Here's today's Lea Fastow update — Houston Chronicle.

And here's a trip down Enron memory lane: Cliff Baxter's suicide note.

{ 2:21 PM }

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"A blind man in a room full of deaf people." Who said it? No, not Dean or Clark or Gore or Sharpton — a member of Bush's own Cabinet (WaPo):

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts Friday from a CBS interview.

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour.

"As I recall it was just a monologue," he told CBS' "60 Minutes," which will broadcast the entire interview Sunday.

In making the blind man analogy, O'Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate.

"There is no discernible connection," CBS quoted O'Neill as saying. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neil said, according to the program.

CBS said much of O'Neill's criticisms of Bush are included in "The Price of Loyalty," an upcoming book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.

O'Neill was fired for his hand in demonstrating how Bush's insane tax cuts contribute to $44 trillion in chronic US deficits.

"Blind," "no discernible connection," "lack of engagement" — he's the Stepford president.

{ 12:27 PM }

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Bush on Mars. Props to No More Mister Nice Blog for connecting "Beat Street Breakdown" by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five to Dubya in space.

{ 11:07 AM }

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Tax breaks to scrape national resources. You can't give energy industry lobbyists any credit for having an original idea. Here's their big new suggestion — let's privatize the Rocky Mountains and national forests and wilderness areas of the American West, so Bush donors can provide inexplicable blackouts to the Northeast and SUVs can continue to get ever-lower gas mileage (Arizona Republic):

America's insatiable demand for energy will require the development of vast new sources of natural gas, coal and oil and the construction of billions of dollars worth of pipelines, transmission lines and power plants, experts say.

That will require new tax breaks and other incentives to encourage businesses to invest in new infrastructure and more liberal policies about extracting natural resources from government lands, including national forests and wilderness areas.

And, at the bottom line, Congress needs to pass a controversial national energy bill proposed by the Bush administration.

That was the message delivered by a panel of government officials and energy industry leaders Thursday at the annual Summit of the West conference sponsored by the Western Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Jim Glotfelty of the U.S. Department of Energy tried to assuage audience members' fears that the Bush administration may put the National Energy Bill on the back burner now that the president's popularity is on the rise.

[...]

He [C. Michael Smith, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for fossil fuel energy] acknowledged there are environmental challenges to developing some of the reserves and the pipelines needed to bring the gas to market.

Passage of a national energy bill would remove some of those challenges by making it easier to access government land.

Conn Lass, chief of staff to Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clark, said the agency would cooperate by opening up more formerly protected land to drilling and mineral exploration.

"We are making efforts to help energy production on public lands in the West," he said. He noted that the agency recently approved the first drilling permits for Otero Mesa in New Mexico, which had been proposed for wilderness status.

Otero Mesa is one of the largest remaining tracts of Chihuahuan Desert grassland and home to many threatened or endangered species.

The height of folly is to destroy something permanent to gain something impermanent. The Bureau of Land Management apparently serves as a welfare office for the energy industry, with Congress at the counter cheerfully asking, "How may we help you? How much more of the nation's land would you like?"

The report above shows one the few examples of me agreeing with the right wing that the word "liberal" equals "treasonous evil incarnate": "...more liberal policies about extracting natural resources from government lands, including national forests and wilderness areas."

I heard a report on this story on NPR this morning but couldn't find a transcript.

{ 9:08 AM }

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499 dead.

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Each circle represents a US soldier killed in Iraq — and behind each soldier an American family in grief, forgotten and unrecognized by its government.

And for what did they die? An administration that was "systematically misrepresenting" the threat:

The Bush administration will today [Jan 8] be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.

The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims.

As Kos puts it, "They just made shit up."

Count of casualties from Cryptome.

{ 3:03 PM }

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The sad thing is, it's plausible. A prediction from Xymphora:

If Rove needs the votes, and the Republicans can't get sufficient paperless computer voting machines in place before the next election, Americans will see a terror attack by 'dirty bomb', probably in one of the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle, at a time, May or June, to set up the Republican National Convention with jingoist nonsense and the message that only Bush is tough enough to protect America, and the clear warning that the country cannot afford to shift horses in its time of crisis. The commandos who will set off the attack are laying the paper trail now to be associated with whatever group the neocons wish to attack next. I guarantee that suitable patsies will be picked up in a few days of the bombing, and the FBI will have bursting files on each of them connecting them with the next country on the neocon wish list (almost certainly one or more of Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba). If Americans hadn't fallen for the obvious lies about September 11, and had demanded a real investigation of what really happened, they could have avoided this next fake terrorist attack, so in a sense it is a deserved attack. The saddest thing is that Americans are already falling for the new terror, and the real fear is starting to build to its Republican crescendo.

San Francisco, with its new-economy atheist homosexual leftism threatening the old-economy Christian hetero right wing, seems the most likely target because of its godless dispensability.

That an argument like this should be plausible shows how far we as a formerly great nation have fallen in less than three years — not because of 9-11, but because of all the politically motivated lies and secrecy and theft and carnage that were carried out in its name.

{ 12:32 PM }

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GOP: "Give your prescription money to your old boss." Another head-slapping Republican recipe for corporate plunder: You retire, and your Bush prescription drug benefit subsidy goes to your old boss (Ellen E. Schultz and Theo Francis, WSJ, sub. req'd.):

Some companies with many retired workers are expected to post big earnings gains for 2003 or 2004, thanks to accounting guidelines for subsidies under the federal prescription-drug program.

When Congress approved prescription-drug benefits for Medicare recipients last year, it granted benefits for the 65% of large employers with retiree health-care plans, providing funds for companies that maintained their prescription-drug coverage for retirees.

The program is supposed to encourage employers to retain prescription-drug coverage.

But companies are entitled to the subsidy regardless of how much of the cost they pick up themselves. As a result, it does nothing to halt the current rush by some employers to shift more costs to retirees.

In fact, benefits consultants are designing employer-sponsored prescription plans to save companies more money by unloading costs on their former workers without losing out on the new subsidy.

[...]

Some of the biggest accounting gains are expected to show up at such companies as Lucent Technologies Inc., which has 240,000 retirees and dependents, General Motors Corp., Dow Chemical Co., and SBC Communications Inc. All are members of the Employers' Coalition on Medicare, which lobbied for the subsidy. Some of these companies won't take the gains immediately.

[...]

Thanks to a little-noticed provision in the new law, the government will calculate the subsidy based on both what the employer spends for prescription drugs and what the retiree spends.

So if an employer and a retiree each pay $1,000 toward the retiree's medical costs, the employer's subsidy is calculated on the full $2,000, bringing the company a total subsidy of $490, rather than the $210 that it would get if it received a subsidy only on its share.

As a result, when combined with tax and accounting rules, the program allows employers in some cases to use the subsidy to erase the entire cost of prescription drugs for retirees, or even turn a profit from a drug plan. For instance, if a Medicare-eligible retiree's prescription costs are $2,550, and his former employer pays $1,000 of it, under long-standing tax rules, the employer can deduct its full $1,000 for tax purposes, meaning the after-tax cost to the company is $650 at a 35% corporate tax rate.

Meanwhile, the company doesn't pay taxes on the subsidy it receives, thanks to another provision of the new Medicare law. So in this example, the employer would receive a subsidy of $644, based on the full amount paid by both employer and retiree, reducing the company's cost for the retiree to $6 for the year.

"It's hard to believe that any of this was an accident or an oversight," said Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.).

More accounting sleight-of-hand, from the people who brought you Halliburton's magically overpriced Kuwaiti gasoline and the energy policymakers and generous Bush-Cheney campaign donors of bankrupt Enron.

And where is the leadership of the AARP?

Kissing the boot that kicks its membership.

{ 9:28 AM }

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Kenneth Starr, where are you? Someone's lying in the White House again and this time — just like the last time you were in the headlines — the lie has nothing to do with national security (Timothy Noah in Slate):

"President Bush is a great leader and husband—but I bet you didn't know, he is also quite the poet."
—Laura Bush, remarks at the National Book Festival in Washington, Oct. 3, 2003.

[...]

"Well, of course, he didn't really write the poem. But a lot of people really believed that he did."
—Laura Bush on NBC's Meet the Press, Dec. 28, 2003.

Now why on earth would anyone "really" believe that he wrote the poem? Because she "really" said so?

As Noah points out, "The first lady lies in order to make the president look ... stupid?"

Well, duh.

Here's our first take on the stupid poem, back in October 2003.

{ 12:37 PM }

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The latest on Lea and Andrew Fastow.

Poor Lea Fastow — from Enron art connoisseur to a possible stint in a halfway house in just three short years. I wonder if she still agrees with Gordon Gekko.

Meanwhile, the unindicted Lay and Skilling wait in the shadows.

{ 11:33 AM }

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One more expensive 9-11 fraud. Remember those TV commercials that connect drugs to terrorism? The logic was as fraudulent as the cost (WSJ, sub. req'd.):

NEW YORK -- A grand jury indicted one current and one former senior executive of WPP Group PLC's Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, alleging the pair worked with unidentified co-conspirators to defraud the U.S. government.

The indictment also alleges the duo made false claims while working on a lucrative account for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The action surprised Madison Avenue, which largely believed the matter had been resolved after Ogilvy paid $1.8 million to settle civil charges in February 2002. At the time, Ogilvy, one of the ad industry's best-known shops, said it voluntarily withdrew $850,000 in billings to the U.S. because it lacked confidence in the documentation supporting the figure.

[...]

The court document, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Thomas Early, 48 years old, Shona Seifert, 43, and unnamed co-conspirators "participated in an extensive scheme to defraud the United States government by falsely and fraudulently inflating the labor costs" that Ogilvy incurred while working under contract.

The drug-policy office, which is responsible for establishing the U.S.'s drug-control program, is a component of the executive office of the president. As part of its duties, the office conducts a national media campaign to educate young people about the dangers of illegal drugs. Ogilvy was awarded a lucrative five-year contract in December 1998. The government put the cost of the contract at $684 million, according to the court filing. For the initial year of the contract, Ogilvy was entitled to receive a fixed fee of about $1.6 million.

[...]

Ogilvy's main role was to determine when and where to broadcast antidrug ads, which were donated by ad agencies around the country through the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a nonprofit group. Ogilvy also was occasionally asked to craft ads. The agency created a stir with two jarring TV commercials that debuted during the Super Bowl in 2002. The spots told teenagers that by buying drugs they were handing money to the terrorists behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and their ilk.

To be fair, this fraudulent contract commenced under the Clinton* administration, during the fraudulent impeachment proceedings. The fraudulent 9-11 commercials and the $1.8 million kickback to settle the civil charges of fraudulent billing occurred during the fraudulent Bush administration.

Here's TalkLeft's take on the situation.

*Genuinely elected.

{ 11:09 AM }

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You err what you eat. Beyond the mad cow complacency... "And as long as we're talking about about complacency, how many people do you think bothered to wade through the Times's front-page story on price-fixing by Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred? People are so alienated from the means of agricultural production that the don't even realize that everything they eat is affected by deals like this. Of course, such complacency is easier when the cost of commodity crops is an arbitrary fiction that bears no relationship to the cost of production."
— mmw of bad things

{ 9:24 AM }

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Ssshhh, the voters are sleeping. If you're going to exonerate Halliburton, please do so quietly (WSJ, sub. req'd.):

The head of the Army Corps of Engineers quietly exonerated Halliburton Co. of any wrongdoing in a Kuwait fuel-delivery contract that Pentagon auditors asserted has overcharged the U.S. government by more than $100 million.

In a previously undisclosed Dec. 19 ruling, the commander of the Corps, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, cleared Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of the need to provide "any cost and pricing data" pertaining to a no-bid contract to deliver millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq.

He acted after lower-level Army Corps officials concluded in a memo to him that Kellogg Brown & Root had provided enough data to show it had purchased the fuel and its delivery to Iraq at a "fair and reasonable price."

The decision, which Halliburton itself requested, came after Halliburton's pricing of gasoline sold to the U.S. government exploded into public controversy last month when Defense Department auditors alleged that Kellogg Brown & Root, known as KBR, was significantly overcharging.

[...]

According to the Dec. 19 Army Corps memo requesting the ruling, KBR adequately sought bids for the fuel subcontract last May and picked Altanmia Commercial Marketing Co., the Kuwaiti supplier, as the lowest bidder. But since then, other companies have come forward offering to deliver gasoline into Iraq "on more favorable terms than Altanmia," the memo states.

The government-owned Kuwaiti Petroleum Co., however, "has refused to grant permission" for any subcontractor other than Altanmia to perform the work, the Army Corps memo says. The petroleum company, which controls all domestic oil sales, has also prohibited Altanmia from providing KBR or the U.S. government with any cost data related to the fuel contract.

"It is common throughout the Middle East for contractors to refuse to provide such information," the memo says.

Very little is publicly known about Altanmia, other than it is controlled by a prominent Kuwaiti merchant family with real estate and other commercial interests. A representative of the company has said that its main businesses include real estate and government work, including unspecified service contracts with the Kuwaiti military.

Since KBR could use no other gasoline provider, and couldn't extract any financial information from Altanmia, the company "is left with no option for providing these services from Kuwait other than to continue obtaining them from Altanmia," the Corps memo says.

[...]

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, a relentless critic of Halliburton's work in Iraq, called the Flowers ruling "incomprehensible" and said "it appears the administration is deliberately sabotaging the government's ability to audit Halliburton."

Army Corps officials said Monday that the Flowers ruling was necessary to allow KBR to continue to deal with Altanmia at a time when the need for gasoline and kerosene in Iraq remains high. The process that led to the waiver, they said, began in early December when the Army Corps needed to increase the amount of gasoline coming in from Kuwait and KBR had to justify sticking with Altanmia instead of seeking a new supplier through a competitive bid.

The Kuwaiti monarchy, for whom the president's daddy waged the first Gulf War, is apparently pulling a few of Cheney's strings too.

{ 2:37 PM }

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The danger of obviousness. Vermont's Times Argus tells it like it is in this editorial:

Howard Dean has reached the kitchen sink phase of his candidacy, which is to say his opponents have decided to throw everything at him, including the kitchen sink and more.

He has obliged them by giving them plenty to throw.

At the same time, his opponents are employing time-honored techniques of exaggeration and distortion. His own hostile reactions to their attacks have soured the atmosphere further, igniting a gleeful glow in the eyes of Karl Rove and other Republican strategists.

Dean has a way of saying things that are obviously true but which leave him open to attack by those wishing to make him look bad.

[…]

In America the holidays were accompanied by the second highest state of alert, suggesting that what Dean said was true: A sense of safety has never been more lacking.

Yet Dean's opponents have twisted his statement to suggest Dean actually thought it would be better if Saddam were still in power.

A statement by Dean about Osama bin Laden has been used against him in a similar way. Dean was talking about the fact that, were bin Laden to be tried by a war crimes tribunal, he would enjoy the presumption of innocence.

That is the way trials work.

Otherwise, the proceedings would not withstand the international scrutiny that President Bush has said is important.

But it is a dangerous thing for Dean to say the obvious, and his opponents were only to happy to suggest Dean thought Osama might be innocent.

Dean's record in Vermont has also come back to haunt him. Thus, tax incentives for economic development - something all 50 states probably have - could be portrayed as a mini-Enron scandal. Dean's private discussions of energy deregulation could be likened to Vice President Cheney's secret talks on energy policy.

"Will absolutely be likened" is closer to the mark. The details of conflicted-interest Cheney's Enron energy policy and Halliburton Iraq invasion will remain top secret and off-limits to public inquiry, while candidate Dean's routine discussions will get the full brunt of a press inspection. In the court of mainstream media, why are Democratic candidates more accountable than Republican executives in power? (The answer is not "9-11.")

Political reporters and editors — where is your sense of shame?

{ 1:57 PM }

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Follow the yellowcake road. Today marks the publication of American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips, who also wrote the excellent Wealth and Democracy. From the Booklist review posted on Amazon:

There are many Bush-bashing books out there, but this one is quite different. Ivins, Franken, and Conason, among others, have focused primarily on the current president's administration. This book, written by a former Republican strategist, is more wide ranging, more scholarly, and in many ways, more disturbing. Focusing on the last four generations of Bush men, Phillips brings the reader into the secretive upper echelon of the American power establishment, where connections are made in Ivy League clubs, and he shows how members of that old-boy network become the policymakers of the country. In the case of the Bushes, this resulted not only in money and power but also in links to the CIA, the energy industry, and the military-industrial complex--links that have shaped this country's national and foreign policy for decades. Phillips explains the Bushes' relationship with Enron and the House of Saud in eyebrow-raising detail and adds confirming information about troubling claims, including the notion that the Reagan-Bush ticket arranged that American captives would not be released from Iran until Reagan took office. One of Phillips' main points is the juxtaposition between the Bush family ascent and European aristocracies....

In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips examined how the machinery of wealth erodes the foundations of democracy. Phillips is a "former Republican strategist" who has managed to free himself from the enormous, self-blinding ethical lapses that are the prerequisite for a career in the GOP. Now he offers us a glimpse behind the curtain of Oz at the huffing and puffing men, none of whom are wizards, working the controls on the elaborate machinery of lying, deceit, and deception in Emerald City.

Don't surrender, Dorothy.

{ 3:28 PM }

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Mad cows in the USDA. In November, will we remember who the real friends and enemies of mad cow disease are? WaPo:

The Agriculture Department's announcement yesterday of a ban on the sale of meat from ailing "downer" cattle marked a policy turnabout for the Bush administration, coming only a few weeks after the department and allies in the powerful meat lobby blocked an identical measure in Congress.

Faced with the first case of mad cow disease in this country, the White House and the USDA were scrambling to restore public confidence in the nation's meat supply, encourage foreign governments to resume beef imports and head off a possible political crisis for President Bush.

[...]

For years, the politically potent and well-financed cattle and meatpacking industries have held sway in the debate over the practice of slaughtering and marketing non-ambulatory, or downer, cattle. They repeatedly blocked efforts by urban Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans to end the practice -- which provides producers with millions of dollars of profits each year but also represents the biggest potential source of contaminated meat.

An estimated 190,000 sick or injured cattle are shipped to slaughterhouses annually, and only about 5 percent of them are tested for serious illness such as mad cow disease. Just last month, Republican congressional leaders deleted from a pending spending bill a measure banning the slaughter of downer cattle.

Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), a longtime advocate of legislation to ban the slaughter of sick or injured cattle, said the industry has "shot themselves in the hoof" by resisting a necessary safeguard to the food system. With the industry now facing a crisis of consumer confidence and the temporary loss of European and Asian markets, he said, the Agriculture Department "has seen the light, but that's only because they've been struck by lightning."

The ban announced yesterday also gave a lift to animal rights activists and consumer groups who had been consigned to the fringes of the mad cow debate. "We've been pushing this for years," said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "I do believe that this can restore consumer confidence in the government's regulatory authority as it stops one of the worst abuses that occurs in the modern livestock production system."

A downer or non-ambulatory cow is unable to stand. Some animals break legs or injure themselves either on farms or on the way to slaughter, but others may be sick or paralyzed. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- mad cow disease -- turns brain tissue spongy and causes animals to stagger and fall. There is no known cure.

[...]

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) in 2000 and 2002 asked the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, to check feed companies' compliance with a Food and Drug Administration regulation prohibiting protein pellets made from the remains of cattle and other ruminants from being fed to cattle. Twice the GAO found serious lapses.

The GOP — no principles, no public health, no food safety, no rational policies — just politics everlasting, 24/7.

For the tragic details of agribiz, go check out mmw of bad things who is back from the holidays and on the case again.

{ 12:00 PM }

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The big lie of privatization. In theory, 401(k) accounts are supposed to turn working people into investors who own and oversee the management of their own retirement money. As an addendum to other forms of retirement savings, 401(k) accounts can be a great thing. But, in practice, for many Americans it doesn't always work out quite like the theory.

Later this year, when the big theme of Ownership is played out in the Bush campaign, it will be useful to remember that reality does not always mesh with employers' (and Republicans') glorious dream of employees who entirely fund their own retirements.

The 401(k) system that started out with good intentions is rapidly becoming a massive deflection of responsibility — because working people simply don't have as much money as their companies' owner-managers do (Houston Chronicle/WaPo):

Despite years of reasoning, wheedling and sermonizing from financial advisers and retirement planners, nearly half of all workers who change jobs cash out their 401(k) plan savings instead of leaving them to grow, either there or in some other form of tax-deferred account, according to a new study.

This behavior, at best, deprives workers of years of compounding, which can do miracles for even modest sums. At worst, it could undermine the entire premise of these “defined contribution” retirement plans, which is that a combination of worker prudence, employer assistance and tax benefits will enable workers to build up adequate nest eggs for their retirement years.

[..]

The study did not look at what workers did with cash when they took it, but Stacy Schaus, a consultant with Hewitt Associates, the benefits consulting firm that did the study, said anecdotal evidence suggests most of it went for such things as living expenses and credit card debt. Even if the job changers reinvested the money in a taxable account, they would have lost from taxes and penalties.

[...]

But the Hewitt study and others like it raise serious public policy questions. The Bush administration apparently has not given up on the idea of allowing almost everyone to fund large IRA-like accounts, notwithstanding the evidence that many workers have difficulty funding even small accounts. Such a proposal, while appealing to people with the wherewithal to save, could magnify a looming split in the retiree population between those with enough to live on and those without.

Judiciously applied, the 401(k) system makes a useful contribution to the ability of Americans to save, supplement, and oversee their own retirement money. But pushing the retirement privatization logic too far, as the Bush administration appears hell-bent on doing, demonstrates their deep-seated hostility to workers with lower compensation. With millions of jobs lost in just three years of the Bush administration, saving money — even tax-deferred money — is a luxury fewer Americans enjoy.

Here's the Hewitt press release for the study mentioned.

{ 9:35 AM }

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Delousing and deluding. Patriot Act II is a nasty business, especially for non-suspects (San Antonio Current):

...while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

Casinos, damnation! Wait until Bill Bennett finds out about this. Also, isn't Denny's OxyContin parking lot a business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters," at least as far as Rush Limbaugh is concerned?

Thanks to Good Soldier Schweik of Wealth Bondage for a tip of the almanac.

{ 9:13 AM }

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Israel's new apartheid.

{ 5:19 PM }

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"One lesson Americans should be learning from all this [cancellation of international flights] is that they can't win the 'war on terror' - their only hope in the long run is to stop creating the injustice which creates terrorists." — Xymphora

{ 5:05 PM }

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