It's a brush Bush fire. A blow job is a bit more vivid as a political image than the stock market manipulations of your biggest contributors, but for sheer spectacle and havoc, nothing beats fire (LA Times):

SACRAMENTO — The Bush administration took six months to evaluate Gov. Gray Davis' emergency request last spring for $430 million to clear dead trees from fire-prone areas of Southern California.

The request
Just in time for Halloween: the
limitless horror of Bush/Schwarzenegger.was finally denied Oct. 24, only hours before wildfires roared out of control in what has become the largest fire disaster in California history.

[...]

Davis' request, made in a letter to President Bush dated April 16, took months to process, [FEMA spokesman Chad] Kolton said, because "we obviously wanted to consider this issue very carefully."

Members of the California congressional delegation were informed of FEMA's decision in an e-mail last Friday, after some of the fires were already burning. Kolton said Davis' Sacramento office was also notified of the decision verbally and in a faxed letter.

In that letter FEMA offered no explanation for why it had taken six months to rule.

Looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger's new best friend just fucked up his insane ambitions — and possibly vice versa.

Link via Media Whores Online. Happy Halloween.

{ 2:04 PM }

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Enron's criminal ladder. Another rung looks rotten (WSJ, sub. req'd.):

A former Enron Corp. (ENRNQ) executive pleaded guilty Thursday to a single charge of insider trading, part of an agreement to cooperate with the government's criminal investigation into the management of the failed energy company.

[...]

Under the guilty plea, Delainey [David Delainey, former chief executive of Enron North America and Enron Energy Services] will forfeit about $4.26 million in ill-gotten gains and cooperate with the government's ongoing investigation. Under the SEC's civil charges, Delainey agreed to pay a fine of about $3.74 million. He is also barred from serving as an officer of a public company, the SEC said.

Delainey, a Canadian citizen, was accused of selling Enron stock in a number of transactions between Jan. 10, 2000, and Jan. 23, 2001, while an officer of the company and in knowledge of Enron's financial misdeeds. Proceeds from the stock sales netted the executive about $4.26 million.

[...]

"A senior executive has now admitted that Enron company executives engaged in widespread and pervasive fraud to manipulate the company's earnings results," [Enron Task Force prosecutor Sam] Buell said. "The events today show that the truth will come out about Enron and its collapse."

Delainey helped manipulate Enron's financial reports to overstate earnings growth, then traded shares of the company with material information not available to outside investors, Buell said.

Of course, it's entirely possible that a divisional chief executive had full knowledge of Enron's financial shenanigans without Bush contributors and former CEOs Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling knowing anything.

Right?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

{ 2:02 PM }

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It's the stupid economy. Republican shills are already hailing the growth numbers as a sign of their leader's economic genius. But it doesn't hold up under scrutiny (Houston Chronicle):

The U.S. economy grew at a stunning 7.2 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department reported. That's a pace not seen in 19 years and more than double 3.3 percent growth rate in the second quarter.

[...]

U.S. businesses created a modest 57,000 jobs in September, but still lost 41,000 overall for the third quarter.

The hiring picture remains mixed. IBM has announced plans to hire 10,000 workers, but drug maker Merck & Co. plans to lay off 4,400, while Sony Corp. intends to hand out 20,000 pink slips.

The 80 Houston firms surveyed recently by the National Association of Purchasing Management -- Houston have shed jobs for 24 consecutive months and are likely to do so again this month, noted Doug Miller, chairman of the group's business survey.

[...]

Wall Street shrugged off the report as old news. The Dow Jones industrial average rose a mere 12.08 points, even though the 7.2 GDP growth was far stronger than many economists had predicted.

In contrast to the current job market, the nation added 1.2 million jobs in the first quarter of 1984, when the economy was cooking at a 9 percent rate. "This is not your father's 7.2 percent," noted Bryan Jordan, an economist with Banc One Investment Advisors in Columbus, Ohio.

Jordan estimates 55,000 more jobs or so have been created in October. But the economy needs to create 150,000 to 200,000 jobs a month "before we can sound the all-clear," he said.

Jim Glassman, senior U.S. economist for JP Morgan Chase, argues that if the nation can't create jobs when production is growing at such a clip "we're in a miracle economy."

[...]

But with job growth barely materializing, Democrats continue to cast President Bush as a latter-day Herbert Hoover.

In contrast to real growth of the kind the nation saw under Clinton, jobless growth helps only one class of people — the CEO class of owner/investors who pull the Bush/Cheney strings. Their net worth will rise without the troublesome bother of lower-class laborers to upset their view of pure, accelerating, untaxed profits.

Jobless growth is useless growth. The Bush economy is class warfare based on class hostility, characterized by the hatred of the privileged for the little people who mow their golf courses. Their logic runs something like this: "So what if they all lose their jobs — they can always work at Wal-Mart or enlist in the armed forces."

That's the economic plan in a nutshell.

{ 9:22 AM }

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Wow — the Windfalls of War. The Center for Public Integrity has released a major report called Windfalls of War — US Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One revelation revolves around a married couple that serve as a two-person microcosm of the usual multibillion conflicts of interest that characterize this administration and its international dalliances:

One of the more interesting Iraq contracts the Center uncovered involves a tiny firm called Sullivan Haave Associates.

Sullivan Haave is actually a one-man shop run by a government consultant named Terry Sullivan. Sullivan says his firm was hired as a subcontractor by Science Applications International Corp., one of the most successful and best politically connected government contractors doing work in Iraq.

Sullivan says his job was to spend four months in Iraq providing advice to various ministries being set up there by coalition and local authorities.

Sullivan has a much more intimate relationship with the Pentagon than his competitors, however. He happens to be married to Carol Haave, who, since November 2001, has been deputy assistant secretary of defense for security and information operations. And yes, Haave is the same person who appears in the name Sullivan Haave Associates.

If the efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on the domestic front were humming along nicely, this report wouldn't have any weight at all. But they are all major fiascos, and these revelations therefore have a chance to capture the public imagination — if only we had a media that were up to the task of questioning these issues daily, relentlessly demanding answers that are not pet names for staff members or journalists, or cute runarounds, or mispronounced nonsequiturs, or the consistent up-is-down doubletalk that now passes for presidential speech.

{ 4:44 PM }

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Perspiring minds want to know. Facts are the ultimate inconvenience to the current crop of hot carbon dioxide-spewing Republicans. It's not exactly an inspiring sign when the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, is comfortable contradicting nearly every scientific body on earth when he calls global warming a hoax.

{ 10:00 AM }

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Cheaters' approval rating soars. If Florida and the Supreme Court and Enron and Halliburton and Merrill Lynch and ex-directors of Harken can do it, why can't we?

The number of Americans who believe it's OK to cheat "a little here and there" on their taxes has risen 50 percent in the past four years, a government survey says -- a trend that new IRS Commissioner Mark Everson promises to reverse by going after scofflaws at all income levels.

"That can't continue," Everson said. "If that trajectory is allowed to continue, you won't be able to fund the government, and you'll have serious erosion of the basic rule of law."

[...]

The percentage of people who agreed with the statement that it was every American's civic duty to pay his fair share of taxes decreased from 81 percent in 1999 to 68 percent in 2003.

So much for the fake patriotic fervor fostered by an administration made up of shady businessmen, demagogues and cheaters. Americans can smell unfairness and will act accordingly — by eroding their own sense of decency when they believe they're not getting a fair deal.

The fish stinks from the head.

{ 9:34 AM }

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California recalls voting. It wasn't enough to banish Gray Davis — now California is forgoing voting altogether (FindLaw):

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that a new computerized touchscreen voting system in California was an acceptably fair and accurate way to cast ballots, even though it left no paper trail.

Paper trails are the only evidence that votes were even cast. You can see why at countthevote.org.

{ 11:25 AM }

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Buying revenue with blood. "The former employer of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney [Halliburton Co.] reported revenues rose 39 percent to $4.1 billion, boosted mainly by work its KBR engineering and construction group is doing for the government in the Middle East and elsewhere."

{ 9:29 AM }

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Memo from Kuttner. Co-editor and co-founder of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner lectured yesterday at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I had the pleasure of attending his talk entitled "Social Justice in the Age of Markets." It was a great opportunity to hear an economic policy expert talk in the broader context of what’s going wrong with America’s social agenda.

Kuttner mentioned he’s writing a new book on deregulation and the stock markets, and he also recommended a forthcoming Brookings book by Alicia Munnell on the highly suspect accomplishments of the 401(k) pension system.

Here are a few disconnected and paraphrased notes on what he said that I jotted during his talk (I can’t vouch for accuracy — the man talks fast and I write slow):

The free market does not comprehend "compassion" — only "efficiency."

A pure market economy is a social nightmare.

Oscar Wilde said, "A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," but that’s a better description of a free market economist.

The principal challenges in defeating the laissez-faire mindset are twofold: intellectual and political.

The intellectual challenge is to weaken the two dominant economic myths of "efficiency" and "people get what they deserve."

Real people don’t behave the way free market economic models predict. They’re generous. They help strangers. They value norms of fairness.

Some things are beyond price, beyond markets. Freedom (as opposed to slavery). Healthy infants. Organs for human transplantation.

The political challenge is to get across the idea that we achieve social justice by reining in the markets.

The boom following World War II gave more people more purchasing power than ever before, and was largely on the foundation of government interventions like the GI Bill, the FHA, and similar programs — all of which run counter to free market models.

How should the left rebuild our ethic of social solidarity? (1) Build out from our islands of strength. Rally people to the bulwark of social security — one of the most popular and successfully redistributive programs ever — and proposals for national medical insurance. (2) Attack the opposition. Managed care is a system hated by patients and doctors alike. The only ones who like it are the insurers who profit from it. Managed care shifts costs from employers to employees — effectively removing employers from the social contract for medical care. Half of the prescriptions in the USA go unfilled because people can’t afford to pay for their own medicines.

As Kuttner pointed out, social disaster emanates from the lack of regulation applied to the markets, and from the misapplication of market principles to social needs.

One of the themes of this blog is that vast amounts of power reside in the most boring of details. That’s why I spend so many of your monitor’s valuable pixels on the conflicts of interest among the economic elites that support George W. Bush’s concept of America while they hurt the actual citizens. That’s also why I spend so much time on Enron as the symbol of everything wrong with the direction of this administration. It encapsulates stock market regulation, energy market regulation, environmental policy, globalization, campaign finance reform, corporate and governmental secrecy, the invasion of Iraq, pension reform, accounting vs. consulting, investment banking vs. equity analysis, and a zillion other financial conflicts of interest — not to mention the corporate class warfare of the upper attacking the lower classes. As his thousands of employees scramble to find some way to fund their retirements, former Enron CEO Ken Lay not only remains to be indicted, he still flies first class.

Of the 150 or so in attendance, I may have been the only person there who had no affiliation with education. I went because I'm a regular reader of Kuttner's in his magazine The American Prospect which I probably started subscribing to a year or so ago because of Matthew Yglesias’s blog. Matt is now a writing fellow there and they are evidently glad to have him. In our brief private conversation after the lecture Kuttner had only the highest praise for Matt and told me to watch out for his upcoming print work. I’m also looking forward to Kuttner’s next book.

{ 9:15 AM }

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Derailing the CEO runaway train. A lot of our favorite themes run through "Addressing Reform" by Stacy Forster in the Wall Street Journal, subscription required:

Voters want to know what their elected leaders are doing to hold disreputable companies accountable for governance and put safeguards in place to prevent future scandals, says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale School of Management's executive-education program, and president of the school's affiliated Chief Executive Leadership Institute (www.ceoleadership.com), a nonprofit group that examines CEO leadership and corporate governance.

[...]

Mr. Sonnenfeld says corporate malfeasance is so widespread that most of investing public considers fraud a prevailing practice. While the Bush administration is working to distance itself from shadowy corporate practices, he says, Democratic presidential candidates aren't doing a well enough job in taking the Republicans to task over the issue.

[...]

Q: What about President George Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney's own histories on this issue -- how much of a liability are they? (Mr. Bush was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading while serving as director of Houston-based Harken Energy Corp., but no misdeeds were found. Mr. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton Corp. during a period that also has come under SEC scrutiny, but he hasn't been implicated in any wrongdoing. Mr. Cheney also successfully blocked the release of records from his energy task force, which would have shed light on how Enron and other industry players influenced the administration's energy policy.)*

A: I'm not sure how much awareness there is about the president's own complicated situations. The political parties -- the Democrats -- will work to bring attention to it, but they surprisingly haven't been lately. But the vice president's [history] is better known, and the stubbornness to block the actual deliberations of an energy advisory board that both parties wanted shared is troubling. You can only imagine the worst and you can imagine there is some deep Enron involvement. But the administration has been working to distance itself from Enron.

[...]

Q: Many of the Democratic candidates talk about reining in executive pay, but how do they propose to accomplish this? And what do they do to prevent coming across as antibusiness?

A: [Efforts] shouldn't be on putting ceilings on pay, but it could be pressures put on negligent board directors that allow disproportionate pay packages that don't respond to a company's performance. If [the candidates] do it the right way, they should be pushing good business.

Q: This seems like a prime issue for many of these populist candidates …

A: There are some bad people and systemic reforms need to be addressed. If they fall into the trap of making it a class war**, it becomes one they are going to lose. This is not a society where haves and have nots hate each other … . This is a fluid society and people like the fact that some folks succeed and want to be among those successful people. Rather than make a crude attack on all successful people, go after the people who succeeded by cheating. But when politicians show they can't tell the difference they lose credibility and effectiveness.

Q: What's on the checklist for some practical steps that the next president might be able to take to shore up corporate governance?

A: Closing the offshore tax loopholes so you don't have pseudo-U.S. companies. Ensuring greater mechanism for shareholder voice on the board, such as transparency of votes of institutional fund managers -- and hold them accountable. Third is putting a good deal of pressure on public authorities to promptly investigate and swiftly prosecute corporate crime, and to use individual culpability. The federal white-collar crime guidelines need to be dramatically improved … .

Did you catch that? "What's on the checklist for some practical steps that the next president might be able to take to shore up corporate governance?" It's assumed that the present president will promote nothing substantive — even the Wall Street Journal says as much.

*Remember that the Department of Justice moved swiftly to indict not Enron, or Merrill Lynch, or Harken, or Halliburton, or any of the true insiders, but instead went after Arthur Andersen, the auditor of Halliburton on Cheney's watch. Andersen's demise became the convenient smokescreen behind which evidence of Cheney's and Halliburton's financial (and strategic and ultimately military) misdeeds could be not only forgotten but permanently destroyed.

**"They, not we, have brought class warfare back to America." That's Bill Clinton in The American Prospect, full interview by Michael Tomasky not yet online.

{ 9:19 AM }

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