That implies people are digging into their savings to maintain their spending. In other words, they are not only going into greater debt, but there is no offsetting savings. This is a great negative and eventually will catch up with us.
It's puzzling that so few Wall Street gurus think as holistically about the economy as Seth Glickenhaus. Training young people in foreign languages as a technique of national defense would be infinitely more effective (not to mention cost-effective) than what passes for "war on terror" defense policy now. Housing, healthcare, the educational system — all of these contribute to the labor/capital infrastructure which is where both jobs and wealth are created.
Seth Glickenhaus phophetically and unambiguously said in June 2003, just weeks after Bush's flight-suit "Mission Accomplished": "The public thinks we won the Iraq war and that it is over. They don't realize we are going to keep more troops in Iraq than we thought. The deficit will grow. We are not going to win the peace. Iraq is so divided internally it makes Afghanistan look like one unified group. Do you think soldiers know how to straighten out a country? They know how to make war. Do you think the State Department has the people and the training to help the country rebuild? Do you think we have anything like that? No, of course not. "
The best investment managers have both feet firmly planted in the reality-based community. Long live Seth Glickenhaus!
WASHINGTON – As the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down yesterday, government documents surfaced showing that vital resources, such as buses and environmental health specialists, weren't deployed to the Gulf region for several days, even after federal officials seized control of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
[...]
...FEMA's official requests, known as tasking assignments and used by the agency to demand help from other government agencies, show that it first asked the Department of Transportation to look for buses to help evacuate the more than 20,000 people who had taken refuge at the Superdome in New Orleans at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31. At the time, it only asked for 455 buses and 300 ambulances for the enormous task. Almost 18 hours later, it canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, "the DOT doesn't do ambulances."
FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,355 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving on the first day.
Hours before FEMA realized that it needed buses, Jonathan L. Snare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, said he was prepared to offer the full resources of the agency to help protect the safety and health of workers responding to Katrina.
Health and safety experts play an important role by testing the environment at a disaster for toxins, disease and pathogens. They then advise rescue workers about needs for protective clothing for themselves as well as for the people they are trying to move from harm's way.
The National Response Plan gives OSHA responsibility to coordinate efforts to protect and monitor disaster workers and victims from environmental hazards.
But the part of the plan that authorizes OSHA's role as coordinator and allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn't activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.
Attempts by officials at NIH to reach FEMA officials and send them briefing materials by email failed as the agency's server failed.
"I noticed that every email to a FEMA person bounced back this week. They need a better internet provider during disasters!!" one frustrated Department of Health official wrote to colleagues last Thursday.
By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.
No reason has been offered by either FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security for the delay in activating OSHA's role.
Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis.
Server failures and bounced-back email — just what you want to see from FEMA in a crisis.
Farsighted FEMA individuals with backup NetZero and HotMail accounts might have saved dozens.
(AP) - HOUSTON-A federal judge has dismissed a federal complaint accusing Halliburton Co.'s former chief financial officer of aiding and abetting the company in filing financial reports that did not promptly disclose a 1998 change in accounting procedures.
What's missing from this story? "which occurred while Dick Cheney was CEO."
A provision in the Katrina Emergency Supplemental Appropriations (i.e., the $52 billion) would extend from $15,000 to $250,000 the purchasing limit for an individual transaction for federal employees with government-issued credit cards. This takes a temptation to steal office Post-It Notes to a whole new level — a quarter-million dollars of unaccountability per employee.
The Honorable Jerry Lewis Chairman Committee on Appropriations H218 The Capitol Washington, DC 20515
Dear Chairman Lewis:
I am writing about my very serious concerns with a provision in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill for Hurricane Katrina. A substantive provision was inserted in the bill, at the request of the Administration, which would raise the “micro-purchase” threshold from $15,000 to $250,000 for purchases relating to relief and recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Raising this threshold would mean that any federal employee with a government-issued credit card could buy up to $250,000 in goods or services in a single purchase. There would be no limit to the number of such purchases. This is an unwise provision that could lead to contract abuse and extensive waste, fraud, and abuse.
The use of government credit cards has a track record, and it is not a good one. In the decade since these credit cards were first introduced, GAO and agency Inspectors General have documented millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Recent examples cited in GAO reports include: • A Navy cardholder who made $250,000 in unauthorized purchases in less than a year, including buying a dog. • A Navy cardholder who spent $150,000 for automotive equipment, home building, and general home supplies, some of which the cardholder later resold for cash. • A Department of Education cardholder who made fraudulent purchases from pornographic websites, including one named SlaveLaborProductions.com.
There are about 500,000 of these credit cards in use in the federal government, so this provision could ultimately apply to $150 to $200 billion in taxpayer funds. The vast majority of federal employees are honest, upstanding people, but the ability to buy up to $250,000 in any single purchase is a great temptation. In addition, most federal employees are not trained to make purchases of this magnitude to ensure that taxpayers get the best value for their money.
There is another provision in the same section of the legislation that would give trained contracting officers the ability to use emergency procurement procedures passed in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The inclusion of this provision ensures that federal procurements of up to $250,000 can be made expeditiously, making the credit card provision unnecessary.
The federal response to Hurricane Katrina has been woefully inadequate to date. We should not now compound those problems by creating a situation which will inevitably lead to further waste, fraud, and abuse.
Sincerely, Henry A. Waxman Ranking Minority Member
This is a massive entitlement program like none other for Republican fraudsters within the government. Who will have the teeth to question the authority of the thousands upon thousands in Ferragamo shoe purchases that emerge from the State Department? Who will question furniture purchases for a recently acquired mansion in St. Michaels on the Chesapeake? Seriously, this potential for abuse could easily get into the tens of billions in a matter of months.
NEW ORLEANS -- On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.
The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Yesterday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it's still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.
The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.
Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.
More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.
A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.
He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.
The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."
Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.
Alternately, instead of adequate schools and municipal water service, we could provide each citizen of New Orleans with his own heliport, highball glasses, and place in Vail, thus leveling the playing field.
Former Enron chieftains Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Rick Causey have asked that their federal criminal cases be dismissed based on allegations prosecutors threatened witnesses to keep them from helping the three defend themselves.
Actions of the Enron Task Force have deprived Lay, Skilling and Causey "of their constitutional rights both to secure and confront witnesses, thereby stripping defendants of their ability fully and fairly to prepare for and defend themselves at trial. Put simply, witnesses are afraid to talk to us," the request stated.
Naturally these pity-party allegations are based on sealed affidavits that the public hasn't seen.
Boo fucking hoo. Who among these louts defended their employees from losing their life savings?
Q But, Scott, more concretely, an officer of the Northern Command is quoted as saying that as early as the time Hurricane Katrina went through Florida and worked its way up to the Gulf, there was a massive military response ready to go, but that the President did not order it. It could have been ordered on Sunday, on Monday, on Tuesday -- the call didn't come. Why not?
MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, let's point out a couple of things. There were a lot of assets that were deployed and pre-positioned prior to the hurricane hitting. And you have to look back --
Q These assets were deployed, but the order to use them never came. The Bataan was sitting off behind the hurricane.
MR. McCLELLAN: I know these are all facts that you want to look at and want to determine what went wrong and what went right. I'm not prepared to agree with your assessment just there. There is a much larger picture here that we have to take a look at, and --
Q It's not mine, it's an officer in the Northern Command.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- in terms of the President, the President issued disaster declarations ahead of time so that we could make sure we're fully mobilizing resources and pre-positioning them. But this was a hurricane of unprecedented magnitude.
Q Right, but the military can't go into action without his order.
And they didn't. But, as Scottie said on the record, the buck stops with the president who is fully accountable for this disaster.
But the real good this especially ill wind may blow Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Bush, along with the frantically bullish contingent on the Street, is that it provides them with perfect cover for just about anything that goes wrong. Should housing, which is already starting to show signs of serious fatigue, roll over, why Mr. Greenspan can cite Katrina's unsettling influence on energy costs and the resultant undermining of sentiment in general and that of would-be home buyers in particular.
If those already towering twin deficits continue to grow to the sky, putting the nation at even more financial risk, why, Mr. Bush is sure to label Katrina the culprit.
And if the economy, which despite reasonably good job numbers in August is beginning to slow, a trend that can only worsen with skyscraping energy costs and the attendant slide in consumer sentiment, Katrina will get the all's-well chorus off the hook.
In the same vein, bulls on the stock market, with its heavy speculative lacing and exceedingly rich valuations, will shrug philosophically as they explain that even the most perceptive souls like themselves couldn't possibly have been expected to foresee a freak of nature like Katrina and it's baleful effect on investor psyches.
In sum, never before will a hurricane have done so much to bail out so many people.
How like the Bushes to bail themselves out, again and again, at the expense of the poor.
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
Because, according to the wisdom of the vacationing Bush administration, brochures and toll-free numbers would have saved Lower Manhattan on 9-11-01.
Are the firefighters, who were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and MREs, reacting too hastily? Maybe they can use the brochures after all — by stuffing them into the breached levees and the mouths of Republicans at press conferences.
Today, Ms. [E. Lee] Hennessee finds herself in the middle of a battle over the apparent collapse of Mr. [Samuel] Israel's hedge-fund firm, Bayou Management LLC, and the possible disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars. She and her husband, Charles Gradante, run Hennessee Group, which vets hedge funds for wealthy investors, and are two of the booming industry's biggest promoters. On their advice, Hennessee clients say they had invested tens of millions of dollars in Bayou.
[...]
Ms. Hennessee, a North Carolina native, said she has never encountered a fraud since founding her company in 1987 as a division of E.F. Hutton. In 1997, Hennessee struck out on its own. She and her husband are routinely quoted in media stories about hedge funds. Ms. Hennessee was also a vocal supporter of President Bush. "Help!," she wrote in an email she sent to fund managers during the previous presidential campaign, "the current administration is favorable to the hedge-fund industry and we need to do all we can to keep them in office."
During the debate over an SEC rule requiring registration by hedge funds, Mr. Gradante argued in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC should avoid being too heavy-handed in regulating the funds because most frauds "could have been curtailed by the gatekeepers of the industry."
Could have been, but weren't. Self-regulation among pirates is doomed to fail, isn't it? Argh!
Naturally, these Republican fraudmeisters would be opposed to regulating hedge funds, because it becomes that more difficult for them to defraud their investors. (Although pesky regulations never got in the way of Bush mega-contributors like Enron's Ken Lay from siphoning tens of millions in Enron stock and converting it into self-titled real estate and annuities, over four years before he would come to trial.)
Why do I write about this? To help establish the pattern. Bush Republicans are the purest form of parasite — they will steal from the poor (New Orleans, Medicare, tax policy), the rest of the world (Iraq, Blair's UK), the middle class (Enron, gas prices), and even their true base: the richest of the rich.
The Connecticut hedge-fund firm under scrutiny in what authorities believe may have been a massive fraud emptied five Citibank accounts over the course of six days in July 2004 in withdrawals totaling $161 million, bank records show.
About $100 million of that money is the subject of a court fight between Stamford-based Bayou Fund LLC and Arizona authorities who seized the funds after concluding that there was reason to believe they were being used in a fraud.
The remaining $60 million -- and possibly much more -- remains unaccounted for.
Only $161 million missing? Bayou Fund CFO Daniel Marino and founder Samuel Israel III were generous Bush contributors, in keeping with the consistent pattern of fraud established by irrational tax cuts, Medicare "reform," Social Security privatization, Iraq WMDs, Enron, Halliburton, and the various failures and frauds of all the other cronies of the thieves in the White House.
