Not the Smartest Guys in the Room or Anywhere (For That Matter)

Remember Jack Abramoff and the smart-as-whips (on your back) Bushies (and their Enron pals, dying just in time) who brought us to this pretty pass? Ever wonder how smart they really were? Several years ago I wrote about the Enron "Smartest Guys in the Room" who seemed quite limited in intelligence to me and their choices (like building a really BIG house) after stealing so much of innocent people's savings were worse than laughable, although with Bush himself as the measuring stick . . . . Many people thought they deserved Dante's lowest level of Hell. But what did we know? Brad does. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff's obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious dealmaker" Jack Abramoff.

Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation - as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them - not even good at being criminals. . . . (Matt) Taibbi's piece (in Rolling Stone) covers in detail some of the many scams that Abramoff and the rest of the nationwide Republican Network of dishonest, opportunistic players who now comprise the power structure of the Republican party - or the "vast rightwing conspiracy" as Hillary correctly described it. It's an ugly, but accurate portrait of those who have hijacked all that America was supposed to have stood for while an otherwise distracted and/or media-whipped public was trained to look the other way - or otherwise give the benefit of the doubt to some very very bad guys who have earned no such benefit.

Those bad guys now run the country, its government, its corporations and its media virtually in its entirety. And more shamefull still, they've got goons played for suckers who are so daft and gullible that, to this day, they run around and play apologist for these people who - I guess they don't realize it - are fucking them hard up their own asses with their own hard-earned money and blindly offered good-will. You'll find many of those dopes repeating Fox "News" and Limbaugh-isms over Thanksgiving dinners everywhere, and otherwise plying their foolish and self-destructive trade wherever they can. A stroll through some of the most trollish comments left here at The BRAD BLOG reveals these people have left only the dimmest of connections to Reality as it exists in 2006 on the planet Earth.

. . . All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.

We're glad to see Taibbi pick up on some of our reporting as he writes . . . . And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

...But it would certainly help to keep such bad guys from affecting so much corruption and damage for so many years before they actually get busted, if Taibbi would be kind enough to point out some of the sources - independent, alternative, "blog" or otherwise - who have been trying to blow such whistles for so long.

With appropriate credit and recognition from the mainstream, as we opined a several weeks ago, reporting such as ours and many others would likely have the effect of stopping the bad guys before they manage to wreak quite as much havoc on our once-great American democracy.

We'd hope that even the usually independent-minded Rolling Stone would keep such important points in mind by choosing to give appropriate attribution where possible in their future reporting. As we've said before: It matters.

Greenberg Traurig. Do those two words have a special ring to you by now? And if not, why not?

R. Allen Stanford and Miami-based Greenberg Traurig: Why Is It Always Greenberg Traurig? In the 1990's, Greenberg Traurig's behind-the-scenes influence as a lobbyist in Miami zoning and permitting decisions began to attract my interest. The firm, for instance, was the key organizing force for the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco. Whenever a zoning decision involving South Dade was on the county commission agenda, founding partner Bob Traurig was in the audience and frequently on behalf of converting farmland to sprawl. Environmental land use attorney, MIguel De Grandy - formerly of Greenberg - remains an influential player in county politics, mainly related to zoning and also an advisor to the unreformable majority of the county commission. Both Marvin Rosen and Jack Abramoff represented Greenberg Traurig, as well. . . . The Miami Herald runs an excellent story on R. Allen Stanford - charged with multi-billion fraud - and a new angle: the stage was set for Stanford's multi-billion fraud in 1998, the year Stanford persuaded Florida banking regulators to grant his company special rights to open a Miami office outside the scrutiny of federal banking regulators. In this unique instance, Sanford was represented by Greenberg Traurig. "There was no lawful way that office should have been opened," said Richard Donelan, the state's chief banking counsel who opposed the deal. On Eyeonmiami, I've written a lot about 1998, the year Jeb Bush was elected governor of Florida. That year and that election set the stage for the the biggest boom in housing and construction in Florida history, now in ruins. Jeb won in South Florida, and primarily through the coordination of his base constituency - builders and developers - and as a result, Miami is the epicenter of the housing bust. This is the place the gears of the machine all lined up to mesh Wall Street financial motive with political levers at the most intricate level of decision making, from state authority to local zoning allowing unsustainable growth. The boom, based on unsustainable foundations and fraud, destroyed South Florida's quality of life and environment, minting millionaires through the reciprocal arrangements of campaign contributions and politicians. And Greenberg Traurig attorneys seem to pop up everywhere.

Stanford obtained authority to do offshore banking - an exclusive arrangement-- with the help of Greenberg Traurig lobbyists from a Democratic administration in Tallahassee during the 1998 campaign for governor. Stanford does not begin to show up, according to a brief and cursory review of campaign contribution lists, as a prolific political donor until 2000. His contributions appear to be weighted to Democrats. Whose chains did Greenberg Traurig help to pull, during 1998, for Stanford in Tallahassee?It is part of the story that the Herald might have considered more carefully. There was a huge amount of political pushing and pulling in 1998.

Although Bill Clinton had won Florida in 1996, Lieutenant Gov. Buddy McKay, who served out the term of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, lagged Bush badly in the polls.

Read the rest here. Chris Hedges addresses the pressing issue of exactly who is paying for the guilty guys to stay out of jail and the not-guilty ones to languish there for year.

But innocence and guilt are funny things in America. If you are rich and guilty, if you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, if you wear fancy suits and have degrees from elite universities that cost more per year than Brown used to make, you get taxpayer money. You get lots of it.

You maintain the lavish lifestyle of jets and spas and million-dollar bonuses. You live a life of unchecked greed and have too much in a world where most have too little. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown and African-American and 39 years old with four kids and no job and you live in the inner city, you are in trouble. No one comes to help you. You don’t get a second chance. This is what being poor means.

Enjoying the real end of days much now? Suzan __________

"The Gift That Keeps On Giving"

Have you been wondering about the pervasive silence from the MSM on Jack Abramoff and his crime spree - "the gift that keeps on giving?" Luckily for us Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have "tracked down the facts" (paraphrasing Bill O'Lielly's threat to Michelle Obama), which should be reported on soon even by the MSM, and are ready to lead another type of party: one leading directly to jail for a very long time. They address the ongoing Monica Goodling and Sen. Ted Stevens scandals and plug Thomas Frank's (I've loved this guy since reading his What's the Matter with Kansas?) new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, which contains these most astute observations:

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident," he writes, "nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. ... The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action." Have we the stamina, commitment - or even the attention span - to take such action?

They give some overdue attention to the current TV stardom of the thugs Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist who seem to be skating away from their criminal associations with Abramoff, the defrauding of Indians, casinos scandals and the murder of a mafia-connected possibly made guy, ending with the damning indictment that the U.S. has become "a nation too easily distracted and looking the other way as everything rightfully ours is taken." ______________________________________________

The Wave of "Capitol Crimes" Continues Thursday 31 July 2008 Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective Like the largesse he spread so bountifully to members of Congress and the White House staff - countless fancy meals, skybox tickets to basketball games and U2 concerts, golfing sprees in Scotland - Jack Abramoff is the gift that keeps on giving. The notorious lobbyist and his cohorts (including conservatives Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) shook down Native American tribal councils and other clients for tens of millions of dollars, buying influence via a coalition of equally corrupt government officials and cronies dedicated to dismantling government by selling it off, making massive profits as they tore the principles of a representative democracy to shreds. A report earlier this summer from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform builds on an earlier committee investigation that detailed some 485 contacts between Abramoff and the Bush administration. According to the new report, "Senior White House officials told the Committee that White House officials held Mr. Abramoff and members of his lobbying team in high regard and solicited recommendations from Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues on policy matters." Now Abramoff's doing time in Maryland. He's at a minimum-security federal prison, serving five years and ten months for unrelated, fraudulent business practices involving a fake wire transfer he and a partner fabricated to secure a loan to buy SunCruz Casinos. SunCruz, a line of Florida cruise ships, ferried high and low rollers into international waters to gamble. (The original owner of SunCruz Casinos, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, was gunned down, Mafia-style, in February 2001). But come September, Abramoff will be sentenced for his larger-than-life role in one of the biggest scandals in American history - a collection of outrages that has already sent one member of Congress to jail, others into retirement and dozens of accomplices running for cover. Over the last couple of years, he has been singing to the authorities, which is why he has been kept in a detention facility close to DC and the reason his sentencing for tax evasion, the defrauding of Indians and the bribing of Washington officials has been delayed. The FBI is thought to be using Abramoff's testimony to build an ever-expanding case that may continue to shake those who live within the Beltway bubble for months and years to come. Bill Moyers Journal is airing an updated edition of "Capitol Crimes," a special that was first produced for public television two years ago, relating the entire sordid story of the Abramoff scandals. Produced by Sherry Jones, the rebroadcast comes at a moment of renewed interest. Not only is Abramoff's sentencing imminent, but the most important national elections in decades are little more than three months away amid continuing, seemingly daily revelations of further, profligate abuses of power. Monday saw the publication of a 140-page report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, confirming that, as The Washington Post recounted, "For nearly two years, a young political aide sought to cultivate a 'farm system' for Republicans at the Justice Department, hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices. "That aide, Monica M. Goodling, exercised what amounted to veto power over a wide range of critical jobs, asking candidates for their views on abortion and same-sex marriage and maneuvering around senior officials who outranked her, including the department's second-in-command.... [The report] concluded yesterday that Goodling and others had broken civil service laws, run afoul of department policy and engaged in 'misconduct,' a finding that could expose them to further scrutiny and sanctions." With the next day's sunrise came the indictment of Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, the first sitting US senator to face criminal charges in 15 years. Apparently, the senator was playing the home version of "The Price Is Right," for among the gifts a grand jury says were illegally rewarded him by the oil company VECO were a Viking gas grill, a tool cabinet and a wraparound deck for his mountainside house in Anchorage. In fact, VECO allegedly gave the place an entire new first floor, with two bedrooms and a bath. How neighborly. (By the way, just to round the circle, Senator Stevens received $1,000 in campaign contributions from Jack Abramoff directly, which subsequently he donated to the Alaskan chapter of the Red Cross, and $16,500 from Native American tribes and others represented by Abramoff, which Stevens gave to other charities.) Coincidentally, this week also marks the publication of a new book, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule," written by Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" In an essay in the August issue of Harper's magazine, adapted from the book, Frank adroitly weaves the actions of Abramoff and his pals into a vastly larger ideological framework. "Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident," he writes, "nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. "... The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action." Have we the stamina, commitment - or even the attention span - to take such action? Abramoff may be cooling his heels in minimum security, but his pals DeLay, Norquist and Reed appear on television and radio shows whose hosts treat them as political savants with nary a nod to their past nefarious association with Abramoff. Few in the audience seem to notice or care. Former House Majority Leader DeLay is awaiting trial on money laundering charges. The incorrigible Ralph Reed, who played Christian pastors in Texas for suckers in enlisting their unwitting help for Abramoff's gambling clients, even has a political potboiler of a novel out - "Dark Horse." The novel is the story of a failed Democratic presidential candidate who finds God, then runs as an independent, funded, presumably, by the supreme being's political action committee. "Do we Americans really want good government?" That's a question asked not by Thomas Frank, but by the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, writing more than a century ago in his book, "The Shame of the Cities." He wrote, "We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some 'party'; we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us." From more than a hundred years' distance, Steffens would recognize Abramoff and company for what they are. And we for who we are; a nation too easily distracted and looking the other way as everything rightfully ours is taken. __________________________________ Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS.

Suzan ______________________________________