Follow the money. That is the way to see through all of the scams, cheating,
drug busts, fraud, etc. in the thousands of ways it is done. Follow the money.
You probably wonder, as I have, and surely millions of others have, why is it
that nothing has taken place yet with Enron, Ken Lay, and all those others in on
this national monumental scam and outright theft? Anderson Consulting/Accounting
and a boatload of the worst kind of gangsters stole the savings accounts and
ratepayer dollars in amounts bigger than anything ever to hit the American
people. No penalties of any kind have been imposed which are anywhere near
commensurate with the crimes that were committed.
Let me tell you my version of why. This happened because the President of the
United States, George W. Bush, was in lockstep with Enron. He didn't help
engineer the Enron scam directly, but he got a boatload of the money. Enron was
ripping American citizens off, period. You may not ever find the proof of this
connection between Enron and George W. Bush because of the magnitude of this
theft. But George W. Bush is president today, in my opinion, because of Enron.
He became governor of Texas via Enron, and Ken Lay, where he used them as
conduits to lay the foundation and plant the seed money to the right
politicians.
This Enron scam was not pulled off under the radar screen. It was a big-time
scam perform right out in the open and was well known to politicians, especially
those in California, some of whom made it to the Senate with Enron's help under
the table. When California deregulated their electrical power system in 1997
political money was flowing out of Enron by the millions to politicians all over
hell plus half of Georgia.
The Bush administration won't let the shit hit the fan until Bush is safe and
sound in his Crawford weed patch. And even then it won't be until the books come
out telling the true story of the under-the-counter deals involving Bush and
Cheney.
Now add the billions and billions of dollars that are being lost and going
unaccounted for in Iraq today. That probably includes another billion or more
more rip-off by Enron too. So that's hundreds of millions of dollars that
Halliburton, Brown and Root, and Kellogg are making as long as the United States
lasts in Iraq. This war profiteering will make the Enron rip-off look like a
dime store deal.
The Bush administration has wheeled and dealed more billions of dollars away
in the first four years than the total amount spent by the United States in all
the prior years of the United States going all the way back to when that bunch
of guys signed the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776. It's one big
monster of fortune.
And I am sure that I have missed and least two trillion more dollars that's
changed hands on Bush's shift to date.
PS. Got a dime to spare, buddie?
Enron was the prototype of the media built company. They
had no assets to speak of besides the pipeline business - and the software for
'energy trading'. Their value as a company was a fraud from the beginning.
During one of the hearings, an employee said that their business was 'so complex
that nobody could figure out exactly how they made their money'.
As a
computer systems analyst, that was a red flag for me but at the time, I didn't
realize full extent of the fraud. After the bankruptcies of several other
corporations under similar circumstances - stock fraud from pumping the stock
and the Dot.Com boom which was the same thing, I realized what they were doing.
Here is how the scam works - They start with a mid-size company that has
a reasonable business. They do one big deal which the media (CNBC and other
financial media outlets) really pushes. They generate excitement about the
stock. This is where the Big Five (4 now?) accounting firms - Arthur Anderson,
Price-Waterhouse, etc. design and write the computer systems to produce fake
earnings and assets reports from non-existent assets. The stock goes up.. the
more it goes up, the more money they make, the more of a 'really big show' they
can produce to hype the stock even more. The CEO's and key men all get their
money in stock and bonuses and salaries which they walk away with when the house
of cards crumbles. Since white collar thieves hardly ever go to jail, the risks
are minimal and the rewards are enormous. The large shareholders have protected
their investments through deriviates and hedgefunds. Only the small shareholders
and the employees lose.
Now - about the theft of money from government
accounts. The same accounting firms that cook the books for corporations also
get the contracts to do systems for the government. I know absolutely that the
reports from the Social Security Administration showing tax receipts have been
falsified. They show double-digit billions increasing every year since 2000.
That is impossible because of the number of high dollar jobs that have been
exported to India through outsourcing. The jobs that have been created are low
paying service jobs - Walmart. On average, my guess would be that it would take
6 low paying service jobs to REPLACE the social security tax receipts from one
programmers job. We simply haven't had that kind of job growth.
As I
watch the economic news as reported by the government, my suspicions are that
our government's finances are an accounting fiction just like Enron. Our economy
is supposedly worth trillions - but only 14% of our economy is in manufacturing
and most of that is owned by foreign companies, the majority of it was in
technology and service (knowledge jobs) which are being exported to either China
or India. I think that to make up for the loss of tax receipts, the computer
systems and generated reports are falsified. Big talk - little money.
To
generate offsets for the trade imbalance, people are being included in the
agreements as tradable commodities. They must have some kind of algorithem -
something like 6 im-ex credits for one exported programmers job = x dollars cash
plus 3 imported visapukes. Similar deal for the illegal aliens from Mexico. That
would explain why Vincente Fox was so brazen in demanding rights and benefits
for illegals.
In this way, the corporate whores who run our government
are selling our country out from under us.
DEEP REASONS AND OTHER REASONS FOR
BUSH'S WAR ON IRAQ
The deep reasons for Bush's Iraq war (i.e. the unacknowledged or suppressed
reasons: notably oil and the defense of the dollar) are not the only ones. There
are also other reasons which to a greater or lesser degree are overt, and need
to be addressed, above all by those opposed to the war.
The most overt reason given is to deter terrorism. This reason has lost
credibility with the public, because of the Administration's repeated attempts
to construct a direct link between Iraq and 911, based on dubious reports, some
apparently obtained from witnesses who were tortured. I doubt that these dubious
reports existed when the Administration (as the Guardian
and others have pointed out) considered an invasion of Iraq in 2001, in
retaliation for the 911 attacks. The thinking was not that Iraq itself was
responsible, but rather that an overwhelming illustration of US strength and
determination would deter anyone anywhere from attacking again.
US geostrategists, such as Stratfor.com, 2/26/03, also believe that a
subsequent US military presence in Central Asia could have a deterrent effect on
neighboring countries, notably Saudi Arabia, which have been unwilling to crack
down on their citizens who, for whatever reason, have been giving financial
support directly or indirectly to terrorist organizations.
The same belief in the efficacy of overwhelming response underlay the US
attack on Libya in 1986. I was then and remain opposed to that attack, partly
because there was considerable evidence that Libya was not responsible for the
terrorist incidents which gave rise to it. It was however my subjective
impression over the next few years that the US attack on Libya, justified or
not, was followed by a temporary decline in terrorist incidents against the
West.
Equally overt is the doctrine that the US, as the world's dominant
superpower, should now assert its strength unilaterally over residual nations,
such as Iraq, that plot against US hegemony. As I wrote here in
2001 Wolfowitz first articulated his vision of the US as a great power which
should tolerate no competitors in a draft Defense Policy Guidance statement [for
Donald Rumsfeld] ten years ago. The draft explicitly called for the US to
exercise its power unilaterally, adding that it "must sufficiently account for
the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from
challenging our leadership" (New York Times, 3/8/92). This unilateralist
doctrine has since been echoed and emphasized by a number of neocons inside and
outside the present administration, such as William Kristol
and Robert Kagan. The Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski has voiced similar views
in his book The Grand Chessboard (see my Drugs, Oil, and
War, due out March 2003).
The neocon case for unilateralism is often linked, by both proponents and
opponents, to the defense of Israel. I am myself in favor of seeing Israel
abandon the settlements, return to its pre-1967 borders (possibly renegotiated
by mutual consent), and give reparations to those Palestinians dispossessed of
their land (the Tikkun position).
But opponents of violence in the Middle East, from whatever side, must recognize
that Saddam's policy
of rewarding the families of suicide bombers has involved him conspicuously
in the subsidization of terrorism. If war is not the solution, we must help
encourage another.
The internal thinking of the Bush administration along unilateralist, neocon,
and pro-Israel lines, and also the domestic political reasons for it, are
astutely analyzed by Ed
Vulliamy, "Two Men Driving Bush into War," Observer, 2/23/03. This
article helps explain why the US heartland, traditionally isolationist, has
supplied the core of support for Bush's hegemonism; and also, more importantly,
why the antiwar movement of the coastal states must speak to this heartland in
language that will persuade rather than alienate.
The Vulliamy article also points to the quiet role of Enron and other
petro-corporations in assembling and financing this new heartland coalition.
Vulliamy focuses on the organizing genius of Karl Rove, backed by the financial
power of Enron, to redirect the political energies of the Christian right.
The following passage is particularly germane:
"By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of a Texan wheel
connecting the family, the party, the Christian Right and the energy industry. A
single episode serves as metaphor: during the Enron scandal last year, a shadow
was cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had sold $100,000 of Enron stock
just before the firm went bankrupt.
"More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally arranged for
the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, to take up a
consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single financial backer - worth between
$10,000 and $20,000 a month.
"This was the machine of perpetual motion that Rove built. His accomplishment
was the 'Texanisation' of the national Republican Party under the leadership of
the Bush family and to take that party back to presidential office after eight
years. Rove is unquestionably the most powerful policy adviser in the White
House."
Thus, as is always the case in deep politics,
the deep and overt reasons for the Iraq war are complexly interwoven. To give
just one prominent example, the unilateralist case for a permanent US base in
Iraq has been made overtly, without reference to the obvious significance this
would have for US dominance over Middle Eastern oil. Because of the plurality of
reasons and constituencies for this war, no one should make the mistake of
attributing the pressures for war uniquely to oil or any other single cause.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq2.html
