Corporate Piracy: A New Business Model

The monied interests in the US have moved one step closer to making defrauding investors an accepted growth industry, and Enron’s employees who lost their pensions and the investors who got fleeced in the Enron fraud schemes just got shafted again—this time by the hand of President George W. Bush.

The monied interests lead by powerful investment banks and their accomplices lobbied the Solicitor General, the person who represents the US at the Supreme Court, to reject the recommendation of the Securities & Exchange Commission that the Justice Department support the defrauded investors, the shaftees, in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

The position of these short money financial pirates is really self destructive if you give it a minutes thought. I mean, what investor in his/her right mind would buy stocks in a company, any company, if they knew that it was ok for the company managers to manipulate the books and steal from them?

See: Stoneridge v Scientific America.

A Lie is Forever

A Lie is Forever

At the time of, and shortly following the attack on September 11, the conspiracy theorists went wild with allegations that the Bush Administration or one of its shadowy corporate boy’s clubs was ultimately responsible for, or directly complicit in, the attack in an effort to create a vehicle for corporate America to complete its takeover of the government. Like most Americans, I shook my head and dismissed these wackos as non-thinking fear mongers who didn’t really understand the ways of the world. I’m beginning to change my mind. James Madison reminded us that, "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy"

Going after those who gave comfort and training to our attackers in Afganistan was, after all, the right thing to do. Any ambivalence I might have had was based on my knowledge of the history of Afganistan and the fact that no power had ever conquered these people. My concern has become reality. We are mired in a conflict that is, in any western way of thinking, unwinable. And then there’s Iraq. Before I get into the Iraq thing, I want to quote or erstwhile President. "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” We are now made privy to the intelligence estimates made available to the policy-makers pre-war vote and it’s worst case scenarios have come true.

Based on this concept the President has acted as if the American people were shills at a carnival, to be tricked and fleeced for the personal gain of the show. He lied to us and we fell for it, hook line and sinker. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a politician lied to me, I mean that’s what they do. I usually avoid excessive quotations but in the normal course of my weekly reading I continue to come across words that ring loudly and often in my thoughts on this matter. As I engaged in a little light reading to clear my head of such thoughts, Friedrich Nietzsche pulls me back into them when he writes, “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” For a free thinker who is usually tolerant of the ideas of others, I find myself unable to believe anything this President says. And that’s what I hate the most.

Maybe Oscar Wilde was right when he said, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

Dog Out