Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, March 29, 2002 NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY FOR NONE BUT ONE Today's story of supreme arrogance concerns a Canadian businessman charged with violating the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba. In an unprecedented case widely regarded as a challenge to Canadian sovereignty, James Sabzali, a 42-year-old Hamilton salesman currently living in suburban Philadelphia, is accused of selling $2.1 million US in water purification supplies from Canada to Cuba from 1992-2000. ... Sabzali is charged with 76 counts of violating the 1919 U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act and one count of conspiracy. The trade-embargo counts carry a possible penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 each and the conspiracy charges up to five years and a $250,000 fine each. Sabzali allegedly made the sales while working as a marketing director with Canadian and U.K. subsidiaries of Pennsylvania-based Bro-Tech Corp. U.S. prosecutors hope to prove the company skirted the ban by selling goods through foreign middlemen. Both sides agree that chemicals used to purify and soften water made their way to Cuba from plants owned, directly or indirectly, by Brotech. However, they disagree on whether the sales were designed to violate the embargo. "Jim Sabzali is all about disclosure. He says 'Cuba' and 'Cuban customers' all over the place," Recker said, holding up government exhibits. Sabzali, who did not testify, said in an earlier interview that "there is no way I thought I was breaking the law. "You can't conspire to break somebody's law if you're compelled to follow a law that's 180-degrees away," he said, referring to the 1992 Canadian Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act which requires non-compliance with the U.S. embargo. Jim just doesn't get it. Big Brother has the biggest guns so what he says goes. The only surprise here is that the U.S. isn't charging him with selling weapons. After all, the huge Cuban military - poised as ever at the ready to invade the U.S. at the drop of a hat - could at this very minute be drinking that purified water. posted by Steven Baum 3/29/2002 02:10:43 PM | link THE MYTH OF THE GASSING OF THE KURDS Here's an excerpt from a 1990 Pentagon report entitled Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East. The authors were Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II and Leif R. Rosenberger of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This is from chapter 5: In September 1988, however -- a month after the war had ended -- the State Department abruptly, and in what many viewed as a sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemicals against its Kurdish population. The incident cannot be understood without some background of Iraq's relations with the Kurds. It is beyond the scope of this study to go deeply into this matter; suffice it to say that throughout the war Iraq effectively faced two enemies -- Iran and the elements of its own Kurdish minority. Significant numbers of the Kurds had launched a revolt against Baghdad and in the process teamed up with Tehran. As soon as the war with Iran ended, Iraq announced its determination to crush the Kurdish insurrection. It sent Republican Guards to the Kurdish area, and in the course of this operation - according to the U.S. State Department -- gas was used, with the result that numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Schultz stood by U.S. accusations, and the U.S. Congress, acting on its own, sought to impose economic sanctions on Baghdad as a violator of the Kurds' human rights. Having looked at all of the evidence that was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the State Department's claim that gas was used in this instance. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organizations who examined the Kurds -- in Turkey where they had gone for asylum -- failed to discover any. Nor were there ever any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ... It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, the Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraqi-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing a great many deaths. Photographs of them Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack, even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds. Thus, in our view, the Congress acted more on the basis of emotionalism than factual information, and without sufficient thought for the adverse diplomatic effects of its action. As a result of the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq is now the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf, an area in which we have vital interests. To maintain an uninterrupted flow of oil from the Gulf to the West, we need to develop good working relations with all of the Gulf states, and particularly with Iraq, the strongest. So even the Pentagon thought (at least in 1990 when the evidence was fresher and the needs of the Forever War didn't trump reality) that the supposed gassing of thousands of Kurds by Iraq was a steaming pile of propaganda. That is, the gassing story is about as real as the wholly discredited story about Iraqi soldiers dumping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. posted by Steven Baum 3/29/2002 01:52:36 PM | link HEAD FOR THE HILLS I'm off to Texas hill country for the weekend, and we'll undoubtedly make a stop at Luckenbach on the way to Kerrville to raise a last glass or two in Waylon's direction. posted by Steven Baum 3/29/2002 01:16:46 PM | link BUFFET ON ACCOUNTING Warren Buffet, the world's second richest man, on the "new accounting" in his message accompanying the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual report: "Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking. In golf, my score is frequently below par on a pro-forma basis: I have firm plans to 'restructure' my putting stroke and therefore only count the swings I take before reaching the green." posted by Steven Baum 3/29/2002 01:15:13 PM | link SHARON AND HAMAS As Sharon rolls the tanks into the PLO headquarters and is probably well on his way to assassinating Arafat, with everything justified by the latest Hamas suicide bombing, the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner provide an interesting read. This might come as something as a surprise to those who've been instructed that Arafat and the PLO have any sort of control over Hamas, whose 1988 charter stated: "The land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations, and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it ... Peace initiatives, the so-called peace initiatives, are all contrary to the beliefs of Hamas, for renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion." On to the Rabbi: The strategies of Ariel Sharon and Hamas are far less irrational than portrayed by American media. Each has been cooperating in what amounts to a tacit alliance to achieve a shared goal: the elimination of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and its replacement by Hamas. Israel's announcement that it will not deal with the PLO any more is only one part of this process. Ariel Sharon has never hidden his contempt for the Oslo Accord, precisely because it aimed to create a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza. When campaigning, he presented himself as the strong military man who could play the role of peacemaker. But he always reassured his own right-wing constituents that he had no intention of ceding any land to Palestinians. Sharon was the inventor of the strategy of filling the West Bank with settlements in the 1980s to prevent any possibility of Palestinians creating their own state. His fondest dream would be to find the political excuses that could allow Israel to reoccupy the entire West Bank and establish another hundred settlements. Arafat represented a thorn in his side, because Arafat kept insisting on returning to negotiations and on building the Palestinian state promised in the treaty Israel had signed in the White House garden in 1993. Moreover, the United States has made it clear that it wants Arafat in power and negotiations in place so that Arab leaders can say to their own populations: "See, our cooperation with the United States against Osama bin Laden has produced a return to the peace process." But continued conflict in the region allows Arab elites to displace resentment against the injustices of their own undemocratic societies onto anger at Israel. So they seek a balance: continued negotiations and an endless peace process, but not the creation of a viable Palestinian state. When the United States became preoccupied with the war against terror, Sharon felt free to increase the violence and repression of the Occupation and to accelerate the assassinations of those "suspected" of being directly or indirectly connected to acts of terror. Those assassinations, primarily directed against Hamas leaders, ensured that Hamas would strike back in retaliatory blows against civilian targets within Israel. Instead of striking back against Hamas, Israel instead has used Hamas attacks as justification to destroy the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and to debate what would be the best moment to kill Arafat. With Arafat dead and the Palestinian Authority in shambles, Hamas would become the prevailing force in the Palestinian world -- and the image of the Palestinians would then be more like that of the Taliban. Sharon would be able to portray Israel as fighting the same fight as the United States -- a battle against terrorists -- a move he has tried with less success against Arafat. With Hamas in charge of the Palestinian camp, Sharon could rally much broader support, because even those of us who support Palestinian rights would be forced to admit that a Hamas-dominated Palestine would be a real threat not only to Israel, but also to world peace. Hamas has much to gain as well. Convinced that the peace process is betraying Islamic claims to Palestine, Hamas is willing to wait another 30 or 40 years until Israel tires of endless war and terror -- if, that is, it can be assured that when Israel tires, fundamentalists will come to power. Hamas despises the secular forces around Arafat, and worries that if the Palestinian Authority is not destroyed it could become the government of a secular Palestinian state. Hamas is openly contemptuous of the many Christian Palestinians who influence the Palestinian Authority. So it is hard for Hamas to resist the open invitation from Ariel Sharon: Israel will do the dirty work of destroying the Palestinian Authority and rejecting any peace process if Hamas does its part by blowing up innocent Israeli civilians. Sharon refuses to negotiate unless there is a period of non-violence, thereby signaling to Hamas forces that all they have to do to block negotiations is to escalate their terror. And if the violence gets intense enough, Sharon will find himself "with no alternative" but to kill Arafat and wipe out the Palestinian Authority. This position, of course, creates an overwhelming incentive for Hamas to engage in acts of terror. Arafat has spoken about this publicly on several occasions. (Although we surely can't believe the words of a terrorist, unless of course his name is Ariel Sharon.) Hamas has always been seen as a tool by which Israel could undermine the nationalist movement led by Palestinian Authority President and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat. Similar statements by Arafat have been dismissed by Israel as "cranky" propaganda. In an interview with the Dec. 11 Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Arafat said, "We are doing everything to stop the violence. But Hamas is a creature of Israel which at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir [the late 1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of [Egpytian President Hosni] Mubarak." To the Italian daily L'Espresso, Arafat laid out the reasons for this support. "Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we have been limited, even to build a tomato factory. Rabin himself defined it as a fatal error. Some collaborationists of Israel are involved in these [terror] attacks," he said. "We have proof, and we are placing it at the disposal of the Italian government." To forestall an obvious criticism, although the last couple of paragraphs were found in a publication of Lyndon Larouche's organization, Arafat said what he said and the details of the founding of Hamas are a matter of public record, although this particular record hasn't received much publicity. Arafat has been negotiating with Israel for years. The Hamas charter bluntly states that all peace initiatives are contrary to their beliefs. Hamas is behind the suicide bombings. With Arafat and the PLO out of the way, the Hamas will be the negotiating organization for the Palestinians. And since they'll utterly refuse to negotiate, Sharon will be able to negotiate entirely with his favorite tool: the military. No more compromises. Just more massacres along the lines of 1982. posted by Steven Baum 3/29/2002 08:56:37 AM | link Thursday, March 28, 2002 EGAN'S LAW Satire Wire expands on a thought I had a few days ago, except I wasn't thinking in a satirical vein. Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood. The law also mandates that Catholic churches register with authorities, wear electronic monitoring devices, and be prohibited from moving to within a half-mile radius of a school. A follow-up to Megan's Law, enacted by New Jersey in 1994, the so-called "Egan's Law" is named for Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who are both accused of covering up sexual abuse by priests under their authority. Like Megan's Law, Egan's Law is expected to spread quickly to other states, but for parents in towns across New Jersey, it's on the books none too soon. ... posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 11:44:31 AM | link PIPES' DREAMS Hussein Ibish details the hysterical lengths to which saber-rattling psychotic Daniel Pipes will go to discredit a critic who bests him in a televised argument. IN a heated exchange on MSNBC's Alan Keyes show recently, Daniel Pipes was so badly beaten on the merits of the argument that he was reduced to shouting at me to "shut up." Having failed to convince me to silence my advocacy on behalf of the Arab-American community voluntarily, Pipes now seeks to have me banned from the TV shows where I have repeatedly carried the day. In the pages of the New York Post he urges the media to "close their doors" to me. Pipes accuses me of being "anti-American" because I have criticized some aspects of U.S. foreign policy, something he does all the time. He calls me "anti-Semitic," but provides not a single piece of evidence of this because none exists. Ibish has also been recently attacked by David Horowitz, who falsely accused Ibish of secretly celebrating the 9/11 attacks on the evidence of a fabricated email Horowitz received. Horowitz issued a full public retration and apology, which I'm happy to think must have caused him much pain. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 11:34:42 AM | link GREAT MOMENTS IN CORPORATE DROID-DUMB The Dispatch in Argus, Illinois (via Progressive Review) reports on another shining moment in corporate history. A 73-year-old women was trapped by a newspaper vending machine for more than 20 minutes before the assistant manager of a Wal-Mart store - who was notified of the situation a couple of minutes after it happened - would put two quarters in the machine to release the woman. That is, the cheap-ass management of a chain that's created four of the top ten wealthiest people in the U.S. refused for twenty minutes to cough up four bits to help an old woman out of a painful situation. This would be the same flag-waving, "proud to be an American" megacorporation that now has 700 or so plants in China manufacturing their merchandise. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 11:23:24 AM | link ENRON'S GARBAGE The Houston Chronicle tells how the utter contempt of Enron's management extended further than just to the employees and stockholders. California prosecutors say that when they pried open 940 boxes of documents subpoenaed from bankrupt energy giant Enron Corp., they made a surprising discovery. "What we found were discarded Kleenexes, old pizza boxes, garbage," California Attorney General Bill Lockyer told reporters. On March 11, Lockyer said he and a team of lawyers arrived at the offices of Enron's utility subsidiary in Portland, Ore. Lockyer expected to find subpoenaed documents related to Enron's California electricity sales. A California judge will rule next week on whether Enron should be held in contempt for its action, he said. From the 940 boxes, "we got one piece of paper, one document, in response to our subpoena," Lockyer said. Enron has incensed California politicians by ignoring a subpoena and failing to appear last month at a state Senate panel hearing on document destruction. Lockyer won a court order in January requiring Enron to preserve all paper and electronic documents subpoenaed by state officials. If the many boxes of records the Clintons handed over to the Starr inquisitions had contained any such detritus, the resulting shrieks and howls would've broken windows all over Washington, and there would've been an epidemic of apoplexy amongst the usual suspects. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 11:11:53 AM | link AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, MOVE TO ... The Denver Post reports how those evil bastards in Cuba, North Korea and other "rogue states" insidiously keep track of their political dissidents. Er, wait a minute, never mind. Most major police departments across the country keep and share intelligence files on political protesters, officials said Tuesday, a day after Denver police came under fire for their own record-keeping. The American Civil Liberties Union and a multitude of political activists attacked Denver police Monday for keeping such files on protest groups. But other departments, including some in Colorado, keep similar records. "Every police department does to a certain extent," Aurora police spokesman Rudy Herrera said. "Our people try to concentrate on the more radical groups." ... Nationally, several large cities freely admit they keep intelligence files on protesters but would not provide detailed information. Salt Lake City officials said their files helped them prevent any violent protests at the Winter Olympics last month. "It's no big secret. It's important for police departments to gather information about these groups. Some are peaceful, some aren't," said Salt Lake police Sgt. Fred Louis. "Most of your large cities do have intelligence units with people assigned to gather information on demonstration groups." ... Salt Lake City's dissident files apparently didn't help them much in preventing the violent protest that spun up the night the beer ran out at the Olympics. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 11:04:40 AM | link THE BEST JAZZ ON CD A friend asked me to supply him with a list of jazz albums for someone just beginning to explore the field. While searching for appropriate benchmarks I found The Best Jazz Albums on CD, which is itself based on a 1980 book by Len Lyons entitled The 101 Best Jazz Albums: A History of Jazz on Records. While "best" may be overdoing it a bit, the list certainly offers a fine overview of the most representative recordings of most of the major artists of the jazz era (at least up until 1980 which is 20 years farther than Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis got). Jim Determan, the site's creator, has performed a yeoman's task of annotating the choices from the book, a sorely needed task seeing how just about everything has changed since 1980, not the least of which is the nearly complete switch from vinyl to CD. He's also provided links to those albums still in print and available at CDNow. Someone just starting out might want to start with Part Two: Modern Jazz, Section A. Bebop and Modern Jazz. This bebop era is what many consider the classic jazz era. It also strikes a balance between the fidelity of the recordings, which gets worse as one progresses backwards from 1950, and the accessibility of the music, which some find a whole lot less listenable post-1965 as the pioneers of the fusion and free jazz movements hit their stride. Once you get your fill of the bebop era, move forwards or backwards in time as your tastes dictate. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 10:45:05 AM | link GOON-O-RAMA The Goon Show Depository has an 8 CD collection of most of the Goon Shows and various spinoffs as well as bits from Derek and Clive, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connelly, Monty Python, Not the Nine O'Clock News, etc. Everything's in MP3 format and the sound quality is described as ranging from dire to good, with most equivalent to FM radio quality. The CDs can be obtained individually, or as a set for about $50 U.S. These were available via the web, but the costs became prohibitive for the webmeister, so he's making them available for what is basically a nuisance fee, i.e. Please remember that you are not paying for the shows. The shows are free. You are paying only for the raw materials, postage and wear and tear on the writing equipment. And it's a hell of a bargain at that, seeing how much of what is available is long out of print and would cost hundreds of dollars and take years to cobble together. If you're a fan, then it's definitely worth a look-see. posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 10:23:31 AM | link DEREK AND CLIVE Their finest hours. The Worst Job I Ever Had (MP3) Sex Crime (MP3) Peter Cook on the making of Derek and Clive. "Sometime late in 1973 Dudley Moore and I booked a recording studio for a late night ad-lib session after performing what seemed like the millionth performance of Good Evening in New York. I never believe performers who maintain that constant repetition of the same material is not enormously tedious. Once I have got through the tension and excitement of the first night and the brief period of elation or despair that comes from reading the critical reaction, acting becomes just another job. The one redeeming factor about our show was that we had written it and therefore felt quite entitled to mess about with it to a certain extent; but there is a limit to how much one can alter a show, which in our case opened to very flattering reviews. We both fell that we really ought to offer up at least a fair approximation of what had been described in the press. I suppose we felt restrained by the Trade Descriptions Act. We had to produce the advertised goods. Moments of pleasure came when something technical went wrong. Lights would go out, teapots shatter for no good reason. . .at times like these we felt perfectly free to imrovise and guiltlessly enjoy ourselves with no text to follow. This brings me to why we went to Electric Lady Studios, armed with several bottles of wine, just to see, what happened if we talked with no prior ideas into two microphones. We had no preconcieved attitudes or intensions. What emerged, on the whole was a shower of filth, with no socially redeeming or artistic value. We heard it back the next day and found it to be funny, but on the other hand we had no idea what to do with it. What we did was very practical, i.e. nothing. A few weeks later we decided to try out the same sort of rambling filth on a small audience. We did and they laughed. This time we did something; we sent a whole bunch of unedited tapes to a long time friend of mine, Christopher Blackwell, head of Island Records. He and his good lady also laughed and wondered what the hell to do with them. The whole matter lapsed. Dudley and I went on tour round the States and forgot about the tapes, in our relentless pursuit of dollars. ... posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 09:46:02 AM | link TMCM posted by Steven Baum 3/28/2002 09:33:48 AM | link Wednesday, March 27, 2002 CROSSOVER OFFICE One of the last barriers to using Linux in the office environment has apparently fallen with the release of CrossOver Office by the friendly folks at Codeweavers. It allows you to install and use Windows applications such as Microsoft Office 97 and 2000 and Lotus Notes on your Linux box. I have no desire or intention of using this as I'm a LaTeX nazi, but I'm sure quite a few people might find it useful. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 04:50:37 PM | link CONTENT MANAGEMENT While perusing a Slashdot thread on content management systems, I encountered some open source packages that were new to me. Post-Nuke, an offshoot of PHP-Nuke PROPS, designed specifically for periodicals such as newspapers and magazines who want to publish online Cofax, a text and multimedia publication system designed to simplify the presentation of newspapers on the web (and by Knight Ridder employees) OpenACS, an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications OpenCMS, an effort to create the first professional-level open source content management system Maybe I'll play with one of these suckers one of these days. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 04:38:39 PM | link THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT The Texas Observer offers its endorsement of Phil Gramm for the only presidency he has a chance in hell of getting, and then only because most of the Texas A&M Board of Regents are past contributers to his political campaigns. I should point out that in addition to my genetic dislike for Gramm, I additionally loathe him these days seeing how the Texas teacher's retirement fund, of which I'm a member, purchased a shitload of Enron stock last August. If Enron sticks to anyone, it should stick to these two [Gramm and his wife Wendy], yet comparatively little ink has yet been spilled on their involvement in the scandal, perhaps because Phil Gramm is a now a lame duck. But for those who question whether Enron actually got anything for its campaign largesse, look no further than the Gramm family. As Public Citizen and others have thoroughly documented, their fingerprints are all over this billion-dollar debacle. Leave aside for the moment the fact that Wendy Gramm served on the audit committee of Enron's Board of Directors, and therefore is particularly culpable for failing to alert investors about the off-balance sheet hijinks that resulted in the largest bankruptcy in American history. In fact, Wendy and Phil helped create this disaster in the first place. As chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commis-sion, a federal regulatory agency, Wendy Gramm exempted Enron's energy derivative contracts from regulation in the fall of 1992, setting the stage for the company to become a huge player in the wholesale energy market. That was one of her last official acts; Enron hired her a few days later to serve on their board, where she would earn at least $900,000 over the next eight years. After Wendy joined the board, Enron quickly became Phil Gramm's top corporate contributor. It paid off. In December 2000 Phil Gramm pushed through-over the objection of regulators-a bill deregulating energy commodity trading, which set the stage for Enron's online trading operation and ensuing dominance of the California energy market. That bill was a disaster for California ratepayers and a bonanza for Enron. Unfortunately, Enron was at the same time hemorrhaging huge amounts of cash on ill-advised overseas investments in power plants, public water utilities, pipelines, and other capital-intensive enterprises. As head of the Senate Committee on Banking, Gramm helped them hide those losses, fighting banking reforms that would have made transactions in offshore tax havens much more transparent. Enron had hundreds of subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands whose primary reason for existence seems to have been to deceive investors and Wall Street analysts. Gramm announced his decision to retire on September 4, shortly before Enron made its stunning restatement of earnings and Wall Street's favorite cookie began to crumble. Coin-cidence? With his wife on the audit committee, privy to inside information that nobody on Wall Street had seen, he was uniquely positioned to know that things were about to get ugly. That being the case, Texas A&M might have appreciated a call from their former prof-the university, along with various state pension funds, was among the public entities in Texas that lost money on Enron investments. Texas has joined a class-action suit to try to recover those losses. According to Phil, there was never any Enron-related pillow-talk at the Gramm residence. "We talk about my taking out the garbage and Texas A&M football," he told the Houston Chronicle. (Depressing, but certainly plausible as far as it goes.) Wendy may very well wind up testifying in front of one of many Congressional panels currently investigating the meltdown. Does Texas A&M, which already went through a series of scandals involving dishonest or incompetent administrators in the mid-'90s, really need the headache? To say the least, it's not exactly an auspicious start for a potential university president, whose main job, after all, is to raise money for the school. For all of his railing against government waste, Gramm owes his entire livelihood to public spending, from his birth in a military hospital to his National Defense Fellowship in graduate school, to his career at A&M and in Washington. It's time for him to try the private sector for awhile-where his sympathies have always lain anyway-and he should take his wife with him. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 02:48:52 PM | link BANKRUPTCY FOR THE WEALTHY, I.E. FREE MONEY David C. Johnston describes a couple of ways bankruptcy was eased for the extremely wealthy in the early 1990s. ... One dealt with the benefits of regulation for a company eager to stiff its creditors. The other dealt with retirement pay in a precursor of everything that happened to Enron workers and their 401(k) plans, only worse. In one well known example of the first scenario, we saw Donald Trump and Merv Griffin borrow millions in the corporate bond market, even though their own loan applications, in the form of prospectuses, made it clear that the money would not be paid back. One set of Trump bonds, underwritten by Merrill Lynch, defaulted almost before the ink dried. Neither The Donald nor the Merv was at risk of having unpaid creditors seize their temples of chance, however, just because they skipped their mortgage payments. That's because they held gambling licenses and the bondholders did not. Both the New Jersey Attorney General's Division of Gaming Enforcement and the Casino Control Commission demonstrated the benefits of regulation to the regulated when they found a way around a most simple rule. That rule said that an Atlantic City casino must be solvent to stay in business. The rule defined solvency as the ability to pay bills as they come due. It might seem that Trump and Griffin failed that test when they missed their interest payments, but the creative regulators took the view that once a bankruptcy deal was in the works the interest payments were no longer due and, thus, the casino companies were solvent. Welcome to strategic bankruptcy, forever to be a part of our future, unless Congress intervenes. It is what Kmart did when it filed Chapter 11, not because it was out of cash, but because it wanted out of leases and the landlords wanted their promised monthly rent. Corporate bankruptcy can be contract renegotiation by other means. The second egregious bankruptcy practice emerged when management ran into the ground such once great companies as Morrison-Knudsen, builders of Hoover Dam, and Carter Hawley Hale, operator of department stores from Santa Monica to Sacramento. These companies all had as their retirement plans a pool of their own stock, just as Enron had. Companies deduct the value of stock or cash they put in these accounts, where the money is safe from the company's creditors, but not from the risk that the investments will lose value. But highly paid workers get an extra dollop of stock put into their "executive deferred compensation plan" that is not subject to any limits. These plans also do not generate an immediate tax deduction for the company. By law the money that executives defer can be seized by creditors if the company goes bankrupt, which would seem to create a powerful incentive for the executives to run the company prudently. It does not. At Morrison-Knudsen, Carter Hawley Hale, and eight other companies, the workers whose funds were safe from creditors were wiped out when their company's stock sank to zero. The executives, however, pocketed 100 cents on the dollar. How? The executives got paid in full because when the creditors came in to take over the bankrupt companies and rehabilitate them in the Hamiltonian fashion, they needed these executives to hang around and help until they had full control of the enterprise. And what did the executives demand as the price to stay? That their deferral accounts pay off. Bill Agee demanded that Morrison-Knudsen pay him to the penny. He walked away with $367,062.30. Department store mogul Phil Hawley pocketed several million dollars. Whooooa!! Talk about your draconian punishments! Those "smoke one joint and go to jail for life" laws pale in comparison to the Inquisition-like sentences handed down to these folks. Well, sure, Hawley walked away with a couple of millino dollars, but he's forever going to be a prisoner of his conscience. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 02:34:05 PM | link FUN TALES OF CORPORATE SKULLDUGGERY The Jerusalem Post finds an even tighter embrace between IBM and the Third Reich than was previously known. Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make it clear IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German subsidiary. During the rape of Poland and the Holocaust there, which killed millions and plundered a nation, IBM technology was a key factor. That custom-tailored technology was provided not through the German subsidiary, but directly through a new special Polish subsidiary reporting to IBM New York, mainly at its headquarters at 590 N. Madison Ave. in Manhattan. When the Nazis invaded Poland, IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines, which was totally separate and apart from its German subsidiary. The Polish subsidiary was also known to the Nazis as Watson Buromaschinen, the German equivalent of Watson Business Machines. IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland. This shouldn't be too terribly shocking, especially given the warm relationship between the current president's grandpappy and the jackboots. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 02:18:06 PM | link MONKEY REVISITED Several correspondents have supplied further information about the television series called "Monkey" televised in England circa 1980. To begin with, there's Monkey, the folk novel of China as translated by Arthur Waley. Then there's Monkey Heaven, a "tribute to the cult classic live action Japanese TV series" containing, perhaps most importantly for those wanting to see the bloody thing, information on the upcoming DVD versions of the series. There's another good fan site called, shockingly enough, Monkey. Videos can currently be had at Amazon UK, although they are in VHS PAL rather than VHS NTSC format, with the latter being the U.S. standard. There will almost certainly also be region problems with the DVDs when they come out. The latter problem can be defeated by either obtaining a code free DVD player, or by hacking an existing DVD player to circumvent the greedy bastards. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 01:45:50 PM | link THE GRANDADDY OF THE GAME In a followup to yesterday's National Post item about phoney financial statements during the 1990s, we find that it's not just new tech companies and high-risk con jobs like Enron who are at fault, nor can the critics be generally dismissed as "lefty Marxist malcontents." The real granddaddy of this game is GE and last week Bill Gross, a prominent U.S. bond manager, lambasted it for its spotty record on disclosure and the unnatural feat of delivering more than 100 consecutive quarters of profit growth. GE's numbers have been the subject of criticism for years but it's precisely the current environment that could finally shake things up. GE became the best-known master of "earnings management" by drawing each quarter on charges associated with a blistering pace of acquisitions and/or gains or hits at a division in its incomprehensibly complex web of subsidiaries. GE's long-time chief executive Jack Welch is widely considered a corporate genius for his firm's successful growth record but in last week's rant Bill Gross of Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) chastised Mr. Welch and his successor Jeffrey Immelt for being less than forthcoming about how GE has managed to grow earnings steadily at about a 15% rate for the past few decades. "It grows earnings not so much by the brilliance of management or the diversity of their operations ... but through the acquisition of companies," he said. Mr. Gross made his comments in explaining why he was dumping his holdings of GE's short-term debt instruments but he said he hoped others would take up the issue in calling GE and other earnings abusers on the carpet. The sense of outrage after Enron Corp. collapsed in mess of trumped-up accounting and outright fraud is a good thing, he insists, clearly tired of wrestling for "increasingly revealing financial statistics that have had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the bowels of corporate back offices." If the SEC ever launches an investigation of GE's earnings, it could shake up the accounting profession and the role of the chief financial officer much more than Enron's collapse did. Complaints over GE have centred particularly on the ability of GE's huge financing arm, GE Capital, to load up on reserves during good times and hide them in a cookie jar of sorts. Then whenever there is a shortfall at another unit, a few cookies get transferred to smooth over the rough spots. Chuck Hill, director of Thomson/First Call Corp., says GE "needs to become more transparent" with the way it reports results and he singles out GE Capital as a "black hole" of accounting that no one can really understand. "We want to see where the earnings are coming from." GE seems to be listening to Mr. Gross, who is the leading bond manager in the world. On Monday, just days after Mr. Gross's rant, GE said it has changed its ways and will now hold a conference call when it reports its quarter next month. Also breaking with its past, it plans to release a balance sheet as part of the release. Already, earlier this month, GE filed detailed profit and and revenue figures for 26 units, twice what it has filed in recent years. That kind of effort seems to be behind some optimistic words from Alan Greenspan last night. In a speech, the chairman of the U. S. Federal Reserve said corporate behaviour is improving after Enron. Companies with good reputations will be rewarded, he added, and the market is already starting to put a premium on earnings that "appear free of spin." But it's not time to relax, cautions Mr. Gross of PIMCO. "My fear is that this newborn faux hostility in the investment attitudes of lenders and stockholders will go the way of many other short-term jiggles in the inevitable march of capitalistic excess. I sense we are not yet 'mad as hell,' nor are we to the point of 'not taking it any more.' But we should be. It's our money." posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 01:21:14 PM | link NOT TERRIBLY SURPRISING I figured some religious nutbar wasn't too far away from the Yates tragedy. ABC interviews a former member of the cult that sucked in the Yates family. I'm also not at all surprised that Woroniecki, the cult leader, was predating here at Texas A&M. Hell, he's probably still around, although he's gotta stand in line around here to scream at the "hellbound." Religion played a big part in Andrea and Russell Yates' lives, but until now, no one really knew how much it possibly affected them. We've told you the Yates followed a roaming preacher that had six kids with biblical names and that the Yates lived in a bus that they bought from a preacher. A graduate of Texas A&M who was a follower of the same religious cult as the Yates says that cult almost drove him to suicide. David De La Isla/Former Follower: "He would say you're going to hell. You're deluded by Satan. Satan controls everything you do." Today, David De La Isla is a successful salesman, but for twelve years, he followed Woroniecki. He met him on A&M's campus. Russell Yates met him on a college campus, too, and introduced him to Andrea Yates before they were even married. De La Isla says Woroniecki preys on college students. I've known more than a few students who've been dragged into various cults around here over the years and, fortunately, at least one who got out before he was brainwashed for life. Their most insidious tactic, as related by the one who got away, is quietly approaching new and lonely students and offering to be their friends. It starts out with meeting a few other people in the cult, who initially play everything low-key, and ends up with the cult threatening to take away the "friendship" and abandon the victim if they don't straighten up and believe right. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 11:23:30 AM | link DELICIOUS RANT John Scalzi's reply to the critics thereof is every bit as entertaining as was the original rant. A sample of the former: The second complaint I saw, primarily on the Plastic and MetaFilter boards, was that the rant didn't say anything constructive about politics; it was just a litany of complaints. The idea here being that if you're going to bitch about something, then you should offer an alternative. Otherwise, I guess, you're just part of the problem. I think this is a pretty stupid argument, myself. Not every piece of writing needs to be fair and balanced and nice and constructive and useful. Having everything fair and balanced and nice and constructive and useful is boring. People who demand everything is fair and balanced and nice and constructive and useful are boring. I wrote a rant; the purpose of a rant is to spew angrily for several paragraphs. We could have a sit-in here discussing the value of catharsis as a literary device, but since the idea of doing so fills me with an almost crushing sense of ennui, let's not. I don't mind people reading the piece and saying "it's not funny," since funny is one of those subjective things, as amply evidenced by the continued persistence of Martin Lawrence's career. Even saying "it's not good," is fine -- you can't make everyone happy all the time. But complaining that the piece isn't fair or meaningful is really missing the point. You have to be spectacularly beef-witted not to realize that any piece of writing that starts with a declaration that the author hates your politics even though he doesn't know what they are is going to be a generally unfair and unconstructive read. Let a rant be a rant, for God's sake; there's more than enough time for a seminar on political affiliations some other time. I like Scalzi's rhetorical style, especially his marvelous way with invective. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 11:08:23 AM | link THE ROD UP KAREN'S ASS ... ... has a rod up it's ass. The New Republic tells how obsessive the White House, with the chief obsessor and anal control freak being Karen Hughes, has become about even a minor event. The front page of USA Today is a piece of journalistic real estate the White House cares about deeply. With more than 2.3 million readers each weekday, the paper has a reach well beyond the elite dailies of the Cambridge-Manhattan-Washington corridor. Which is why veteran USA Today reporter Larry McQuillan found himself on the phone with the White House for several hours last Thursday. His front-page story that day was about the administration's penchant for secrecy, and he fingered President Bush's senior aide Karen Hughes as the White House's number-one control freak. To illustrate this, McQuillan pointed out a curious development: "White House officials who have been invited to the White House Correspondents' Association [WHCA] black-tie dinner in May say they are required to notify Hughes' office. If an official receives multiple invitations, which is common, she decides which one he or she can accept." As White House aides harangued McQuillan throughout the day, picking apart the piece line by line, another USA Today reporter got a message from an administration official: The Bush aide wouldn't be able to attend the Correspondents' dinner with the paper after all. ... Originally, the 88-year-old dinner served as an opportunity for reporters to get to know, in a more intimate setting, the people they cover. Though the growth and celebrification of the event has long since eclipsed that original purpose, at least the media still controlled things. Until now. Whereas in the past reporters invited their White House sources out for the evening, now the Bush White House decides who eats with whom. In other words, with the WHCA dinner, the Bushies' obsession with control may have reached its absurd climax. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 10:56:52 AM | link WHITEWASH Here's a good 'un. The Washington Post reports that Army Secretary Thomas "Enron" White's trip on a military jet to Colorado, during which the poverty stricken chap sold a house in Aspen for $6.5 million, was actually a top secret trip mandated under a "continuity of operations" plan. No further details can be given, of course, as that would lead to the fall of the commonwealth to the huns. I for one am so relieved that Tommy Boy was bravely protecting me against the evil evildoers of evil rather than using my tax dollars to travel to sell a luxury vacation home. Just when you thought the hubris couldn't get any greater. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 10:42:45 AM | link JUDICIAL WATCH'S ANNUAL REPORT Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch has made an obsessive career out of pursuing Bill Clinton, and even though Clinton has been out of office for well over a year and Klayman has found additional fish to fry in the Bush Cabal, his 2002 State of the Union report almost attempts to blame Bush's ethical problems on Clinton. At a minimum, the President and his advisers have had a "tin ear" for ethics and ethical appearances. His vice president feted donors at the Vice President?s mansion. Access to his cabinet officials was sold by fellow Republicans in Congress. And the whistleblowers, whose heroism during the Clinton years may be the only bright spot in the otherwise sordid story of that era, were treated like pariahs. The President?s Justice Department shut down Chinagate investigations and have not changed any of the legal obstructionists' tactics perfected by former Attorney General Janet Reno's Justice Department. And Judicial Watch was told by a reliable source that the Administration decided early on that it would fight Judicial Watch's legal efforts to finish prosecuting Clinton corruption. The President and Vice President have also refused to turn over records and documents concerning their dealings with Enron, a thoroughly corrupt company that made large contributions to the two major political parties. And now with the Enron scandal, President Bush is reaping the whirlwind. Americans overwhelmingly support his leadership in the war, but almost 70 percent think his administration is hiding something in this latest mega-scandal. Only yesterday the General Accounting Office, following Judicial Watch's lead, threatened to file suit to open up for public scrutiny Vice President Cheney's secret deliberations of his energy task force. Hillary Clinton tried, unsuccessfully, to keep her "Hillary Medical Care Task Force" secret. By far the most entertaining, nay, screamingly funny part of the report is this: Of course there would be political risks for President Bush to take a strong stance on ethics. The Democratic Party may try to go after his family, friends, and appointees with FBI files and by resurrecting old charges of corruption. One wonders if Klayman is indeed pathologically incapable of seeing the obvious parallel. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 10:07:02 AM | link BAD CRIMINALS! EXTEND YOUR KNUCKLES! So what does former Federal Reserve chairman Pual Volcker suggest to do about Arthur Andersen's alleged criminal activities? Dismiss the indictment and replace the old gang leaders with new ones. This has been presented as a last-ditch effort to "save the company." One wonders when such "soft love" practices are going to filter down to the mean streets where the malefactors don't make huge political contributions to those who are supposed to be administering their punishment. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 09:55:51 AM | link FUN TEXAS POLITICS Whether you agree or disagree with them, the political machinations here in Texas are usually one hell of a fun ride. The Houston Chronicle reports on the latest fiasco. Heart of Texas Republicans heaved a sigh of relief Friday with the partial resolution of a scandal of sex, videotape and possible dirty politics in the battle to see who represents the president of the United States in the state House. For almost two weeks, dirty linen and controversy have woven the wicked web that was the GOP primary runoff for state House of Representatives District 56 -- a solidly Republican district that covers northern Waco and areas of rural McLennan County, including President Bush's ranch in Crawford. The scandal's focus was candidate Walt Fair, who won a runoff spot in the March 12 primary. He ran on a family values platform, but his wife, Laura, received a videotape the day before the primary reportedly showing him entering a hotel with another woman. Laura Fair filed for divorce March 13, and Fair publicly admitted marital infidelity. Also in the runoff was primary front-runner Holt Getterman, who repeatedly has denied Fair's accusations that Getterman's campaign made the videotape and delivered it to Laura Fair. We get to another fun part a bit further down the page, where self-proclaimed moral avatar and Jesus and law'n'order candidate Fair finds the real culprit behind his marriage breaking up. Fair told friends the day after the primary that he would drop out of the runoff. A day later, he declared he would continue to challenge Getterman, whom he blamed for the breakup of his marriage. Using this sort of GOP "logic", it was Kenneth Starr's fault that Clinton got a hummer in the Oval Office. You have to fully appreciate what a cloud-cuckoo land Waco and its environs are to fully savor the delicious flavor of this scandal. There aren't many looney-tune offshoots of protestantism that don't have at least a field office in the area. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 09:41:46 AM | link WOMD While the Bush Cabal chants the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" like a mantra to justify current military action and whip up support for future incursions, what are they doing back in the United States of Carlyle? The Miami Herald tells us. The Pentagon and the Energy Department have directed the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories in Livermore, Calif., and Los Alamos, N.M., to compete for the chance to design a hydrogen bomb that could destroy targets underground. To the dismay of arms-control proponents, the Bush administration is advocating such weapons - which would slam into the earth at high speed and then explode underground - as a means of attacking command bunkers or biological and chemical weapons facilities possibly buried in such places as Iraq, Iran or North Korea. But the Cabal is careful to point out that it's only modifying existing weapons. Why? That distinction plays a role in arms-control debates in the post-Cold-War era. Arms-control advocates say designing and building new weapons provokes other nations to follow suit, at a time when the fear of ""rogue state'' nuclear weapons is growing. The Bush White House, like the Clinton administration before it, says it has no plans for new nuclear weapons designs. But critics charge that extensively modifying an existing weapon for a new purpose is equivalent to a new design. Given that there is no operational definition to discriminate between a "new" and a "modified" weapon, the Cabal is making a distinction without a difference, i.e. they're once again blowing smoke up our asses, which has been coming out of our ears for quite a few months now. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 09:30:48 AM | link ANTHRAX BY THE TON! USA Today relates in breathless tones how another evil anthrax lab run by the evil al-Qaeda network was found in another evil cave. U.S. forces uncovered a laboratory near Kandahar, Afghanistan, this weekend that may have been designed to manufacture anthrax, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday. But they burst the thrillseeking bubble in the very next paragraph. There's no evidence that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network produced the biotoxin, officials said. But wait! This was just one in a whole string of such things ... a sort of deadly al-Qaeda McDonald's network! The apparent bioweapons lab was the sixth, and probably most important, al-Qaeda site linked to the possible manufacture of biological weapons, a senior defense official said. Among items found there: an autoclave, a dryer and other pieces of laboratory equipment needed to produce anthrax. OH MY UTTER AND COMPLETE LACK OF GOD!!! An autoclave, a dryer, and OTHER pieces of lab equipment! That's tighter than mathematical proof. But then they bring us down again. The laboratory was apparently under construction and did not have all the equipment necessary to produce anthrax. Also, no trace of any biological agent was found, nor did troops find chemicals necessary to "weaponize" anthrax. And up again. In five other locations in Afghanistan, tests have discovered traces of anthrax and another biotoxin, ricin, Myers said. And down again. But the anthrax traces were so small that they could have been residue of naturally occurring anthrax carried by diseased animals. The faint traces of ricin could have been residue from stores of castor beans, from which the toxin is extracted. There's nothing like bipolar journalism, eh? By the way, according to my Unindicted Co-Conspirator, who recently took THE course in foreign animal diseases at Plum Island, anthrax is very common all over that part of the world. posted by Steven Baum 3/27/2002 09:15:38 AM | link Tuesday, March 26, 2002 STOCK OPTION ACCOUNTING Dean Baker's latest review of the week's economics stories contains the following paragraphs concerning a NYTimes article about the accounting of stock options. Baker consistently does a good job of bringing out the buried or implied inconsistencies in such items. This article reports on the battle between corporations and regulators on the proper accounting of stock options. Government regulators, joined recently by several members of Congress and Alan Greenspan, have urged that stock options be deducted as an expense against profits, at the time they are issued. At several points, this article asserts that such a change in accounting would reduce earnings, especially for high tech stocks that issue large amounts of options. In fact, this accounting cannot change a company's real earnings at all. If investors in financial markets are well informed, as assumed in economic theory, the change in the accounting of stock options will have no effect on these companies whatsoever. The change will only matter if investors do not know how to read financial statements, and are either currently being misled by the failure to report stock options as an expense, or would subsequently be confused by having them listed as an expense. The possibility that investors are as ill-informed as the concern over the accounting of stock options implies suggests that U.S. financial markets are extremely irrational and that stock prices often may not reflect the actual profitability of corporations. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 04:47:36 PM | link SHIVA UPDATE For those who might be wondering, Shiva is now on her fourth day of chemotherapy and seems to be in the 90% of dogs who don't get nasty side effects. Her appetite's down a bit and she sleeps a bit more, but the frisky moments are still there. Thanks to those who've written with gracious and supportive words. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 04:38:08 PM | link SEC BECOMING CORPORATE BITCH So what's the response of the Bush Cabal to the travails of all those who lost everything when Bush pal Kenny Boy's company went under? Are they going to force corporations to be more honest with their financial statements? Fat chance. CFO relates how they're doing just the opposite. The recent re-assignment of a top Securities and Exchange Commission official has some SEC insiders wondering if the Commission is putting a muzzle on its own members. And it seems one lawmaker may have similar questions about the abrupt transfer of former chief accountant Robert Bayless. ... But according to a source close to the SEC, there is now a definite "chill" within the corporation finance division -- a chill that may led to fewer and fewer requests for corporate restatements. Indeed, the source claims the division is facing increased interference from the the accounting office -- which reports directly to the chairman's office. Says the source: "My concern is that what had been the purview of the division of corporation finance will now be vetted through the Commissionís chief accounting office, which tends to be much more constrained by politics." Sources say such constraint can be seen the the case of the Cornell Companies. Apparently, the division of corporation finance (under acting Chief Accountant Craig Olinger) had wanted the correctional facilities operator to restate its third-quarter earnings for 2001. That source claims the chief accountant's office scotched the request -- even though members of the corporation finance division felt Cornell's numbers merited a restatement. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 04:20:03 PM | link WHITEGATE So what's the real scandal involving ex-Enron employee and current Army Secretary Thomas E. White? Is it his use of an Army jet to fly to Colorado to sell a housee? Is it his selling off of his Enron stock after making several calls to Enron brass while Army Secretary? No. According to Mike Hersh, it's something a bit nastier. But we'd better not do anything about it or we'll lose the Forever War. The real story is that White steered long-term contracts to Enron, and since Enron can't perform on the contracts, the taxpayers are out $millions. A Judge Advocate General Officer at the Department of the Army responsible for energy contracts at military bases told my source that Army Secretary White renegotiated several such contracts. White gave contracts to Enron, including those at West Point and other New York State defense establishments. White directed the Army to pay Enron in advance of service, and now Enron will never perform on those contracts. Taxpayers lost $millions when White handed $millions of taxpayer dollars to his former colleagues at Enron for nothing. Worst of all, Enron's bankruptcy created major logistical problems, undermining our national defense. At the very least, we know one of the top defense officials we trust to keep us safe blundered horribly. Bush told us we could trust Army Secretary White to keep us safe. He was wrong. Now we are seeing the contours of a major scandal and the first signs of a cover up -- a credible cover story to glide White off the public stage. The real story concerns the soon-to-be-former Army Secretary's apparent abuses and double-dealing, how it undermined national security, and Bush's own knowledge and responsibility in this scandal. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 04:11:31 PM | link MORE ASHCROFT CONFLICTS OF INTEREST Although John "get thee back, cat o' satan!" Ashcroft did recuse himself from the Enron case, there are a couple of others in which he's still involved and in which, according to Michael Ruppert, his interests are every bit as conflicted if not more so than in the Enron case. Attorney General John Ashcroft's prompt and public recusal from the Enron investigation because of a conflict of interest arising from Enron's donations to his 2000 Senate race has not been matched by a similar recusal in the case of federal grand juries in New York and Washington investigating two additional Ashcroft donors, ExxonMobil and BP Amoco. This, even though ExxonMobil gave more money to Ashcroft's campaign than Enron did. A source familiar with the grand jury investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told FTW that both grand juries are still active and that Ashcroft has quietly moved -- in the wake of last December's departure of Southern New York's U.S. Attorney, Mary Jo White -- to exert control over the New York grand jury from Washington and to exercise 'unusual influence' over the Washington investigations. FTW has also received multiple reports that several high-ranking career prosecutors in both New York and Washington have raised serious objections to Ashcroft's actions and his failure to publicly recuse himself in these cases. So what are the cases about? The web entangles pretty much all the usual suspects, and most likely involves the meetings with oil company officials that Cheney is attempting to keep secret. The two grand juries have been investigating allegations that ExxonMobil, the world's largest corporation, and BP Amoco paid cash bribes to the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and his oil minister, Nurlan Balgymbayev, and that Mobil engaged in an illegal oil swap of Kazakh oil through Iran in 1997. Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force -- now the center of a constitutional battle over the release of its records -- was meeting representatives of both companies after the grand juries had been empanelled as a result of information received from a Middle Eastern source in 1997 and inquiries from Swiss banks in 1999. The fact that these known targets of criminal investigations had access to the vice president's energy task force would be comparable to having allowed Manuel Noriega, while under indictment for drug smuggling, to consult in the war on drugs. At issue is a 25 percent stake purchased by Mobil in Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil field, following an earlier purchase of 50 percent by Chevron and an apparently desperate attempt a year later to start making money from the fields by engaging in an illegal swap with Iran as a means of getting the Tengiz oil to market. Until Sept. 11, there was only one obstacle preventing the oil companies and their related industries from building the necessary pipelines, immune from Russian influence, which would have turned the Central Asian oil into dollars -- the Taliban. American companies with unrequited heavy investments in the region's oil fields included ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP Amoco, Phillips, Total/Fina/ELF, Unocal, Halliburton and Enron. Enron's investment alone, as reported by the Albion Monitor, exceeded $3 billion in a power generating station in Dabhol, India that was floundering in red ink because Enron could not access inexpensive natural gas via a proposed trans-Afghani pipeline from Tajikistan. Enron also had contracts to conduct feasibility studies for the construction of pipelines throughout the region. ExxonMobil's role in the bribery and illegal oil swap, as well as the ensuing federal investigations, was comprehensively documented in a July 2001 New Yorker article entitled The Price of Oil by the venerable Seymour Hersh. Allegations being investigated by the New York grand jury involve felony violations (bribery) of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Washington, D.C. grand jury is investigating evidence that links Mobil to an illegal 1997 swap of Kazakh oil through Iran, which would constitute a felony violation of the 1996 Iran Trade Sanctions Act. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 03:01:34 PM | link A TRILLION GASSED KURDS One talking point never omitted when a Bush Cabal member tries to drum up support for invading Iraq is the supposed murder of 100,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988 with poison gas by Saddam Hussein. An interesting series of letters between Jude Wanniski and various correspondents about the matter can be found at Wanniski's Polyconomics site. While Wanniski is most (in)famous for being one of the chief snake oil salesmen for trickle-down/supply-side economics (and was considered a saint for this by the Gipper), he tends to be a bit more contentious with the GOP on matters of foreign policy. Wanniski's chief correspondent on the matter is Dr. Mohammed Al-Obaidi, an Iraqi expatriate and professor of physiology at a university in the U.K. Al-Obaidi is no fan of Saddam Hussein, who attempted to prevent his departure 17 years ago (when Iraq and Saddam were special friends because they were warring against evil, evil Iran), but he is even less a fan of the crass and baseless propaganda being used to drum up support for invading his home country and installing a puppet regime. Here is Al-Obaidi's take on Saddam Hussein's supposed massacre of 100,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988. What the world should know [is] that Iraq was supplied by the Americans during the Iran/Iraq war with what are called "early warning equipments" that had been used throughout the Iraqi/Iranian borders from the North to the South. These equipments could easily detect any movement of personnel or vehicles on the other side of the border for a long distance. My knowledge is that the Iraqis were not "completely surprised" by the attack of the Iranians, but knew that they have forces several miles away from the border, and that they are preparing to launch an attack from that site. (Halabja is about one mile from the border with Iran, and it is relatively plain area, but surrounded by hills and mountains). A day from the actual attack my brother's regiment was called to rush to the area for that anticipated attack by the Iranians. When his regiment arrived, it was the second day for the attack, (as he had to move from Mosul, which is a bit further in the North, to the Halabja area), and there he saw what has already happened, at a time the Iranians were retreating (probably because of the Iraqi fire power and also their surprise to see what they have done to the Kurds). The issue is also contrary to what Pelletiere mentioned in his book. After the Iranians used the gas and entered into Halabja, the Iranians were surprised by the presence of a reasonably good presence of the Iraqis on the Iraqi side (the Hills surrounding Halabja). Their entry to Halabja gave them the chance to film what they have done there. When they were forced to retreat by the Iraqis, the Iraqis had also filmed what had happened to the Kurds. It fact it was the Iraqi TV who first showed the very first pictures of the atrocities following the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja. Had the Iraqis done what is now believed or alleged they have done, then why did they show those pictures on their own TV immediately after the attack? The gassing story is also contradicted by Nezar Al-Khazraji, who was Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Military Forces in 1988, and who later defected into Jordan. It is additionally denied by current Kurdish leaders Al-Barazani and Al-Talabani. This issue is again confirmed by General Al-Khazraji, who was Chief of Staff of all Iraqi Military Forces supported by confirmations from Al-Barazani and Al-Talabani that he never knew that Iraq had used any kind of gas. In fact, Iraq had no complete facility or equipment to manufacture that gas during 1988. Besides, the symptoms appeared on the victims are consistent with blood-born gas (cyanide), and not mustard gas as alleged that the Iraqis had used. If (when?) Iraq is invaded and a friendly puppet regime installed, look for the massacre story to be resurrected, but next time as a rhetorical club against Iran rather than Iraq. After all, a member of the "axis of evil" wouldn't hesitate to gas every sentinent being in the universe, would it? posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 02:23:00 PM | link TOTAL FAILURE Reactionary firebrand Eric Margolis comments on the Holy War on Drugs. The much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs has proven a total failure in Latin America. The flow of cocaine and heroin into the U.S. has not been reduced, in spite of billions spent to block the flood of narcotics. Ironically, the only nation where the U.S. war on drugs did work was in Afghanistan - thanks to its former Taliban regime. According to the UN drug control agency, the Taliban virtually halted cultivation and trade of heroin-producing opium poppies. Afghanistan supplied 80% of Europe's heroin and about 60% of America's. The American invasion and overthrow of the Taliban handed power to the Russian-backed Northern Alliance, which fully revived the heroin trade and now controls 90% of drug exports. In Afghanistan, Bush's so-called war against terrorism collided head-on with his war against drugs. The latter lost. The Northern Alliance, the real power behind the U.S.-installed Karzai regime in Kabul, pays its fighters and buys its arms from the Russians with heroin money. The U.S. simply turned a blind eye to large-scale drug dealing by its new Afghan allies, just as it did in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America and, for years, Mexico. The White House is now under increasing pressure to increase the $1 billion in U.S. aid to Colombia and switch from assisting a campaign against coca producers to all-out combat operations against FARC and ELN guerrillas. The Colombian government's inept 136,000-man army has been unable to defeat the FARC's and ELF's roughly 20,000 Marxist guerrillas, so the U.S. is now being asked by Bogota for combat troops and fleets of helicopters. An expanded war in Colombia would quickly spill over into Ecuador, Peru and possibly into Panama and Venezuela, all economically stressed and politically shaky nations. While Margolis mentions the "Marxist" FARC and ELN, he apparently forgot to list the paramilitary AUC, perpetrator of most of the violence and purveyor of most of the drugs in recent years, according to even the U.S. Department of State, which finally realized it was losing even the little credibility it had left by blaming everything on the FARC and ELN. Margolis stops obsessing about Marxists just long enough to finish the column on an entertaining note. The 19th century American cynic, Ambrose Bierce, observed that Americans learn their geography from wars. Six months before becoming president, George Bush couldn't name the leader of Pakistan - whom he today hails as a champion of democracy and America's new best friend. This weekend, the non-geographic president will begin to discover the complexities of long-neglected Latin America. He will no doubt discover the continent is rich in new "terrorists," as the Lima bombing amply demonstrated. Terrorists in Peru and Colombia. Plotting Cubans. Islamic fanatics in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, the West Bank and Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Central Asia, Chechnya, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Egypt and Paraguay. America's enemies are everywhere. Even in Detroit and Brooklyn. Bush says he will defend America by fighting them all. But, as Frederick the Great rightly noted, "He who defends everything, defends nothing." posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 02:02:36 PM | link MORE REAL GENIUS FROM THE MILITARY/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX The Daily Telegraph tells of a slight problem with the new Apache attack helicopter. Basically, if it fires its own missiles it stands a good chance of shooting itself down. So does anyone know how much of Westland is owned by, say, the Carlyle Group? THE Army's new Apache attack helicopter cannot fire its Hellfire anti-tank missiles for fear that debris ejected on launching could cause catastrophic damage. The problem is confirmed by a Ministry of Defence document leaked to The Telegraph. The MoD was unable to say how much damage could be caused. It was working with the makers to solve the problem, officials said. But defence sources said there were serious concerns that the debris could damage the main or tail rotors, causing the helicopter to crash. The Army is buying 67 Apache helicopters at a cost of at least £27 million each. They are being built in Britain by Westland under licence from the US manufacturers Boeing. The US has restricted its Apache helicopters to firing missiles only during wartime and to launching them only from the right-hand side of the aircraft to try to ensure that the debris does not hit the tail rotor which is on the left-hand side. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 01:49:44 PM | link REAL PROFITS? David Thomas, the investing editor for the not terribly liberal National Post, wonders if the profit boom of the 90s was real. This should be an interesting series, offering details on what was illegal, immoral and/or fattening, as well as what, if anything, was real. A bear market and the collapse of Enron Corp. have given regulators an added push to clean up creative accounting in corporate earnings. How bad did things get? So bad the profit boom of the late '90s may well have been a mirage. Today, the Financial Post begins a week-long report on how we got into this mess and how to fix it. It's not just the crooks at Enron Corp. that have been misleading their investors by dressing up earnings statements with mojo accounting; it's an epidemic. More and more companies have been pulling essential costs of doing business out of their earnings numbers and burying them under various "extraordinary" categories in their reports. Presto, the result is a new bottom line with improved profits and a record of investor-friendly growth that lends support to the firm's stock. The Enron link shouldn't be overplayed since its rogue managers used earnings tricks to disguise an outright fraud while most practitioners of so-called "pro forma" reporting have been engaged in the perfectly legal practice of earnings management. But while the practice may be legal and there may not be a deliberate attempt to deceive investors, the sad truth is that earnings just aren't what they used to be. "For the average shareholder, [pro forma] numbers can represent a welter of confusing and potentially conflicting signals about how their investments are performing," offers Robert Reid, the head of Independent Equity Research in Toronto. That's a balanced view from a veteran stock analyst. Investors who have had their pockets picked during the tech bubble are likely to be less polite. Recent estimates have pegged the combined losses of the top 100 Nasdaq firms in the first three quarters of last year at US$82-billion. This while the same firms reported profit of US$20-billion. Now that's earnings abuse. Charles Ponzi would have undoubtedly have approved," Bill Gross, managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO), the biggest bond player in the world, quipped wryly to clients last week. We didn't need Enron's spectacular US$60-billion flameout in Houston to learn we had a problem; the issue was already shaping up as a regulatory priority. Enron simply turned up the heat so we can get things cleaned up faster. In a week-long Earnings Abuse series starting today, the Financial Post reports on how we got into this mess and what needs to be done to clean it up. At the centre of the report -- today through Friday -- investing writer Steve Maich delves into the filings of four of Canada's leading blue chips. We picked the firms not because they are the most flagrant earnings abusers but because each allows us to draw attention to a different kind practice that has left investors with either a misleading or incomplete picture of performance. We also picked them because each is a stock that most Canadian investors are likely to hold. ... So how did we get into this mess? There is always a period of reckoning in a bear market, as participants wrestle with the questions of what went wrong during the previous bull and who's to blame. When any bull market tide retreats, it tends to leave a lot of garbage on the beach and the trumped-up earnings report looks to be the one thing market beachcombers are picking over most. Firms have always had a measure of core or operating earnings they could report, which may often differ dramatically from their net-income bottom line. The biggies include discontinued operations and genuine extraordinary writedowns, including acquisitions and the sale of real estate. Those are defined by Canadian and U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). But GAAP has an elastic definition of operating earnings and, as a result, firms have been customizing their own reports for years. In the late 1990s, things got out of control. Firms found ways to inflate revenue, booking swapped ads as real sales or recording an online purchase as a full sale even if the online firm is only entitled to a small transaction fee. On the profit side, earnings were boosted by investment gains and grossly distorted when firms capitalized on big tax savings on stock options, but then didn't account for the cost of options compensation in their pro-forma earnings. Looking back, the whole profit boom of the '90s looks as though it might have been a mirage, mourns Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage Hoenig & Co. He estimated recently most of the 26% growth in operating earnings for firms on the Standard & Poor's 500 composite index between 1997 and 2000 was directly due to accounting hocus pocus. "I don't believe that the earnings growth in the late 1990s was there." Somewhere along the way, the art of earnings reporting changed from earnings per share (EPS) to everything before bad stuff (EBBS). Now we're coming full circle and investors want to see real earnings again -- or else. posted by Steven Baum 3/26/2002 01:38:05 PM | link Monday, March 25, 2002 CORRECTION I was so relieved at someone having apparently relieved me from performing a fairly tedious task that I completely failed to check the details. As a couple of people have already pointed out, the sea level rise inundation map put out by the Matrix Institute is real nutbar stuff, with the most obvious big problem being the very large islands off the east and west coasts of the U.S. While there are many sites offering good information on such things, the Matrix Institute isn't one of them. Geez, now I'm gonna have to make a correct one. Don't wait up late for it, though. posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 01:02:23 PM | link TRAINOR TIRES OF RUMSFELD Even retired Marine lieutenant general Bernard F. Trainor is getting tired of Rumsfeld's high-handed, "how dare you question the emperor!" bullshit. The Pentagon is playing a shell game. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tells us what he wants us to hear. At press conferences he adroitly sidesteps or patronizingly discounts honest questions from journalists and discounts conflicting reports from the field. When asked about enemy losses, we are told that ''we don't do body counts,'' an allusion to inflated claims of Vietcong losses in the Vietnam War. But, surely, Mr. Secretary, somebody in the Pentagon keeps a scorecard on enemy losses, and in this war it is one of the few ways to measure success. Despite the marvels of modern day television, the American people have little knowledge of what is actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan. Secrecy was understandable in the early days of our intervention when Special Forces were clandestinely working with the Northern Alliance. But now that conventional Army soldiers are openly engaged in the ground fighting, the American public deserves more than ambiguous briefings dispensed at the Pentagon. It is time for the country to get a verifiable accounting of our progress. posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 11:29:51 AM | link PALAST ON THE IMF Gregory Palast is interviewed about what he's learned from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and leaked IMF/World Bank documents. GP: We are exposing that they are systematically tearing nations apart, whether it's Ecuador or Argentina. The problem is some of these bad ideas are drifting back into the U.S. In other words, they have run out of places to bleed. And the problem is, this is the chief economist, this is not some minor guy. By the way, a couple of months ago, after he was fired, he was given the Nobel Prize in Economics. So he is no fool. He told me, he went into countries where they were talking about privatizing and selling off these assets. And basically, they knew, they literally knew and turned the other way when it was understood that leaders of these countries and the chief ministers would salt away hundreds of millions of dollars. AJ: But it's not even privatization. They just steal it from the people and hand it over to the IMF/World Bank. GP: They hand it over, generally to the cronies, like Citibank was very big and grabbed half the Argentine banks. You've got British Petroleum grabbing pipelines in Ecuador. I mentioned Enron grabbing water systems all over the place. And the problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. I mean it is not just a question of the theft. You can't turn on the tap. It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense. AJ: And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now. That's been in the Chicago Tribune. GP:Well the problem that we have is - look, the IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury. So the question becomes, what are we getting for the money that we put into there? And it looks like we are getting mayhem in several nations. Indonesia is in flames. He was telling me, the Chief Economist, Stiglitz, was telling me that he started questioning what was happening. You know, everywhere we go, every country we end up meddling in, we destroy their economy and they end up in flames. And he was saying that he questioned this and he got fired for it. But he was saying that they even kind of plan in the riots. They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, you are going to get riots in the streets. And they say, well that's the IMF riot. In other words, because you have riot, you lose. All the capital runs away from your country and that gives the opportunity for the IMF to then add more conditions. ... AJ: Go back into privatization. Go through these four points. That's the key. It sends billions to politicians to hand everything over. GP: Yea, he called it briberization, which is you sell off the water company and that's worth, over ten years, let's say that that's worth about 5 billion bucks, ten percent of that is 500 million, you can figure out how it works. I actually spoke to a Senator from Argentina two weeks ago. I got him on camera. He said that after he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron, that's our current president. He said that what he found was really creepy was that Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world's price for their gas and he said how can you make such an offer? And he was told, not by George W. but by a partner in the deal, well if we only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. And that's how it's done. AJ: This is the .... GP: I've got the film. This guy is very conservative. He knows the Bush family very well. And he was public works administrator in Argentina and he said, yea, I got this call. I asked him, I said, from George W. Bush. He said, yea, November 1988, the guy called him up and said give a pipeline to Enron. Now this is the same George W. Bush who said he didn't get to know Ken Lay until 1994. So, you know..... posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 11:20:54 AM | link ANOTHER DIRTY LITTLE WAR Cheryl Seal comments on a fun time not being had by all in Indonesia. What she doesn't realize is that under the rules of the Bush Cabal's Forever War, the Aceh people are now "terrorists", i.e. eligible for additional bombing etc. via officially supplied U.S. weapons and troops. Their only hope now is to cobble together some uniforms so the ones who are captured rather than killed will at least be granted POW status. EXXONMOBIL'S LIQUID NATURAL gas (LNG) production facility (PT Arun) in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia (an area known as Lhokseumawe in the district of North Aceh) was originally owned by Mobil Oil Indonesia. The first thing the company did back in the 1960s as soon as it had identified the rich LNG reserves in the forests and cut a deal with the Indonesian state fuel company Pertamina, was to seize a huge tract of land and summarily displace all of the resident natives. It is a scenario that has repeated itself following countless oil/gas discoveries in the past, from Oklahoma to Africa. However, to Mobil?s dismay, the Aceh people were committed to throwing off domination by exploitive foreign interests and the corrupt Suharto government that was so eager to aid the exploitation. In response to the Aceh resistance, the military, acting on behalf of Mobil, beat down the opposition with a brutal fist. For example, when a handful of Achel rebels tried to sabotage a gas pipeline in 1977, the military systematically killed an estimated 900 natives. When the Aceh freedom movement GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) was officially launched in 1980, Aceh was promptly placed under military occupation. From the start, Mobil (and now ExxonMobil), has supported and condoned the military's atrocities. Many such crimes have, in fact, been committed on the company's own land, by "security officers" on the company?s payroll. Mobil built two military barracks for the elite security division the Indonesian military sent them to protect the LNG facility.: Post 13 and Camp Rancong. According to eyewitness reports recounted to human rights investigators, Post 13 was on at least one occasion used as a torture/interrogation facility. Since 1980, hundreds of Aceh natives have been murdered and/or tortured or have disappeared. An estimated 15,000-20,000 children have been orphaned during this same period as a direct result of Mobil's "protective forces." The company's operation of the LNG facility has taken a direct toll on the quality of human life and the integrity of the environment. The company repeatedly contaminated the crucial rice paddies or shrimp farms the villagers relied on for food. Not once did the company offer fair compensation for these transgressions. In fact, in 1992, when the village of Pu?uk sued the company for contamination of its land, Mobil marched out its high-powered battery of lawyers and (surprise, surprise!) defeated the poor villagers. In 1997, 1,600 villagers were displaced when LNG wells erupted, dumping tons of contaminated mud on their homes. In another case, four villagers sued the company for seizing their land without adequate compensation and for taking over a village cemetery for use as an airstrip for PT Arun. Of course, once again, the villagers lost their case. The list of egregious violations (the same terminology recently applied to Exxon by a lawyer in Alabama when the company recently lost a $3.4 billion fraud case) of human rights and environmental ethics perpetrated by Mobil, Exxon, and ExxonMobil is astounding. This is supposed to be an American company?Hell, this is supposed to be the 20th/21st century! posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 10:50:26 AM | link KILLER TEXTBOOKS While a big deal is being made of schools reopening in Afghanistan with the assistance of U.S.-supplied textbooks and materials, I've not seen much mention of the last time the U.S. supplied textbooks in Afghanistan. MSNBC describes the previous Afghan education experience. In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. THE PRIMERS, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code. As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence. Now who was it who was sentenced to death for "corrupting the young"? posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 10:24:05 AM | link WHITEWATER ORIGINS Robert Parry offers a case that the first Bush administration instigated what was to become the 8-year, $73 million Whitewater etc. investigations as a failed dirty trick before the 1992 presidential election. The federal Whitewater investigation originated in the summer of 1992 when a Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) investigator named Jean Lewis wrote was is called a "criminal referral" on Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which was owned by James McDougal, the partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater real estate deal. Lewis, a self-described conservative Republican, listed the Clintons as possible witnesses in the Madison case. Lewis pushed hard for the FBI to pursue the matter, but the FBI and local Republican U.S. attorney Charles Banks decided that no investigation would be started until after the November election. Banks suspected that someone wanted to provoke an investigation to boost President Bush's now obviously rapidly vanishing chance of reelection by attempting to embarass his opponent. The recently released final report on the Whitewater investigation - an investigation run by Republican partisan Robert Ray - puts it this way: "Banks thought the reason for the push (to investigate) was the high-profile witnesses named - the Clintons in particular - and the RTC was angling for an overt investigation before the imminent presidential election because the inquiry would become public." Banks rejected a pre-election investigation even after then-President Bush nominated him for a federal judgeship in August 1992. The existence of the criminal referral was somehow leaked to the Bush administration before Banks officially forwarded it to D.C. According to the Whitewater final report: Not long after the referral arrived in Little Rock - and some weeks before (Banks' office) officially notified officials at Main Justice of its existence - high-level Bush administration officials heard rumors about the referral from other sources. One of these officials was Attorney General William Barr, who has testified that Edie Holiday, Bush's secretary to the Cabinet, told him about it on Sept. 17, 1992. After learning of the referral, Barr began making discreet inquiries. He even launched an internal review within the Justice Department searching for a possible criminal case naming Clinton. He was eventually led to Banks who, when contacted by Barr, concluded that he was under pressure from the Bush administration to launch a formal investigation that would mention the Clintons. Edie Holiday denied leaking the information to Barr in a deposition given in 1995. She changed this story in 2001 in a letter to the Whitewater prosecutors in which she claimed that she probably had mentioned the Clinton relationship with Madison Savings & Loan, but it was merely in a "casual, social conversation" after which she found herself "coincidentally" seated next to Barr on Air Force One. But, she claimed, she made no mention of a criminal referral - which, by the way, would be completely within the scope of her duties even if she had - because she had no knowledge of such a referral. Whether Holiday imparted the information deliberately, accidentally or inadvertently via smoke signals, body language, telegraph, a xeroxed copy of the referral, or however she chooses to describe it this week, Banks became sufficiently fed up with the subsequent flurry of messages from the Bush administration demanding further details that he sent a memo refusing to do so on October 16. According to Parry, Banks' response was: "There is absolutely no factual basis to suggest criminal activity on the part of any of the individuals listed as witnesses in the referral," Banks said in a teletype. Banks also wrote a letter saying that "neither I personally nor this office will participate in any phase of such an investigation "prior to Nov. 3, 1992." He added that he considered the referral an attempt to influence the election and that to do so would be "prosecutorial misconduct." Meanwhile, another Bush aide found out about the referral and began making inquiries. White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, according to the final Whitewater report, contacted Albert Casey, then the chairman of the Resolution Trust Corporation (the agency that oversaw failed savings and loans), and asked him about the referral's status. While Casey was still checking out the referral, he recalls getting another call from Gray asking him to forget about the earlier inquiry. When questioned by Whitewater investigators, Gray, like Edie Holiday, claimed that he might have mentioned the referral in passing while talking about the weather and sports at a dinner party, and that he probably heard about the referral from some journalist. So, given all this, who did the Whitewater prosecutors go after for supposedly evil deeds? They started investigating Republican stalwart Banks for "possibly obstructing justice" when he refused to cough up the referral before election day. And what about the conflicting stories of Gray and Holiday, whose stories contradict the testimony of others who acted upon information received from them, i.e. actions that are a matter of public record? The final report has nothing to say on the matter, although it contains more than a few passages of almost scathing skepticism when assessing conflicting testimony involving target Clinton and other witnesses. In other words, instead of investigating a politically motivated and possibly illegal criminal investigation of the Clintons by the not at all disinterested Bush administration, the Whitewater prosecutors were authorized only to investigate "whether before or after the 1992 election of President Clinton, any action that had the effect of delaying or impeding the investigation could raise the question of whether anyone in the Department of Justice unlawfully obstructed the investigation." In other words, the entire Whitewater investigation originated with the Republican-dominated Whitewater prosecutorial apparatus going after anyone - even Republicans - who may have impeded and frustrated a Bush administration dirty tricks operation. It got their foot in the door, which remained open for 8 years and over $70 million. posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 10:15:51 AM | link TEXAS A&M FOLLIES This university is once again engaging in the sort of actions that will cause it to be perceived as the polar opposite of the "world-class university" it so desperately wants to be. The current university president announced his resignation about a year ago, which started a search for candidates for his successor. (On a side note, this is the same president who promised to resign immediately if the university were to be found at all at fault for the bonfire collapse and death of 12 students. It was. He didn't.) The head of the Board of Regents made it known almost immediately that his choice was none other than Phil Gramm, to whose campaigns the former had shoveled tons of money. There are also three or four other members of the Board who've contributed heavily to Gramm over the years. The Board appointed a search committee of 30 people (e.g., professors, administrators, community leaders, the student body president). This board screened quite a few candidate to arrive at what were called the 12 most qualified, among which was Gramm. Last week they announced the three recommended finalists, none of whom were Gramm. So that was it, or so most of us assumed. A few days later the Board of Regents announced that all the work of screening and interviewing candidates performed by the Search Committee was apparently nothing much more than an entertainment performed for the Board's amusement. Saying that the three were not "finalists" because that was too technical a term, Deputy Chancellor Dr. Jerry Gaston said the three candidates whose names were released Tuesday are people the search committee is "interested in." Gaston and several members of the search committee would not confirm or deny rumors of two additional unnamed candidates waiting in the wings. Anyone care to guess who one of the "mystery" candidates might be? Hint: rhymes with "sham." posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 09:24:18 AM | link OSCAR HISTORY Liam Lacey of the Globe and Mail offers some interesting history of the Oscars (via Progressive Review). Back in 1926, when Louis B. Mayer conceived of the Oscars -- to ward off the attacks of morality groups and stall the unionization movement of the industry by creating the academy as a kind of company union -- the awards were an afterthought. In the mid-1930s, as breakaway actor, writer and director unions formed, the academy was rightfully regarded as the enemy -- a stooge organization for producers' interests. Manipulation was constant. There's no doubt awards were determined by block studio voting and horse-trading for prizes. In the Second World War, the timidity and clannishness of the academy also led to one of the most destructive decisions the academy ever made: the failure to give the 25-year-old East Coast theatre wunderkind, Orson Welles, credit for his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, derailing the career of one of the real geniuses of American filmmaking. Television, in 1952, had a cleansing effect, allowing the academy to be freer of the studios' financial strings. TV was also a tremendous threat to movie audiences and the academy's response can be seen in the two very different kinds of films that the fifties honoured: the too-expensive-for-television blockbusters such as Around the World in 80 Days, Ben-Hur or The Greatest Show on Earth; or the too-smart-for-television black-and-white dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire, All About Eve and Marty. In many respects the Oscars still honour those two extremes of commercial filmmaking, as can be seen in this year's nominees -- Lord of the Rings versus In the Bedroom. If the academy was then out of studio control, it was under a darker shadow. The House Un-American Activities Committee left its stain on the movies and the overcomplicit academy. In High Noon (1952), we have screenwriter Carl Foreman's version of himself in Gary Cooper's lonely lawman, victimized by the bullies and left unprotected by the cowardly. In On the Waterfront (1954), we have Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, ostracized for talking to the committee, finding a fictional surrogate in the character of the noble rat. In the generational and racial polarization of the late 1960s, the academy became increasingly irrelevant, honouring family-oriented musicals more than the new kinds of films coming in from Europe, and barely recognizing the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick. Right-winger host Bob Hope was finally dropped from the show and academy president Gregory Peck's attempts at reform ushered in the most confusing, volatile and exciting decade of the Oscars. The decade that represented a renaissance in American filmmaking also represented its wildest Oscar era. George C. Scott's rejection of his Patton Oscar started the ball rolling. Then there was: Jane Fonda's Black Panther salute in 1970; Marlon Brando's use of the fake native spokeswoman to protest the treatment of Native Americans; the streaker waving a peace sign in 1974 and, four years later, pro-Palestinian actress Vanessa Redgrave's "Zionist hoodlums" commentabout protesters outside the theatre when she won for Julia. posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 09:14:05 AM | link MORE ON THE HOLY WAR Michael Manville gives us a simply delicious article about the corrupt, warped, bizarre and self-defeating Holy War on Drugs. ... In 1982, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration set up Sonia Atala, one of Bolivia's most powerful cocaine traffickers, in a sting operation. She was lured onto U.S. soil, arrested, and then--to the DEA's astonishment--moved immediately into the witness protection program, because she was a CIA asset. She was eventually allowed to return to Bolivia, with all her American property holdings intact. It should be noted that during this time, from 1980-83, Bolivia was producing 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. The nation's ascendancy as a narco-state had begun in 1980, during the bloody "cocaine coup" engineered by Klaus Barbie (a Nazi war criminal and another CIA asset), Argentine secret agents, and a military officer named Luis Arce Gomez (a graduate of the US Army's School of the Americas). Gomez seized control of the government and then abetted the narcotics trade with Barbie's help, and the help of the murderous paramilitary forces under Barbie's control. Contrast that charming tale with the story of Oklahoma computer company owner Will Foster, who used marijuana to treat his rheumatoid arthritis. He was arrested for having 70 marijuana plants on his property and sentenced to 93 years in prison. A parole board twice granted him parole, but despite the nonviolent nature of his crime, and despite the healthy amount of evidence regarding marijuana's effectiveness as a painkiller (it is endorsed by, among other sources, the New England Journal of Medicine) Oklahoma's governor vetoed the decision both times. Foster remains in jail. It is hard to imagine a more asinine approach to public policy. But this very approach will likely continue, thanks to a seam in the national awareness that has opened up and swallowed most of the CIA's role in moving narcotics. There simply isn't room in this article to fully detail the Agency's past with drug running. It began as early as 1947, the first year of the CIA's existence, when the fledgling agency pumped money to the heroin-running Corsican Mafia, which was battling Communist union workers for control of Sicily's docks. It continued in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Agency worked with mobsters like Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante (the latter of whom controlled both a cocaine route from Colombia to South Florida, and an opium route that ravaged US servicemen in Southeast Asia). It helped install Bolivia's narco-government. It assisted the heroin running warlords of Central Asia. And it funded the Nicaraguan Contras. ... The War on Drugs is a mirage; the closer you get to it, the more you understand that it was never there at all. The United States mediates, far more than it fights, the $400 billion international traffic in illegal narcotics. Almost all of the CIA's covert wars have been enmeshed, to some degree, with the drug trade, and it is our very illegalization of drugs that have made them such a useful tool for funding the more violent and sordid aspects of our foreign policy. This in turn makes our foreign policy dependent on what our domestic policy abhors, and reduces drug enforcement within our borders to little more than a reactionary exercise against the byproduct of what we do overseas. If it sounds confusing, that's because it is. If it sounds ridiculous, it isn't. It might be, but lives are laid to waste every day by such grandiose ambivalence. posted by Steven Baum 3/25/2002 09:12:53 AM | link

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