Enron, Enron, Enron

AUSTIN -- The seminal historic event always affects the language. Already we can see that Enron is of this shattering magnitude. A stick-up artist goes into the Jiffy Mart to pull a heist. He whips his heater and says to the clerk, "Put 'em up, this is an aggressive accounting practice."

Or, you take your car to Ralph's Rip-Off Garage to get a 50 buck problem fixed and, sure enough, he bills you $600. You say, "What an aggressive accounting practice!"

Euphemism of the Year, and not even February yet.

The single most distinguishing feature of the Enron collapse is that no one is yet sure the company did anything illegal. (Aside from destroying documents, which arguably falls in the "seriously ill-advised" category.) As we gyre and gimble in the wabe of Enron, we run across such delightful items. Did you know that Enron's board twice voted to suspend its own ethics code in order to create private partnerships? But how thoughtful of them to suspend the ethics code first! Otherwise, they might have violated it.

Slaves to fashion: What fur?

Speaking as an animal that has, throughout time, been eyeballed by humans as mostly a delectable honey-baked ham or candidate for a barbecue – always the main course, never the guest – I’m not writing this for my own or my species sake. Yes, perhaps they used to (do they still?) make footballs out of our skin. But pigs have hair, not fur, which is why my dander-allergic daddy picked me for a pet in the first place. Nobody will be wearing a floor-length Iggy to keep them warm this year. I know fur must be warm, though, as my kittycat friends and nemeses in the backyard can attest. I can hardly fault my human friends for wanting to cozy up in a fur during these cold gray days. I’m a tropical pot-bellied pig by nature and spend my winter days on the back porch by a heater.

But here’s my plea for all Freep readers to call for an end to killing animals for fur. I know none of you wear fur, don’t get me wrong. Here’s some quick facts on the fur industry you can use in your arguments and a few local retailers to boycott:

Ashcroft's Media Scam: A Confederacy of Amnesia

Even by Washington's standards, the ability of John Ashcroft to reinvent himself has been a wonder to behold. Just a year ago, squeaking through Senate confirmation as attorney general, Ashcroft found himself shadowed by his own praise for leaders of the Confederacy. Now he's able to tout himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr.

It's quite a scam, and Ashcroft couldn't have pulled it off without major help from news media. Mainstream journalists have declined to subject the attorney general to the most elementary comparisons between present and past stances on race-related issues.

With scant challenge from journalists, Ashcroft is presenting himself as someone with a fervent commitment to racial equality. His lofty pronouncements -- floating like overinflated beach balls in dire need of sharp pins -- are held aloft by the prevailing media winds.

To be sure, when it comes to the undermining of civil liberties since mid-September, the attorney general has faced appreciable criticism from commentators. When the president takes aim at the Bill of Rights, a

Prisoners and World Trade

AUSTIN -- Why do they hate us? Well, scope out the deal at Guantanamo, and see what you think.

We go along for months having a war -- the war in Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, the war to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, troops on the ground, bombs in the air ... in other words, war. Those of us who suggested that maybe war was not the right rhetoric for this situation were booed down for being insufficiently bloodthirsty, and the caissons went rolling along.

Now we've won the war It's not clear what we've won, but we've definitely won, which is better than losing. So we take the prisoners we've captured off to our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suddenly announce that they are not prisoners of war after all, because this isn't really a war we've been fighting. Therefore the prisoners are "illegal combatants," and we don't have to treat them in accord with the Geneva Convention on POWs.

This is why a lot of people hate us. For the sheer bloody arrogance of having it both ways all the time. For thinking that we are

The Enron Uproar

Everywhere we look, it's Enron, in the biggest tumult over corporate criminality since the looting of the S&Ls in the 1980s. Enron will be on the menu for months, if not years. Congress launches into at least eight separate hearings. Federal and state prosecutors prepare indictments. The press marshals, investigative teams and columnists inscribe earnest reflections about the necessity for capitalism to be honest about its balance sheets. My favorite thus far: an article in Reason magazine (a journal of the libertarian right) shouldering a heavy burden of argument to the effect that the evaporation of the life savings of Enron workers, locked in their doomed 401Ks, should in no way slow the effort to privatize the social security system.

Of course Democrats can be forgiven their malicious glee. After years of battering over Whitewater, Chinese influence peddling, Monica, Travelgate, etc., they now enjoy a scandal of epic proportions in which the prime players are: Texan Republicans who were big-time contributors to George Bush; plus a company whose executives were somehow able to locate

War and Claptrap

The disjuncture these days between reality and what one reads in the press here is pretty much absolute. The other day I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle and found a piece hailing what the writer described as something most unusual for Afghanistan, a "peaceful" transfer of power. Now granted, the mostly civilian casualties are probably in the low thousands, and the most effective agent in that same transference of power was large cash bribes to all the relevant warlords, but even so, the word "peaceful" is scarcely the mot juste.

Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, now touted as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie "Black Hawk Down" hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993, Somalia had spent many years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil companies was sufficiently strong for the post-intervention U.S. embassy to be located in the Conoco compound.

The war against the war in Iraq

Delegates from all parts of the U.S. gathered in Washington DC June 15-18 to attend the Education for Peace in Iraq Center’s (EPIC) Iraq Forum and to lobby members of congress to lift economic sanctions and oppose prominent hardliners in Washington who are pushing the president to launch a full scale invasion of Iraq. Speakers at the Iraq Forum included Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies; Christine Gosden, University of Liverpool; Michael Amity, Washington Kurdish Institute; Scot Ritter, former UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector; Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness, and many others.

A Communique From the Ghost of Mark Twain

I see that I'm damn near legendary now; and since I died long ago, that's safe for all concerned.

The other day, with calendars showing January 2002, a radio was having its usual effect -- until suddenly my eyelids popped open. A young fella named Ken Burns was talking about me. I listened attentively in case I might, at last, learn the meaning of my glorious and wretched life.

Weighing me on literary scales, his thumb was heavy on the glory side. I will not object, though I might quibble a tad.

On the program (NPR's "Morning Edition"), filmmaker Burns brought me into the present. "Of all the historical characters that I've tried to size up over the last 25 years," he said, "Twain is the only person that I think you could drop down into today and within about 15 minutes everybody would want him. He'd be on your show. He'd be on all the cable channels."

Well, that depends. The man's own film briefly describes what happened when I wrote an extended attack on King Leopold's murderous plunder in the Congo: "No American publisher dared print it."

Problems with 'Progressives'

I deal with many like you, most calling themselves progressives, democrats, etc. However, what I discovered is your penchant toward verbal and cerebral bullying. Instead of engaging in HONEST discourse, as your position and beliefs become untenable and indefensible, you and your compatriots resort to epithets. Those who disagree are labelled right-wing republicans or (God forbid) Christian or homophobic. Why not revanchist — ring a bell. Personally, I find your brand of left-wing poison indigestible.

Furthermore, I know that you have a very different perspective than I do. I believe you enjoy the right, under the American Constitution, to express your beliefs. I do not believe you and your kind would truthfully reciprocate. My experiences with those of the extreme left confirms that.

War Profiteering

In this time of national crisis, amid calls for sacrifice, I’m truly troubled by some of the choices of the Republican party leadership. Here’s their idea of an economic stimulus package:

$1.4 billion for IBM
$833 million for General Motors
$671 million for General Electric
$572 million for Chevron Texaco
$254 million for Enron

This is war profiteering, and it’s simply wrong. Yet the House has just approved it, on a virtual party line vote, ending the recent spirit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

While our nation was reeling from the Anthrax threat, the House voted to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax on corporations. This law normally requires hugely profitable companies to pay at least some tax, no matter how many loopholes they can find. Its repeal would allow many companies to pay zero U.S. income tax in perpetuity - a loss of more than $12 billion in revenue next year alone.

The repeal is retroactive, so companies would get rebates of all the Alternative Minimum Tax they’ve paid for the last 15 years. The numbers above are a sampling of these rebates.

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