Matthew Yglesias says, "James Woolsey would, if given the chance, intentionally provoke a war with Syria and Iran and powerful actors within the US government want to give him that chance."
Now in its 17th month of bankruptcy, Enron has hired 48 law firms, accounting firms and other specialized professionals nursing it through the process. Some of the law firms are helping the creditors committee and an examiner studying causes of the company's collapse.
Legal and other expenditures billed to the company now exceed $318 million, far more than it cost to build the ballpark formerly known as Enron Field.
By some estimates, the total legal bill for Enron's bankruptcy could exceed half a billion dollars. It is already the most expensive bankruptcy ever.
On Thursday, Enron bankruptcy lawyer Brian Rosen sought to retain Venable, Baetjer and Howard to help resolve complicated energy trading contracts Enron negotiated before its bankruptcy.
Rosen's firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Enron's primary bankruptcy law firm, has billed the company $60 million for its work so far, not including as-yet unsubmitted invoices for recent work.
As Enron filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, Weil sought a law firm specializing in complicated energy matters and brought in Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to handle the contract negotiations. Through Jan. 31 Cadwalader has billed $7.8 million.
But in some instances, the law firms Enron hired could have conflicts of interest, such as representing a counterparty. So the day after Enron filed for bankruptcy it hired Togut, Segal & Segal to handle such situations. Togut has billed $4.9 million through last December.
Less than a year and a half of bankruptcy, and they've burned through over $300 million with a half-billion dollars clearly in sight. Too bad Enron employees had to lose their life savings and 401(k) retirement money, so that what little was left of the company's fortunes could be funneled to 48 hand-picked firms.
Forget medical malpractice reform. We should look into Republican campaign contributor reform instead. It's apparently a very deep trough, circled by the squeals and oinks of America's most venerable legal professionals.
Aside to Ken Lay: How are your bankruptcy-immune annuities holding up in this bear market? All investors, even small ones with under a hundred million dollars, are facing the same twin problems — the corporate governance crisis you created, and your candidate's oil war — both of which are holding down the Dow and S&P indexes. Those caches of Weapons of Mass Campaign Contributions you made from your insider trades might be safer in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands — but you already knew that.
Anyway, if the media ever jogs itself from its war-induced amnesia and notices that you and Jeff Skilling are still running free, there are two words that you must repeat as often as necessary because they are guaranteed to get those pesky but easily distractable journalists off your back: Martha Stewart.
Congress should approve the Bush administration's full $726 billion tax cut to provide economic security in the same way that troops in Iraq are fighting for national security, Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Thursday.
Snow coupled the call for recognition of the practical benefit with a suggestion that it could be seen as a patriotic act.
"We cannot afford to fail the American people, especially our troops overseas," he said in a speech to the Orlando Chamber of Commerce.
Snow, at the start of a two-day swing, through Florida urged voters to tell Congress they want tax cuts. Snow claimed more jobs will be lost if lawmakers decline to approve the tax reductions and implied it was a test of patriotism.
"I believe that these are the two pillars supporting our nation's greatness and the well-being of our people: national security and economic security," Snow said in prepared remarks.
"As a matter of principle, this administration believes we have an obligation to the American people to rebuild our economy, even as we protect our national security," Snow said.
"Choosing one over the other is a false choice."
[...]
The tenuous nature of the U.S. economy's pace was underlined on Thursday by new government statistics showing a sharp uptick in new applications for jobless pay last week -- a 38,000-person increase to 445,000.
Snow said there was urgency in applying a tonic to the economy, saying the White House was doing all it could on the national and economic security fronts and suggesting Congress was dragging its feet.
"We cannot wait until the war is over to focus on economic growth. We must act now," Snow said. "Those here in Florida who are looking for work cannot wait for a job, and should not have to wait for a job."
Florida is considered ripe territory for an appeal for reduced taxes. Its sunny, palm-lined streets and beaches are home to a large community of wealthy and patriotic retirees who are among prime recipients of dividend income.
The dividend tax exclusion "would provide tax relief for 7 million senior taxpayers by an average of $1,252, and 4.5 million taxpayers, mostly seniors, will have a smaller portion of their Social Security benefit payments taxed if the president's plan is enacted," Snow said.
It boggles the mind that Snow can say all of this with a straight face while Bush's record deficits pile up, not even including a $75 billion down payment on Bush's fraudulent war. No expected him to be anything but a lapdog for the administration, but these lies are truly offensive.
The blood of American soldiers is NOT equal to tax-free dividends for the rich. Repeat, NOT. Comparing patriotic support for our troops with a $104,823 cut in Dick Cheney's personal tax bill is not just disingenuous — it's a profound corruption of our government's ability to establish or communicate our national values and policies.
Along a promenade of beachside villas, several hundred American government officials — from well-worn former generals to fresh young aid workers — are working at their laptops, inventing flow charts and examining maps of Iraq in what has become Potomac on the Persian Gulf.
This is the nucleus of the Bush administration's new Iraqi government. One of the faraway masters, in the minds of many here, is someone known fondly, or not so fondly — depending on one's political orientation — as Wolfowitz of Arabia.
[...]
The overall boss of this Iraqi government-in-waiting, an operation that has been endowed with the Washington-speak title "Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance," is retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. When he gets to Baghdad, he will be in charge of everything the American military is not: feeding the country, fixing the infrastructure and creating what the Bush administration has said will be a democratic government.
A stocky 64-year-old, on leave from a top post at the defense contractor L-3 Communications, General Garner was responsible for protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq after the first gulf war, a smaller task than the one at hand but one that gave him a taste for the country, a colleague said.
[...]
Mr. Carney is preparing to run the Baghdad Ministry of Industry. Another person the Pentagon is resisting, at least temporarily, is the former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. But she has also arrived, established an office in one of the villas, and is informally known on the campus as the mayor of Baghdad.
[...]
Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, has made it clear that he would not be satisfied with just an advisory position. The State Department has made clear it would prefer a diminished role for Mr. Chalabi. In recent days Mr. Chalabi has said through spokesmen that he wants the formation of a provisional government in which he would be a leading figure. In this he has backing in the Pentagon.
"The decision on the new political class in Iraq is very hot. It has yet to be made in Washington," said one member of the Garner team here.
L-3 Communications makes secure and specialized systems for satellite, avionics, and marine communications. The US government (primarily the military) accounts for nearly 70% of the company's business, but L-3 is using acquisitions to expand its commercial offerings. Commercial products include flight recorders (black boxes), display systems, and wireless telecom gear. L-3 has added aircraft repair and overhaul services to its offerings with the purchase of Spar Aerospace and what is now L-3 Communications Integrated Systems.
"Star Wars" defense system guru Jay Garner has also been accused of double-dipping (scroll down):
Biff Baker, of Colorado Springs, is running for Congress against Joel Hefley on the strength of his reputation as the whistleblower who recently shed light on Department of Defense contractual double-dipping and corporate favoritism.
Baker, who received the Libertarian nomination for the Sixth Congressional District in May, has publicly accused two Army buddies-U.S. Army General John W. Holly, a former vice chief of staff with the Army, and retired three-star General Jay Garner-of arranging duplicate contracts with Boeing and SY Technology, a division of L-3 Communications which employs Garner as president. The redundant contracts were for computer training of Army personnel.
Baker, a West Point graduate, retired Army Space Command lieutenant colonel and a former Airborne Ranger, believes he was fired without cause from his job as a contract auditor for DOD sub-contractor COLSA's Independent Assessment Team. By doing his job correctly, Baker discovered that SY Technology had been awarded a $48-million, five-year contract which duplicated work already assigned to Boeing on a sole-source, $1.6-billion contract.
While Garner is widely admired for his work with the Kurds, he has his critics. Michael Young, a leading columnist in Lebanon who writes often about Islamic issues, says Muslims are suspicious of Garner because of his strong ties to Israel. It's easy to see why. In 2000, Garner signed a statement by the conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, praising Israel for its handling of the Palestinian intifada. And as president of SY Technology, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., Garner worked closely with Israeli security to develop its Arrow missile-defense system. "There is the problem of credibility if you have someone who can be tagged as [Zionist]," says Young.
Here is a view of Garner from Lebanon's Daily Star, pointing out that "Franks should feel at ease with three former generals working alongside him."
Garner, Bodine, Chalabi — these choices of postwar administrators are as uninspired as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle were as war architects.
4/17/03 UPDATE: CBS News provides a Jay Garner biography, for all you Googlers who come here looking for that.
4/28/03 UPDATE: And here's an interesting "About Jay Garner" page for the curious at heart. Note also that, to usher in the new era of Iraqi democracy, Jay Garner has chosen as his headquarters one of Saddam Hussein's palace compounds. Yet another culturally sensitive exercise in nation-building from the George W. Bush administration.
USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] began approaching preselected bidders for postwar Iraq work as early as late January, when the possibility of going to war with Iraq was still being hotly debated at the United Nations. Requests for proposals went out for four contracts in mid-February, with two more early last month. Altogether, the work -- including rebuilding highways and bridges and rehabilitating Iraq's school system -- is expected to cost at least $1.7 billion.
[...]
The uncertainty over how to proceed also reflects mounting unease over the U.S.-led military campaign, which has so far offered scant evidence that average Iraqis are ready to embrace American control of their country.
Reconstruction officials within the administration had planned to use the southern city of Basra as a test case for the U.S. rebuilding effort. Iraq's second-largest city has a dominant Shiite population that has long been at odds with Saddam Hussein. But continued fighting there, and signs that the local population might be less receptive than some predicted, have put those plans on hold.
Competition for the big infrastructure-rebuilding contract, valued at $600 million, was limited to seven large U.S. engineering companies, several of which have now either been dropped from the running or formed teams with other bidders. People involved in the bidding say the lead competitors are Bechtel Corp. and Parsons Corp, which has taken on Halliburton Co.'s Kellogg Brown & Root as a subcontractor. Halliburton announced Monday that its KBR division won't seek to be the prime contractor for rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, but "remains a potential subcontractor for this important work."
Silence is golden, and secrecy is wealth.
Next up, a different angle on Halliburton's multifaceted activities — domestic natural gas (sub. req'd):
Halliburton has significant leverage to the global natural gas market, through both its energy services business and KBR division, [Chief Operating Officer Doug] Foshee said.
It is poised to benefit from any future natural gas drilling in the U.S. by virtue of having had a stake in the drilling of three-quarters of the known gas reserves in the combined territories of the western U.S., Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, he said.
Jenna goes off to war... as do the children of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush. Here's Dubya:
"That's why my daughters have volunteered to join the Army. They’re going to put their money where my mouth is by defending this great land of ours. I'm so proud that they’re following in my footsteps by joining the military at their country’s time of need. But they won’t be defending the skies of Texas from the Viet Cong, like I did for a little while before skipping my last year of service. They're actually going to be in Iraq, flying troop-transport helicopters behind enemy lines. Me and Laura call them 'our little bullet-stoppers.'"
If the 2004 election were held today, 51% of registered voters would vote for Bush, compared with 36% for a Democratic nominee, the poll found. On the eve of war two weeks ago, Bush led the Democrat 45%-42%, which amounts to a tie, given the poll's 4 percentage-point error margin.
Such numbers can be fleeting, as Bush's father learned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. During the fighting, the senior Bush was preferred over an unnamed Democrat 54%-33%. But he lost his bid for re-election 21 months later to Bill Clinton, largely because he was seen as inattentive to the nation's economic problems. [USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Saturday and Sunday, March 29-30]
One-term Daddy vs. unnamed Democrat: 54-33.
Junior vs. unnamed Democrat: 51-36.
Even with a bump-up in the polls thanks to active fighting, Daddy, the re-election loser, is marginally beating his own son, who is therefore well poised to become an even bigger loser. Junior is not shaping up to be the "inevitable" creation that Dr. Karl Rove stitched together in his laboratory. Barring another election decided by Antonin Scalia, Junior may well lose his bid for a second shot at cynically Christianized demagoguery.
Maybe then we civilized Americans can stop feeling so apologetic every time we talk to any citizen of the rest of the civilized world.
Yemen Arrests 11 for Links to al-Qaida. Too bad it's two years later than FBI al-Qaida expert John O'Neill might have done it, way back in 2001, the culmination of the American Age of Innocence, the year leading up to horrors no one else saw coming.
And it's too bad Barbara Bodine had him banished from Yemen the same year he was killed in the World Trade Center. But at least she's all lined up for her next gig in postwar Iraq.
Cheney counsel David S. Addington warned Wooden's Chickenhead Productions Inc. that Lynne V. Cheney's name and pictures - altered to show her with a red clown's nose and a missing tooth - could not be used to make money without her consent, and asked Wooden to delete the photos and "fictitious biographical statement about her."
Critics of the mayor contend that he is behaving autocratically, because it is common knowledge that his not-so-secret agenda is to replace the small airport in the heart of downtown Chicago with an 80-acre lakefront park.
Now that we are living in a era of autocratic American leaders, it is interesting to compare Mayor Daley's unilateralism with that of George W Bush. When Republican Bush acts dictatorially, he creates enormous deficits, undermines civil liberties, accelerates crony capitalism, and starts an ill-conceived war with hundreds of civilian casualties within the first two weeks. When Democrat Daley acts dictatorially, he bulldozes a tiny airport, used only by Cessna-flying cardiologists and Illinois governors, to protect downtown airspace from terrorism, and proposes a lakefront park for all citizens.
Bush is acting arrogantly to slake the greed and bloodlust of his insane constituents: neoconservative fanatics, Cheney's sugar daddy Halliburton, the murderous Christian right, the gun lobbyists, and the energy and defense industries.
Daley's critics are correct in that he acted arrogantly — but he did so for the safety and benefit of the people of Chicago. Although I am not pleased by the process, I, for one, am grateful for the result.
What's fascinating is the difference between what motivates a Democratic dictator and a Republican one. The Democrats favor promoting public good. The Republicans favor enriching private interests.
Same means, wildly different ends. There's nothing new here, but the essential difference between the parties is heightened and thrown into greater relief by the extremism of contemporary American life since the White House's misfired response to 9/11/01.
We Want the Airwaves is an important new blog — a co-production between Avedon Carol of The Sideshow and Lisa English of RuminateThis — dedicated to covering the degradation of media. It's not just about reportage, it also focuses on the quality of ownership of the media or the lack thereof. If you're concerned about bias in the media, or if you think too few companies own too many news outlets, go to We Want the Airwaves.
This is a subject near and dear to our hearts that we've written about a number of times. Here's a sample of home-grown posts on the subject of media consolidation and degradation.
...the obvious question is whether cutting taxes makes sense just two years after Bush's [first] $1.35-trillion tax cut took effect in 2001. Three big arguments loom against further tax cuts.
First, Washington is already facing mammoth deficits. Private congressional estimates project that, excluding the money raised for Social Security, the federal government could run a deficit of as much as $530 billion this year, by far the largest ever. Under Bush's plan, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects huge deficits every year through the next decade.
Second, those deficits are undermining Washington's last opportunity to improve its fiscal position before the baby boom's retirement explodes the cost of Social Security and Medicare.
[...]
Third, cutting taxes during a war -- not only the conflict in Iraq but also the broader struggle against terrorism -- is unprecedented in American history. It amounts to asking the next generation to fund the national defense through a higher national debt.
Funding Cheney's war will indeed "leave no child behind."
As the military operation enters its second week and as the Iraqi resistance continues, a question has arisen in regards to whether some sections of the Iraqi opposition in exile have painted an unrealistic picture of Iraq for their US patrons. Prior to the launch of the military strikes, it was repeatedly suggested in some western media outlets that the Iraqi Shi'ite population in the south and the Kurdish groups in northern Iraq could be helpful to US efforts to topple the Iraqi regime. But one week later, the south did not rise against Saddam, the population remains defiant and the regime is still standing its ground.
Kubba laid the brunt of the blame for these assumptions on some sections of the Iraqi opposition, particularly those associated with the Iraq National Congress (INC) which, he says, have "misled their US contacts". His views were shared by Kamil Al-Mahdi, a professor of Middle East Economics at Exeter University and a member of the liberal Iraqi opposition in exile. Al-Mahdi believes that the resistance to the Iraqis inside the country will embarrass those groups of the opposition who allied themselves with the Bush administration. These groups, says Al-Mahdi, created assumptions about a regime on the verge of imploding once the US forces enter Iraq. "There were those within the ranks of the Iraqi opposition who portrayed this war to be a walk in the park for the allied troops. Hence, Americans were led to believe that the Republican Guard units would soon switch sides and this would be coupled with a Shi'ite uprising in the south against Saddam. But to their surprise, this did not materialise, at least until now."
Al-Mahdi said that the fact that the opposition in exile miscalculated the strength of the Iraqi resistance is strong proof of how they have lost touch with reality in Iraq. "They can no longer claim to say they represent either the interests or the will of the Iraqi people. It will be very difficult to impose them as the new rulers of Iraq after Saddam is gone," Al-Mahdi said. There were no comments made by any of the main Iraqi opposition factions in exile about the duration of the battle. But on wednesday the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported that representatives of various factions of the Iraqi opposition held secret rounds of talks to discuss the role of the Iraqi opposition in the aftermath of the war and the US exclusion of the Iraqi opposition from any talks on the post-war order. The meetings were attended by representatives from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Patriotic Unionist party (PUK), the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
We previously noted Chalabi in this 3/17/03 article from the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.d):
But with little public notice, [after September 11] Mr. Cheney began working on the Iraq issue with a new dedication. He quietly sought out experts on the politics and culture of the country. He reached out to Iraqi exiles such as Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile whose family led the country decades ago and who seeks to lead a post-Hussein Iraq. And he began hosting a series of small dinner parties -- some at his elegant official residence in Washington and others at the "undisclosed locations" where he'd been secluded for security reasons -- to share ideas with anti-Hussein intellectuals such as Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis, Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami and conservative author Victor David Hanson.
State Department and CIA officials mistrust the wealthy, American-educated Mr. Chalabi, who was convicted in a Jordanian banking scandal more than a decade ago. But Mr. Cheney and his senior staff have remained stubborn advocates of Mr. Chalabi, a man they first got to know in the mid-1990s at the barbecues and golf games held at private seminars hosted by groups such as the Aspen Institute. [Emphasis added.]
The strategic advice that guided American military planning came not from the CIA or the State Department, but from "barbecues... golf games... a series of small dinner parties." Nobody at any of these events can "claim to say they represent either the interests or the will" of citizens anywhere — particularly in Iraq or in the USA. Representative democracy now exists in America only for the plump asses that fill the chairs of corporate boardrooms.
It's a country club war, directed from the fairway by the unencumbered upper class, paid for with taxes on the wages of the middle class, and paid for in blood by the lower class.
