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January
26, 2002
Norman
Madarsz
Adieu,
Bourdieu
January
25, 2002
National
Lawyers Guild
Know
Your Rights
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
January
22, 2002
Brendan
Cooney
Moby-Dick
and the Hunt
for Osama bin Laden
Rick Giombetti
Progressive
Pols for Enron?
Judith
Resnik
Invading
the Courts?
Kevin
Alexander Gray
The
Crisis in Black Leadership
January
21, 2002
Marjorie
Cohn
Will
Walker's Words
Be Used Against Him?
Ahmad
Faruqui
MLK
Jr. and the Palestinians
January
19. 2002
Jordan
Green
Enron
Stole Our Future
January
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
The
Enron Model
Walt Brasch
Enron
at the White House
CounterPunch
Wire
Human
Rights Group Says Guantanamo Prisoners Must
Be Treated as POWs
January
17, 2002
Gideon
Levy
Bulldozing
Rafah
Uri Avnery
That
Weapons Shipment
January
16, 2002
John Chuckman
The
Angel and the Pretzel
Lawrence
McGuire
Subverting
the
Geneva Convention
Kathy
Kelly
An
Open Letter to
Richard Perle on Iraq
January
15, 2002
George
Monbiot
Greenpeace,
Lord Melchett
and the Business of Betrayal
Jack McCarthy
Follow
the Pretzel
William
Blum
Atta
and the Times:
Follow the Changing Story
Edward
Said
Emerging
Alternatives
in Palestine
January
14, 2002
David
Vest
Open
Bag. Eat Pretzels.
Patrick
Cockburn
Collapse
of Georgia
Ignored by the World
Mokhiber/Weissman
Enron's
Accountants:
When In Doubt, Shred It
January
13, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
Why
We Kill People
January
12, 2002
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Forbidden
Truths
January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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TO
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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January
27, 2002
Enron's Drip, Drip, Drip
by Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
The collapse of Enron is a story far too rich
to be reduced to a single story line.
But one crucial narrative is how a series
of seemingly small and technical decisions purchased in Washington,
D.C. eventually combined to enable Enron's implosion -- and how
recent and evolving policy decisions are paving the way for future
Enron-level disasters.
Consider the following: In 1995, the
accounting industry's powerful lobby muscled through Congress
the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Under this accountants'
immunity law, it has become much harder to sue accounting companies
for signing off on bad financial reviews, removing an important
check on the accountants at Andersen and in the rest of the industry.
As accounting firms decided in the 1990s
that they wanted to shed their stodgy image and solid profitability
for the super-profitability of the high-flying financial hipster
elite, conflicts of interest emerged between the firms' audit
function and the lucrative consulting business. To win and maintain
consulting contracts, companies like Andersen have an incentive
to go easy when they are auditing companies like Enron. Former
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Arthur Levitt sought
to impose a regulatory prohibition on firms working as auditors
and consultants for the same clients. But the accounting industry's
money blotted out his prudent proposal, as Congress made it clear
it expected no such regulatory prohibition to be put in place.
In 1997, Enron obtained from the SEC
an exemption from a law that would have prevented the company's
foreign operations from shifting debt off their books and barred
executives from investing in partnerships affiliated with the
company, according to the New York Times. If Enron had not finagled
this exemption, negotiated for Enron by a former director of
the investment management division at the SEC, the company would
have been prohibited from engaging in many of the financial shenanigans
that led to its collapse.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Thus did a series of
small regulatory and deregulatory actions and non-actions --
of which this is only a small sampling -- erode the law-and-order
barriers to the commission of Enron and Andersen's corporate
crime and abuse.
The Enron revelations have not stopped
this steady dribble.
Case in point: In late December of this
past year, the Bush administration struck from the books a regulation
that had considerable potential to deter corporate crime.
In a Christmas mini-coup, the administration
repealed an
anti-scofflaw rule that would have given federal contracting
officials authority to deny contracts to repeat law-breaking
corporations.
The contractor responsibility rule had
been enacted following a tortuous process. Then-Vice President
Al Gore floated the idea in 1997. A concerted campaign against
the proposal led the administration to keep it on hold until
1999, when the Clinton White House formally issued clarifying
rules to put the proposal into effect. Another corporate outcry
led to it being put back on ice. Finally, the Clinton administration
included the anti-scofflaw rule in the raft of regulations issued
in its final days.
The rule went into effect on January
19, 2001. The Bush administration suspended implementation on
January 20. The Christmas coup -- repealing the rule altogether
-- was the last chapter in the defeat of the rule.
The Chamber of Commerce applauded the
repeal of the rule, which it had, spectacularly, denigrated as
"blacklisting." In the fanciful scenario spun by Randel
Johnson, Chamber vice president for labor and employee benefits,
under the anti-scofflaw rule, "government agents could have
wielded virtually unlimited power."
Although Johnson and the business opponents
of the anti-scofflaw rule wildly exaggerated the potential scope
of the rule, the rule's common sense direction that government
contracting officers should exercise caution before contracting
with recidivist corporations would have exerted some deterrent
effect on corporate law-breaking.
And the rule did pose a threat to more
than a few corporations. Multinational Monitor magazine found
that nine of the top 100 corporate criminals of the 1990s were
among the 200 largest federal government contractors in 1998,
and that of the 50 largest defense and non-defense contractor,
20 had received more than 10 "serious" citations from
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The General
Accounting Office (GAO), the congressional research agency, has
found that 261 federal contractors, receiving more than $38 billion
in federal government business in fiscal year 1994, received
penalties of at least $15,000 for violating OSHA regulations,
and that 80 federal contractors,
receiving more than $23 billion in federal government business
in fiscal year 1993, had violated the National Labor Relations
Act.
For some large companies, the prospect
of endangering government contracts would have been sufficient
to prod them to greater respect for the law. But the administration's
concern for law-and-order or individual responsibility evidently
does not extend to corporations.
Sometime in the future, when another
Enron-scale corporate debacle breaks into the front pages, it
will be possible to look back to December 2001, and point to
the repeal of the contractor responsibility rule as an enabler
of the corporate criminals.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, <D.C.-based> Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington,
<D.C.-based> Multinational
Monitor <>. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.
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