The creditors committee in Enron's bankruptcy case filed an objection Tuesday to company executives' efforts to access $30 million in liability insurance to pay mounting legal bills.
Company lawyers, acting on behalf of former Chairman Ken Lay, former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling, former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and others, will ask U.S. bankruptcy judge Arthur Gonzalez today for permission to tap a $445 million pool of insurance funds.
The creditors joined the long list of those objecting because they want that money to pay their claims.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Rules limiting media ownership are rapidly disappearing. If they are allowed to vanish, the nation's news landscape will change dramatically — and not for the better.
Last week's appeals court decision relaxing the limits on television and cable-system ownership is only the first step. This could well be the beginning of a trend in which local newspapers and radio stations are merged with local television stations, consolidating the gathering and distribution of news in most American cities.
The ruling ordered the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its limits on the number of TV stations any one network can own, and it struck down the F.C.C.'s rule prohibiting cable companies from owning TV stations in markets where they operate. Given the terse language of the opinion, and a 1996 law that requires the F.C.C. to review its rules every two years and "repeal or modify any regulation it deems not to be in the public interest," it's likely there will be further reductions, or even the elimination, of limits on ownership. In 1999 the F.C.C. gave networks permission to own two stations in the same city, and not surprisingly the result has been a wave of acquisitions.
Debate rages in state Senate over patriotism bill
Saturday, February 09, 2002 - Denver- Democrats accused Republicans of campaign shenanigans Friday after GOP Sen. John Andrews tried and failed to force a floor vote on a bill that would require public schools to teach patriotism.
The Senate Education Committee took testimony Thursday on Andrews' Senate Bill 136, then postponed a vote until next week after raising questions about how patriotism would be graded and whether teaching patriotism would even be proper.
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee killed another bill by Andrews that would have required students to recite the pledge of allegiance in public schools, after he tried and failed in a procedural move to force a floor vote on that issue.
Superfund’s kryptonite: lobbyists: When big business screws up, you pay the tab
AUSTIN, Texas -- "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today."
-- Theodore Roosevelt.
It's hard to think how this could be any clearer: The headlines are "Bush Proposing Policy Changes on Toxic Sites: Taxpayers Would Bear Most Cleanup Costs." "Bush to Shift Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers."
Katherine Seelye of The New York Times reports the Superfund was founded in 1980 under the slogan, "The polluter pays." Industry was to clean up its own messes, and special corporate taxes were used to fund clean-ups at "orphan sites, where the responsible party could not be identified or could not pay. The taxes were reauthorized under President Ronald Reagan and again under Mr. Bush's father. They expired in 1995, and while President Bill Clinton sought to have them reinstated, the House of Representatives, by then under Republican control, refused."
If Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft "continue to be recalcitrant, I hope everyone on this committee will support me in getting the House to move this forward," Burton said.
Thomas White, the former Enron vice chairman appointed by George W. Bush to be Secretary of the Army, should resign immediately. The case against White is self-evident. Touted as "one of the most outstanding managers in corporate America" by Enron's favorite senator, Phil Gramm, he was named Army Secretary, promising to bring "sound business practices" to the Pentagon. But White's entire business experience was at Enron, where he participated directly in the lies and mismanagement that resulted in its bankruptcy and the betrayal of investors and employees. Enron's business practices generally, and White's in particular, are the last thing that should be inflicted upon the Department of the Army.
Before being named Army Secretary, White was vice chairman of a venture called Enron Energy Services from 1998 through May 2001. He was paid $5.5 million in salary and bonuses in his last year alone and walked off with stock and options valued at about $50 million and homes in Naples, Florida, and Aspen, Colorado, worth more than $5 million apiece.
PRESIDENT BUSH and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld have been indignantly protesting in recent days that the administration would never deliberately distort the truth in reporting to the public, as a new Pentagon propaganda office was proposing to do. Yet the explanations Mr. Rumsfeld and his senior commanders have been offering about the deaths of innocent people during American raids in Afghanistan have been riddled with misstatements, contradictions and denials of the obvious. They seem, if not deliberately false, then driven by an arrogant refusal to own up to truth when it happens to be embarrassing.
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