NP? "In the real world, everything connects"

[Doug Millison]

[...] But the hypocrisies of the Democrats, however sleazy in their own
right, do not cancel out the burgeoning questions about this White House.
Each time Mr. Bush protests that only a few bad apples ail corporate
America, that mutant orchard inches closer to the Rose Garden. If there's
not a systemic problem in American business, there does seem to be one in
the administration, and it cannot be cordoned off from the rest of its
official behavior. Compartmentalization, Republicans of all people should
know, went out of style with the Clinton administration.

In the real world, everything connects. What is most revealing about Mr.
Bush's much-touted antidote to the bad apples, his "financial crimes SWAT
team," is how closely it mimics Enron's Cayman Island shell subsidiaries.
It exists mainly on paper, as a cutely named entity with no real assets. It
calls for no new employees or funds and won't even gain new F.B.I. agents
to replace those whom the bureau reassigned from white-collar crime to
counterterrorism after Sept. 11.

  
The SWAT team's main purpose is to bolster the administration's poll
numbers as the Enron off-the-books partnerships did its corporate parent's
stock price. And like its prototypes, it may already be going south. No
sooner did the SWAT team's chief, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson,
hold his first photo op than The Washington Post revealed that he was an
alumnus of yet another bad apple, the credit-card giant Providian. Mr.
Thompson had headed the board's audit and compliance committee and escaped
with $5 million before the company threw thousands of employees out of work
and paid more than $400 million to settle allegations of consumer and
securities fraud.

Even the war on terrorism is not immune from Enron-style governance by this
administration. Last weekend Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta reported in The
Times that the Halliburton unit KBR got a unique sweetheart deal with the
Army last December, despite being a reputed bill-padder and the target of a
criminal investigation. Why? Call it the perfect Halliburton-Enron storm.
The company grabbing the deal is the former employer of the vice president.
The government agency granting the deal, the Army, reports to the former
Enron executive Thomas White, who is nothing if not consistent: he doesn't
protect taxpayers' dollars any more zealously than he did his former
shareholders'.

We still don't know the full extent of our Enron governance because we
still don't have a complete list of former Enron employees hired by the
Bush administration. (It hardly inspires confidence to know that one of
them is its chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, who also offered such
valuable wisdom to Ken Lay.) Nor, of course, do we know the full details of
the president's past history at Harken Energy or the vice president's at
Halliburton. Those details matter not so much because of any criminality
they might reveal - we are rapidly learning that there is no such thing as
a prosecutable corporate crime anyway - but because of what they may add to
our knowledge of the ethics, policies and personnel of a secretive
administration to which we've entrusted both our domestic and economic
security. [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/opinion/20FRIC.html


"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The
murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.
It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be
taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more
prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just
ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while
they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
markets." (GR 105)

"Unfortunately, young people," recalls the Revd, "the word *Liberty*, so
unreflectively  sacred to us today, was taken in those Times to encompass
even the darkest of Men's rights [...] This being, indeed and alas, one of
the Liberties our late War was fought to secure." (M&D, 307)