a highly irregular column of Truths, Half Truths, and Mostly Truths by Semi.
Volume I, Issue 26 · posted Jan. 29, 2002
URI: http://www.semitrue.com/pages/2002.01.29.html
As I write these words, "President" Bush is presenting his first official State Of The Union address. He will speak about the "war on terrorism", homeland defense, the economy, and corporate irresponsibility ... without ever mentioning Enron by name.
The White House has stated repeatedly, and somewhat desperately, that they do not believe the American public associates the collapse of the energy trading company with this administration.
And why should we? No less than Harvey Pitt, the Chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission, showed his seriousness with this statement:
"The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Enron's meltdown and its tragic consequences. Until all the facts are known, there is nothing that can or should be said about who may be responsible for this terrible failure. The public can be confident, however, that we will deal with any wrongdoing and wrongdoers swiftly and completely, to ensure full protection of investor interests."
(You gotta love that: "wrongdoers" ... I suppose "evildoers" having already been reserved by Bush himself.)
Harvey Pitt, of course, made his name as a lawyer for Arthur Anderson, lobbying the SEC during the Clinton administration to curtail then-Chairman Arthur Levitt's proposal to stop corporate accounting firms from offering both audit and consulting services, the very practice that is now being questioned by several Congressional committees investigating the Enron collapse. Pitt was hand-picked by former Enron CEO Ken Lay to chair the SEC.
While much of Congress spent the day preparing for the President's speech, the Senate
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources took testimony
from Pat
Wood, Chairman of the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission, explaining why FERC did not really have
oversight responsibility over Enron. Bush appointed Wood under pressure from Ken Lay, who wanted to oust the
previous Clinton-
Why should the American public believe that Enron or Ken Lay — one of the single largest contributors to Bush's presidential campaign and whom Bush referred to as "Kenny Boy" until the collapse (now he refers to him as "Kenny Who?") — has had undue influence on this administration?
To show how removed he is, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's chief economic advisor, called Enron's fall "a tribute to American capitalism." And he should know, having previously been a consultant to Enron and a member of its Board of Advisers, alongside his good friend U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Echoing that theme, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill asserted "part of the genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they get to pay the consequence or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions." He probably learned all that when he was still the CEO of Alcoa, whose lobbying partner Vinson & Elkins also represents Enron.
It should not go unmentioned that members of this administration have also suffered as a result of the collapse of the energy giant. In fact, Army Secretary Thomas White, a former vice-chair of Enron Energy, reported that he experienced "significant personal losses'' in the company's bankruptcy. Like many ex-employees who lost their life's savings in the collapse, he will be forced to get by on the paltry $12.1 million he earned when he sold his Enron holdings after taking office.
In fact, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, at least fourteen top administration officials have owned stock in the failed energy services firm, including Defense Secretary Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld and Presidential advisor Karl Rove.
There's a term for all this you may have heard before: "Fuzzy Math". It's Fuzzy Math that allows a corporate giant to market futures to offshore affiliates and claim a profit, it's Fuzzy Math that allows corporate executives to sell shares of a weakening company and earn millions while their employees are prevented from selling their own failing stocks, it is Fuzzy Math for Enron to claim in a report to Congress that it spent $825,000 on lobbying in the first six months of 2001 when the lobbying firms they contracted claimed $1,785,000 in income from the company over the same period, and it is Fuzzy Math to give ongoing tax cuts to the wealthy citizens based on projections of surpluses that have vanished more thoroughly than Osama bin Laden.
And the biggest outrage of them all? The fact that not enough of us are outraged by all this. In this time of national crisis, it has somehow become politically incorrect to question this administration. For my money, the post-September 11 crisis sparked by the deadly attacks just replaced the pre-September 11 crisis following the illegitimate Y2K elections, and those terrorists that attacked our institutions are still inside the machine.
How outraged are you? email me
One year ago, after ironing out the technical details (thinking of a domain name, registering, finding a host, etc.), I sat down and wrote this question:
"So what is all this?"...
That question was the opening salvo in what has turned out to be one of the more interesting experiments of my checkered life. Call it Issue #0 in Volume 1 of what would become SEMI TRUTHS, my highly irregular email and website column (that original letter can still be seen on the website as An Introduction...). I promised a weekly column of "select commentary, random musings, broad social satire, and the occasional enlightened abstraction." I did not make the weekly schedule, but 26 issues in 12 months averages to one every two weeks, which I think is darn good.
My goal then, and now, was to provide my own wry interpretation of current
events and other subjects of import. At the time, as we were watching
He-
SEMI TRUTHS' origins, unlike the narrator, were humble. My initial subscribers were friends and family, but a few notable issues circulated beyond these intimate circles, and over the course of a few months, we gained more readers. Now, most of the subscribers to the email edition are people whom I have never met personally.
As I sought my own voice in this free-flowing forum, I found the irregular
format allowed me to swing from broad parody ("Do
The Hustle!", "Who's
On Drugs?") to Über-serious ("Business
As Usual/
Then came September 11.
Since then, I have struggled to find words that can express my mix of emotions at all that has happened. I fear my satire has lost its cutting edge, irony seems oddly inappropriate, and self-reflection to be poignant bordering on the maudlin.
I need a break. We all do.
This has been a very good experience for me. As I write this, I have gone back and looked at many of my previous columns and, if you will pardon me for saying so, some of them are quite all right. I have also perused drafts of columns that I never quite got around to finishing, and found in them material worthy of presenting.
I have little time to work on the columns these days (many positive but complicated events happening in my personal life at the moment), but with what time I do have, I will be adding bits of content to the website and gearing up for some larger projects — among other things, I hope to write more fiction.
So keep on eye on SemiTrue.com over the next few weeks, and please take these last words as the end of Volume 1 of SEMI TRUTHS. Something new and different — and, I hope, worth your while — will emerge from the foundation of what I have created here. I cannot express enough how grateful I am for your time, your attention, and your comments that you have given me this past year.
Watch the web. In one form or another, I will be back.
For the nonce, then, I leave you with this one final thought. Of the many uncertainties I have attempted to probe in this space, and the many questions I may yet visit, there is one final mystery to which I may never pose a reasonable explanation:
Mayonnaise.
any last words? email me
As usual, all definitions have been liberated from Dictionary.com. This week's words all have to do with finality.
desinence\des"i*nence\, n.; 1) termination, ending; 2) a grammatical ending, an inflection.
eschatology\es`cha*tol"o*gy\, n.; the doctrine of the last or final things, as death, judgment, and the events therewith connected.
sockdolager\sock*dol"a*ger\, n.; 1) that which finishes or ends a matter, a conclusive answer; 2) a combination of two hooks which close upon each other, by means of a spring, as soon as the fish bites
The World of Mayonnaise — a site dedicated to the pleasures of that curious comestible
No Mayo! — dedicated to the eradication of that perplexing pabulum "If you aren't a part of the solution to the Mayo crisis, you are part of the problem..."
Mayo Clinic — the many medical uses of Mayonnaise.
I don't like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written — in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem. Perhaps in no other line of work is delayed gratification so delayed. — William Zinsser
I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word mayonnaise. — Richard Brautigan
All Contents (except the stuff I stole) Copyright © 2002 S.M.
McCord.
Redistribution allowed, provided you cite http://www.semitrue.com.