"Sargeant, hand over half your money." If you know anything about mutual funds, you may be familiar with the load, or sales charge, that you must pay for investing in the fund. Two to eight-and-a-half percent is a range of fairly common initial "front-end" loads. But military personnel are being slapped with loads of fifty percent on their savings for retirement (This article from Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine is in its paid archive. It appears in the September 2003 issue under the title "All Loaded Up."):

Our armed forces are being shot at and ambushed in Iraq, and may soon be quelling genocidal warfare in Liberia. The last thing they need is to be sold overpriced investments by the financial-services industry back home. Just ask Air Force Sgt. Michael Proulx. He attended a First Command financial-planning seminar two years ago near Ramstein Air Base in Germany. After a steak-and-schnitzel buffet, the 35-year-old noncom signed up to invest $166 monthly in a Roth IRA with Templeton Capital Accumulator fund. The first year's sales charge: 50%.

Little-known outside the military, First Command sells a class of mutual funds that levy huge upfront commissions. Some in the military are susceptible to First Command's pitch, says Richard Ferri, a money manager and retired marine major, because they have "zero experience" with funds. "What they're doing is totally legal," says Ferri. "Is it ethical? No." Replies Ivy McLemore of AIM Investments, whose products are sold by First Command: "It's a highly principled product."

These "highly principled products" are foisted upon inexperienced soldiers who have already been tricked into believing they are defending something other than the ability of their leaders to steal not only their lives but also their pittance of a salary from them.

Think about it: First Command keeps $83 out of Sgt. Michael Proulx's $166 monthly savings for the first year. He thinks he socking away money for his retirement, but half of it is eaten up in commissions.

Fifty percent of Proulx's retirement savings — after taxes, because it's a Roth IRA — is simply too much to skim off the top. Proulx already paid all the taxes on the half of his money that First Command confiscated as a sales charge. The government gets, then First Command gets, and if there's anything left in thirty years, maybe Proulx gets to retire. But that's a very big if.

First Command's practices are well beyond the expected boundaries of the inclination of businesses to invoke the letter of the law above the common sense ethical demands of the situation. These are our soldiers they are bilking. The words "unfair," "severely tilted playing field," and "lying, scheming scoundrels" come to mind.

When the soldiers in Iraq need his advocacy, where is that guy who put on a flight suit and "flew" onto an aircraft carrier not so long ago?

It's August, so he's off vacationing and fundraising.

Meanwhile, the privatization of retirement saving, a cherished conservative goal, is once again deployed to screw the little guy. This situation is an echo of the Enron scenario, in which employees' 401(k) accounts were drained while, two years later, the corporate vampire and former CEO Ken Lay is still flying first class and undoubtedly devising new politico-commercial strategies to suck the money out of his next victims.

The word "unfair," though, turns out to be a word that has fallen from the president's lips in specific circumstances. Unfortunately, his sense of moral priority is completely upside down.

Unscrupulous crony capitalism is so much worse than the "unfair" taxation of dividends, wouldn't you agree?

{ 10:27 AM }

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Which unqualified movie or porn star should we select to occupy the Oval Office after the Bush recall?

Link via skippy.

{ 2:00 PM }

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Demolition: that's just what Republicans do. They break and destroy things — with glee (Houston Chronicle):

Harris County [Texas] GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill is asking local Republicans to bring sledgehammers and other implements of destruction to help level the [former headquarter] building the Democrats vacated three months ago.

"You bring the muscle, we'll bring the refreshments and we will have a party as we tear down the Harris County Democratic Party headquarters," Woodfill said in his invitation to party faithful.

Harris County Democratic Party Chairman Gerry Birnberg was quick with a metaphor. That's what Republicans do, he said, "tearing things down, destroying them."

"They did it to our economy, to our jobs market, to our voting rights, to our democracy, to civility in government, to civil rights, to health care for children, to fair pay for teachers -- they took out their sledgehammers and smashed them to smithereens."

True to their lying, thieving nature, Texas Repubs are trying to characterize the Democratic move as an "eviction," even sending a press release to that effect, when in fact the party simply moved its headquarters when its lease expired.

The Dems and local organized labor "will hold a 'peaceful' sidewalk party nearby to watch the GOP 'destroy the building and the economy.'"

{ 9:00 AM }

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Supine media discovers sassy oracle. Bill Clinton is the talk of Aspen Institute conference, if you ask Michael Wolff:

The psychic heart of the conference was Bill Clinton.

He was interviewed on the second day by [Walter] Isaacson, who began by telling a story about how when he was a Rhodes scholar he’d done a paper that his Oxford professor had said was not at all in the same league as a similar paper written by a certain Rhodes scholar from Arkansas a few years before. This was one of those overachievement-upon-overachievement stories that was bound to subdue anyone.

Clinton had lost weight and—with a great collection of just-out-of-the-wrapper pastel-colored polo shirts on view throughout the conference—seemed in fabulous form. He was in campaign mode but without the restraints of campaign mode. While there was clear bitterness on his part toward the successor who had rushed “to undo everything I’d done,” and the Republicans who “will run over you unless you beat their brains out,” there was a feisty humor too. Of the disputed Harken oil deal, Clinton said Bush had “sold the stock to buy the baseball team which got him the governorship which got him the presidency.”

Clinton kept referring to the media as (contrary to Kinsley’s view) the “supine” media, pointing out that when Bush insulted Helen Thomas (who, by asking a rough question in the infamous prewar press conference had, Clinton said, “committed the sin of journalism”), no “young journalists” stood up and walked out.

The media, the supine media, was going to have to “go to the meat locker and take out its brains and critical skills.”

Everybody seemed to love this. Clinton was not just the beloved former president, but he had become some sort of sassy oracle.

There was a party on the second day for Clinton at the Aspen version of Nobu, and then, later that evening, a discussion between Clinton and President Kagame, hosted by the William Morris Agency, at Whiskey Rocks Bar in the St. Regis Hotel (Michael Eisner, the Disney CEO, while not a conference attendee, slipped into the room).

This turned out to be the pivotal moment of the conference—even the primal one. When Clinton took questions, a young man from a technology company who identified himself as chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 in California said he was offended by Clinton’s partisanship. To which Clinton, without hesitation, and with some kind of predatory gleam in his eye, said, “Good!” From there, Clinton went on, with emotion and anger, at a level seemingly foreign to most everyone here, to rip to shreds the motives, values, and legitimacy of the Republicans.

It was all anyone could talk about the next day. People seemed genuinely taken aback (some people kept offering that since it was late at night, in a bar, it didn’t quite count) that one of their own might have violated the accepted codes of lofty liberal behavior. There was a little current of fear at the sudden recognition that testosterone could fuel politics. It was a shock, apparently, that we might be this close to real feelings. That politics could actually be personal.

Link via Altercation.

{ 9:28 AM }

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Fly the friendly skies of Enron. A frequent reader of this site emails to inform us that he or she spotted former Enron CEO Ken Lay on a Continental flight from Houston to Denver last Wednesday, August 13. Lay was likely flying to check on his extensive real estate holdings in Colorado, purchased with wealth purloined in the time preceding the collapse of his company and the obliteration of his employees' retirement savings.

As one of the most damaging and yet well-connected CEO criminals of our time, he was, of course, a passenger in First Class.

Some personal details: He read at least three newspapers, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Houston Chronicle. He was seen tearing out an editorial from the New York Times, probably this one, which is about to go into the paid archive:

A Get-Along Voice at the E.P.A.

Gov. Michael Leavitt's nomination to succeed Christie Whitman as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency means that the country will be not be treated to a rerun of the political soap operas that marked the Whitman years. That is bad news. Mrs. Whitman almost always lost her internal battles on behalf of the regulatory framework that for 30 years has brought the nation cleaner air and water. But the country was better off for having her in Washington, a solitary if increasingly faint voice against the ideologues and lobbyists who occupy every other important environmental job. Mr. Leavitt, by contrast, is at one with the administration: a Westerner, unlike Mrs. Whitman, and an antiregulatory one at that. He should fit right in.

A three-term Utah governor who saw little point in seeking a fourth, Mr. Leavitt is also smart, soft-spoken and a formidable negotiator. Among his recent successes were the two back-room deals he worked out earlier this year with Gale Norton, the interior secretary, to strip federal protections from millions of acres of public land in Utah. The deals were deplored by environmentalists but celebrated by the oil, gas and off-road-vehicle interests, which hope to exploit that land for commercial purposes.

Mr. Leavitt says he is more sympathetic to the environment than his critics think. He will have some early opportunities to prove it.

On his desk are two pro-business proposals pushed by the White House that are vigorously opposed by the environmental community. One would greatly narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act by removing federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands, lakes and streams. This is a terrible proposal for which even the Justice Department has little enthusiasm. But it is favored by the home builders and other interests to whom the White House feels indebted.

The second proposal would gut a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as "new source review." That provision requires older power plants to install modern pollution controls whenever they significantly expand their output. Eliot Spitzer of New York and other attorneys general have successfully invoked the provision in a series of lawsuits against older power plants whose largely unregulated emissions contribute significantly to air pollution in the Northeast. Their most important victory came just last week in a federal case involving Ohio Edison. Since the decision is likely to influence other pending cases, the big utilities are sure to bring heavy pressure to bear on Mr. Leavitt to get rid of new-source review once and for all.

Mr. Bush plainly hopes that Mr. Leavitt's low-key approach will generally keep the E.P.A. and environmental issues out of the news. With crucial sections of two bedrock environmental laws under attack, that will not be easy.

It's frightening to know that he's still keeping up with all the latest trends in deception and deregulation, prepping himself for some kind of phoenix-like return to fraudulent corporate commerce or a return to his role as the antichrist of energy policy in the future.

While the circus of indictments of just about everyone else at Enron also deserving of prosecutorial attention continues, Ken Lay isn't suffering at all. Fat in his wide leather seat, it appears that he is on the Atkins diet because he ate only the meat from his First Class meal.

{ 11:22 AM }

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The Terminator gets Layed. The Enron-Schwarzenegger linkage is coming to light:

In May of 2001, [Ken] Lay [CEO of Enron] convened a private meeting with junk bond king Michael Milken, Los Angeles' then-Mayor Richard Riordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, at which Lay reportedly presented his vision of solving the state's energy deregulation crisis by, absurd as it sounds, expanding deregulation. The meeting, about which the public still knows very little, may become a major issue now that Schwarzenegger is no longer just a Republican movie star..."

Here's a more thorough and analytical report on the same meeting:

The 90-minute secret meeting Lay convened took place inside a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel. Lay, and other Enron representatives at the meeting, handed out a four-page document to Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken titled "Comprehensive Solution for California," which called for an end to federal and state investigations into Enron's role in the California energy crisis and said consumers should pay for the state's disastrous experiment with deregulation through multibillion rate increases. Another bullet point in the four-page document said "Get deregulation right this time -- California needs a real electricity market, not government takeovers."

The irony of that statement is that California's flawed power market design helped Enron earn more than $500 million in one year, a tenfold increase in profits from a previous year and it's coordinated effort in manipulating the price of electricity in California, which other power companies mimicked, cost the state close to $70 billion and led to the beginning of what is now the state's $38 billion budget deficit. The power crisis forced dozens of businesses to close down or move to other states, where cheaper electricity was in abundant supply, and greatly reduced the revenue California relied heavily upon.

Milken, Lay, the recently departed Poindexter — all these white collar criminals are continually prancing around the periphery, acting as lieutenants of the Bush Wimp Mafia. And Arnold's brand name and limitless ambition will enable him to sell his soul to these devils more quickly than the other hundred-odd gubernatorial candidates.

{ 9:21 AM }

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Lessons in how to lie, by Brian Eno.

Link via Media Whores Online.

{ 11:13 AM }

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