You may also like this site: https://www.consortiumnews.com/: Easily scannable word and natinal headlines and articles from a progressive-politics viewpoint.
h, and if you’re not familiar with Democracy Now, this hard-hitting and highly ethical one-hour news program airs five days a week and has broken story after story. The show has an excellent website, too.
It doesn’t seem fair–all these years before the trial, Lay and Skilling found guilty…and then, because the verdict was under appeal, Lay’s record is apparently to be cleared (at least in the legal system) just because he happened to drop dead.
The Houston Chronicle reports that not only will his conviction be vacated, but the government’s efforts to recapture $43 million of ill-gotten gains are likely to be stymied.
Cynic that I am I have to wonder if that was really Ken Lay’s corpse; it just seems a little too convenient. I hope there’s confirmation via DNA testing.
I am not a vengeful person–but I am galled that not only did this criminal continue to live high on the hog but he escaped justice in the end–while thousands harmed by his greed were not so fortunate. Even as late as his trial, according to a widely reported news story,
Lay also defended his extravagant lifestyle, including a $200,000 yacht for wife Linda’s birthday party, despite $100 million in personal debt and saying “it was difficult to turn off that lifestyle like a spigot.â€
I do take some comfort in knowing that death will not save his reputation, even if it protects the fortune of his estate (which, according t some rumors, is still a large fortune–while other sources say he was heavily in debt and there isn’t anything left).
Meanwhile, GWB’s appearance on Larry King Live puts to rest any question about the relationship between the president and Lay–a relationship that the White House tried to minimize earlier in the week:
KING: Because I mean you knew it pretty well from Texas, right? BUSH: Pretty well, pretty well. I’ve known him — I got to know him. People don’t believe this but he actually supported Ann Richardson in the ’94 campaign…Yes, he’s a good guy and so what I did — then did was we had a business council and I kept him on as the chairman of the business council and, you know, got to know him and got to see him in action. One of the things I respected him for was he was such a contributor to Houston’s civil society. He was a generous person. I’m disappointed that, you know, that there was — betrayed the trust of shareholders.
In that same transcript, Lay himself offers this rather telling bit:
We were competing with the very best and biggest companies in the world for the best talent and they loved working at Enron just like I did. But I grieve for all that they’ve lost and we, I mean even having lost what we’ve lost, I mean we are so much better off. My family is so much better off than most of them and it just, it pains me each and every day of my life.
The transcript is worth reading. While superficial as TV so often is, it gets in some very interesting quotes from a wide range of sources: Lay family friends (including the former mayor of Houston, who lauded Lay for his charitable work), employees who were cheated out of their retirement, and Skilling’s lawyer, who I found incredibly unctuous.
Looks like famous hatemonger Ann Coulter doesn’t always write her own stuff. A very informative article in the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch, last time I checked, and not exactly a bastion of liberalism) documents at least three instances of cribbing in her latest book, “Godless,” and numerous more instances in her columns.
She even cribbed a section from one of her frequent targets: Planned Parenthood:
One 25-word passage from the “Godless” chapter titled “The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion” appears to have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthood literature published at least 18 months before Coulter’s 281-page book was released.
And this woman is supposed to be telling us about morality? Yuck on her politics, and yuck on her ethics.
The poster boy for crooked business, Enron’s Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay, died today, just a few weeks after he was found guilty in the massive fraud/ethics case.
Already, the White House is denying that there was a genuine friendship (sound file) between Lay and George W. Bush. But Bush was a long-time high-end fundraiser for GWB, and it was in fact GWB who started calling him “Kenny Boy.” So the denials don’t have a lot of credibility.
But the real question is not whether Lay and Bush were close personal friends; the real issue is what kind of future business climate can we create together, where future Enron scandals simply don’t gain any traction.
If you’d like to help create that climate, I invite you to sign the Business Ethics Pledge.
Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.
There it is–right from the pages of the National Journal. The government has known for a year and a week that GWB directed Cheney to embarrass Wilson by illegally disclosing classified information. Cheney chose to carry out this directive, through the help of Scooter Libby and probably Karl Rove, by leaking Plame’s CIA status to friendly reporters. A total violation of the law, on top of hundreds of other violations.
Will someone please tell me why both parties aren’t setting up impeachment hearings? Some independent voices have been calling for impeachment for years–if you’d like to join them, click here. GWB and Cheney have repeatedly engaged in criminal activity. When will enough be enough?
An excellent article describing the Bush Administration’s various major usurpations of power. Long but worth the read. From last week’s New York Review of Books.
This has nothing to do with business culture, government, or most
of the things I usually blog about–but it does have a lot to do with
ethics, with the idea of acceptance of difference and with gender
identity, angels, terminal illness, justice, conformity, and more.
I’ve just read a remarkable novel, What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-Ucci, published in 2002 by Harcourt. Written for older teens, it has a lot to say to anyone.
Told
from the point of view of a teenage girl living an isolated and
conventional life on an island off the New Jersey coast, the story
involves this girl’s friendship with the gender-bending new kid in
town, whom no one else likes, and how their brief friendship before his
murder? disappearance? changes everything for her.
Amazon stocks the mass-market edition of this book.
It may or may not be easy to track down the trade paper edition (ISBN
is 0-15-216813-3)–but either edition will be worth the effort.
You’ve got to wonder about marketers who send those horrible emails where everything is in 8-point type all jammed on the left side of the page and completely unreadable. I own a one-trick-pony software app called SmartWrap that is designed to strip out all the > characters and bad line breaks in multi-quoted e-mail–but it’s also very useful for converting those scrunchy e-mails into something my 49-year-old eyes can handle. If only it supported the page-down key, I’d be all set.
As for my own newsletter prep: I do three monthly newsletters, all in plain text, none of them with pix. I could probably increase deliverability by posting the whole thing on a web page (we do archive them later, but only the main articles) and sending an email with a URL pointer–but I think the higher deliverability would be countered by the lower readership, especially as two of my newsletters target the frugality market and therefore can be expected to have higher-than-usual percentages on dialup.
When I was on dialup, pretty much the only outfit that got me to click to the web was MarketingSherpa.com; now that I’m on broadband, I’m considerably more willing.
However…as a recipient, I loathe HTML, find that in 98% of newsletters with graphics, the graphics are unnecessary–I keep them turned off, so for the most part, I don’t even see the “pretty” pictures–and 3/4 of the time I do turn them on for a particular newsletter, I wonder why they bothered.
As for PDF as an attachment versus a webpage, I’d let it be the reader’s choice. But I do remember that PDF downloads on the web were very annoying when I was on dialup–attachments were better, but only if they weren’t too huge. If a lot of readers are on dialup, it’s probably better to format a page in HTML and send a link. Or just post on a blog!
* * * *
Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.
BBC/The Guardian Investigative reporter Greg Palast first broke the story about the disenfranchisement of over 90,000 heavily Democratic Florida residents of color prior to the 2000 election–without which Gore would have been the clear victor and thus become President.
Now, he tells us that the GOP around the country systematically sent do-not-forward letters to the home addresses of soldiers stationed overseas who lived in mostly black, mostly Democratic precincts, and then when they came back as undeliverable, challenged these soldiers’ right to vote. Also targeted: residents of homeless shelters.
There’s quite a bit more, but here’s a little excerpt:
What about black soldiers? Here’s what they did. They sent, we found out – here’s now what we’ve just found out. They sent first-class letters to the homes of African-American soldiers shipped overseas. They wrote on the envelopes “Do not forward. Return to addressee.” Well, of course, they’re shipped overseas, so the letter can’t be forwarded, to Baghdad or Germany, or wherever. Letters are sent back to the Republican National Committee, filtered back out to the state committees, and then elections officials are told, ‘These people don’t live at that address. We have evidence that they’re falsely registered.’
Now, here’s the trick. You send in your absentee ballot. That is a great act of faith, probably the greatest religious act of faith since Moses walked across the Red Sea, you know, hoping that he wouldn’t get drowned. You just mail in that ballot, and soldiers – this is, remember the Republican Party made a big deal about Al Gore complaining about soldiers’ illegal absentee voting. These people knew that these soldiers couldn’t defend themselves, would not know that their ballot would not be counted, would be challenged. And there’s no way, I mean you could – from Baghdad you can fight George’s war, but you can’t fight for your ballot – massive, massive, nationwide challenge.
In places like Wisconsin, by the way, we’ve just discovered – How did they even know how to challenge these people? They were using Blackberries loaded with the names. This is one expensive multimillion-dollar operation, and by the way, Amy, it’s illegal, okay? One of the reasons why the Republican Party didn’t ‘fess up when we showed them the sheets and they said, ‘Oh, it’s donors,’ is that if you target black people, or Jewish voters, as they did in a few districts, because that’s a democratic demographic, if you challenge these people, that’s against the law. That’s against the voting rights act of 1965. It’s a felony crime, you know.
WHY do we still let these thugs and crooks stay in office?
Aside: Isn’t it ironic that Palast, an American, works for two of the most well-respected British journalism outlets. Why won’t any major US media hire him? His website and books are accessible to us, though.
You must have heard this one by now. Company after company is involved in schemes to make their executives rich by issuing stock options after the stock price jumps, but backdating them to appear that they were issued before the rise.
Option timing abuse first came to light earlier this year after a number of media reports questioned why executives had exceptionally good luck in obtaining stock option grants just before large increases in the related stock price. Erik Lie, a University of Iowa finance professor issued a study that claimed as many as ten percent of all option grants appear to have been backdated. A similar Merrill Lynch study found that 40 companies in the S&P 500 likely backdated their options.
Hey, people–if you already know that insider trading–buying or selling based on information you have that will affect the stock price but isn’t yet public–is enough to go to jail, surely it should occur to you that this sort of thing is essentially insider trading coupled with outright fraud.