President Bush today appointed former secretary of state James A. Baker III to a key new post in the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq, announcing that the veteran political operative and renowned troubleshooter would become his "personal envoy on the issue of Iraqi debt."
"Secretary Baker will report directly to me and will lead an effort to work with the world's governments at the highest levels, with the international organizations and with the Iraqis in seeking the restructuring and reduction of Iraq's official debt," Bush said in a statement.
Iraq is saddled with an estimated $125 billion in foreign debt, and most international donors have pledged loans instead of grants. U.S. officials fear the debt load will badly hamper the country's economy as the United States takes steps to foster a sovereign, democratic government.
[...]
Baker, a 73-year-old Texan, has long undertaken challenging assignments for the Bush family. He was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, helping to assemble the international coalition for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He then served as White House chief of staff and manager of the first President Bush's reelection campaign of 1992.
Baker later headed the Republican team during the Florida recount litigation after the disputed election of 2000.
[...]
Baker currently works as a senior partner in the international law firm of Baker Botts L.L.P., which has offices in Washington, New York, Houston, Moscow, London, Riyadh and other cities. The firm last year landed the Houston-based oil services company Halliburton as a client. Baker also serves as a senior counselor to The Carlyle Group, a merchant banking firm in Washington, and is honorary chairman of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Houston's Rice University.
Can Baker credibly be expected to act on anyone's behalf except Bush's, Halliburton's, or The Carlyle Group's, all of whose interests he represents?
From the perspective of the civilians who will make up Iraq's purported new democracy, this development is like the scene in the film Brazil when the accused are presented with an invoice for the cost of their interrogation and torture.
An independent examiner in Enron's bankruptcy says accounting firm KPMG was "willfully blind" to the fraudulence of a series of financial transactions the energy company used to inflate its bottom line.
KPMG also knew that former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, who managed the LJM1 and LJM2 financing vehicles, received about $40 million from the improper deals he helped arrange, the examiner says.
The conclusions come in an investigation into the roles three banks and two accounting firms played in Enron's collapse. They are part of a 457-page report submitted Thursday to Enron's bankruptcy court by Harrison Goldin, a former New York City controller.
The accounting firm denied the accusations in the strongest of terms, calling Goldin's report "utterly baseless and irresponsible."
This is the first time an accounting firm other than Arthur Andersen, now defunct, has been critically associated with misdeeds at Enron. Until Thursday, KPMG's role had gone largely undocumented.
In his report, Goldin also found another accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was "grossly negligent" in preparing a fairness opinion for certain transactions involving LJM1 and Enron. The firm, known as PwC, relied on factual misrepresentations it knew were not justified from Enron executives, and the reports it prepared for Enron's board of directors were of no value.
There's no doubt it was partially involved, but was Arthur Andersen set up to take the full brunt of the Enron scandal? Probably. The firm also happened to be the auditors of a certain outfit also known for financial irregularities called Halliburton when its CEO was called Cheney. Destroying Andersen had multiple benefits of convenience for the entire White House — both the president and vice president.
Missing in action throughout these legal machinations are the Enron executives themselves (excluding former CFO Fastow and his lovely wife, Enron art buyer Lea Fastow). Kenny Boy and Skilling must have some sort of presidential magic force field of immunity surrounding their purloined estates.
Why is it that crimes involving enormous amounts of capital don't deserve capital punishment? This is, after all, Texas we're talking about.
Federal authorities this year mounted one of the most extensive investigations of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing, CBS 11 has learned.
Three people [William J. Krar, his common-law wife, Judith Bruey, and Edward Feltus] linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area.
Investigators have seized at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents. But the government also found some chilling personal documents indicating that unknown co-conspirators may still be free to carry out what appeared to be an advanced plot. And, authorities familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may be in circulation.
Since arresting the three people in May, federal agents have served hundreds of subpoenas across the country in a domestic terror investigation that made it onto President Bush’s daily intelligence briefings and set off national security alarms among the country’s most senior counter-terror officials.
At a total of one so far, Texas apparently has more weapons of mass destruction than Iraq.
President Bush's Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating.
In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.
The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 2 1/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate.
Officials said they did not know the turkey would be there or that Bush would pick it up. A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.
The scene, which lasted just a few seconds, was not visible to a reporter who was there but was recorded by a pool photographer and described by officials yesterday in response to questions raised in Washington.
An anti-abortion extremist was convicted of 51 counts Wednesday for mailing hundreds of envelopes of fake anthrax to women's clinics. The jury deliberated for about two hours.
Clayton Waagner, who once was on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted'' list, concluded his defense Wednesday by telling the jury that he was a proud terrorist and that people who provide abortions should be shot.
Waagner, who represented himself, is already serving 49 years in prison for car theft and weapons violations.
In a rambling closing argument, Waagner said he was "tickled'' that letters containing death threats and white powder disrupted operations at clinics in 24 states in 2001. He said only his abhorrence for killing prevented him from doing "what I should have done: shooting them, abortionists and clinic workers, in the head.''
It's obvious he's just a pathetic loser, but his views are indeed reflective of the current sentiment on the right.
One of the important things I learned as a cops-and-courts reporter lo these many years ago was something about crime victims: That they often make themselves vulnerable to violent crimes because they are not prepared to deal with people who are sociopathic, or who exhibit antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders, or in some cases outright psychoses. That they project their own normalcy onto these other people -- they really cannot believe that someone else would act in a way substantially different from their own decent, sane base of operations.
In a way, I think this is a large part of what is happening to our national body politic: People in key positions of media and conservative ideological prominence (Coulter, Limbaugh, even Bill O'Reilly) exhibit multiple symptoms of being pathological sociopaths, either antisocial or narcissistic, or a combination of both. And not only their fellow participants in the conservative movement, but mainstream centrists and even liberals are unable to figure out that there is something seriously wrong with these people because they are projecting their own normalcy onto them. They cannot perceive because they cannot believe -- that, above all, these people are not operating within a framework guided by the boundaries of basic decency that restrain most of us.
They are political muggers out of control -- and as their rhetoric encourages both the figurative and physical elimination of liberals, they become ever more likely to actually tread into regions of real violence.
Neiwert's point about projecting normalcy onto sociopaths is well-taken — as a nation we so want our media figures and senior government officials not to be mentally ill that we ignore all evidence to the contrary.
In the period of time following the Oklahoma City bombing I often mused that what this country needs is a left-wing militia to act as a counterbalance.
I guess it's not a joke any more. These might be the seeds of another civil war — no metaphor intended. Liberals had better brush up on their skill at shooting back.
Neil Bush, a younger brother of US President George W. Bush, has had a $60,000-a-year employment contract with a top adviser to a Washington-based consulting firm set up this year to help companies secure contracts in Iraq.
Neil Bush disclosed the payments during divorce proceedings in March from his now ex-wife, Sharon. The divorce was finalised in April and the court papers were disclosed by The Houston Chronicle this week.
Mr Bush said he was co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation, a company based in Houston, Texas, that invests in energy and other ventures. For this he received $15,000 every three months for working three or four hours a week.
The other co-chairman and principal of Crest is Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, a company set up this year by a group of businessmen with close links to the Bush family or administrations. Its chairman is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign director in the 2000 presidential elections.
Other figures at New Bridge include Ed Rogers, its vice-chairman and a senior official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and Lanny Griffith, with whom he works in the lobby firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Lord Charles Powell, adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, is listed as an advisory board member.
On its website, New Bridge describes itself as being created to "take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq''.
Note the key words "take advantage." If Cheney's Halliburton is on the Iraqi gravy train, shouldn't Neilsie stand by with his ladle poised and ready? (Here's more on the sleaze behind New Bridge.)
Maybe the president of Taiwan did pay presidential younger brother Neil Bush a million bucks for a recent 30-minute meeting in New York.
I expressed skepticism in a recent column, but that was before I saw Exhibit 24 in the files of Bush's contentious divorce.
I didn't realize Bush's advice was so valuable.
The exhibit is a two-page contract between Bush and Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which recently opened a $1.6 billion computer chip production plant in Shanghai.
The co-founder and CEO is Winston Wong, son of a wealthy Taiwanese plastics magnate. The contract bears Wong's and Bush's signatures.
Under the contract Bush has two duties:
· "To provide GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest information and trends of the related industry, and other expertized advices (sic)."
· "To attend Directors Board Meetings."
For this the contract provides that Bush be paid $400,000 a year in company preferred stock for five years -- a total of $2 million worth of stock.
[...]
The question remains: What does Bush offer Grace that is worth $2 million?
In the deposition, Sharon Bush's attorney, David Brown, put it directly:
"Now, you have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors, do you Mr. Bush?"
"That's correct," Bush responded.
Pressed later, Bush said, "But I know a lot about business and I've been working in Asia quite a long time."
[...]
In some parts of the world it is assumed that members of the Royal Family have influence. And in those regions, anyone who has had both a father and a brother as presidents of the United States is a member of a Royal Family.
Membership is good for business. Bush, for example, had raised $23 million for his software firm at the time of the deposition, despite the fact that a series of businesses he started over the years went belly up.
Bush said 60 percent of the $23 million came from overseas -- Am I one of the many pretty Bangkok girls Neil Bush had sex with? Click here to see others.much of it from the Middle East and Asia.
Grace CEO Wong was already one of those investors when he signed Bush to the $2 million contract. His co-founder of Grace was Jiang Mianheng, son of then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
[...]
As has been reported, Bush admitted to having sex with several women in Hong Kong and Thailand during an earlier business trip. In the deposition, he said a woman would knock on the door of his hotel room.
Under questioning he said he didn't know them before or see them afterward, and he didn't pay them any money.
"Were they prostitutes?" he was asked.
"I don't know," he said.
Not knowing is one of Neilsie's chief areas of expertise. "The problem with education," says Neil Bush, "is that we create prison-like environments that suppress many students' natural gifts and bore them with useless facts." Neil is much more qualified to provide "expertized advices" than useless facts anyway.
It's quite the family portrait: the uselessness of facts, the boredom inherent in education, the profitability of having relatives in government, his brother's insistence on the sacredness of marriage, his mother's sexy and fertile volunteer Maria Andrews distracting him from his own wife and children, those several unknown Asian girls knocking at his hotel door to copulate with him for free.
Book reviewers received a one-paragraph e-mail Tuesday from the publisher of “Soaring Through Turbulence.” It told them that the March launch of the book had been delayed indefinitely and to “please disregard the galleys.”
That’s because co-author Michael Sears, 56, was fired as Boeing’s chief financial officer a day earlier for allegedly discussing a job opportunity at Boeing with Darleen Druyun, who was representing the Air Force in contract negotiations with the aircraft maker.
The book, subtitled “A New Model for Managers Who Want to Succeed in a Changing Business World,” focuses in the early pages on what allegedly got him fired: business ethics.
Galleys, which are typeset proofs of books used to get publicity ahead of publication, arrived days before the firing.
Sears and his lawyer James Streicker did not respond to requests for comment, nor did publisher John Wiley & Sons publicist Mike Onorato, who sent the e-mail.
In a statement Wednesday, Sears said he was “deeply disappointed” that Boeing fired him.
From the CFO of the Boeing Company, nine rules for business leaders on managing your company through change
In Soaring Through Turbulence, Mike Sears and Tom Schweich show how managers today can weather any turbulent time and plan for the future. In the wake of a year of setbacks to all companies–September 11th terrorist attack among them–and the resulting troubled economy, being prepared and flexible is even more critical. There is much to learn from Mike Sears’ success at Boeing. Despite a huge shakeup in the airline industry, the company remains the #1 commercial jet manufacturer and the #2 defense company, making crucial improvements in its customer response time and winning industry-wide praise for newly introduced technology despite a difficult business environment.
Based on a theory of leadership and management built over Sears’ career, Soaring Through Turbulence presents nine steps that can guide managers in moving forward, establishing credibility, making solid decisions, communicating, and aligning actions with new priorities. This groundbreaking approach is designed to help leaders win the trust of their employees, streamline the flow of information, and foster teamwork in unpredictable times.
Michael Sears (Chicago, IL) is Executive Vice President, a member of the Office of the Chairman, and Chief Financial Officer of the Boeing Company, the world’s largest aerospace company. He formerly served as president of McDonnell Douglas Aerospace and president of Douglas Aircraft Company. Thomas Schweich (St. Louis, MO) is a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave LLP and the author of three previous books. His work has been featured on CNN and the Bloomberg Financial Network.
Michael M. Sears, Thomas A. Schweich ISBN: 0-471-45729-9 Hardcover 240 pages February 2004 US $24.95
Can't they just retitle the damn thing? Something along the lines of Stealing through Turbulence: A New Model for Managers Who Want to Deceive in a Changing Business World.
At least then they could honestly call it nonfiction.
⇒ In this article from USA Today we learn that Sears "made" a salary of $746,154 and a $363,900 bonus in 2002 — not bad for the former McDonnell Douglas president whose new company's 9-11-01 troubles were now being solved by repositioning itself as a defense contractor in light of the administration's prevailing screw-the-evidence-and-go-get-em attitude.
Sears' co-author was also responsible for a Viagra-like book called Staying Power: 30 Secrets Invincible Executives Use for Getting to the Top — and Staying There. I guess Sears never read it.
Seniors with big prescription drug bills, health maintenance organizations awaiting lucrative new subsidies, upper-middle-class families anticipating a fat tax refund, and Iraqi cities expecting new schools or hospitals all have reason to be thankful about President Bush's extraordinary success at pushing his agenda through the Republican-controlled Congress this year.
There may be less celebration among the young people who will inherit the tab for these initiatives. Bush is funding every penny of every one of these goodies by increasing the national debt. Which is another way of saying that he's sticking the bill to the next generation.
The scale of the transfer is dizzying.
In just the last few months, Congress, at Bush's request, has doled out $87 billion to rebuild and secure Iraq and Afghanistan; approved a $401-billion defense appropriation bill, the largest ever; completed a $1-trillion tax cut on top of the $1.35-trillion reduction the president won in 2001; and approved a Medicare prescription drug benefit that will cost at least $400 billion over the next decade, probably more. If the energy bill is revived next year, add to the list at least another $26 billion in tax cuts for energy companies.
All of this, it's worth remembering, comes when the federal government already faces its largest deficit ever — some $374 billion last year, $84 billion more than the previous record held by Bush's father, George H.W. Bush.
Several reliable analysts project the federal deficit will soar past $500 billion this year — and then remain near that unprecedented level for the indefinite future, even if the economy recovers. It's an understatement to conclude, as the Goldman Sachs investment bank did in a recent report, that the budget process in Washington is "out of control."
In 2010 when George H.W. Bush dies, Dubya and Jeb and Neilsie will get all his Carlyle Group money free and clear of those annoying estate taxes while the rest of us foot the bill for their collective multitrillion-dollar hijinks.
