BuzzFlash pointed out this from the Washington Post. They buried this major tidbit in the middle of an article:

GAO Vows to Sue For Cheney Files (washingtonpost.com)
Former Enron executives disclosed yesterday that a top Bush campaign adviser, Edward Gillespie, served as the company's key conduit to the White House and House leaders. Gillespie's firm received $525,000 over nine months last year from Enron for lobbying that included the energy task force and economic stimulus legislation with tax provisions that would have helped Enron.

Arianna Huffington points out the differences between Bush's rhetoric and his actions:
January 10, 2002 - Compassionate Conservatives vs. Enron Conservatives
During his run for the White House, Bush fought long and hard to convince us that he was a new breed of conservative -- a Compassionate Conservative. But recent events make clear that he is actually the standard bearer of a far more coldhearted breed. Call them the Enron Conservatives.

Enron Conservatives are people who use political money and connections as levers to free themselves of all accountability to laws, regulations and responsibility -- even to their own employees. Simply put, they are people who consistently, shamelessly and aggressively put their self-interest above the public interest. And when the lives of others are destroyed in the process, they just look the other way and hope that the law does, too.

It probably is too much to expect the Federal Trade Commission to hop on the Enron investigation bandwagon and look into whether Bush violated truth-in-labeling laws during his campaign, when his pledges of compassionate conservatism were stump speech favorites.

A lot of people (but not all of them) seem to be missing the real lesson of the Enron scandal. They act as if it only dealt with one instance of corporate behavior, and that the lack of obvious illegailty by our government should be the end it. It's not, and it shouldn't be.

I, for one, doubt that a "smoking gun" will be found. Most of the politicians involved are either too careful to do anything that might get them busted or too paranoid to leave a paper trail if they did. On the level of personal behavior by government officials, I doubt anything illegal was done (though we could debate the legality of pushing legislation in return for campaign contributions, it's never been prosecuted). That's not the real point.

What the collapse of Enron should show us is the complete failure of Market Fundamentalism as an ideology. Just as Communism couldn't survive the test of actual behavior by real people in real life, neither can this quasi-religious faith in completely unregulated markets as the only proper way to run our economy.

The belief that any government regulation of the behavior of corporations and corporate executives is always a bad idea has been espoused by an increasingly powerful group of people for the last 20 years. Deregulation of the marketplace has been treated as always a good idea, and increased regulation as always a bad one. This only makes sense if, given a marketplace free of government oversight, corporations and individuals would act responsibly and honestly without being forced to do so. Ken Lay and Enron have put this fallacy to rest.

Enron, due in part to generous campaign contributions, operated in an atmosphere almost free of regulation. The markets in which traded were too new to be subject to the regulatory agencies set up to deal with the aftereffects of the Depression. The accounting firm auditing it, Arthur Anderson, was employed at its discretion and stood to lose millions in revenue if it displeased Enron's executives. Enron, quite literally, could do anything it wanted.

What it did, of course, is lie about its profitability in order to jack up its stock price. The executives then cashed out billions in stock at the inflated price, leaving their employees and their investors holding the bag. There's no particular reason to believe that this is an abberation. Executives at Ford and Firestone lied about the safety of Ford Explorers in order to save their companies the cost of a recall while hundreds died in accidents. Executives at tobacco companies lied for years about the evidence their scientists had of tobacco's cancer causing and addictive properties. Executives at W.R. Grace buried information about how asbestos was killing their employees, and the employees died by the thousands (Libby's Deadly Grace). Given an incentive big enough, any goup of people will produce some willing to do the wrong thing. Corporate executives are no different than the rest of us.

Communism eventually collapsed under the weight of human nature. Any system operating under the assumption that all people would rather work than sit around drinking coffee all day was bound to fail. It just took enough people not doing their share of the work for long enough to bring it down.

Market Fundamentalism is also doomed to the dustbin of history, it's just a matter of how long it will take. Any system operating under the assumption that no one would cook the books or act irresponsibly given the chance to makes themselves wealthy is also bound to fail. The only question is this: do we act now and move to sensibly regulate corporate behavior, or do we construct an entire society around a faulty premise and suffer the consequences when it collapses?

Peter Beinart makes a good point about the future of the Republican Party. If they hope to compete in the states that are trending Democratic (California, New Jersey, et al), they'll have to nominate candidates who are much more liberal than the mainstream of the GOP. They'll have to learn to accept ideological diversity, in much the same way as the Democratic Party has learned to accept the kinds of candidates who can win state-wide races in the South and Great Plains.

TNR Online | TRB: West Wing by Peter Beinart
But Riordan can't win unless conservatives turn out on Election Day, and unless the national Republican Party aggressively assists his campaign. And therein lies the GOP's fateful decision. If it abandons Riordan, it will remain moribund in California, putting Republican presidential candidates at a permanent disadvantage. What's more, it will have rejected perhaps the best model for long-term success in a host of other states--for instance, New Jersey, where the national GOP's rightward drift is increasingly making Republicans an endangered species--that are following California's demographic lead.

If Riordan wins, on the other hand, the most powerful Republican outside Washington will disagree with core Republican principles. As governor of America's largest state, Riordan would have the political platform that his ideological soulmate Rudy Giuliani lacked. And he could conceivably launch the first serious liberal Republican presidential bid in a generation, a bid that would shake the GOP to its bones. Instead of Republican expansion, a Riordan governorship could produce Republican fratricide.

In response to the American announcement that we are no longer going to force off-duty women in the Armed Forces to cover themselves from head to toe, the Saudis have apparently announced that it's not our decision to make:Salon.com News | Saudis want U.S. servicewomen veiled

Saudi officials warned Thursday they would not allow U.S. servicewomen to go around without a head-to-toe robe, and criticized Washington for lifting the requirement that its female troops wear the garment.

A member of the Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a government agency for enforcing Islamic law, said all women must wear the robe, or "abaya" in Arabic, irrespective of religion, nationality or profession.

"Everybody is considered equal under Islam. Whoever doesn't like it, let them go back home," a committee official said on condition of anonymity.

I, for one, would like us to tell the Saudis to kiss our fat, coed, secular asses. I'm sick of coddling rulers who shit on us and on their own people. I know we can't flip off everyone who annoys us, but we can certainly stand up to their petty bullying (in the short term) and pave way for the day when we can tell them off (in the long term).

In under one generation, we could break our dependence on fossil fuels through a combination of conservation technology and alternative energy sources. Not only would we be able to tell the bigoted despots that rule the Middle East that we no longer care what they think, but we would also be positioned to lead the biggest export market of the next century and wipe out our trade deficit (almost all of which is due to importation of energy). Freeing ourselves from fossil fuels is not only a good thing to do from an environmental standpoint, but it should also be a key ingredient to National Security in the next century.

As for the short term, maybe we should just tell the Saudi religious police that they're free to assault the heavily armed females in our military, but recommend that they make their peace with Allah first.

They say that you can tell who watches a TV show or reads a magazine by looking at the ads, and that makes sense. You see ads for beer and Doritos on Monday Night Football, not on Ally McBeal. You see ads for luxury cars and stock brokerages on golf broadcasts, not on roller derby ones. If this is true, if you can tell who pays attention to something by the companies that advertise on it, then we know one thing about the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh.

They're suckers.

To be more precise, they're impotent, balding suckers with bad teeth and small penises.

I know this because I forced myself to listen to his radio show today. Every fly by night piece of crap that the National Enquirer is too proud to advertise, that's what is advertised on Limbaugh's show: herbal Viagra substitutes, crappy hair-replacement products, get-rich-quick schemes, guys who fix crooked or stained teeth on the installment plan, even some sort of pump that supposed to lengthen "masculine tissue" (which I've gotta assume means the penis). The target audience for Rush Limbaugh's radio show has got to be the biggest collection of suckers the world has ever known. It's like a holiday feast for con men.

I guess they just know an easy mark when they see one.

William Greider breaks down the way cronyism and backscratching in banks and corporate boardrooms come to hurt us all in this article:Crime in the Suites (1)

The rot in America's financial system is structural and systemic. It consists of lying, cheating and stealing on a grand scale, but most offenses seem depersonalized because the transactions are so complex and remote from ordinary human criminality........

.......The evolving new forms of finance and banking, joined with the permissive culture in Washington, produced an exotic structural nightmare in which some firms are regulated and supervised while others are not. They converge, however, with kereitzu-style back-scratching in the business of lending and investing other people's money. The results are profoundly conflicted loyalties in banks and financial firms--who have fiduciary obligations to the citizens who give them money to invest. Banks and brokerages often cannot tell the truth to retail customers, depositors or investors without potentially injuring the corporate clients that provide huge commissions and profits from investment deals.

Found a really good article on farm policy from TomPaine.com. TOMPAINE.com - Modern Day SharecroppersIt talks about how consolidation among chicken companies and the new wave of contracted farming have reduced many farmers to virtual sharecroppers.
The farmer takes out massive loans to build the giant chicken houses the packers require and supply the labor. The packers supply the chickens, the feed, and the medicine, then pay the farmer based on the weight the chickens have gained (minus the death rate) over the six weeks or so they have the chickens.
This is a dream for agribusiness. The farmer takes all the risks of weather and disease, and takes a beating if yield is down. The corporation gets a guaranteed price, even when supply is tight and open-market prices would go up (since they've locked the farmers into exclusive contracts).

This contract farming is most common with chickens and beef cattle, but look for it to spread to grains, sheep, and vegetables very soon. If you're wondering why the farmers don't just tell the companies to take a hike and sell their chickens on the open market, it's simple. There is no open market. A handful of companies process almost all the chickens raised in America, and they only buy from their contractors. A farmer raising chickens on his own wouldn't have anyione to sell them to.

This is another good example of how the interest of agribusiness is almost diametrically opposed to that of farmers and consumers (we don't even want to get into how unhealthy many of these factory raised chickens are). But, since small farmers and consumers don't give much to PACs and can't hire former civil servants to fat consulting contracts, you can figure out who Congress and the Dept of Agriculture are going to shaft.

Todd Gitlin rips into the kind of people (Noam Chomsky, please pick up the white courtesy phone) who always rip American foreign policy and American actions no matter what they.

Blaming America First
Motherjones.com -- Magazine
In this cartoon view of the world, there is nothing worse than American power—not the woman-enslaving Taliban, not an unrepentant Al Qaeda committed to killing civilians as they please—and America is nothing but a self-seeking bully. It does not face genuine dilemmas. It never has legitimate reason to do what it does. When its rulers' views command popularity, this can only be because the entire population has been brainwashed, or rendered moronic, or shares in its leaders' monstrous values.

More from The Economist on how Bush's tax plan (most of which won't take hold for years) has eliminated the budget surplus and will keep us from running one for the forseeable future:

Politics by numbers
Economist.com | American fiscal policy
GEORGE BUSH'S political fortunes have improved enormously in the past few months. But his stewardship of the public finances took another knock on January 23rd with the release of new forecasts from the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The government's budget is now projected to be in deficit in the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30th, and it will remain in the red next year as well. Perhaps more significantly, the CBO has slashed its estimates of the budget surpluses for later years......

......The CBO says 60% of the revisions made reflect legislation, including the tax cut, enacted since last January and its knock-on effect on the size and cost of the government's debt.

Joshua Micah Marshall goes after the White House Press Secretary for lying to the Press once more:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
Can Ari Fleischer tell the truth? Let's make this the first installment of the Ari Fleischer Ridiculous Mistatement Watch.


He caught Fleischer saying that Cheney's supersecret Energy Taskforce met with the Sierra Club several times (while trying to deflect questions about Enron's access to the Taskforce). As it turns out, the Taskforce had already issued a report and disbanded before Cheney met with them damn tree-huggers so they could gripe about what he'd already put forward. That's nothing like the access that Enron got (6 meetings with the Taskforce while they were still writing their report) for their millions in contributions.

Good article in The Economist about Every white bigot's favourite black

The dangerous quest of Al Sharpton
Economist.com | Lexington
Mr Sharpton also has something else on his side: the media's voracious desire for controversy. The Reverend is a gift-horse for the political talk-shows that fill so many hours of cable television. It is a safe bet that, given a choice between interviewing a serious black politician about local services in Atlanta and interviewing Mr Sharpton about reparations for slavery, the moguls of cable television will choose the showman every time.
This is depressing news for black America. It helps to obscure the fact that America boasts a plethora of successful black politicians. It reinforces the impression that black America is still mired in the politics of protest and victimhood. Black America may now be too successful and sophisticated to need a single spokesman. But the same cannot be said of either mainstream America or the media. Al Sharpton's greatest strength is not his ability to lead his own people. It is his ability to reinforce the prejudices of the white majority.

From John Lewis to Jesse Jackson Jr, we've got tons of black elected leaders with credible resumes and serious ideas about what America should be. It's too bad that the media has to fixate on one charalatan in a cheap suit who's never been elected to anything. Giving this clown a platform not only cheapens our political discourse, it makes it that much harder for black Americans to be accepted by everyone else.

A little bit about myself:

Southern (born and raised)

White (as if it mattered; but people want to know)

Male (yep)

Heterosexual (yep, again)

Father (one boy, damn near grown)

Veteran (Petty Officer in US Navy)

Pseudo-Intellectual (well-read; have well-thought out positions; don't do anything about it)

Self-Educated (read constantly and promiscuously; curious about pretty much everything)

"Liberal" in the 19th century British meaning of the term (out of self-interest; I don't want to live in an aristocracy)

Hello World!