Frank Rich, former "lifestyle" columnist and now editor of the New York Times, lays out an editorial MASTERPIECE: a swift review of the past decade, how government and business 'leaders', both Democrat and Republican, paved the way for America's current TRILLIONS-of-dollars economic meltdown, with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTING, vastly overstated assets, suppression of open reporting and transparency - with DOZENS of banks, business executives, and government officials ECHOING and REPEATING the basic template of ENRON massive ACCOUNTING FRAUD, and Bush-Cheney co's. LIES-to-WAR.
IN particular, Rich details FORMER CLINTON/Democrat TREASURY SECRETARY ROBERT RUBIN as being in on the Wall Street con game:
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Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich
[i.e. a small-time, comparatively honest hoodlum compared to the predatory sharks, parasitic bankers, and massive fraudsters of Wall St., Washington, and corporate America.]
By FRANK RICH
Published: December 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/opinion/14rich.html
<< Regulators had failed to see the iceberg in Enron’s path and so had Enron’s own accountants at Arthur Andersen, a corporate giant whose parallel implosion had its own casualty list of some 80,000 jobs. Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. Warren Buffett’s warning in 2003 that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction” was politely ignored. Much larger companies than Enron figured out how to place even bigger and more impenetrable gambles on derivatives, all the while piling up unseen debt. They built castles of air on a far grander scale than Kenny Boy could have imagined, doing so with sheer stupidity and cavalier, greed-fueled carelessness rather than fraud. >>
<< The most stupendous example as measured in dollars is Citigroup, now the recipient of potentially the biggest taxpayer bailout to date. The price tag could be some $300 billion — 20 times the proposed first installment of the scuttled Detroit bailout. Citigroup’s toxic derivatives, often tied to subprime mortgages, metastasized without appearing on the balance sheet. Both the company’s former chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and his senior adviser, Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary, have said they didn’t know the size of the worthless holdings until they’d spiraled into the tens of billions of dollars. >>
<< It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and [Phil] Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far. >>
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THE STUPID, media-sedated American public TOLERATES MASSIVE THEFT of both the US taxpayer Treasury AND THEIR OWN SAVINGS, INVESTMENTS, (home-values, etc.) and PENSION funds!!
(note: ONe thing that Frank Rich doesn't quite get to in this information packed commentary, is the role his own employer, the SULZBERGER OWNED New York Times, played in all this massive, gigantic, titanic accounting fraud and economic meltdown.
That is, in the early-mid 1990s the new Clinton administration was only just starting to drag America out of the BUSH-1 RECESSION, brought about by the Phil Gramm led DEREGULATION of the entire US Savings & Loan financial industry, when the New York Times started perpetrating journalistic fraud with their shoddy, misleading, and often times outright LYING reporting about the hapless Jim McDougal's role in "WHITEWATER", i.e. the routine real-estate flops of McDougal's Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan in Little Rock, Arksansas. The Times' RELENTLESSLY BAD reporting on "WHITEWATER" led millions of American "news" consumers to believe that McDougal's rural Arkansas "Whitewater" real-estate flop was THE CENTER of the nation's entire $500 billion (in 1980s money) S&L debacle; when, even by the Times' most hysterical accounts, McDougal's Madison Guarantee was bailed out by government/taxpayers for no more than $22 million. By comparison, Neil Bush's Colorado-based SILVERADO S&L cost taxpayers $1 BILLION in losses; and President Bush Sr., in FIRING the fed criminal banking auditor fo CHARLES KEATING's "LINCOLN Savings & Loan", allowed Keating to dodge a criminal audit, and continue Lincoln's operations for another year.... Costing taxpayers ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS in losses, for TWO BILLION DOLLARS in losses for Keating's Lincoln S&L, ALONE!
In relentlessly putting McDougal's hapless "WHITEWATER!" flop on the front pages of the NY Times for five or more years in a row, the TIMES publisher and editors HELPED AMERICANS FORGET about the far larger, far more systematic S&L debacle - thereby paving the way for good ol' PHIL GRAMM and his Democrat/Republican financial fraud enablers to REPEAT the ECONOMIC "DEREGULATION" tsunami all over again in the late 1990s!
(Authors Lyons & Conasons document the Times' relentlessly atrocious "Whitewater" reporting in their encylcopedic accounting of "THE HUNTING of the PRESIDENT"
http://www.amazon.com/Hunting-President-Ten-Year-Campaign-Destroy/dp/0312273193
(The contents, index, and several hundred of the authors' _25 pages_ of citations are included in the free GoogleBooks preview of the book.)
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