The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: Second Half of January 2006 Archive

January 29
The entry Monday about Richard Scrushy buying pastoral support for his defense in his accounting fraud trial leads to a related point I didn't have time for then, nor have I been healthy enough to blog since then (an advantage of a figurative over a literal soapbox is you can't catch my infectious diseases). It gets to that phrase Republicans are coming to hate, "culture of corruption" (what, they'd prefer "kleptocracy"?). Corporate accounting fraud has nothing to do with Jack Abramoff, or lobbying scandals, or Congress, or Bush, but is part of it. Scrushy went from corporate CEO under indictment to TV evangelist in Alabama. He couldn't have been more Republican if had elephant jammies. Ken Lay was the acting president's political sugar daddy, and the sharing of personnel between the upper ranks of Enron and the upper ranks of the Bush administration was looking pretty embarrassing until Bush contrived a crisis in Iraq just in time for the 2002 election. Just yesterday, Bloomberg carried this story that another scandal corporation, Tyco, hired as a lobbyist guess who, Abramoff. David Safavian, now under indictment, tipped off Abramoff who tipped off Tyco that they were about to lose eligibility for federal contracts.

As much Republicans understandably wish this culture of corruption was non-partisan, wouldn't it be worse if it was? Think about it: corruption already permeates Congress, the executive branch, we're about to see the approval of a Supreme Court nominee who doesn't recuse himself when he has a financial interest in the outcome of a case; staff jobs are just rungs on the ladder to the more important lobbying jobs; corruption in terms of accounting scandals has been cracked down upon, but executives move in and out of government with the effect industries get to regulate themselves; besides Scrushy's cynical use of religion, many churches act like local party HQ for the GOP while the IRS looks the other way, and lobbyists like Abramoff and Ralph Reed not only manipulate religion for grassroots campaigns, they plead their piety when they get caught; when you look to the media for coverage of what's going on, you discover much positive coverage of these corrupt people was paid for while the recipients of the pay didn't disclose the extra pay they got from the people they praised. Yes, it does seem like the corruption is spreading to every institution, and such a circumstance would have to make us fearful of what's happened to this country except for one common factor in all of it: it's all Republicans/conservatives who are doing it. The upper reaches of corporate America are heavily Republican, the federal government is entirely under Republican control, the corruption of religion is coming from the conservative side, the journalists/columnists who are getting caught on the take have all been conservatives, and even the state governments ridden with scandal have been Republican.

It all goes to show just how much is at stake in the next election. Americans blew their chance in the last election to clean things up, provided you believe the election results. Even if you believe as I do that the Republicans have been stealing elections, the votes were at least close, and crooks have been genuinely winning. The fact the Tom DeLay got elected should tell us there is a long way to go in exposing the corruption to more of the voters. Much of it is still an impression to many and not yet associated with the GOP. I think we're making progress in getting the word out beyond bloggers and news junkies but we're far from being able to stop.The entry Monday about Richard Scrushy buying pastoral support for his defense in his accounting fraud trial leads to a related point I didn't have time for then, nor have I been healthy enough to blog since then (an advantage of a figurative over a literal soapbox is you can't catch my infectious diseases). It gets to that phrase Republicans are coming to hate, "culture of corruption" (what, they'd prefer "kleptocracy"?). Corporate accounting fraud has nothing to do with Jack Abramoff, or lobbying scandals, or Congress, or Bush, but is part of it. Scrushy went from corporate CEO under indictment to TV evangelist in Alabama. He couldn't have been more Republican if had elephant jammies. Ken Lay was the acting president's political sugar daddy, and the sharing of personnel between the upper ranks of Enron and the upper ranks of the Bush administration was looking pretty embarrassing until Bush contrived a crisis in Iraq just in time for the 2002 election. Just yesterday, Bloomberg carried this story that another scandal corporation, Tyco, hired as a lobbyist guess who, Abramoff. David Safavian, now under indictment, tipped off Abramoff who tipped off Tyco that they were about to lose eligibility for federal contracts.

January 23
This "Take the Red Pill Award" goes to the jurors who acquitted Richard Scrushy last June. Scrushy is the former CEO of HealthSouth Corp. and allegedly behind one of the biggest instances of accounting fraud to come out during the spate of scandals in 2001-2002. The verdict was a surprise at the time, the successful defense including religious appeals. Now, it turns out Scrushy paid for the black pastors who oddly sat in on the trial to lend their presence to the argument that Scrushy was a good Christian man. At least one was also planted stories favorable stories in The Birmingham Times. Scrushy himself has turned TV evangelist. Well, it worked. The jury bought the story that this was he was really a good Christian. Surely he couldn't be the corrupt man portrayed by the prosecution and everybody who worked with him --- except it now looks like he purchased the good impression with a little of the money he stole. In hopes that they will learn that publicly praying to Jesus does not a decent man make, those who aqquitted this religious man get a "Take the Red Pill Award."

January 22
I don't know what you or I can do about it necessarily, perhaps get our policy makers, if they'll consider a major factor in deciding Iraq policy which their record indicates they haven't given a thought. Maybe this is just documentation for me when I say "I told you so". Anyway, it appears that the biggest obstacle to a unified Iraq won't be the religious divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but the separatist aspirations of the Kurds. This is hardly a new thought to us news junkies, but I really hope the acting president and the people inside the bubble have that thought, and I doubt that they do. With that downer of an opening, let me state that alas it's not my own original thought. Oddly enough, that idea comes from journalists who have actually been to the Kurdish regions of Iraq and spoken to real Kurds rather than soaking up the drivel from administration spokesman.

Frank Viviano wrote The Kurds in Control in this month's National Geographic. The key point is that there are plenty of divisions among Kurds, but they are quite agreed in their desire for independence. There is a very similar article in last month's Smithsonian, where Andrew Cockburn noted the same things, that there is a divisions between two powerful militias/political parties which have fought each other, but the Kurds are unified in hating Arabs and wanting independence. Knight Ridder ran this article by a reporter, Tom Lasseter, who spent time with Kurdish soldiers in the Iraqi army. These soldiers were upfront about their loyalty to their Kurdish militia leaders before anyone in the Iraqi army, and that includes turning on the Arabs in the army if taking Kirkuk comes down to force. Be in no doubt that Kirkuk is the flashpoint, the place more than one side think they have to have. The Iraqi army denied the Knight Ridder report was accurate, but demanded the names of those who talked.

map of Kurdistan which is divided among four countries A common theme is the Kurds know they will have no outside help when they make their bid for independence, but they are preparing slowly. They are building their own economy, separate political structures, making their own deals with foreign businesses, and above all maintaining their own armies. I hope Smithsonian will forgive the copyright infringement as the accompanying map is from their article, but it shows the biggest complication in the whole situation. Maybe they'll consider the link adequate compensation. Anyway, please notice that the Kurds have a contiguous territory divided among four nations. The Iraqi Kurds hate the Arabs for the oppression suffered not just under Saddam but before him too. Turkey has had a long war with its Kurds and threatens to invade Iraq if the Iraqi Kurds declare independence. Personally, I think they mean it. The Kurds have had less documented problems with Iran, and I suspect Iran might intervene to suppress restiveness among its Kurds. I don't know how Syria's Kurds get along, but combine potential separationism with the US neocons fantasy that the war in Iraq is due to arms coming from Syria, and I can imagine potential trouble.

OK, there's not an obvious action item here. You can't just send off a letter to your Congressman demanding this allegation be investigated, or this alleged crime be prosecuted, or this bill be passed or opposed. If I can ask one thing of those in power, it is that they stop and think through this complex situation which could change in ways I suspect they have not considered.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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