Letter Never Sent

Here’s a great article from the LA Times about the Carlyle Group with some really fantastic detail. Arms Buildup Enriches Firm Staffed by Big Guns. Ex-president and other elites are behind weapon-boosting Carlyle Group:

“On a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army’s fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the Sept. 11 attacks. The stock sale cashed in on increased congressional support for hefty defense spending, including one of United Defense’s cornerstone weapon programs.”

“It’s the first time the president of the United States’ father is on the payroll of one of the largest U.S. defense contractors,” said Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Policy and one of Carlyle’s most ardent critics.

“Between Baker and Carlucci, not to mention dear old dad, the relationship of the president with this particular company is as tight and close as, well, anyone can imagine.”

While puzzling over my stats trying to figure out how to get more people to the site so I can spread the word I came across what must be one of the few sites that actually links to letter never sent. This caused me to puzzle over the description associated with the link. I found it very funny. (Yes, I can laugh at myself). It reads as follows:

Letter Never Sent – like this site, the semi-coherent yet vaguely informative ramblings of someone who spends too much time online.

For some reason this really made my day. For one, it’s nice to have someone take the time to link to me. I thought about the description for a while because I found it to be a nice way of seeing how I am received and understood by complete strangers. Plus, for some reason it’s just funny. It sounds like he’s commanding people to ‘like this site’. Also, my writing consists of ramblings which are semi-coherent (very true many times) yet vaguely informative. My ramblings are informative (good) but only vaguely so (bad?). The last part is admittedly true although I’m not so sure you can spend too much time online. I do work and take time out for hygeine rituals occasionally. All in all, I feel flattered. At least I think I do.

Details of the collapse of Enron are coming out. It’s shaping up to be a huge scandal. In a news analysis in The Times:

“Elements of a classic political scandal are here: A Texas corporation, led by Mr. Bush’s most generous campaign contributor, files the largest bankruptcy petition in American history. A handful of Enron executives are able to sell $1 billion worth of the company’s stock before its collapse, but thousands of employees are barred from selling, losing their life’s savings and their retirement accounts.”

The bankruptcy of Enron is the largest corporate bankruptcy in history. Coincidently, many of the white-collar con artists at Enron are best buds with Bush, Cheney, and the cabinet. The Department of Justice is ‘investigating’, but Attorney-General Ashcroft is removing himself from the investigation due to the fact that Enron bankrolled his failed senate re-election campaign.

Enron helped write our national energy plan. We won’t know all the details until the Bush administration stops stonewalling. In an effort to control the situation and contain political damage, the Bush administration disclosed that Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron and contributor to Bush’s campaign warchest, had called upon two members of the Bush cabinet, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, to solicit a government bailout.

Some details:
1. Enron paid out $55.7 million out to 500 select people prior to filing for bankruptcy protection. Meanwhile, laid-off employees who were not allowed to sell the company stock in their portfolios go home with zilch.
2. Fraud, fraud. The crooks high-class thieves lined their pockets. Enron Corp. executives and directors earned nearly $600 million from selling company stock over the past four years, with many individuals topping $12 million in the past year alone, according to trading data.
3. “Also on Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that she has the authority to freeze $1.1 billion in assets belonging to Enron executives. The ruling relates to a lawsuit from Amalgamated Bank that alleges that Enron executives artificially inflated the price of the company’s stock.
   The bank claims that Enron insiders gained at least $1.1 billion by selling more than 17.3 million shares of stock during the past three years.”

4. An audit reveals the firm which handles Enron’s books, Arthur Andersen LLP, destroyed “significant but undetermined” number of documents related to the company.
5. Cheney met with Enron officials 6 times in 2001 while working on the nation’s energy plan! I feel safe now. The foxes are guarding the hen house.

Read the full Public Citizen report, Blind Faith: How Deregulation and Enron’s Influence Over Government Looted Billions from Americans:

After Enron Corp. used its vast web of political connections to win December 2000 passage of commodities trading legislation that helped the company shield its energy trading activities from government scrutiny, California’s energy crisis suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse as artificial supply shortages led to frequent rolling blackouts, according to a new Public Citizen report released Friday.

The legislation reducing government oversight of energy trading was muscled through Congress — without a Senate committee hearing — with the aid of U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. Gramm was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over the legislation he co-sponsored, but he chose to bypass his committee, and the bill was quietly tacked onto a “must-pass” appropriations bill late in the session. Gramm’s wife, Wendy Gramm, also aided Enron’s rise to power. As chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, she pushed through a key regulatory exemption on Jan. 14, 1993, just as she was about to leave office. Five weeks later, she joined Enron’s board of directors, where she served on the board’s audit committee and had access to key financial information about the company.

Damn, damn, damn. I did it again. I had an entire entry ready and then I accidently opened another page. I tried to hit ‘back’ and everything was gone. *groan* I do that way too much. Note to self: save often.

Anyway, I posted a link the other day to an article which describes the buildup of a longterm US military presence in Afghanistan. This is hardly surprising to anyone with eyes and ears. The whole of the war on terrorism is nothing but a pretext for expanding American power, influence, and dominance over the rest of the world. The machiavellian US Establishment finds Afghanistan a particularly tasty morsel for a number of reasons.

First and foremost are the immense reserves of fossil fuels including oil and vast supplies of natural gas. This would be an obvious boon to Bush’s owners who run the US oil and energy industries. Secondly, Central Asia has enormous strategic importance for the US war machine. Afghanistan is right in the middle of where the US would like to have a foothold. Afghanistan shares a tiny border with China who they would like to keep an eye on. It shares a border with Iran who the US would like to keep pressure on. Also an American presence in Afghanistan would create a nice expanding box around Russia with NATO pushing in from the west. Russia, I might add, has significant quantities of natural resources which American business would love to have control over. It’s an offer they can resist. The WTC attack was merely the perfect excuse. No nation would dare to openly criticize this move lest they then become accused of harboring ‘terrorists’ and end up becoming a target of this war. This is the modus operandi of the US. They used the same strategy during the Cold War in their fight against ‘communism’. Anyone who didn’t knuckle under was branded as supporting communism and would then be subject to US interference. This could include assassination, invasion, and subversion. All this under the name of freedom.

The New York Times has an article about this as well.

“Even as the air war in Afghanistan wanes and American-backed forces hunt down pockets of Al Qaeda and Taliban resistance there, the United States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could last for years, military officials say.”

This presence is to go with the new puppet government of Afghanistan. At the very least, if you deny the ruthless aims of the United States you cannot deny the fact that this recent action has led to large-scale destabilization in the region and to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, most of them women and children. It is likely that other governments will seize upon this idea and start their own wars against ‘terror’. In fact, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, and Israel have already done so.

The US Government must be somewhat concerned by all this talk of civilian casualties. They’ve got Afghan-born US envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former adviser to oil giant Unocal, out pushing the US message:

“The envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, said that “you have to weigh the risks of ending the conflict prematurely with the costs [innocent lives] of continuing it,” adding, “I have no doubt, on balance, that we will continue until we achieve our goals.”

Is the United States a terrorist organization? The definition of terrorism: “terrorism n : the systematic use of violence as a means to intimidate or coerce societies or governments” You be the judge.

Welcome to the Fatherland. This article recaps some of the incidences of in which the government has violated the protection of the 1st amendment by routinely humiliating and intimidating people. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t feel intimidated.

Political dissent can bring federal agents to your door:

“All of this speaks to the new McCarthyism, where political dissent is being equaled to treason,” Mr. Steinhardt says. “It’s a very frightening trend: that people are doing nothing more than expressing the very freedoms that we are fighting to preserve – and find themselves with the FBI at their door.”

“WASHINGTON: US military planners are preparing for a long stay in the region around Afghanistan, confirming fears about the Americans digging themselves in like in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. American warplanes will begin arriving at an air base being built in Kyrgyzstan as early as next week in what could be the first prolonged US military presence in the former Soviet Union, a senior Pentagon official said on Thursday.

Ostensibly, the moves will allow US forces to keep looking for terrorists in Afghanistan. But the presence of US troops in the back yards of Russia and China for the long haul could cause worry to the regional countries. That the region offers the world’s largest oil and gas reserves after the Middle East gives credence to the conspiracy theories about larger US designs in the region.”

Bush Cronies Getting What They Paid For: The Rollback of Pollution Standards
Bush’s treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, was the CEO of Alcoa, one of the worst abusers of pollution standards in Texas. This is really no surprise. What a bunch of dirty rats.

“Environmental groups have been equally vehement in their support of the current regulations, saying that any relaxation would amount to the biggest rollback of the Clean Air Act since its passage 30 years ago. In addition, the attorneys general from some states in the Northeast, which often bear the brunt of pollution from industrial plants in the Midwest, plan to gather here on Tuesday to protest any changes in the regulations.”

This is not an altogether bad article and contains some interesting information on the case of Robert Hanssen. That is, if you can get past the trite psychoanalysis and the unnecessary Jerry Springer-like detail about Hanssen’s sexual proclivities. One thought I had while reading this is that fucked-up people work for the FBI. They’re either swinging-dick, beer-swilling goons or they’re straight-laced, religious freaks who get off on twisted sexual stuff. Yes, we’re in good hands.

Bush’s Enron Ties: Enron-gate?

Shortly after taking office, President Bush waged a battle against the imposition of federal price controls in California that allowed Enron to price-gouge consumers by extending the energy crisis in California, costing the state billions of dollars. Enron reported increased revenues of almost $70 billion from the previous year.

Bush also resisted attempts to crack down on Enron’s utilization of its 847 offshore subsidiaries in countries with lax banking-regulation laws. The consumer-rights watchdog organization Public Citizen alleges that some of these offshore havens helped Enron defraud its stockholders.

Moreover, while Sen. Gramm was working the Congress to pass legislation favorable to Enron (and collecting nearly $260,000 in campaign contributions from the company), his wife Wendy Gramm first was chairperson of a regulatory committee overseeing Enron’s business activities and later a paid member of that company’s board of directors. Enron paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million, according Public Citizen. Sen. Gramm has announced his decision not to seek reelection for another term in the senate.

Brave New Web by Michael Connor of The Austin Chronicle:

When it comes to the Internet, the potential dangers suddenly seem to outweigh the benefits. McCullough forecasts grim consequences of this current trend. “I think the so-called ‘controllers of wealth and power’ have decided that this plaything [the Internet] is a sharp instrument that children shouldn’t be allowed to run and play with. The most positive aspect of it will be taken away. We will once again be relegated to the role of passive consumer instead of active citizen.”

It’s still about the oil, but I guess that doesn’t matter does it? Civilian casualties do not matter. Shredding the constitution does not matter. The fact that this is nothing but a war to promote the interests of the American establishment and the goal of American corporate-military global hegemony.

Bush Names Oil Firm Advisor as Afghan Envoy:

As an adviser for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan.

Unocal was the lead company in the formation of the Centgas consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market natural gas from the Dauletabad Field in southeastern Turkmenistan, one of the world’s largest. The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch diameter pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta and linking with existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600 million extension to India was also under consideration.

More innocent blood spilt in Afghanistan:

“The bombing is very intense and very heavy. Many people have died. The United States should stop bombing. They are all civilians in this area,” Tani tribe elder Ghazi Nawaz Tani was quoted as saying.

The Bush drug discount card for the elderly gives old people small savings So this is how they take care of a serious problem? Either have a government provide real assistance or let the free market dictate the price. Something needs to be done. Patents for essential medications are a burden on the people who can least afford it. Drug patents should be 2-3 years at most if at all.

The U.S. media is ignoring the killings of more than 4000 civilians in Afghanistan in the dispicable ‘war on terrorism’. That’s about 200+ tons of human blood, bone, and gristle. People with children, and families who they cared about. If you had sympathy for the people who died in the World Trade Center then how could you not have sympathy for the people who died at the hands of our own military? I think the main difference is that Americans care about the WTC victims more because they realize that in some way it is possible for they themselves to be the victims of inhumanity. I think most of the outrage and anger over the attacks stems from this point and can be the only explanation for the lack of consideration for others who have had their life’s reduced to blood and rubble.