(WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2003) -- The Bush Administration is preparing a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information.
A full text document is available at the source above.
Tonight, Bill Moyers* will feature this story, a smallpox story, as well as a visit from Frank Rich.
Tonight they examine alien abductions and talk about their letter to the White House, in which they invite response to a statement made by UFO author David Ickes. This is an excerpt from the letter (click on "Official Letters to the White House"):
For a segment of this television program, producers recently taped a series of interviews with participants at an event in California called "The UFO Expo." At the event, noted expert and author David Ickes claimed that President George W. Bush is a "reptilian entity." The following is an exact quote from Mr. Ickes: "If we could see beyond the limitations of our five senses, we would see George Bush the father and George Bush the son as reptilian entities."
I am offering Presdient Bush an opportunity to respond to these accusations.
I guess you have to watch the show to find out the outcome.
Some wealthy Americans who paid millions in fees to two of the Big Four accounting firms to set up tax shelters are suing the firms after the Internal Revenue Service denied the tax savings that they had been promised.
Although only a few lawsuits have been filed, tax experts and lawyers handling these cases said they expected a flood of similar cases as the I.R.S. stepped up its hunt for tax cheating by hundreds and perhaps thousands of executives, business owners, athletes and entertainers with big incomes.
Two firms being sued, Ernst & Young and KPMG, offered shelters that they said would make taxes on salaries, stock option profits and capital gains from the sale of a business either shrink to pennies on the dollar or disappear.
The fees and savings on taxes can be enormous. Ernst & Young charged some clients $1 million just to hear a sales pitch, according to court papers. And the firms made millions from the sale of each shelter. The shelters allowed accounting firms, their clients and the law firms that blessed the deals to share money that otherwise would have gone to the government.
This is no longer legally justifiable tax avoidance, but industry-wide tax fraud. The sheltered (i.e., stolen) money rightfully belongs to citizens.
The Bush administration's isolation and public crucifixion of Andersen, designed to move the spotlight away from the actual Enron perps who contributed lavishly to several Bush campaigns, also conveniently served to destroy the auditor of Halliburton, whose questionable accounting practices occurred while Dick Cheney was its CEO in the late 1990s. It also managed to avoid any real reform of the accounting industry, thereby prolonging a bearish crisis in the stock markets when more Americans own stock than ever before.
Last night Larry King interviewed Bill Clinton. Late in the interview — during which Clinton is extraordinarily informed and articulate by current standards — they are joined by radio host Tom Joyner who said:
I think that right now, as people are watching this, I don't think I'm the only one that wishes that he was still president right now.
Later, Clinton on the topic of Trent Lott:
So I thought what they did was -- that Trent Lott made a boo-boo. It was like the equivalent of, you know, an uneducated guy scratching his ear or picking his nose at a dinner party. And they made him a scapegoat so that other people in America who were uncomfortable with what he said wouldn't think the rest of the Republican Party was doing that.
[...]
They axed him because he embarrassed them and risked undermining their policies. But their policies are what I disagreed with and I just thought it was terrible that used him as a scapegoat.
While the regulators and the industry squabble over the planned reforms, analysts are more worried about whether Americans’ faith in shares [stocks] has been shattered for good. An unlucky few have seen their investments completely wiped out in the past couple of years. Almost all investors are nursing losses. But shares always do well over the long term, right? Not necessarily. Analysts at Merrill Lynch, an investment bank, have worked out that the break-even point for someone investing sensibly on a monthly basis since 1990, when America’s interest in mutual funds exploded, would be around 776 on the Standard & Poors composite index, a level to which it has come perilously close. In other words, the average investor is near to losing his capital. Fund managers are learning a bitter lesson. Just as they benefited from a virtuous cycle of inflows and stockmarket rallies on the way up, they are vulnerable to a vicious cycle on the way down.
No matter where you look in the American economy these days, there's a sinking feeling. This is the price we pay for Enronesque corporate criminality and an ill-conceived (and wildly expensive) Bush family grudge match with Iraq that sidesteps the real threats to this country — North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, home-grown anthrax-mailing terrorists, and so on.
Neal Pollack covers the pro-war haiku movement. Perhaps Neal is the poet that New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball (see 2/5/03, "The tragic story of a disappointed Republican poetry fan" below) longs for:
Hussein, ugly rat Missiles hidden underground Soon you will be dead.
Officials in Corpus Christi have already killed two brown tree snakes, climbing serpents from Guam that eat everything they come upon, according to Howells. One was hiding in a washing machine aboard a ship, he said.
And there have also been reports of a piranha-like fish known as a Pacu that can weigh up to 30 pounds lurking in the waters of Buffalo Bayou.
Earlier in the article we learn that many of these invasions were intentional, but have since spun out of control.
The economy has fallen into its worst hiring slump in almost 20 years, and many business executives say they remain unsure when it will end.
[...]
About one million people appear to have dropped out of the labor force since last summer, neither working nor looking for a job, according to government figures.
[...]
The shortage of jobs has also slowed wage growth so that only workers in the most affluent groups are still gaining ground on inflation, ending a six-year streak of broad increases in buying power*.
[...]
The possibility of a war with Iraq and an increase in oil prices offers another reason for hesitation [in hiring], they say. Many companies have also used new technologies and management techniques to produce more with the same number of employees.
"This is what I call the new reality," said Robert M. Dutkowsky, the chief executive of J. D. Edwards, a software maker in Denver that has kept its work force at 5,000 people for the last few years. "The environment we're operating in is what it's going to be like for a while."
[...]
An unusually large number of today's unemployed have been out of work for months, including Mr. Koehn, the South Bend manufacturing worker, who lost his job last spring. Almost 1.9 million people still looking for work have been unemployed for at least six months, triple the number of two years ago.
The young, the poor, the middle class — all must share in the sacrifice as we hand over our wages to our Republicorporate Chief Executive Overlords, in the form of George W. Bush's $2+ trillion tax cuts to benefit the wealthy.
The administration is astute in its opposition to a draft, because if young people were now being forced to go to Iraq against their will we would have riots. Instead we've been lulled into complacency by fear, weariness, and a rah-rah media that can't wait to go to war for the surge in ratings.
Meanwhile, the economy rots.
*A six-year streak that coincided with the administration of a president impeached by the same people who are botching the economy now.
Poetry and Politics Don't Always Mix: A Case in Point
In the Fray
By ROGER KIMBALL
I was looking forward to lunch at the White House. It was to have been next Wednesday, Feb. 12. Laura Bush had invited a flock of poets and critics to a symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice." I have never been to the White House. I was quite bucked at the prospect.
Then came the news that the symposium had been postponed. Why? Because one of the invitees had decided to replay his adolescence rather than go to the White House.
The offending individual is a chap called Sam Hamill. No, I hadn't heard of him either. An AP wire story described him as "a poet and founder of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press." The poets I canvassed regard that description as a species of poetic license. Milton said that "fame was the spur" that prompted him to "scorn delights and live laborious days." Here was Mr. Hamill's opportunity for, if not fame, at least temporary notoriety. Who knows when or if it would come again. He was not about to let it slip.
It was the work of a moment for Mr. Hamill to broadcast his anguish by e-mail. Homer sang of the wrath of Achilles; Virgil sang of "arms and the man." Mr. Hamill told us about his tummy. Receiving the invitation, he wrote, "I was overcome by a kind of nausea."
The invitation from the White House was one of those elegant stiffies you like to see dotting the mantelpiece: "Laura Bush requests the pleasure," etc., etc. Clearly, Mr. Hamill is a tender fellow.
He is also given to . . . exaggeration. He had, he said, just read "a lengthy report" about the president's Iraq war plans. According to Mr. Hamill, they called for "saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians."
Really? Every report I have seen has dilated on the extraordinary efforts of U.S. military planners to minimize civilian casualties by the use of precision weapons, tactics to isolate Saddam from control of his weapons of mass destruction, and so on.
But somehow the headline "U.S. Strives to Remove Brutal Dictator, Liberate the Iraqi Populace, While Keeping Civilian Casualties and Damage to Infrastructure to a Minimum" doesn't play well to the gallery.
What apparently does play well is the feverish, self-righteous rhetoric of protest. According to Mr. Hamill, "the only legitimate response" to the president's "morally bankrupt" plans for Iraq is "to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam."
Ah, the Vietnam War! The days of pot and poses. What a godsend to infantilizing irresponsibility that era was. Dodge the draft, and you are making a "moral statement." Join a protest march, and you are striking a blow against "U.S. imperialism." Sign a petition, and you are "showing solidarity with the oppressed."
What rubbish.
Mr. Hamill ended his dispatch by calling on "every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country" by signing his petition against the war and contributing a "poem or statement" for an "anthology of protest." Now it was my turn to be "overcome by a kind of nausea."
No sooner did the White House get wind of Mr. Hamill's endeavor than it decided -- quite rightly -- to scrap the event. An aide observed that "While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum."
The 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote (and did) a lot of stupid and repellent things. Possibly the stupidest thing he wrote was that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." W.H. Auden was right to heap scorn on that statement. But Shelley's fantasy continues to fire the imaginations of people who mistake adolescence for adulthood, self-infatuation for idealism. For them, too, the distinction between a "literary event" and a "political forum" is moot, to the detriment of both literature and politics.
According to one news report, Mr. Hamill has collected more than 1,500 signatures and "contributions," including literary bijoux from the well-known poets W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Yes, well: There is such a thing as a Coney Island of the mind.
What about the many distinguished poets who believe Sam Hamill is a publicity-craving nonentity who spoiled their chance to celebrate American poetry at the White House? They, of course, have not been mentioned much. "Poets for Responsible U.S. Foreign Policy" is not news. But it's a bigger group than you might think. Mr. Hamill will discover this if (as I hope) Mrs. Bush reconsiders her guest list and reconvenes the event.
Mr. Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion.
Updated February 5, 2003
The mocking tone does not disguise the fact that nowhere in the article (reproduced in its entirety above, with the original WSJ headline) does Kimball talk about the merits of the dissenting poets' argument or their genuine concerns over human lives that are about to end as a natural consequence of an artificial war. Kimball instead focuses on irrelevancies like "pot and poses," draft-dodging (?), and, inexplicably, 19th-century English poet Shelley.
"What about the many distinguished poets who believe Sam Hamill is a publicity-craving nonentity who spoiled their chance to celebrate American poetry at the White House?" Kimball asks. And they would be... who? How many of these distinguished poets can Kimball name? A Google search on Kimball's bogus phrase "Poets for Responsible U.S. Foreign Policy" turned up nothing, nada, zip. Is Kimball implying that W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are not "distinguished"?
Republicans inhabit a culture of exclusion, keeping out the people who don't mesh with their petty world-view. Don't like the untidiness of others' opinions on matters of life and death? "Reconsider the guest list" is an un-American attitude that ridicules basic American concepts of pluralism, freedom of literary speech, and, most profoundly, democracy itself.
The United States is a country, not a country club. But Roger Kimball is just a caddie on the manicured fairway of Laura Bush's stunted cultural imagination.
2. Follow up that call with a visit to True Majority and send off their fax which calls for an Estrada filibuster. The fax is already written. If you agree with the verbage, just sign your name and move on. If you'd like to craft your own personal message, take the opportunity to do so.
We are talking ten minutes of your time. Ten minutes that can make a difference. Our country cannot afford to tolerate the corporate and religious ideologues being pumped out by this administration onto our courts.
Do you have ten minutes to give your country?
*Read Estrada's background and why he's bad for America and the full post from which I lifted this text at RuminateThis. Do it now.
Over a ten-year period, the latest tax cuts are estimated to cost nearly $1.5 trillion, and they come on top of tax cuts passed in the first months of Mr Bush’s presidency which will cost $1.35 trillion over a decade.
The long run of forecast deficits reminds some of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, which lumbered successive governments with deficits that took years—and enormous political effort—to reverse.
George W. Bush's one-year budget deficit of $307 billion for 2003 — the highest in history — will break the previous record set by his father (AP via SFGate.com) before the cost of the Iraq invasion is factored in:
President Bush will project a record $307 billion federal deficit for this year in the budget he sends Congress on Monday, followed by another huge shortfall of $304 billion in 2004, congressional and administration officials said Friday.
[...]
The figures, disclosed by officials speaking on condition of anonymity, include the costs of Bush initiatives like tax cuts for stimulating the economy and extra spending for the military and domestic security. They exclude the price tag of a possible war with Iraq, estimated to be at least tens of billions of dollars.
The biggest shortfall ever was $290 billion in 1992, when Bush's father was president.
The Republican Party is double-crossing the American people with their preposterous self-serving charades. The lone president who managed to balance the budget and deliver a surplus in the last few decades was the same one they tried to impeach.
They are not interested in the financial health of this nation. They are not responsible human beings.
To further enrich the rich and to subsidize the energy and defense industries, they are borrowing against your children's wages — because their children will be living on tax-free dividends and inheritances.
These folks didn’t stop believing that Clinton was the anti-Christ or that he intended to enslave us all under the New World Order. They didn’t stop believing it was appropriate to pre-emptively murder “baby killers” or that Jews secretly conspire to control the world.
No, they’re still with us, but they’re not active much in militias anymore. They’ve been absorbed by the Republican Party.
Jurors said pot grower Ed Rosenthal never had a chance with U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer blocking defense attempts to show Rosenthal was growing marijuana for dispensaries and clubs serving seriously ill people. The only evidence left was that Rosenthal was guilty of conspiring to grow more than 100 plants.
Rosenthal might have been acquitted, jurors said, if the judge had allowed the defense to show he was officially working for Oakland under the city's medical marijuana evidence.
"If we'd known he was hired by the city, I would have said this guy didn't deserve any of this," said Pamela Klarkowski, a Petaluma nurse on the jury. "I feel used. It's horrible. We didn't get the whole picture."
"I feel used."Charles Sackett, the jury foreman, said many jurors were frustrated that they faithfully followed the judge's instructions only to learn after the trial that they weren't given any evidence about why Rosenthal was growing the marijuana.
"It's ironic. The public probably knew much more about this case than we did," said Sackett, a Sebastopol landscape contractor.
"The reason some of the jurors have been so angry is because we weren't given all of the evidence. The evidence allowed just tilted the outcome of the case to the point where the outcome was a done deal from the beginning."
This is one of the reasons people hate jury duty so much — they sense that they are mere pawns being manipulated by scheming attorneys and, in this case, a judge with an agenda.
Four times since mid-October the Globe has unwittingly published letters that were written not by the local folks who signed them, but by the Republican National Committee. The same letters, all praising President Bush, also appeared verbatim (or nearly so) in papers across the country, each signed by a person in that paper's area.
It's the latest example of what some call ''astroturf'' (as in, fake grass roots), and it has generated a buzz online and in journalism circles.
[...]
The most recent Republican National Committee-authored letter ran in the Globe on Jan. 12 and was signed by Stephanie Johnson of Milton. It praised Bush for ''demonstrating genuine leadership'' on the economy, and detailed his tax relief plan. (Roughly 45 identical, or nearly identical, letters have arrived in the Globe's electronic mailbox - a potential tip-off that it was not an original work.)
Multiple copies were also sent to papers nationwide, and by the time the duplication came to light, dozens of papers had published it. Because the Globe was among the largest, it's been prominently mentioned as one of the papers caught off guard.
But it turns out the Jan. 12 letter was not an isolated incident. Research shows the Globe also ran GOP-authored letters on Jan. 6, Dec. 1, and Oct. 18.
[...]
Certainly the letter-writers I contacted felt they had done nothing wrong. Although Johnson could not be reached, I tracked down five other people who sent the same e-mail. All were surprised to hear that the Globe frowned on form letters.
''It is a convenient way for people who are very busy to participate in the democratic process,'' said one. Another said the form letter she sent expressed ''exactly how I feel, and I appreciate the fact that someone with a better education wrote it for me.'' From a third: ''if I take the time to forward a form letter to anyone, and put my name on it, it should be considered as mine and as good as my signature.''
Fine, except for the nagging matter of readers' trust.
If I am correct in thinking that most readers would answer ''yes'' to the question at the top of this column, doesn't the paper owe them a letters page that is original thought?
Yes, says Editorial Page Editor Renee Loth.
''Readers have a right to assume that what they read on the letters page is not canned public relations material,'' she says. Thus, she has instituted a new policy to confirm original authorship on any letter that could be part of an organized campaign.
Without using the trademark-infringing verb, the Globe goes on to say that they will make a practice of Googling letters that stink of GOP authorship.
And that, as our dear friend Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.
Here is an overview from the FCC and here is the comment form. [If you use the form to send comments, you will need to fill out the "Proceeding" field. Enter: 02-277].
Enron Creds Sue Ex-CEO Lay, Wife To Recover Over $70 Mln
WASHINGTON -- Creditors of Enron Corp. (ENRNQ) have sued former Enron Chairman and Chief Executive Kenneth Lay and his wife Linda to recover more than $70 million in transfers, according to court papers obtained.
The committee representing unsecured creditors in Enron's Chapter 11 case said the suit seeks the return of Enron property for the benefit of the company's creditors. The committee filed the suit late Friday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan with the express authority of the bankruptcy court, according to the suit.
Enron filed for Chapter 11 in December 2001, amid an accounting scandal related to off-balance sheet liabilities.
According to the suit, during the year before Enron's Chapter 11 filing Lay allegedly used Enron common stock to repay loans he had received from the company. The committee says "the tendering of Enron's own stock to repay loans taken in cash was not a fair exchange for Enron ."
In addition to the loan transfers, the committee said that the Lays temporarily assigned their interest in two annuity contracts to Enron in exchange for $10 million in cash. The committee said Enron internal documents estimated that the annuities had a collective value of $4.7 million.
Enron didn't receive equivalent value for these transfers, the committee alleges in the suit, which seeks to void and recover the transfers as fraudulent transfers under bankruptcy and state laws.
Updated February 3, 2003 9:10 a.m. EST
I give it stuff worth jus' $4.70, and then order the company I run to give me $10.00 in cash. Multiply the deal by one million, and I am Ken "Kenny Boy" (and Linda "Jus' Stuff") Lay.
Prediction: The plaintiffs will receive nothing. The lawsuit is too late to be effective. Lay has had plenty of time — over a year — to hide and otherwise legally shield the $70 million he stole by deceiving his employees, shareholders and creditors. That money will be protected by international banking and personal bankruptcy laws, because no doubt Lay has had some pricey Texas legal talent working on saving his ass(ets) since the get-go.
Anybody who has credible inside information — please email me at skimble99@yahoo.com. I will publicize it here and protect your identity if you ask.
UPDATE: The Houston Chronicle later published a more detailed article here.
