licentious radio

Wednesday, June 26, 2002
[2:44:43 PM]

Good job BartCop for digging out the article to show Bush cut a BILLION DOLLARS [enn.com] that would have gone to fighting and preventing forest fires.

[2:16:34 PM]

More fun with WorldCom....

WorldCom used Andersen. Did anybody believe that what Andersen did for Enron, they weren't doing elsewhere?

WorldCom now uses KPMG. KPMG did the audit that discovered the $3.6 billion discrepency. Does anyone believe that KPMG wasn't doing the same stuff as Andersen? That is, if somebody audited KPMG's big accounts, do you think they would find less fraud than at Andersen's? (Maybe: Cheney switched Halliburton over to Andersen, and you know he'd go with the most corrupt company he could find.)

The first articles didn't point out that WorldCom was worth $115.3 billion in June 1999, but was down to less than a billion last week, and dropped 68 percent in one night -- to 26 cents a share. It's junk. It's toast. $30 billion in debt. Oopsy.

BuzzFlash notes that WorldCom was a bigtime donor to the Republican party -- the Grand Old Kleptocracy.

17,000 jobs is nothing to sneeze at. (Darth Fiorina would be jealous.) And then there is the retirement savings of the employees.

Finally, a note to PR firms: please coach the remaining CEOs and board members in *advance*. We don't want any more auto-satirization like "Our senior management team is shocked [-- shocked! --] by these discoveries."

This kind of thing hurts the punditry business -- who can recite the Casablanca line ("I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to discover gambling...") if management does it first? Consider it a professional courtesy from PR flaks to pundits. (You need us as much as we need you.) Thank you.

[11:51:21 AM]
"At MCI-WorldCom, we make money the old-fashioned way: we bribe politicians."

"That's so quaint. At Halliburton, we have no need to bribe politicians. We bought the whole damned government outright."

[11:38:13 AM]
Day 236 of the man-hunt for Osama Bin Laden. George W. Bush had this to say: "Nice Democrat. Roll over. Play dead. Good Democrat!"

[11:35:05 AM]
Dear Palestine,

Pay no attention to Bush. Please. We have to, but you don't.

I suggest non-violent direct action. Israelis can only put you under house arrest and terrorize you if you let them. 800,000 people sitting in the streets... IDF would surely kill some, but not many. Are you brave enough for that? IDF would have to go home. Don't give up your future to terrorists (on both sides).

[12:36:03 AM]
And don't let's forget that Enron stole 500 MILLION DOLLARS in ONE DAY from California, and then hid it "off-books". Americans want Cheney's head.

[12:32:22 AM]
George W's bloody folly [guardian.co.uk].

[12:19:57 AM]
MWO [mediawhoresonline.com]: Thanks, Ralph.

[12:17:40 AM]
Duh. It wasn't that the economy was in good shape. It was that the economy had stopped getting progressively worse, and was on track to get progressively better.

Greenspan killed that in April 2000 -- presumably to give Bush a chance to be elected. Bush renewed the downward spiral of Poppy and Ronald Raygun -- using all the usual suspects as excuses to divert vast flows of wealth from citizens to the gang.

The point is that the economy will suffer significantly more than you could account for, just on the basis of what they have stolen to date. Everyone can see that they'll keep pillaging until the world is in ruins. Poverty works for fascists. Just keep waving the flag and carpet-bombing brown-skins. The attack on Iraq is probably good for two years of crippling recession by itself -- just like Poppy's.

[12:03:24 AM]
AskGeeves bought Teoma. Google has *nothing* to worry about.