"Dow down 27% under Bush." That Clinton dollar you invested in your 401(k) or IRA is now worth a mere 73¢. More than a quarter of your retirement money has vanished into the fog spewn by Ari, Tom Ridge, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Homeland Sideshow.
We should be on Red Alert any minute now. Duct-tape your battery-operated radio to your head for further instructions.
Houston's bankrupt Enron Corp. aggressively pursued complex tax schemes of dubious legitimacy to improve its bottom line by $2 billion before collapsing in 2001, according to a critical new congressional report released Thursday.
The company that left many rank-and-file employees broke paid top executives lavishly, operated its tax division like a profit center and benefited from lax oversight inside and out, investigators said.
[…]
According to the committee investigation, the specially created entities had either flimsy or no true business purpose beyond securing favorable tax and accounting results for Enron.
One entity, noted by the committee for its punlike name, "Project Steele," delivered pretax earnings of $133 million for Enron's bottom line. Internal company documents for the transaction are titled, "Show Me the Money!"
[…]
In devising the transactions, Enron received tax advice that pushed legal boundaries from companies such as Bankers Trust, accounting firms Arthur Andersen and Deloitte & Touche, and from its outside law firm, Vinson & Elkins, the congressional panel said.
The work of outside advisers, which the investigators noted at times reached the level of "collusion," cost the bankrupt energy trader $88 million in fees.
Of Houston-based Vinson & Elkins in particular, the report notes that the "minimal level of review" provided by Enron's outside counsel was "perhaps not unintentional."
[…]
[Enron's former lead tax counsel, Robert J. ] Hermann said that between 1995 and 2001, the tax department booked close to $1 billion in profits[Ed.: !!!] for Enron. In 2000 alone, $296 million, or 30 percent of Enron's profits, came from tax-saving strategies.
"Through September of 2001, I was already putting $300 million on the bottom line for the company that year, but my boss asked if I could come up with another $300 million if I had to," Hermann said. "I said I could, but never got the chance to."
[…]
In 2000, the year before the company filed for bankruptcy, the 200 top Enron executives collected a combined $1.4 billion in salaries, bonuses and stocks.
At the same time, many other employees lost millions in retirements savings when the company failed, in part owing to a corporate culture that promoted investment in Enron stock.
The report notes that in addition to not pushing for diversification of investment, the company's retirement plan required Enron's matching contributions be invested back into Enron stock.
"Enron's 'core management philosophy' was rotten to the core," said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., and a committee member.
Enron was one of candidate Bush's most generous contributors at the gubernatorial and presidential levels. Enron's brazen financial frauds helped put an unelected candidate into the White House.
Remember when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton shook hands and promised us campaign finance reform? The sorry state of our union is what we get for not badgering our representatives and insisting upon them coming through with a campaign finance system that did not reward candidates backed by money stolen from their employees, their shareholders, and the US Treasury.
Keeping track of these issues is the grunt work of democracy — and it is our responsibility.
Moderates and liberals in this country believe that discussion will get them somewhere. It will not. The opposition does not speak; they spout, they preach, they revile, they attack. We spend a lot of time on the defensive: "but Bill Clinton didn't..."; "no, I didn't say that..."; "but that is not what happened..." By forcing us to defend ourselves, they make us repeat their lies until they are the only thing people hear. When did we forget the simple sentence: "you are lying?" Why do we have to be mealymouthed about it, and look for euphemisms? Why can't a Democratic politician look one of those blowhards on tv straight in the eye and say: you, sir, are a liar?
Of course, countering every blowhard on television will require superhuman strength and endurance. Can we clone Carville? (Link via Blue Streak.)
For recent movies, 9 is the highest possible score. The decade-based Skimble CineSystem™ is a 10-point scale, but to receive a rating of 10 a film must be at least ten years old and still be recognized as an indisputable masterpiece — e.g., Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and so on.
President Bush's fiscal 2004 budget has little foreign policy content but, properly understood, has immense foreign policy implications. If Baghdad, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Seoul understand this administration's comprehensive boldness, they will understand not only that regime change is coming to Iraq but also that the end of NATO as we have known it, and the removal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, are not unthinkable.
The budget evokes 1862. In that annus mirabilis, with the national government's writ severely restricted and the entire American project in doubt, Lincoln and Congress nevertheless enacted the Homestead Act, which sped the settlement of the Great Plains; the Morrill Act, which begot the land grant college system; and the law that ignited construction of the transcontinental railroad.
This invocation of the ghost of Lincoln is used to qualify every plutocratic, destructive move by an ex-governor of Texas.
But Lincoln, as a congressman, voted against statehood for Texas.
Wouldn't it be a different country now if Lincoln had gotten his way?
"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent," said Abraham Lincoln, representing the views of the real party of Lincoln. The current Republican administration concerns itself not at all with the consent of anyone but its obsequious minority, and maybe not even that.
A lot more than W's budget evokes 1862. The political climate in 2003 reeks of another civil war spurred by dividend-wielding corporate plantation owners stealing the wages of their worker-slaves.
2. Cut and paste What Liberal Media's ASIN (same as the ISBN) which is 0465001769 into the "I recommend:" box, and then check off whether you'd like your recommendation to be in addition to or instead of Coulter's screeching rants. (You'll have to have an Amazon ID to recommend a book.)
Extra credit: Then go get (or give a right-wing colleague or relative) a copy of What Liberal Media? if you haven't already.
...it has long been apparent that the extremist right in America -- the neo-Nazis and skinheads, tax protesters and "Patriots," gay-bashers and anti-abortion radicals -- are being quietly funded by some very wealthy right-wing "sugar daddies." These people may not necessarily share all the views of these extremists, but they deliberately underwrite their causes as a way of creating "wedge issues" -- mostly racial and class issues that serve to keep the working class firmly entrenched in the conservative camp -- that help drag the national center rightward and start a million fires that keep liberals busy extinguishing them.
As with Johnson's 'Four Sisters' [the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors's Castle Rock Foundation and the Olin Foundation], their money grossly distorts the national body politic by exerting a strong gravitational pull rightward, and helps put a broad array of extreme agendas into play in the mainstream, when they might otherwise be relegated to the fringes. The real danger, as I've been discussing, is that the commingling of all these elements in an anti-liberal right -- especially one that is being whipped up with the kind of rhetoric that traditionally escalates into physically violent reaction -- may bring about a genuine coalition of corporatism and proto-fascism, all bent on destroying liberals.
Upward wealth redistribution isn't enough for these folks. The Ann Coulters of the USA want the alienation, exile, humiliation, and death of any citizens who disagree with them. We haven't seen bloodthirsty, self-indulgent extremists like these since the promotional tour for Mein Kampf.
INTERVIEW AND NEWS POSSIBILITIES: Local and State Universities for a published guide of 'Spokespersons and Experts.' Local Congressmen (know key committees involved) Local Senators (same) Terrorism experts Chemical/Biological warfare experts High ranking local military or ex-military officials Military History professors Former G-Men Local Mosque spokesperson Political Science professor Government & Politics professor International affairs experts and/or professor Hazardous materials expert / Local Haz-Mat Director Middle Eastern Studies professor ROTC Instructor Veterans of Desert Storm or the recent Afghanistan Conflict Local families with loved ones currently in the Middle East Local families of business types working in the Middle East Local Companies with business ties to the Middle East (oil etc.) Arab League Rep Jewish Community Center Rep Local airports and airlines Military recruiting offices Hotels ˇV stranded travelers? National Guard/State Police (Are they on alert?) Local emergency management officials or agencies What about public access to Federal and State buildings? Local schools ˇV business as usual? Psychologists for effects on children Is there a foreign consulate nearby (Israel has one in Houston) Keep focused on the wires whatever for story angles occurring in CC markets If a local TV station sends someone to the area find a way to use them, radio exclusive Anti-war types
Enron and other big companies have escaped taxes in recent years through financial maneuvers so complex that the Internal Revenue Service has been unable to understand them, the Senate Finance Committee will be told this morning by Congressional tax experts who spent nearly a year going over Enron's tax returns.
[...]
Enron, the Houston-based energy trading company, was one of the most politically connected businesses in the country, with ties to President Bush and many other federal officials. Its name became synonymous with corporate scandal when its stock price collapsed and it sought bankruptcy protection in December 2001. Enron's chief financial officer is awaiting trial on fraud and other charges.
The report's disclosures on corporate tax avoidance, and its details on executive compensation, "are eye-popping," said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of only two people who would speak publicly yesterday about its contents.
Molto misterioso! The scale of Enron's hypnotic powers boggles the mind:
"The report paints quite a shocking picture of Enron's tax gimmicks and structured transactions and executive compensation," Mr. Baucus said. "Bad as Enron is going to come out, the deeper concern is this is just not Enron alone. It involves lots of other companies and how they inundated the I.R.S., out-complexed the I.R.S. The I.R.S. just cannot handle the complexity of some of these transactions."
Enron created 881 offshore subsidiaries, 692 of them in the Cayman Islands, as part of its strategy to avoid taxes.
The committee chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, called the report "an absolute barn-burner."
At a confirmation hearing for new Tax Court judges yesterday, Senator Grassley said the report "provides for the first time the complete story of Enron's efforts to manipulate its taxes and accounting."
"The report is very disturbing in its findings," he added. "From this report, I'm worried about the Tax Court blessing highly artful interpretations of the code."
[...]
Enron did not pay taxes in four of the five years before its collapse, according to the financial statements it sent to shareholders. The company has hinted in the past that it may have actually paid some tax during those four years because of the corporate alternative minimum tax. If Enron did pay some alternative tax in those four years, it would raise fresh questions about the reliability of reports to shareholders and whether the Securities and Exchange Commission is adequately policing rules on the disclosure of material information about corporate finances.
So far none of this is news, although it's worth repeating for a variety of reasons.
Tucked into the article was something a bit less unique to Enron and bit more shocking in its quantification:
Tax shelters are sold primarily to the very biggest companies because they can pay the largest fees to the accounting and law firms and investment houses that design them and sell them on the condition of confidentiality. The I.R.S. has stepped up efforts to find tax shelters, but the agency lacks the resources to address the problem fully, Charles O. Rossotti, the former I.R.S. commissioner, warned last fall in his final report to his oversight board.
Corporate profits reported to the I.R.S. in 1998 were $155 billion less than those reported to shareholders, according to Mihir A. Desai, a Harvard economist. His study and others suggest that tax shelters may be the primary reason for this difference, which is costing the government as much as $54 billion in taxes each year.
The 10,000 or so largest companies paid 20.3 percent of their 1999 profits in federal income taxes, while the next tier of companies paid at a 30.9 percent rate, according to an I.R.S. analysis of corporate tax returns for the year. The largest companies had 26 times the profits of the second tier of companies, which paid income taxes at a rate 50 percent higher than the largest companies, the I.R.S. data shows.
So much for double taxation of dividends. They apparently weren't even properly taxed the first time, if the cash was siphoned off to fund elaborate tax shelters.
The middle class of companies, like the middle class of citizens, is paying more than its share. The wealth redistribution schemes of this administration and the Republican Party are designed to tilt the playing field toward their contributor-masters, so that all wealth rolls uphill and concentrates in the fewest hands.
If we're losing $54 billion a year to shelters, what would it cost for the IRS to "address the problem"? $1 billion? $10 billion? Even if it cost an annual $25 billion to enforce IRS rules, We the People would be getting over 100% return on this investment — the closest thing we'll ever see to a Nasdaq bull market while a sticky-fingered Republican is president.
By 2004, most voters in the US may well be voting by touch-screen systems, provided by a handful of companies, mainly private. Routine oversight of the counting process is effectively impossible. Even in the event of a court challenge, there is no sure way of telling that the votes have been allocated correctly. I asked a spokesman for Diebold, one of the largest firms involved, how a losing candidate would know they had lost. "Our machines undergo a battery of tests undertaken by independent testing associations for logic and accuracy," he said.
Fine - in theory the machines are perfect: we all have computers that never go wrong, don't we? Unfortunately, there appears to be nothing to stop to a corrupt company, a corrupt official or a corrupt (or merely incompetent) programmer subverting the democratic will.
There has, naturally, been zilch coverage of this issue in the mainstream American press - because the White House hasn't mentioned it. But conspiracy theorists on the web (see, for instance, ecotalk.org and bartcop.com) are hard at work. The Florida election was, of course, a shambles again in the 2002 midterm election, especially in the primaries. The conspiracists, however, are concentrating on two other states.
One is Georgia, where all the votes in 2002 were cast on Diebold screens. The sitting Democratic senator and (to general astonishment) governor were both defeated in the election. Nine of Diebold's 12 directors are listed as Republican donors. The other case is Nebraska, where more than 80% of the votes last November were counted on machines produced by the leader in the field: ES & S. Nebraska handily re-elected its Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, who just happens to be the company's former chief executive and remains a major shareholder. I do not remotely suggest either election was rigged, though Charlie Matulka, Hagel's beaten Democratic opponent, has protested in a manner somewhat unusual for a candidate who only got 15%. This is probably all just paranoia, but the Paranoid party has as much right to participate in elections as anyone else - and to know how and why they have lost.
This is the eye of my God. How long will it be before faith-based budgeting eliminates science-based cosmology?
How does creationism and so-called "intelligent design" square with astrophysics and the geological record? Can believers in "revealed" truth ever peacefully coexist with actual, physical truth? Doesn't the complexity of reality intrude upon the simplistic formulas that govern their souls?
The appeasement mob can add playwright Arthur Miller to its ranks. Miller is joining more than 25 other Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, poet laureates and hip-hoppers who will read "Poems Not Fit for the White House" Feb. 17 at Avery Fisher Hall. The leftie literati - who oppose the liberation of Iraq from genocidal Saddam Hussein - are miffed at First Lady Laura Bush, because she put the kibosh on a White House poetry symposium after poet Sam Hamill submitted antiwar propaganda from his colleagues. Other crybabies include Saul Williams, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Strand and Mos Def.
Could there be more damning evidence of the liberal bias of the New York press than this? [The NY Post link will vanish after today. Link via MobyLives.]
More about responses to the poetry dissenters here.
Senate Democrats, brushing aside a personal appeal from President Bush, vowed today to delay a vote on the judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada until they receive more information about his legal views.
In a major escalation of the increasingly bitter partisan fight over Bush's judgeship choices, Democrats announced they had enough votes to block an immediate vote on nomination of the conservative Hispanic attorney to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
While stopping short of saying they would kill the nomination, they said they would filibuster -- or delay a vote -- until Estrada more fully answers questions about his legal views and the Bush administration provides memoranda he wrote while he worked in the office of the solicitor general in the Justice Department.
Remember when they said that the "grown-ups" were back in charge? What kind of grown-up puts people on the street so they can have a nice shiny war to get re-elected? What kind of grown-up gives the money that they take away from housing and gives to churches so they can build...more churches? If you didn't already know that the Bush Administration was made up of some the most evil bastards to ever roam the Earth...welcome to the new reality. The terrorists have not only won, they're running the government.
First of all, home owners near the Iraq border might have to deal with fallout of another kind. Has there been one story about what would happen if a cruise missile hits a chemical dump?
Not that I'm aware of. But what would happen if a cruise missile — or 3,000 of them — hits a chemical dump?
Anecdotal evidence for the "power" of prayer abounds:
Accident victim credits prayer with saving his life after being thrown 25 feet into the air.
An 18-year-old driver credits God with answering his desperate prayers for survival. "God was definitely in control," said Joe R. Thompson, III after he was rescued.
Thompson was driving in Kansas City, Missouri on Monday, January 27 when he lost control of his vehicle. He was thrown 25 feet into the air, bounced off several power lines and fell onto what he believes was a heavy telephone line. When one of his legs caught on the wire, he quickly wrapped his other leg around it and held on.
"I just kept saying a prayer over and over," he said. Police report that Thompson was "bear-hugging" the wires when they arrived. He was also in constant communication with his father while the crew worked to turn off power in order to complete the rescue. His father asked him how long he would be able to hold on, and Joe reported, "I can hold on as long as it takes." Thompson dangled from the wires for 20 minutes before he was brought safely to the ground.
Who can argue with evidence as compelling as this?
If God is "definitely in control," as Joe just informed us, does this mean we can finally blame God for the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle? 9/11? Vietnam? The Holocaust? Hiroshima? The Inquisition?
The deaths of millions of innocent victims can now be attributed to the feebleness of their efforts at effective, politically motivated prayer. We must kneel and give thanks to American Christians for showing nonbelievers the way to completely shut down rational thought and obey our unelected masters.
...the majority of the conservative experts and scholars writing newspaper op-ed pieces, books and magazine articles, and even the organizations that generate the "talking points" and position papers used by TV pundits and radio talk show hosts, are directly funded by, or work for organizations supported by this core group of funders.
[...]
It turns out that many of the most important attacks [on academic freedom] are part of a campaign organized by conservative foundations, as a study by report by the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found. In a section entitled, "Targeting the Academy" the report discusses right-wing attacks on academia, including "political correctness" campaigns, efforts to use alumni contributions to advance a conservative agenda, efforts to take over or de-fund the National Endowment for the Humanities and to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts. These attacks follow the pattern outlined in the [influential 1971] Powell memo -- attack the patriotism of liberals and attempt to convince trustees of colleges and universities to remove them, replacing them with ideological "conservatives."
Melt butter in pan. Add eggs and cheese. Cook until done. Serves 2.
Now America's Beef Producers™ are targeting teenage girls with something equally inane, their faux-hip Cool 2B Real beef-friendly site, complete with recipes for Nacho Beef Dip, Beef Tacos, Beef Chili, etc.
Conclusion: In contemporary American corporate culture, it is increasingly impossible to distinguish satire or parody from whatever is being satirized or parodied.
WorldCom's Ebbers, in case you forgot, is notorious for the $408 million in personal loans he got from the company. Three farms owned in part by Ebbers or linked to him got more than $4 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture aid from at least 1998 through 2001, according to USA Today. Ebbers was No. 174 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans in 1999.
Maybe we should let him die to save on litigation.
If there is anything in the Middle East mounting faster than the threat of war, it is property prices in Kuwait. More specifically, the price of real estate near the dusty border-crossing into Iraq, where values have doubled and trebled in the past year. Since October alone, Kuwait's stock index has shot up nearly 30%, as businessmen sniff a windfall of opportunities after the smoke has cleared from next door.
Call your broker and ask for shares of the Iraqi Windfall REITs and some kickass Kuwaiti call options, and it'll feel just like a Clinton economy again.
WASHINGTON (Variety) Reminding the divided ranks that he's in control, Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell made it clear Thursday that Democratic commissioner Michael Copps had no authority to schedule official public hearings on media ownership rules.
Copps, who insists that more of a national debate is needed before the rules are voted on, did not consult Powell, a Republican, before announcing in a press release that he was scheduling two commission hearings, in Seattle and Durham, N.C.
Powell directed the agency to issue a corrected press release, which states that the hearings being arranged by Copps are "field" hearings, not FCC events.
In recent days, Powell has appeared frustrated by the growing outcry over the agency's review of an unprecedented number of regs, an outcry based in part on the perception that the chairman is keen on deregulation.
If the FCC rules in question are undone, companies like News Corp. and Viacom Inc. could expand their empires.
...he [the Indian general who's in charge of Jammu and Kashmir, the world's current nuclear battlefield] came to the conclusion that the best way to provide border security is through human security, and the best way to provide human security is through human development, and the best way to provide human development is through information, and the best way to provide information is through the network, therefore Indian army soldiers should bring internet connections to Muslim girls!
So, it's this amazing project where his soldiers are going in and bringing these net connections to little villages. And, in particular, the Muslim girls and Buddhist girls in these breeding-grounds of insurgency, who used to run when outsiders came, now they come running to these places. We were helping them with things like low-cost antennae and embedded controllers, so you can make incremental hubs of networks without any central control of the infrastructure. And what's amazing is the extent to which it flipped a community, from being a breeding-ground of insurgency, to having a tremendous sense of connection, a tremendous sense of belonging, transformed by these low-cost, distributed, locally developed technologies. And so, in a very real sense, I believe the deepest consequence of all of this stuff is not just making it easier to win wars, but preventing the need to fight wars in the first place.
A glimpse into the next revolutionary technologies, in every sense of the word. Via Boing Boing.
