Britain is bypassing its own arms embargo on Israel by selling military equipment via America.
In a move that has split the Cabinet, the Foreign Office is set to reveal that components for F16 fighter planes will be allowed to leave the country despite being destined for aircraft already sold to Ariel Sharon's government.
The move will be viewed with dismay by Arab states and anti-arms campaigners who say the arming of Israel raises tension in the area. One senior Government figure said there was a 'clear understanding' the fighter planes could be used for aggressive acts against the Occupied Territories, in direct contradiction to Tony Blair's call for peace.
Israel regularly uses F16s for assaults on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They have been used in attacks on Rafah and the Palestinian securty compound in Nablus, killing civilians.
Government sources admitted the issue was 'delicate' and that rules on sales to embargoed countries via third countries were vague. One said the charge of hypocrisy would be 'difficult to head off'.
Saturday, July 06, 2002
Experienced money managers are puzzled by the stock market's untypical behavior. Normally, stock prices rise in anticipation of recovery and profits from Fed easing. This time it did not happen. Months into the recovery, it still has not happened.
Investors Business Daily, the Los Angeles financial newspaper that studies the market, noted last week that the stock market is usually led by newer issues, "stocks that have come public in the last eight years" and that bring "new products, new services, new technologies and new ways of doing business."
One problem is the dearth of initial public offerings. For the past 18 months, initial public offereings (IPOs) have been averaging eight per month. When entrepreneurs are afoot, IPOs run eight per week or per day.
Where are the entrepreneurs? What is holding them back? Are they deserting the United States because of class-action lawsuits, high taxes, regulatory restrictions and global considerations? Are entrepreneurs stymied by the anti-business climate attributed to accounting scandals?
The Fed's magic has not worked. Policymakers should focus on finding a way to give incentivizes to entrepreneurs.
The missing stock market recovery could turn out to be a bigger crisis than terrorism for the Bush administration. Bridgewater Associates points out that foreign investors are heavily overweighted with U.S. assets at a time when financing the massive U.S. trade deficit requires about 75 percent of the capital exports of the entire world.
In recent months, the dollar's value has fallen. The new European currency has risen about 10 percent against the U.S. dollar. Even the Japanese yen has risen against the dollar. Why should foreigners remain heavily invested in nonperforming U.S. assets when the dollar is also declining, thus magnifying their losses?
WASHINGTON – Anne Sumers, the Democrat vying for retiring House Rep. Marge Roukema's seat in New Jersey, boasts a unique qualification: As a teenager, she spent several years living in Afghani-stan, where her father worked for the University of Kabul.
So in the days following Sept. 11, Ms. Sumers posted a message on a website for Americans in Afghanistan, expressing horror at the attacks but also decrying the dangers of "jingoistic 'patriotism'" in the US. That was all it took for her opponent, Republican Scott Garrett, to label her "radical" and "anti-American."
The charges may not stick – Sumers's campaign organizers say her comments were taken out of context, and the local media have largely ignored them – but she's hardly the only candidate whose love of country has been challenged in this election cycle.
Indeed, in the latest example of how the war on terror is insinuating itself into the political landscape, questions of patriotism are cropping up in a number of races. Challengers are pointedly scrutinizing incumbents' past votes on red-white-and-blue matters from defense spending to flag burning, accusing their opponents of being "antimilitary" or failing to protect their country.
While patriotism has always been a backdrop of political campaigns, analysts say that in the wake of Sept. 11 it has become a theme in its own right – and more potent grounds for attack.
DALLAS -- Mark Anthony Stroman was an easy case. A white supremacist, in the days after Sept. 11 he walked into a succession of convenience stores in the Dallas area and killed a clerk from Pakistan and another from India, and he partially blinded a third from Bangladesh.
Tried, convicted and sentenced to death, Stroman voices no remorse. He recalls telling each of his victims, "God bless America."
As the incidence of hate crimes against suspected Middle Easterners subsides, authorities are beginning to prosecute cases growing out of more than 420 investigations nationwide. Although some offenders show no regret, many others are expressing embarrassment over their hostile acts in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Joe Montez drew two years' probation for telephoning a truck stop in Hewitt, Texas, on Sept. 17. After asking whether the clerks were Iranians, he said, "There's a bomb where you're standing.... There's a bomb in your building."
Montez knows he should have controlled his Sept. 11 anger. "I made a mistake," he said in an interview. "I'm trying to put all that behind me."
The threats and retaliations have come in many forms: a call left on the voicemail of the president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. An anthrax hoax letter that turned up at an Arab American restaurant in Madison, Wis. Physical attacks, arson, hate messages on the Internet.
AMERICA is as wide open to terrorist attack today as it was on September 11 despite billions of dollars spent on heightened security and the establishment of an entirely new government department tasked with defending the American homeland.
Security experts and political opponents say a combination of bureaucratic inertia, poor government oversight and inter-agency rivalry has neutered efforts to date and that the Bush administration is guilty of posturing in its commitment to defending the country. They say all the real money and effort is being spent overseas on a war against terrorism that is producing questionable results.
The attack by a lone gunman at Los Angeles airport on the July 4 holiday shocked the nation, but after copious warnings that much worse might have happened Americans heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Such relief is misplaced, according to one investigation of civil defence in the city thought most likely to be al-Qaeda’s prime target, Washington DC. Despite being given $54m to prepare against biological terrorism the city is not even close to a coherent bio-warfare strategy according to the investigation’s secret report seen by Scotland on Sunday.
A number of flaws in disaster planning were exposed but the most damning of all, the report says, is that among all the agencies involved in civil defence none knew which was in charge. The investigators say this is a pattern being repeated across the country at local and national level.
Well-documented failures by the FBI to listen to warnings from their own agents about potential terrorists taking flying lessons at US flight schools pre-September 11 were mirrored by failures in the CIA and the National Security Agency to interpret properly overseas intelligence that might have prevented the attacks.
Acknowledgement of such failure has not led to a dramatic change in efficiency at either agency, despite public vows to co-operate with each other and to end the fratricidal war of a thousand leaks by which each discredited the other .
Short-term efforts at defending the country have been disturbingly ineffective. A recent study showed that in surprise visits to 32 major airports, federal inspectors were able to sneak fake guns, bombs and other weapons past security screeners on average 24% of the time. A professor of Middle Eastern studies who volunteered in the week after September 11 to assist the FBI’s understaffed Arabic language section has yet to be processed by the agency’s bureaucracy.
Colin Powell, the beleaguered Secretary of State, has delivered an angry riposte to the Pentagon hardliners responsible for his recent string of policy defeats - insisting to allies that he "won't let those bastards drive me out".
Colin Powell: does not intend to quit before the next presidential election
Despite his frustration at President Bush's tendency to side with Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, on issues ranging from the Middle East to the International Criminal Court, Gen Powell is making it clear that he does not intend to quit before the next presidential election.
"He won't resign because to do so would be tantamount to admitting defeat," said a senior Washington official. "He would only go earlier if he thought he had lost the president's confidence and there is no sign of that. He thinks it is better to carry on and have some influence from inside the administration than to leave and have none."
Gen Powell's blunt observations, which are being discreetly and deliberately circulated in Washington by senior State Department officials, are the first clear sign that he acknowledges the damaging criticisms he has taken from a combination of Mr Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, and Dick Cheney, the vice-president.
Friends of Gen Powell say that he is buoyed by his personal popularity rating, which he reaches for "like a comfort blanket" as proof that he is still in step with most American voters. He also receives strong support from his combative deputy, Richard Armitage, a former navy Seal who, like his boss, saw extensive military action in Vietnam.
The two men are said to share a contempt for the Pentagon's civilian chiefs, despite a superficial cordiality in public. "They are combat-hardened and that affects their outlook," said one official. "There's no love lost on either side."
SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt said he was "mad as hell" last week in the wake of WorldCom's (WCOME, news, msgs) stunning admission that it hid $3.8 billion in expenses to inflate its reported profit. Well, so am I, and so are plenty of other people I know. It's time for some accountability -- which means some prison sentences for high-level corporate wrongdoers.
Before I return to the subject of retribution, let's review the investment perspective for a moment.
I hope no one is even thinking of buying WorldCom stock at six cents, or wherever it's trading on the increasingly rare occasions it does trade. As I wrote in this column on April 23, "readers of this column have been amply warned about WorldCom, a company I have distrusted for some time." I recommended selling when the stock sank below $5 a share. The only kind thing I had to say was that "WorldCom, you might argue, is still earning a profit." That, of course, we now know to be a blatant falsehood. Former Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers is gone -- good riddance -- but Bert Roberts inexplicably remains as chairman. In my view, WorldCom deserves the bankruptcy filing that seems all but inevitable, and its top executives deserve far worse. I'm sorry for the many thousands of innocent investors (including me) who lost money in this stock.
By the way, if you felt sorry for Arthur Andersen after its recent conviction for obstruction of justice in the Enron (ENRNQ, news, msgs) case, then perhaps you believe its recent protests that it knew nothing of WorldCom's egregious accounting fraud, even though it audited that company's books, too. Top Andersen executives still have plenty of explaining to do, perhaps in court.
PATRIOTISM IS a funny thing. It can be used to justify almost anything. Timothy McVeigh believed he was a patriot. He was a terrorist who murdered 168 innocents. Senator Joseph McCarthy believed he was a patriot. He was a censorious demagogue who ruined the livelihoods and reputations of hundreds. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a patriot. Enough said.
As countless others have observed, some of the most ardent flag-wavers are those who violate the Constitution in the name of protecting it. Take Attorney General John Ashcroft, for instance, who arrogantly opined during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December that "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty" merely "aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Or the United States Congress, whose members thoughtlessly passed the USA Patriot Act, which tramples on the First and Fourth Amendments.
A true patriot would keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances, and not allow them to rest till the causes of their just complaints are removed. —Sam Adams of the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence, Boston, Massachusetts, 1771
Right after John Ashcroft revived the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover (its headquarters, after all, is named after him), The Bill of Rights defense committee of Northampton, Massachusetts (Voice, July 2), reacted by recalling Hoover's disgraced COINTELPRO program, which serially abused the Bill of Rights:
"In the 1970s, the Senate banned COINTELPRO because of its unconstitutional character. The FBI had invaded privacy in order to disrupt lawful political activity. . . . By banning COINTELPRO, Congress declared illegal what was obviously unconstitutional. It was a major step forward for democracy in this country.
"Now Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Bush . . . have unilaterally placed in jeopardy the right to organize peacefully and legally, [putting] our communities at risk. Who is sitting next to us at city council, church, peace, or ACLU meetings? And what will that mean to the outcome of that meeting or to our individual security?"
Europe’s crumbling faith in U.S. political and financial institutions – starting with the installation of George W. Bush as president after Election 2000 through the latest corporate-accounting scandals – is sending shivers through a U.S. economy that has grown dependent on $1.2 billion a day in capital from overseas. This withdrawal of foreign investment now is threatening to choke off a U.S. economic recovery.
We're going to hear this Independence Day about how America has never been stronger.
The trouble is, it's not true.
The business scandals that couldn't get worse after Enron did get worse with WorldCom. The scandals that were supposedly the work of "a few bad apples," to use President Bush's phrase, instead turned out to be so pervasive that daily revelations of wrongdoing have become the norm.
If a foreign power had inflicted this damage on the U.S. economy - hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars in nest eggs wrecked, entire regional economies pulverized - it would have been seen as an act of war deserving the most severe retribution.
Instead, the damage is the work of our homegrown business elite - the best paid fifth column in history.
T hese are hard times for God, country and the flag. The red-white-and-blue fever that erupted after September 11 is giving way to another great American impulse: political dissent. The Bush administration's continued efforts to rally the populace behind its never-ending "war on terror" can't overcome the rising tide of cynicism brought on by the FBI and CIA's bungling of 9/11 warnings, global warming, the Middle East mess, and Bush's hollow condemnation of WorldCom, whose stunningly creative accounting -- along with the chicanery of Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing (and even our tarnished Martha Stewart) -- this administration's laxity helped to flourish.
Even during wartime -- when protest, we all know, is a terrible, terrible threat to national security -- some whippersnappers have commenced to troublemaking. Take the students at Ohio State University, who weren't at all pleased by the selection of President George W. Bush as their commencement speaker. (The students' first choice -- not Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky, but Tom Hanks -- was unavailable.) A group of students created a website called "Turn Your Back on Bush," which encouraged graduating seniors to stand up and turn their backs in silent protest during the president's speech. The students were urged to "stay silent" and "maintain an air of dignity and an environment of respect for everyone."
Accounts vary as to what happened that day, but it seems that of 6,000 graduates and 55,000 spectators, only four grads and 10 others actually stood and did the about-face while the the commander-in-chief (and Yale's most famous "C" student) gave a speech that touched on baseball, the heroes of Sept. 11, and volunteerism. Other potential back-turners were likely dissuaded by Vice President of Student Affairs Richard Hollingsworth, who warned that those who turned their backs would be arrested and denied diplomas. Reportedly, 10 students were escorted out of the stadium by police and Secret Service; one man, carrying a 3-year-old child, was charged with disturbing the peace (the charges were later dropped).
Hollingsworth was barraged by critical e-mails, and the organizers are considering filing a lawsuit against the university for violating its First Amendment rights.
It's time for more than merely waving the flag, singing patriotic songs and proclaiming one's love of country. To be a patriot in this day and age is to wake up and look around, with clarity and discernment. To be a patriot is to take personal action - to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, to live more simply, to elect true public servants. To be a patriot is to allocate our resources wisely and to live out our highest values as individuals and as a nation.
We can create the lives we want for our children and ourselves. We can create a nation that lives up to the ideals of our Founding Fathers. But it's up to us - individually and collectively.
For if we are not now willing to undertake the challenging tasks at hand, there will ultimately be little need for the symbolic gestures now so fully in vogue.
Lost in the cacophony of military music, flying the red, white and blue and the patriotic rhetoric that marked the celebration of Independence Day and surrounds the war on terrorism is democracy's most wonderful and critical aspect: the right to dissent.
Since Sept. 11, it's as if we've been terrified, not only by the terrorists, but also by an American government that demands silent acquiescence to whatever it proposes to do as part of its vague and thus far ineffective "war on terrorism.
"Americans are lazy," says Bernhard. "They don't want to look at the larger picture. They don't have a concept of how the world interacts with America or how the world interacts with itself. That makes it easier for them to be denigrating to the rest of the world because it makes them feel safer. It's a little scary to be in a country so detached from reality and so ready to buy into the propaganda that the enemy is out there lurking, ready to attack us again."
According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, on four separate occasions Gov. George W. Bush disregarded federal statutes by failing to file insider stock trade reports on a timely basis, back-dating one trade by some four months. Moreover, one key trade just a few weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait -- but reported some eight months late after the Gulf War was over -- netted Bush close to $1 million in profit as he sold stock in Harken Energy, an oil company doing business in the Middle East wherein some of his father's largest contributors also maintained substantial positions.
The SEC under President Bush carried out an incomplete investigation of the younger Bush's pre-Gulf War trade in 1991 after key presidential advisor George Jr. claimed that he filed a report, but that the SEC had most likely lost it. (No one has really asked whether the governor bothered to use registered mail to verify receipt of the documents.)
According to an Oct. 28, 1991, Time Magazine report, SEC spokesman John Heine said, "as far as I know, nobody ever found the 'lost' filing." And, strangely, Bush refused comment to Time regarding either the incident or his involvement with Harken.
The governor also did not reveal the blatant conflicts of interest involved, since the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breedon, former lawyer with Houston firm Baker and Botts and deputy counsel to Bush's father when he was vice president. Breedon received his SEC appointment after the elder Bush became president.
The SEC investigation of George W. was led by general counsel James R. Doty who, according to a UPI report, mysteriously neglected to interview any of the Harken directors. Moreover, Doty had previously served as George W. Bush's personal lawyer in the deal involving his Texas Rangers purchase. So, in the end, the younger Bush was cleared of insider trade wrongdoing by his personal attorney and by his father's vice-presidential counsel, a virtual impossibility for the average U.S. citizen.
That the mainstream media has refused to question Bush regarding what voters might consider a mockery of the criminal investigative process is a story in and of itself -- especially considering it concerns how a possible future president might enforce U.S. laws if he had also broken those statutes.
This is exciting. Will Dick Cheney keel over from his fifth heart attack before he becomes the first veep since Spiro Agnew to resign in the face of charges of financial crookery? Or will Bush fire him to divert attention from his own scummy past? n Over the weekend President Dumbo poked his head above the rubble of the WorldCom scandal and made a stand: "No violation of the public’s trust will be tolerated... Executives who commit fraud will face financial penalties and, when they are guilty of criminal wrongdoing, they will face jail time."
Sunday morning brought more ringing pledges to protect the public weal: "If anybody violates the law, we go after them," SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told Sam Donaldson on ABC’s This Week. In an earlier incarnation Pitt was one of the guys who successfully lobbied the SEC to make it easier for Arthur Andersen and the other big accounting firms to cook the books on behalf of Enron, MCI/WorldCom and others. Bush, flush with campaign contributions from Enron and MCI/WorldCom ($100,000 last summer), duly signaled his gratitude by putting Pitt in charge of the SEC, where he put the agency in snooze mode amid a ripening cloud of scandal involving the biggest names in corporate America.
But even Pitt couldn’t choke off the investigation into Halliburton, one of the largest oil service companies in the world, headed until July 2000 by Cheney, who was the company’s CEO. The SEC is probing whether Halliburton reported more than $100 million of disputed costs on big oil contracts as revenues so that it could prop up its profits while negotiating a merger with a rival. These accounting shenanigans took place in 1998 on Cheney’s watch, and yes, the accounting firm was Arthur Andersen. Noting Bush’s promise that CEOs who have mismanaged their companies in some fraudulent way will "have to pay," Donaldson asked Pitt, "Will that be the case in Halliburton if you find wrongdoing under Mr. Cheney’s reign?" Quivering with integrity, Pitt bravely declared, "I head an independent regulatory agency. We don’t give anyone a pass."
What else could he say? Up till now the Halliburton scandal has been rumbling along, just under the radar. But now it’s nearing Critical Mass. It may not be long, too, before Dick Cheney announces that on doctor’s orders, and the better to deal with these outrageous accusations of chicanery, he’s stepping down, which is–if you believe friends of Tom Ridge in Philadelphia–what Cheney was planning to do before 9/11, making way for the former Pennsylvania governor.
Of course, anyone with a memory longer than the day before yesterday would have doubled over with laughter at the spectacle of Bush calling for jail time for corporate crooks. Remember Spectrum? Back in 1986 George W. Bush’s oil company, Spectrum, was about to go belly up, until kind friends folded it into Harken Energy. Various accounts, including the Daily Enron site (www.dailyenron.com), narrate that, from being on the threshold of the debtors’ prison, Bush suddenly had $500,000 worth of Harken stock, an $80,000-a-year salary and a stock option arrangement that allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40 percent below market value. Bush made more than a million off Harken, even though the company itself lost a ton of money.
Sound familiar? Here’s more, culled from the Daily Enron site. Bush also borrowed $180,375 from the company–a loan that was later "forgiven," in accordance with Christ’s instructions on the subject of sinners. (In 1989 and 1990 alone–according to the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing–Harken’s board "forgave" $341,000 in loans to its executives.)
Sure, this is old stuff, just like Whitewater. Now it’s spring 1990. Iraq is menacing Kuwait and thereby casting a shadow over Harken Energy’s only pending contract, a drilling project in Bahrain. Harken’s Smith Barney financial advisers have just issued a bleak assessment of the company’s position and future. Harken sets up a "restructuring board" and Bush is on it. In June 1990, claiming ignorance of Harken’s desperate plight and the Smith Barney report, Bush sells his 212,140 shares of Harken Energy, banking $848,560.
The sale falls under the SEC’s insider stock sale rule requiring almost immediate formal notice, but Bush does not report the sale until seven months later. At the time the SEC is headed by George H.W. Bush’s appointee, Richard Breeden. W sold his Harken stock less than 30 days after his father’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, sent the President a secret memo warning that hostilities between Iraq and Kuwait were likely.
As Daily Enron asks, "Did dad share this information with his son? If so, W. Bush traded on ‘non-public’ information of an extraordinary nature indeed."
Sure enough, two months after W made his killing, the shit hit the fan in the Gulf, and Harken’s shares went south, losing 25 percent of their value the day Saddam sent his troops into Kuwait. If Bush hadn’t bailed out he’d have lost nearly $250,000. And they talk about this man restoring "trust" in the White House?
BETHLEHEM | President Bush and his followers are searching for a strategy to gloss over the miasma of corruption engulfing some large American corporations. The Republicans are acutely aware that their see-no-evil alliance with the business community could hurt them in this year's Congressional campaign. Thus far, carefully constructed Republican talking points promote the fairy tale notion that a handful of irresponsible or criminal malefactors in the business community are responsible for these corporate transgressions.
This is a soothing apothegm to reassure the GOP during a time when each day reveals another alarming corporate rip-off. Thus far, WorldCom, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Tyco, Adelphia, Xerox, ImClone, Dynegy and Qwest have been caught. Instead of attributing these debacles to a free market run amok under the approving gaze of a Republican Congress and President, we are lectured that they should be seen as nothing more than the aberrant antics of rogue CEOs who perhaps may have gone temporarily insane. Anyone accepting this vapid cover story probably also believed Mrs. Ken Lay, when she announced on ''The Today Show'' that the collapse of Enron had created ''personal hardship'' for her family. The CEOs responsible for these financial scandals are not experiencing any adverse monetary consequences, which is more than can be said for the thousands of hapless employees and shareholders whose lives have been decimated by their legerdemain.
Business excesses during the 1920s led to the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression that ensued. During the 1920s, the American people elected three Republicans to the White House, each one of whom governed with the acquiescence of a sympathetic Republican Congress. The government stood down while business hucksters sold worthless stock and manipulated markets. President Coolidge, not known for having uttered many memorable phrases, once said: ''the business of America is business.'' Decades later, the GOP still adheres to the Coolidge philosophy.
As a Texas oilman, President Bush engaged in some of the same kinds of business practices he's now promising to clean up in response to a wave of corporate scandals.
Bush was a board member of Harken Energy Corp. in 1989 when the company engaged in a transaction that later prompted an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC forced the company to amend its books to reflect millions of dollars in losses that had been masked by the sale of a subsidiary to a group of insiders. And Bush, who was on the company's audit committee, was the subject of a separate insider stock trade investigation by the SEC.
More than a decade later, the SEC is investigating insider deals and questionable bookkeeping at Enron, WorldCom and other companies, and Bush is promising to crack down on corporate wrongdoers.
Questions about Bush's past business practices prompted the White House to acknowledge Wednesday that he had failed to promptly disclose the 1990 sale of his Harken stock as required by federal law. The notice of the sale was filed with the SEC 34 weeks after it took place.
A spokesman blamed it on a clerical mistake by company lawyers. Bush has said previously that he filed the disclosure form and government regulators lost it.
Bush's stock sale was the subject of an SEC insider trading investigation. The president sold Harken stock for $848,000 two months before the company reported millions of dollars in losses. The stock price plunged from $4 when Bush sold it in June 1990 to a dollar a share by year-end.
Bush had gotten the stock when Harken bought his failing oil company in the mid-1980s. The SEC took no action in the insider trading probe of Bush.
Democrats have made Bush's dealings at Harken a political issue over the years, and it resurfaced in recent days because of Bush's promises to deal harshly with corporate wrongdoers in the wake of the latest corporate scandal, at WorldCom.
"It's time this CEO, President Bush, took responsibility for his actions as a private businessman and as president of the United States," Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said Wednesday. He said the Bush administration has "given the green light to unscrupulous CEOs by helping to foster a business environment that says 'if it feels good, do it.'"
George W. Bush is so peeved about corporate America's "wrongdoers" — not to be confused with "evildoers" — that last week he spoke out about them four times in four days. By the time he took a breather, the markets had hit their worst half-year finish since 1970, the Nasdaq was at a five-year low, the dollar was on the skids and, despite much evidence to the contrary, a majority of Americans had told CNN/USA Today pollsters that the country was in a recession.
On Tuesday the president returns to the subject in a full-dress speech on Wall Street. Maybe it's time to try pinning the whole mess on Ann Richards again.
Mr. Bush keeps saying all the right things. He is "deeply concerned." He will "hold people accountable." But words, like stocks, lose value when nothing backs them up. It is now more than six months since the president promised "a lot of government inquiry into Enron." Since then, Playboy has done a better job of exposing the women of Enron than the Bush administration has done at exposing its men. Just as the Justice Department rounded up some 1,000 alleged Sept. 11 suspects and failed to indict a single one of them for terrorist activity, so it has made a big show of its shaky Andersen conviction while failing to indict a single Enron executive or individual Andersen accountant. (Not that all the law-enforcement news is downbeat: last month John Ashcroft's minions held a press conference to boast that a 13-month investigation had led to the arrest of 12 prostitutes in New Orleans.)
The sight of a corporate crook being led away in handcuffs, Giuliani-style, would do far more to restore confidence in Wall Street than any more presidential blather. Mr. Bush says that only "a few bad actors" are at fault. Why is the administration so lax about bringing them to justice?
LOOK WHAT'S come back to bite President Bush. A stock deal that looked very much like insider trading, and that netted the future president $848,560 when it took place in 1990, is suddenly in the news -- again.
It has never hurt him in the past. It has come up in one campaign after another, and voters just never got excited about something as arcane as insider trading. It never had any traction. With the economy booming, it just never looked like an issue.
But it sure does now.
Twelve years ago, before he got into politics, George W. Bush was sitting on the board of directors of a company called Harken Energy -- a post he got largely through the magic of his name -- and after receiving memos warning that big trouble was brewing, he unloaded a large chunk of stocks just weeks before the share price tanked. If he was acting on the basis of information not available to the public, he was breaking the law.
Mr. Bush waited eight months past the deadline before filing the required documents. This week he blamed his lawyers for the delay. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the deal, but closed the case without taking any action.
The president has been very stern recently about bad actors in the corporate world -- and in the past year there have been plenty of them. He has proposed a new set of standards for business that would tighten the rules on audits and hold executives more accountable when things go wrong. That's fine, a skeptic might point out: He already got his.
As a young businessman, Mr. Bush ran an oil company that went deep into the financial mire, and it would have expired if he hadn't been bailed out, several times, by his father's friends. Finally, his firm was taken over by Harken, and he was rewarded with a consulting contract, $300,000 worth of stock and a seat on the board.
He was a member of Harken's audit committee, but he says that despite the memos he was given he had no idea that financial problems were threatening the company. If he had known, he says, he never would have sold all that stock in June 1990.
Interestingly, Mr. Bush said he had to sell his Harken stake to pay back money he had borrowed when he became a partner in the Texas Rangers. As a partner he was essentially a local figurehead. But again there's that magic name. When he later sold his Rangers share, it brought him $18 million.
In other words: He parlayed a failing company into stock in another company that he bailed out of just before it, too, began to fail; he used the proceeds to support his minimal investment in a baseball team that he eventually cashed in for $18 million. Where do we get in line for that kind of work?
None of this before ever stuck to him. But Americans are starting to get a better feel for just how rancid the system can be. Pals, connections, inside dope, duplicity and political pull characterize an unsavory corner of the business world -- and the president was very much a part of it. The SEC's chief during the time it was investigating him had been a friend of his father, and the agency's general counsel, James R. Doty, had been the lawyer who arranged the sale of the Rangers to Mr. Bush's partnership in 1989. It's only the suckers who get taken.
Friday, July 05, 2002
According to David Gergen (1999), the 2000 election was about raw political power. He termed it a hinge point in history. The last time the GOP controlled the White House and the Congress was when "Ike" was in charge and he didn't want to rock the boat. "Conservatives have very different ideas in mind if they can grab the helm now." What Gergen and other members of the media didn't mention to the American people is that if the Far Right could control the White House and Congress, they could also control the judiciary and the fate and face of America for generations to come.
And grab the helm they did, not by winning the White House by a majority, but by Supreme Court fiat ( with at least two judges violating several statutes of Title 28 Sec. 455 of the Judicial and Judiciary Procedure). Even with the legitimacy of the Bush presidency in question, the Conservatives -- those with the Far Right agenda -- grabbed the raw political power that Gergen predicted would be the outcome of that election. The abuse of power in the guise of pushing an agenda which the majority of the electorate voted against would now become a perverted rule of law. The Far Right transformed into the Far Reich. We need only to look at Bush's nominations and appointments to fully appreciate this tactic. Corporate America's cronies were placed in every powerful position within the Bush administration. From Alcoa's O'Neil as Secretary of Treasury to Enron's White as the Secretary of Army, this administration represents Totalitarian Corporatism. And what precisely does Totalitarian Corporatism look like and how does this play out in the United States? Will the outcomes be any different for America than they were for Germany?
When most people hear the word "fascism" they think of racism and anti-Semitism, the hallmarks of the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But do not forget there is an economic policy component of fascism known as "corporatism," an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism (DiLorenzo 1994). This is why corporate leaders played key roles in financing Hitler as Chancellor and George W. Bush's run for the White House. Corporate heads from the United States, England and Germany financed Hitler's rise to power. These same powerful worldwide forces from the Military-Industrial Complex, Oil, Energy, and Media spent millions of dollars to influence the American 2000 election. And when the election could not be bought, they used five members of the United States Supreme Court to stop the Florida vote, thereby giving election "victory" to the eldest son of George Herbert Walker Bush. Now why was this election so important to the Far Right forces? And having gained the White House, what -- besides greed and power -- motivates them to change the face of America? Why would a political party supposedly dedicated to "states' rights" use the Supreme Court to usurp those rights? Why would a political party with slogans such as "get the government off our backs" move to take over the government and all its vast financial resources? There is only one explanation. Totalitarian corporate industrial policy. From the Department of Energy to the Departments of Justice and Defense, the Bush administration has worked to establish policies that do not serve the interests of the people, but serve the interests of rich and powerful corporations.
"Totalitarianism is a form of government in which all societal resources are monopolized by the state in an effort to penetrate and control all aspects of public and private life, through the state's use of propaganda, terror, and technology. Totalitarian ideologies reject the existing society as corrupt, immoral, and beyond reform. They project an alternative society in which these wrongs are to be redressed, and provide plans and programs for realizing the alternative order." http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html
What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people... And it became always wider... the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway ... Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about ...and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated ... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us... Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'... must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. ...Each act... is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone... you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' ...But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. ...You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father... could never have imagined."
Source: They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
Thursday, July 04, 2002
July 3, 2002 | HEBRON, West Bank -- A pile of rubble is all that's left of the symbol of the Palestinian Authority's presence in this divided biblical city. The "Muqata," as the massive British Mandate-era police fort was known, towered over large parts of the city for almost three-quarters of a century. The Israeli army says it blew up the hilltop complex over the weekend because it had information that 15 wanted militants were holed up inside. But after several days of searching through the debris no bodies have turned up, and Palestinians say it was just an excuse to demolish yet another symbol of P.A. control.
"The Muqata to us was what the Pentagon is to Washington, the World Trade Center towers to New York," proclaims Abbas Zaki, in an unabashed bid for Western sympathy. Zaki is a local leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and a member of the Legislative Council, the Palestinian parliament. Under curfew in his house on the edge of the city, he believes, like most Palestinians, that the Israeli demolition of the security and administrative headquarters is part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's longstanding plan to dismantle the P.A. and depose Yasser Arafat -- a plan he charges is now backed by the U.S. "We know that Sharon has wanted this for a long time; now Bush has also said it."
Outside the Bush and Sharon administrations and pro-Likud commentators in the U.S. media like William Safire, it is almost impossible to find anyone who can detect in last week's major Middle East address by President Bush an effort to actually come to grips with the conflict. Instead, both moderate Israelis and Palestinians regard it as yet another attempt by the Bush team to avoid having to deal with the situation. In fact, by setting out the preconditions for a peace process the way he did, Bush has assured that they will never be met. What was needed was not yet another plan, but immediate steps that would have led to a breaking of the deadlock. Bush called for a change in the Palestinian leadership, but the reality is that in the Middle East right now neither side has leaders that are regarded as ideal peacemakers. Yet they are the ones who have to be dealt with.
The successful regime change in Afghanistan, it would seem, has gone to the administration's head. But Palestinians make it clear that no Karzai can be imposed on them.
July 2, 2002 | WASHINGTON -- After the shock of two more multibillion-dollar corporate fraud cases last week, WorldCom and Xerox, President George W. Bush has taken up the mantle of corporate responsibility. "Corporate leaders who violate the public's trust should never be given that trust again," he told listeners to his radio address on Saturday.
But even to the most objective observer, this pitch, from this White House, is one tough sell.
Although Bush evaded most of the political fallout from the Enron debacle despite his adminstration's close ties to that company, the growing scandal of corporate irresponsibility is threatening to engulf the business-friendly White House. And with every move Bush makes to respond, his own corporate past, and that of Vice President Dick Cheney, the former Halliburton CEO, may well come back to haunt him.
Bush is planning a big address on the issue, complete with proposals for reform, for July 9. He already put forward a 10-point proposal for corporate reform back in March. But these very moves could help remind Americans of the corners Bush and Cheney cut during their days in the executive suites of corporate America.
June 29, 2002—Ray Berry recently wrote a letter in his BushToons, where he spoke of seeing a documentary on the '50s called "Duck and Cover," about the Cold War and nuclear war scare. He went on to suggest that it had built into those of us who were kids then a sort of hard-wiring acceptance of a black-and- white view of the universe, where We are always the Good Guys, and They are always the Bad Guys.
The problem is, of course, that the real world doesn't work that way, that it's all shades of gray.
Now, I have viewed the last 20-odd years as the GOP pushing this world-view as hard as it can. There was serious trouble for them by the time of the '92 elections, because The Evil Empire had fallen, and they had no real Bad Guys to be against. With what they tried through the '90s, we saw the first shots fired, when in the Bush-Dukakis debate, Bush Sr. "accused" Dukakis of being a "card-carrying liberal," as though he was accusing him of being a communist.
Obviously, it worked to some degree, but not far enough for them, since they lost the '96 presidential elections, as well.
With the advent of 9/11, they finally had everything they wanted back again: an Evil Empire (militant Islamics), consisting of, and run by, people who didn't look like us (assuming that "us" referred to Caucasians), who wanted to destroy us. Better still, unlike the Soviets, who were also a legitimate nation-state which could be destroyed economically, this was more of a Vietnam-style conflict, where the enemy could move, regroup, and attack again ("they won't stand up and fight like a man!" . . . didn't the British say that, in some little colonial conflict a couple hundred years ago?).
This is literally almost the scenario of Orwell's 1984, except that there is, at least for the moment, only one superpower fighting an eternal war.
Consider this phraseology, now: "fighting an eternal war against Evil." Ring a bell? Is this not exactly a return to the Crusades of the Middle Ages?
[Dear Readers: This article was first published in December of 2001, in the wake of 9/11, when the grim outlines of police-state-like tactics were first starting to appear on the American horizon. It might be useful to compare and contrast—whoops, it turns out there isn't much to contrast—between then and now. Doing so may help us understand the forces we're facing and how to respond as Bush&Co. continue their move toward a more militarist society. At appropriate points, I've added [[in italics inside double brackets]] some observations from our contemporary situation. Reading the article this way might serve as a reminder that those of us warning then of the due-process dangers ahead faced epithets like "paranoid" and "conspiracists"—much like those today who are connecting the dots that take us from Bush&Co.'s pre-9/11 knowledge and the administration's manipulation of a frightened Congress and citizenry that have followed.—BW, July 4, 2002]
First, they came for the terrorists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a terrorist.
Then they came for the foreigners, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a foreigner.
Then they came for the Arab-Americans, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't Arab-American.
Then they came for the radical dissenters, and I didn't speak up, because I was just an ordinary troubled citizen.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
—Adapted from Pastor Niemoller's 1945 quote about the Nazis
June 29, 2002—The following is an open letter in response to an editorial that I read in the Washington Post, written by Dennis Pluchinsky, a senior intelligence analyst with the Diplomatic Security Service in the US Department of State.
Dear Mr. Pluchinsky:
In the middle of June 2002 you wrote an editorial that was published widely on the Internet, and in many major newspapers. You began by accusing the media in the United States of treason. By the end of that article you softened your approach, and simply accused the news media and academicians of lacking common sense. You are qualified to tell us this, you assert, because you are a threat analyst for the US government, who possesses, "the imagination of Walt Disney, the patience of a kindergarten teacher, the mind-set of a chess player, the resolve of a Boston Red Sox fan, the mental acuity of a river boat gambler, and the forecasting ability of a successful stock market analyst."
I am less capable of such broad self-promotion. I am but an Internet commentator who has an understanding of law, the Constitution of the United States, and American history. You have had your say. Now, I would like to have mine.
You may be surprised to hear that I agree that the US press is irresponsible, and often lacks common sense. But that is the beginning and the end of our agreement. While you claim that the press reports too much, allowing potential terrorists to understand our weaknesses, the failures of our infrastructure, and our lapses in security, I argue that they fail to inform us enough. You argue that the press should inform the government, and not the people, whereby they may be issued gold stars to display as patriotic American journals. By extension you claim that it is better for the people to simply trust their government to deal with its own lapses and failures, leaving both the public and foreign enemies ignorant.
In an open society, terrorists are as capable, on their own, of identifying lapses in infrastructure and security as any beat reporter. Unless you advocate the closure of our society, as I hope you do not, because we would then resemble the defunct Soviet Union or Red China, the problem will always exist.
Wednesday, July 03, 2002
WASHINGTON –– The White House acknowledged Wednesday that when he was a corporate director, President Bush failed to promptly disclose stock sales as required by federal law. A spokesman blamed it on a "clerical mistake" by company lawyers, though Bush has said government regulators lost it.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush had followed the law by informing regulators of his intention to sell stock in Harken Energy Corp., a Texas oil company, in 1990. But he conceded that because of a "mix-up, a clerical mistake" by Harken lawyers, Bush had not promptly reported the sale after it took place.
Reacting to a wave of corporate accounting scandals in recent weeks, Bush has proposed that top company leaders be required to promptly disclose their sales or purchases of company stock for personal gain. The law already says company insiders must disclose publicly, by the 10th day of the month following the transaction, a sale or purchase of stock in their companies. The report is known as a Form 4.
Nine months after the expertly coordinated terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed more than 3,000 people and tore the heart out of New York City, the Bush administration appears to pose a greater threat to civil liberties and domestic programs than it does to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
After all, bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda lieutenants are believed to be holed up in the lawless Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, under the protection of Pashtun warlords who answer to neither the Pakistan army nor US Special Forces. Meanwhile, James Ridgeway of the Village Voice notes that right-wing lawyers supplied to the Bush administration by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation are seizing the initiative to rewrite rules to provide local police with sweeping federal authority, push the military and CIA directly into everyday domestic politics, and sanction indefinite detention without a charge or court hearing, even for US citizens.
Bush's Justice Department arrogantly argues that its decisions to lock up prisoners indefinitely should not be subject to judicial review. In the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, the US-born man captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan and now held incommunicado at a Navy brig in Norfolk, the Bush administration argues that those declared enemy combatants in the war on terrorism have no right to counsel and can be held indefinitely, even if they are US citizens.
Don't look for help from US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who told federal judges meeting in Williamsburg, Va., June 14, the courts are inclined to bend the law in the government's favor during hostilities. "In time of war, the laws are silent," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. He cited as examples President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the right to habeas corpus during the Civil War as well as the Supreme Court's willingness to uphold the internment of Japanese Americans and the secret military trial of eight Nazi saboteurs during World War II. Of course, in those cases, the US actually was in a state of war, a status that is lacking in the current actions against Al-Qaeda and other allied groups.
Everybody praised this fine speech. Prime Minister A. lauded the style, President B. commended the fabric, Sheik C. admired the collar. And I saw only a naked emperor.
Everynody knew, of course, that it was a stupid speech, perhaps the most silly ever uttered by an American president. But who will confront the leader of the world's sole superpower? Who will bring upon himself the wrath of a man that possesses such frightening power, while voicing such inanities?
A 12-year old would have been ashamed of presenting such a composition to his teacher. The assumptions are baseless, the general picture resembles a caricature, the conclusions are ridiculous and the parts contradict each other.
It is nearly 10 months since September 11, and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked and humane response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the "war on terrorism" - when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them.
The fanatics who attacked America came mostly from Saudi Arabia, the spiritual home of al-Qaeda and the tutors of the Taliban, but no bombs fell on that oil-rich American protectorate. According to an American study, 5000 civilians were bombed to death in stricken, impoverished Afghanistan, where not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught, or to anyone's knowledge, killed. Osama bin Laden got clean away, as did the Taliban ruler Mullah Omah.
After this "victory", hundreds of prisoners, including the Australian David Hicks, were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced. In the United States, more than 1000 people of Muslim background have "disappeared"; none has been charged. Legislation undermining the Bill of Rights has been rushed through Congress. For example, the FBI now has the power to go into libraries and find out who is reading what.
Meanwhile, the British and Australian governments made fools of their soldiers by insisting they followed America's orders and pursued Afghan tribesmen opposed to this or that favoured warlord. This is what British squaddies in puttees and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world".
There is no war on terrorism. It is the great game speeded up, and now more dangerous than ever.
Truth is the first victim of every war, so it's not surprising when, again and again, western leaders congratulate themselves enthusiastically in front of the TV cameras on their supposed successes in the fight against terror.
But was this war really so successful?
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, my 20-year-old daughter was in Manhattan. The whole day, we desperately tried to contact her. We didn't reach her until late the same evening. I know what was going on in the hearts of millions of U.S. families that day.
But we mustn't allow our feelings to obscure our view of the facts--and the latter are sobering.
The loathsome Taliban were bombed into retreat, but was that the main objective of the Afghanistan war? Had the U.S. government really spent billions of dollars spilling the blood of 40 U.S. soldiers and more than 6,000 Afghan civilians, only to drive one of the most wretched governments of the Third World into the Hindu Kush mountains?
Could it be possible that we won the wrong war?
Sorry, but I consider our strategy to combat international terrorism with conventional war methods futile, immoral and counterproductive.
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle would now say that the destruction of the Al Qaeda training camps, the defeat of the Taliban and the enthronement of the sympathetic Hamid Karzai were proof to the contrary.
But this is wrong. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian terrorist, mass murderer and the main target of this war, who was supposedly "surrounded and virtually eliminated" in Tora Bora, has since disappeared without a trace.
Even third-rate Taliban boss Mullah Omar was able to break through the ring of anti-terror forces on a motorbike, as in a cheap slapstick comedy, and is now mocking his enemies via the Internet.
If that is what we call a victory against terrorism, what would we call defeat?
Behind the turbulent news from Israel, a struggle for historical truth has passed almost unnoticed outside academic circles; yet its wider significance is epic. In May 1948, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by the advancing Jewish militia in the coastal village of Tantura, south of Haifa.
According to the recorded testimony of 40 witnesses, both Arab and Jewish, half the civilians were shot in a "rampage". The rest were marched to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children. They were taken to a wall near the mosque where they were shot in the back of the head.
The "cleansing" of Tantura (a term used at the time) was a well-kept secret. When they were interviewed four years ago, several Palestinian witnesses said they feared for their lives if they spoke out. One survivor, who as a child witnessed the murder of his entire family in Tantura, said to the interviewer: "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble... "
Trouble indeed. The researcher, a student called Teddy Katz, has had his masters degree annulled by Haifa University, even though he was awarded a top grade by the Middle Eastern department. When his research was revealed in the Israeli press, Jewish veterans of the attack on Tantura sued him for libel, and several Jewish witnesses recanted.
Katz had breached the taboo of the ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel and which the Palestinians mourn as Nakba - the catastrophe. Without waiting for the case to come to court, the university struck Katz's name from its honour roll. Whispered to be a traitor, and under pressure from his family and friends, Katz, a devout Zionist who lived on a kibbutz, apologised. Twelve hours later, he retracted his apology.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - The unexpectedly strong showing of radical Indian agitator Evo Morales in Bolivian elections promises to deal a serious blow to the Andean nation's successful U.S.-backed efforts to halt cocaine production.
Morales, an Aymara Indian, campaigned on an anti-United States platform and the promise to reverse Bolivia's efforts to eradicate coca, the plant from which cocaine is made.
Preliminary returns from Sunday's presidential election, announced Monday, showed Morales battling for third place in the presidential race, with about 17 percent of the vote. Because the presidential voting determines the award of Senate seats under Bolivian law, that strong finish will give his Movement to Socialism party as many as six seats in Bolivia's 27-member Senate. That in turn will put him in strong position to thwart new legislation to punish those who grow the coca bush.
Support for Morales surged following comments from the U.S. ambassador effectively warning voters away from Morales.
Morales trailed leaders Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Manfred Reyes Villa by less than five percentage points and declared his strong showing ``a moral victory.''
Interviewed in the capital of La Paz days before the election, Bolivian anti-drug czar Oswaldo Antezana told Knight Ridder that Morales ``could undo everything we have done.'' Bolivia has eradicated more than 90,000 acres of coca cultivation since 1998 and taken more than 230 tons of cocaine out of the global illicit drug market.
Arthur Levitt, Bill Clinton's choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, crusaded for better policing of corporate accounting — though he was often stymied by the power of lobbyists. George W. Bush replaced him with Harvey Pitt, who promised a "kinder and gentler" S.E.C. Even after Enron, the Bush administration steadfastly opposed any significant accounting reforms. For example, it rejected calls from the likes of Warren Buffett to require deduction of the cost of executive stock options from reported profits.
But Mr. Bush and Mr. Pitt say they are outraged about WorldCom.
Representative Michael Oxley, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, played a key role in passing a 1995 law (over Mr. Clinton's veto) that, by blocking investor lawsuits, may have opened the door for a wave of corporate crime. More recently, when Merrill Lynch admitted having pushed stocks that its analysts privately considered worthless, Mr. Oxley was furious — not because the company had misled investors, but because it had agreed to pay a fine, possibly setting a precedent. But he also says he is outraged about WorldCom.
Might this sudden outbreak of moral clarity have something to do with polls showing mounting public dismay over crooked corporations?
Still, even a poll-induced epiphany is welcome. But it probably isn't genuine. As the Web site dailyenron.com put it, last week "the foxes assured Americans that they are hot on the trail of those missing chickens."
An internal Securities and Exchange Commission memo from 1991 says President Bush repeatedly failed to file timely reports of his business interests and transactions before his election as Texas governor.
The memo said that when Bush was a director of a Texas-based oil and gas exploration firm called Harken Energy Corp., he had filed reports up to eight months late for four stock transactions totaling $1 million.
Bush brushed off a question about the transactions yesterday. "Everything I do is fully disclosed, it's been fully vetted. Any other question?" he said as he toured a church in Milwaukee.
The memo, provided to The Washington Post after it was the subject of a column yesterday in the New York Times, offers new details about Bush's rocky career as a Texas businessman before he turned to politics and was elected governor in 1994.
MILWAUKEE –– President Bush defended in a snappish tone Tuesday his own business experience with a corporation accused of fishy accounting.
"Everything I do is fully disclosed; it's been fully vetted," the president said as he paused to speak with reporters during a church appearance in Wisconsin. "Any other questions?"
Bush was responding to a journalist who asked for his reaction to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who said in Tuesday's newspaper that Bush's recent campaign against corporate malfeasance draws on "firsthand experience of the subject."
Bush, in 1989, was on the board of directors and audit committee of Harken Energy when the company masked $10 million in losses by reporting a profit on the sale of a subsidiary to a group of Harken insiders borrowing money from the company itself.
The Securities and Exchange Commission ruled the transaction phony and forced the company to restate its 1989 earnings. The SEC also investigated Bush for insider trading after he sold nearly $850,000 of Harken stock shortly before its mounting debt was publicly disclosed.
The SEC eventually closed its investigation of Bush without taking action against him, although The Dallas Morning News has quoted a 1993 letter from the SEC to Bush's lawyer emphasizing that its decision "must in no way be construed as indicating that (Bush) has been exonerated."
Four Times, SEC Report Says
Washington, Oct. 4) George W. Bush violated federal securities laws at least four times when he was a director of a Texas oil firm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to an internal government report.
The document was prepared by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1991 during its well-publicized investigation into whether Bush had benefited from insider information when he sold Harken Energy Corp. stock before its value plummeted, and then failed to promptly report the transaction to the SEC in violation of federal law. Bush’s stake in Harken helped make him a multimillionaire.
The internal SEC memorandum, prepared by the commission’s enforcement division and obtained by The Public i from sources, discloses what was previously not known--that Bush also had been tardy in reporting three other transactions involving stock in Harken, on whose board he sat as director.
(This report was prepared in collaboration with Talk magazine, whose article, "George W. Bush . . . And the Horse He Rode In On," appears in the magazine's November issue.)
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 requires company insiders to disclose publicly, in a report called a Form 4, all stock purchases and sales by the 10th day of the month following the transaction.
Preceded Huge Profit
On Stock Deal
(Washington, 4 April) The year 1986 was very good for George W. Bush.
After a decade of striking Texas brown dust instead of oil, his luck finally turned that year when go-for-broke Harken Energy Corp. bought his failing oil exploration firm for stock. Four years later the company concealed large losses just before the GOP presidential hopeful unloaded those securities for a nice profit. That, in turn, helped finance his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball club and catapult him into the ranks of multimillionaires.
And it was in 1986, too, that Harken’s CEO introduced Bush, the company’s new director and consultant—as well as son of then-Vice President George Bush--to a little startup health-care company. He put in a modest investment, and a few years later walked away with a six-figure windfall.
There also was a little benefit on the side. In 1994, when Bush was running for Texas governor, and scrambling for campaign cash, insiders in that health-care company, now known as Advance Paradigm, contributed $23,700.
Bush’s sale of the Harken stock in 1990 attracted the attention of regulators and the national media because he was tardy in filing the required public disclosure, and because the trade came shortly before the company reported for the first time that it was incurring huge losses.
The rift between Britain and the United States over the Middle East deepened last night when a British Foreign Office minister held talks with Yasser Arafat at his West Bank headquarters.
The surprise visit by Mike O'Brien came only days after President George Bush demanded that Mr Arafat step down as President of the Palestinian Authority, and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, shelved plans to visit the region and suggested Washington was no longer talking to Mr Arafat.
Mr O'Brien, who took over as junior minister with responsibility for the Middle East last month, also met Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, on what Downing Street said was a "familiarisation visit". He did not meet Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister.
The meeting with Mr Arafat threatened to reopen the row between London and Washington over Mr Bush's call for his removal as part of a Middle East peace settlement. Relations have also been strained by America's opposition to the International Criminal Court established on Monday.
Criticism mounted over US opposition to the world war crimes court, mandated to try the gravest of atrocities and crimes against humanity, on the day the court officially opened in The Hague.
European Union allies of the US were quick Monday to condemn a US decision to veto the renewal of the UN police force in Bosnia if its soldiers were not exempt from prosecution by the court on the eve of the tribunal's launch.
The world's first permanent international war crimes tribunal, The International Criminal Court, opened for business Monday as four members of an advance team opened a temporary office to receive and register complaints on the outskirts of The Hague.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the creation of the ICC, supported now by 74 states, "an historic occasion."
"It holds the promise of a world in which the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are prosecuted when individual states are unable or unwilling to bring them to justice," Annan said in New York on Sunday.
There is a long history to bombing blunders - and one lesson the military authorities around the world never seem to learn is the importance of avoiding dogmatic descriptions of what they think happened.
These often turn out to be untrue or just half the truth and the aims of the overall campaign are submerged in a welter of claim and counterclaim.
The public relations battle is an essential component of war.
The latest disputed bombing in Afghanistan already shows the classic signs.
'Errant' bomb
On the one hand, there are the local people, talking to the media or their own government officials.
In this case, the story is that there was a wedding at which there some celebratory firing and then an attack out of the night.
But take a look at what the Pentagon web site has been saying about it.
"An unknown number of Afghan civilians reportedly are casualties following a coalition air patrol's response to hostile ground fire, a Pentagon spokesman said."
It went on: "US Air Force B-52 and AC 130 aircraft struck several ground targets, including anti-aircraft sites that were engaging the aircraft, US Central Command officials said."
The Pentagon admitted that one bomb was an "errant."
But then said: "It's unclear whether those casualties were the result of our errant bomb or from falling anti-aircraft artillery."
The new government in Kabul yesterday condemned America's conduct of the military campaign in Afghanistan, accusing US bombers of killing 40 people attending a village wedding.
Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister, contradicted every point of Washington's official explanation for the bombing raid on Monday that mistakenly hit civilian targets in Uruzgan province.
In the strongest attack yet made on America by a member of the post-Taliban government, Mr Abdullah described it as "unacceptable that civilians who suffered so much under al-Qa'eda and the Taliban should suffer under the campaign against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban".
A complete review of operational procedures was needed, he said, emphasising that "the enemies of peace" in Afghanistan would exploit costly American errors.
US military officials in Afghanistan have refused to apologise following the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding party on Monday which killed at least 30 people, insisting that aircraft had come under sustained and hostile fire.
The incident prompted the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to summon US military chiefs to his office and demand "all necessary measures" be taken "not to harm innocent Afghan civilians".
Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near Deh Rawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, had been firing into the air - a Pashtun wedding tradition - when American planes struck.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Henry Kissinger writes in his memoirs that when, upon entering the Nixon administration as national security adviser in 1969, he first heard the phrase "a just and lasting peace within secure and recognized borders", he thought the incantation so platitudinous that he accused the speaker of pulling his leg. But Kissinger quickly learned that this central tenet of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during the 1967 war in return for an Arab pledge of full peace and recognition, was deadly serious. The resolution had been adopted more than a year before Kissinger arrived on the scene, but he played a key role in setting it, and the land-for-peace doctrine that is its centerpiece, into concrete as the basis for U.S. policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For 25 years, the resolution remained the bedrock of all efforts to forge a peace agreement through every subsequent U.S. administration--until President Bill Clinton arrived on the scene and until, ironically, the peace process revved up in earnest.
Depleted Uranium
Depleted uranium is created as a by-product of the processes used to convert natural uranium for use as nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.
NATO used ammunition and weaponry made of depleted uranium during its air strikes on Yugoslavia in 1999. Suspicious deaths and illnesses among Europeans exposed to the substance are prompting investigators to examine DU's health risks. The United States has denied any link between illnesses and exposure to depleted uranium.
Monday, July 01, 2002
Tom Clancy is lousy at writing sex scenes between a man and a woman. But he's great at writing sex scenes between a man and a weapons system. In Clancy's Red Storm Rising, it's boy meets plane, boy gets plane:
"Colonel Douglas Ellington's fingertips caressed the control stick of his F-19A Ghostrider attack fighter....
"Lockheed called her the Ghostrider. The pilots called her the Frisbee, the F-19A, the secretly developed Stealth attack fighter. She had no corners, no box shapes to allow radar signals to bounce cleanly off her. Her high-bypass turbofans were designed to emit a blurry infrared signature at most. From above, her wings appeared to mimic the shape of a cathedral bell. From in front, they curved oddly toward the ground, earning her the affectionate nickname of Frisbee. Though she was a masterpiece of electronic technology inside, she usually didn't use her active systems...."
US helicopter gunships and jets attacked a house in southern Afghanistan today while a wedding was underway, killing and injuring scores of people, witnesses and hospital officials said.
The attack occurred inthe village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province, where special forces and other coalition troops are searching for al–Qaida and Taliban fugitives. There were reports that as many as 120 people, including many children were killed or hurt in the two–hour onslaught.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said an air reconnaissance patrol that was flying over Uruzgan province reported coming under anti-aircraft artillery fire. Other coalition aircraft opened fire on the target and at least one bomb went astray.
One survivor, Abdul Qayyum, told reporters at the Mir Wais Hospital in Kandahar that the attack began about 2 am and continued until 4 am, after which US special forces ground troops were in the area.
"The Americans came and asked me 'who fired on the helicopters', and I said 'I don't know' and one of the soldiers wanted to tie my hands but someone said he is an old man and out of the respect they didn't," he said.
Hospital officials said a number of wounded were being brought to Kandahar. Most of the dead and injured were women and children, they said.
WorldCom's $3.8bn (£2.5bn) accounting scandal could deal serious damage to the workings of the internet, some experts are warning.
About 40% of internet traffic uses WorldCom's network at some point.
Technology consultancy Gartner Group is worried that a collapse at WorldCom - following difficulties at rivals including Carrier1, Global Crossing and KPNQwest - could prove disastrous.
The situation for WorldCom customers is "not dire - yet", Gartner said in a note to clients on Thursday.
But it warned that the massive staff cuts the stricken company is planning will devastate service quality.
"Enterprises should therefore make contingency plans," it advised.
OVER the last few centuries, capitalism has been the heartiest contender in the global bout for economic supremacy. It emerged from its decades-long death match with communism as the unquestioned victor. Its dust-up with socialism barely lasted a few rounds. It flourished in wartime, and survived wrongheaded assaults from embargoes and tariffs. Even terrorism aimed at capitalism's heart failed to deliver a knock-out punch.
But now, a staggering rush of corporate debacles is raising a disturbing question: can capitalism survive the capitalists themselves?
The scandals that have oozed out of corporate America with alarming regularity in recent months have repeatedly featured executives betraying the marketplace for their own short-term self-interest. From Enron to Global Crossing, Adelphia to WorldCom, the details differ but the stories boil down to the same theme: the companies lied about their performance, and investors paid the price.
To those inured to corporate wrongdoing — perhaps by the insider trading scandals or the savings and loan debacle of recent decades — the latest scourge of white-collar malfeasance might seem like more of the same, with greedy executives cutting corners to make a profit. But in truth, the corporate calamities of the new millennium are of a different ilk, one that challenges the credibility of the financial reporting system, and in turn the faith of investors in the capital markets — the very engine that has driven capitalism to its success.
HE world outside the US is now getting used to the fact Americans have a fraudulently elected nitwit as their president, but George W. Bush excelled himself this week with a "long-awaited" definitive speech on Middle East policies that stretched even the weirdest imaginations.
US embassies around the world moved to "explain" the batty future Bush saw for Israel and Palestine, but nothing could disguise that the bedbug was running the White House and anything could happen next.
Hey, look. Even Tom Cruise is worried. In London this week he said he wanted his adopted kids brought up outside the USA because of what happens inside the USA. He listed terrorism and street crime, but very cogently he listed corporate crime as a reason not to bring up kids in the old US of A.
Now, Tom Cruise is not a Grade A rocket scientist. In fact, he is a Grade A Scientologist. On the whole, though, I would say he was brighter than George W. Bush (along with my neighbour's catatonic cat) and it was most intriguing that he named corporate crime as a reason not to want to grow up in America.
The WorldCom affair comes after the Enron affair while the Andersen affair simply defies belief. It has become perfectly clear that major US corporations have been running out of control, throwing billions of dollars into a kind of international financial black hole.
In vain you ask (as I tried to do), well, where has the money gone? I mean, if you back a loser at Randwick, then you know where your money went. If these companies have lost billions – $US3.8 billion in the case of WorldCom – why hasn't somebody won it? Or got it? Where has it gone? Or, more to the point, did it ever exist?
SEATTLE -- Muslim terrorists consider Seattle an "easy target" because of bad policing, the FBI has warned area officials.
Charles Mandigo, FBI special agent in charge of the Seattle office, told the King County Council that terrorists consider the area an "easy target" and that an undisclosed number of potential local collaborators are "willing and able" to help commit acts of terrorism.
Mandigo gave his assessment Wednesday in a homeland security hearing that was closed to the public shortly after it began. His prepared remarks were released afterward by Sheriff Dave Reichert and reported Friday by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"It has been noted by the highest level of our government in our nation's capital that the Seattle area has and continues to receive a disproportionate high number of terrorism threats as compared to other parts of the country, many of them coming from overseas," Mandigo said.
"None of the threats has been substantiated," but the trend is "very disconcerting," Mandigo said.
He said the FBI is conducting "a significant number" of terrorism-related investigations in Washington state and "several of these investigations are considered to be very significant."
WATERLOO, Iowa -- Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, visiting here in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, was making points with the 10 party activists who joined him for coffee the other morning at the Country Kitchen cafe.
He had been asked where he would find fault with President Bush, and he replied, "As far as domestic policy is concerned, I can't think of anything he's done that I agree with." He ticked off a list of Bush "outrages," ranging from an education bill he called the "largest unfunded mandate in history" to Bush's "appointment of ideologues to the courts." Heads were nodding in agreement.
And then he added, almost as a throwaway line, "I think he's done a good job on the war on terrorism."
"Are you sure?" responded Vi Neil, a veteran Democratic worker and the wife of Dave Neil, the head of the United Auto Workers in Iowa. "A lot of us think we are wasting a lot of money on trying to find the guy with the beard [Osama bin Laden]. We have to find a new way to fight terrorism."
Taken aback, Dean said, "I don't agree with that," adding that he believed that the United States had to strike back against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and arguing that it is not the war, but the Bush tax cut, that has pushed the budget back into deficit.
The exchange brought vividly into focus for me a realization that was slowly dawning during a two-week swing that took me from Madison, Wis., to Lansing, Mich., to San Francisco and finally to Des Moines, Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Much of my time was spent with Democrats, ranging from a mayors' convention to interviews with candidates for legislative and statewide office in all four states. And what I heard convinces me that the nine-month moratorium on dissent from Bush's war on terrorism is coming to an end.
They made 16,000 of them the last time: Sacks that are about eight feet long and three feet across, with six handles and a zipper across the top. "Human Remains Pouches" is the horrible phrase the Pentagon uses for them, but everyone else knows them by the vernacular: body bags.
Remember the run-up to the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm? The U.S. was headed to war, and for the first time since Vietnam we were going to take casualties, probably numerous.
Or so we thought. Three hundred and ninety American troops died in Gulf War I, a figure that is larger than what you may remember, but far, far smaller than what we had feared. Now, 11 years later, the U.S. military is fresh from subduing a band of fanatic tribal warriors in a country sprung straight from the Middle Ages, a conflict that was, on our side anyway, even more bloodless than Operation Desert Storm. This recent history of no-muss, no-fuss military success serves now as the critical backdrop to an atmosphere, both in Washington and across the country, that one eminence grise in the nation's capital reasonably describes as "surreal." We appear headed for round two with Saddam Hussein. And this time, as an HBO promo might have it, it's for keeps.
That prospect, even if it is probably a year away at best, is hugely serious business. No matter how smoothly (knock wood) any eventual military operation goes, a "regime change" in Iraq will have vast geopolitical and economic consequences. Some of them might be good, some not so good, and some of them could be horrible. But consequences there will be, for Iraq, for the region, and for the world. What is "surreal" is that for the most part, for now anyway, a lot of people in Washington talk about punching out Saddam the way they talk about, say, passing an education bill. Everyone's in favor, passage is a done deal, everyone will take credit, but please, spare us the details.
In a shock that surprised no one, Worldcom and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, two of America's corporate giants, were recently laid low by their own stupidity. One was a telecommunications giant that deals with pumping data through the arteries of American commerce. The other is a frozen witch-queen who shills Turkish delights and other trifles to the American public. All of this is as surprising as having to kill the bad guy a second time in a B-grade action film: Believing corporate leaders are as ethical as Eagle Scouts is like believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or that George W. Bush was fairly elected. However, a comparison between these two scandals might, as they used to say in college, be enlightening.
The WorldCom scandal is a bit hard to understand, but basically, as I grok it from my daily perusal of Salon.com, it goes something like this. Businesses have two types of expenses: Operating expenses (such as salaries, utility bills, Web hosting fees, etc.), and capital expenses (the physical stuff you need to produce your goods or services, such as computers, factories, dump trucks, etc). When you do the spreadsheet for your profits and losses each quarter, operating expenses are deducted from your gross income for that quarter. Capital expenses, on the other hand, can be spread out, sort of like car payments, so that if one year you buy, say, $1 million worth of dough-mixing machines for your bagel bakery, you can figure $250,000 against your first quarter profits, $250,000 against your second quarter profits, and so on. That way, the $1 million expense doesn't make such a big hole in your bagel-making venture.
Sunday, June 30, 2002
part one
Doug Henwood Thank you for joining us, Gore Vidal.
Right now we have a lot of liberals wagging their fingers telling us, "I
told you so," about the George Bush regime, that people who said there
was no difference between the two parties are now saying it's enormously
big. How in the wake of the reaction to September eleventh do you read
that kind of "no difference between the two" argument?
Gore Vidal Well, Bush acted more quickly with repressive legislation
to push us further along the road to a police state, which Clinton, two
years after Oklahoma City, launched when he signed a special piece of
legislation, the Anti-Terrorist Act, which removed a number of our
freedoms as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. It was a bad bill.
Then in the wake of 9-11, the Bush people, particularly Ashcroft, they
were ready with, they had all sorts of terrifying totalitarian
legislation ready, which was promptly passed. The USA PATRIOT act it
was called, went through Congress without any debate, and many people
said many congressmen never read it. Then when they began to look and
see what was in it, you know, the decapitation of the first-born, I
believe, was in there, or something like it, it was filled with....
H The liberals would have waited for the second-born...
V Well, they would wait till the last-born perhaps, thus doing away
with contraception, which is causing their constituents such worry.
Anyway, it was created, the bill, and now it's being corrected, I don't
know what state it's in now and I don't think anybody does. But we are
losing our liberties, and there is no doubt about it. And every day
there are more and more examples, as Ashcroft gleefully says that he
single-handedly suspended the confidentiality between lawyer and client,
"if it's a terrorist situation." And now he's trying to lock up a woman
who, a woman laywer who's worked for a terrorist, which it seems it has
got the legal profession quite angry.