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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| swiss bank bucks/gross bush guys/from horseback? |
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| mwishka |
| 07/20/02 at 14:22:16 |
| yeah, i like this idea! only problem is that, for example, getting nazi money out of those swiss banks, with "world sympathy" on the side of that endeavor, took forever. and that was more than likely just a very secret and specific deal made to appear to be a gesture of human concern, and only permitted because it was bound by strong legal grounds based probably on reams and reams of evidence available from nuremburg. who has that much "evidence" on these others, and which corrupt leaders or rulers will be sacrificed by the rest of the international power class of (mostly) white corporate criminals whose "investments" fruit only into those banks? the Daily DAWN World asked to help recover looted money: President opens anti-corruption moot moot By Our Staff Reporter ISLAMABAD, July 19: President Pervez Musharraf urged the international community on Friday to wage a war against corruption with the same resolve with which the menace of terrorism narcotics were being addressed Speaking at the inaugural session of the two-day "National Anti-Corruption Strategy Workshop" organised by the National Accountability Bureau, the president observed that billions of dollars stashed away by corrupt rulers of developing countries in Swiss banks, if returned, could be used by these countries to repay their debts. Gen Pervez Musharraf said the money deposited by looters and plunderers in the foreign banks was enough to repay Pakistan's debts. "Pay our money and we will pay back our debts," the president said, urging the international community to evolve some mechanism so that the money earned through corrupt practices could not find its way to the Swiss banks. He wondered why some institutional checks could not be put in place on laundering of money made through illegal means. "Why there could not be some legislation at the international level and why the banks are allowed to accept such deposits?" he asked. The president recalled that when he took over power in October 1999, corruption was rampant among the top echelons of power. There had been a collusion between the political and bureaucratic elite and financial institutions, which, he said, was the source of macro-corruption in Pakistan. Through this collusion, development funds to the tune of billions of rupees had been siphoned off, he added. The president pointed out that over the last ten years around Rs1.1 trillion had been allocated for development but there were no projects on the ground. "This huge amount has gone down the drain," he said. Except for M-2 Motorway for which the country had been paying Rs6 billion a year, two international airports and few buildings in Islamabad, he said he found nothing else on which over Rs1 trillion allocated in the Public Sector Development Programme had been spent over the past ten years. The president claimed his government was corruption-free, saying he was proud of it. In 1988, Pakistan ranked seventh among the most corrupt countries of the world, now we stood at 11th, he said. He highly appreciated the NAB role and said it had recovered Rs140 billion in the last one year. Gen Musharraf said the NAB must get a constitutional cover and autonomy so that it would not get politicised in future. The government, he said, was restructuring the FIA and linking it to the NAB for tracking white-collar crimes. As regards the law and order situation, the president said the law enforcement agencies had improved their performance a lot. He said restructuring of police was also being done and its three basic functions - watch and ward, investigation and prosecution - would be separated. The investigation wing would have a different uniform from the force responsible for watch and ward, he added. The president hoped that the organizational restructuring would reduce mega corruption in the country. He said privatization of banks, devolution of powers and other reforms undertaken by the government would go a long way in eradicating corruption from the society. Enumerating his government's success in implementation of the seven-point agenda, Gen Musharraf said confidence-building and morale boosting was the first point on his agenda. "It is still important" as the nations without self-confidence could not rise and develop. He said the second point was to strengthen the federation and remove inter-provincial disharmony and forge national cohesion. The constitutional amendments were being carried out to achieve this goal. The third point was the revival of economy, he said, adding the regime had been successful in pulling out the economy from the red. However, he admitted that still a lot had to be done. The economic recovery was not possible without getting rid of the debt trap, which was difficult but achievable, the president added. The fourth point, he said, was to ensure law and order and dispense speedy justice. He said the government had not been able to ensure speedy justice but the law and order was certainly improving. The fifth point was to depoliticise the state institutions, which, he said, had been done and there was no favouritism and intervention in the state institutions. "This needs to be continued after October elections," he said. The sixth point was about devolution of powers to the grass-roots level. "We have done it, and brought about a silent revolution in the country," he said. He said lack of resources were impeding the functions of district governments. Lastly, Gen Musharraf said, he had promised to ensure swift and across-the-board accountability. "It has been across the board," he remarked, apparently dismissing the criticism that it had remained focused on politicians. The president recounted the number of politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and others so far tried on corruption charges. Gen Musharraf lamented that there had been a degeneration in the society to the extent that it had developed an acceptability for corrupt people. ============================================================== ny times July 20, 2002 The Road to Perdition By FRANK RICH Wagging the dog no longer cuts it. If the Bush administration wants to distract Americans from watching their 401(k)'s go down the toilet, it will have to unleash the whole kennel. Maybe only unilateral annihilation of the entire axis of evil will do. Though the fate of John Walker Lindh was once a national obsession, its resolution couldn't knock Wall Street from the top of the evening news this week. Neither could the president's White House lawn rollout of his homeland security master plan. When John Ashcroft, in full quiver, told Congress that the country was dotted with Al Qaeda sleeper cells "waiting to strike again," he commanded less media attention than Ted Williams's corpse. What riveted Americans instead was the spectacle of numbers tumbling as the president gave two speeches telling us help was on the way. For his first pitch, he appeared against a blue background emblazoned with the repeated legend "Corporate Responsibility." Next came a red backdrop, with "Strengthening Our Economy" as the double-vision-inducing slogan. What will be strike three — black-and-white stripes and "Dick Cheney Is Not a Crook"? Maybe this rah-rah technique helped boost the numbers back when George W. Bush was head cheerleader in prep school. But he's not at Andover anymore. Where his father's rhetoric gave us a thousand points of light, his lopped a thousand points off the Dow. Once the market dissed him, the president waxed philosophical, if not Aristotelian, professing shock that his fellow citizens would care about something as base as money. Invoking Sept. 11, he said, "I believe people have taken a step back and asked, `What's important in life?' You know, the bottom line and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself?" Easy for him to say. It's hard to engage in lofty meditation about loving your neighbor if your neighbor is Kenneth Lay or Gary Winnick or Bernard Ebbers or any other insider in "corporate America stuff" who escaped with multimillions just before the corporation cratered, taking your job or pension or both with it. Democrats celebrate the Republicans' travails as if it were Christmas in July. But the party's chief, Terry McAuliffe, was a Winnick crony who made his own killing before Global Crossing tanked, and its most visible presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, is fighting to the political death for loosey-goosey stock-option accounting. Just as the Harken-Halliburton stories gathered fuel, such tribunes of the people as Tom Daschle, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry boarded corporate jets supplied by companies like Eli Lilly and BellSouth to rendezvous in Nantucket with their favor-seeking fat cats. But the hypocrisies of the Democrats, however sleazy in their own right, do not cancel out the burgeoning questions about this White House. Each time Mr. Bush protests that only a few bad apples ail corporate America, that mutant orchard inches closer to the Rose Garden. If there's not a systemic problem in American business, there does seem to be one in the administration, and it cannot be cordoned off from the rest of its official behavior. Compartmentalization, Republicans of all people should know, went out of style with the Clinton administration. In the real world, everything connects. What is most revealing about Mr. Bush's much-touted antidote to the bad apples, his "financial crimes SWAT team," is how closely it mimics Enron's Cayman Island shell subsidiaries. It exists mainly on paper, as a cutely named entity with no real assets. It calls for no new employees or funds and won't even gain new F.B.I. agents to replace those whom the bureau reassigned from white-collar crime to counterterrorism after Sept. 11. The SWAT team's main purpose is to bolster the administration's poll numbers as the Enron off-the-books partnerships did its corporate parent's stock price. And like its prototypes, it may already be going south. No sooner did the SWAT team's chief, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, hold his first photo op than The Washington Post revealed that he was an alumnus of yet another bad apple, the credit-card giant Providian. Mr. Thompson had headed the board's audit and compliance committee and escaped with $5 million before the company threw thousands of employees out of work and paid more than $400 million to settle allegations of consumer and securities fraud. Even the war on terrorism is not immune from Enron-style governance by this administration. Last weekend Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta reported in The Times that the Halliburton unit KBR got a unique sweetheart deal with the Army last December, despite being a reputed bill-padder and the target of a criminal investigation. Why? Call it the perfect Halliburton-Enron storm. The company grabbing the deal is the former employer of the vice president. The government agency granting the deal, the Army, reports to the former Enron executive Thomas White, who is nothing if not consistent: he doesn't protect taxpayers' dollars any more zealously than he did his former shareholders'. We still don't know the full extent of our Enron governance because we still don't have a complete list of former Enron employees hired by the Bush administration. (It hardly inspires confidence to know that one of them is its chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, who also offered such valuable wisdom to Ken Lay.) Nor, of course, do we know the full details of the president's past history at Harken Energy or the vice president's at Halliburton. Those details matter not so much because of any criminality they might reveal — we are rapidly learning that there is no such thing as a prosecutable corporate crime anyway — but because of what they may add to our knowledge of the ethics, policies and personnel of a secretive administration to which we've entrusted both our domestic and economic security. What we know about Harken so far is largely due to the S.E.C. documents unearthed and posted since 2000 by the enterprising and nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, also a leader in uncovering the Clinton administration's Lincoln Bedroom scandals. "It's Forrest Gump does finance," says Charles Lewis, the center's founder, in looking at the story line of the remarkable George W. Bush business career. "Every time he seemed to be in trouble, he would end up with a box of chocolates." The president's self-contradictory defense of his past is to say he was "fully vetted" by the S.E.C. even though he still hasn't "figured it out completely" himself. But the S.E.C. never interviewed Mr. Bush during its investigation. The agency was then run by an appointee of his father, Richard Breeden, who recused himself from the case. Last Sunday, Mr. Breeden turned up on Fox News as a George W. defender. Yet when Tony Snow asked him twice if he could give the president "a clean bill of health, yes or no," Mr. Breeden pleaded ignorance and ducked. Perhaps that's why the White House has not asked the S.E.C. to release its Harken papers, even though Harvey Pitt last weekend said he would if it did. The president has also told the press that "you need to look back on the director's minutes" to answer questions about Harken — and then refused to provide those minutes or to instruct Harken to release them either. But yesterday Mr. Lewis's organization posted a pile of them at www.publicintegrity.org, and says that more documents are yet to come. What is the president hiding? Clearly the story here is not merely a hard-to-prove case of insider trading, tardy stock-sale forms and Mr. Bush's knowledge of the sham transaction involving Aloha Petroleum. Most likely it also involves the mystery first raised by The Wall Street Journal and Time in 1991. Back then, their investigative journalists tried to break the cronyism code by which tiny Harken, which had never drilled a well overseas, miraculously beat out the giant Amoco for a prized contract for drilling in Bahrain. They also tried to learn what various Saudi money men, some tied to the terrorist-sponsoring Bank of Credit and Commerce International, may have had to do with Harken while the then-president's son was in proximity. These questions, like the companion questions about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq on Mr. Cheney's watch, are not ancient history but will gain in relevance in direct proportion to the expansion of the war on terrorism and the decline of the Dow. Sooner or later George W. Bush will have to answer them, because even though he cares more about loving his neighbors than the bottom line, the rest of us are just irredeemably crass. =============================================================== By ALLISON LAWLOR Globe and Mail Update Thursday, July 18 ? Online Edition, Posted at 6:44 PM EST B.C. motorists beware — the next squeegee kid who offers to wash your windshield may be a Mountie. RCMP in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby are posing as window washers at major intersections in an attempt to catch drivers who are breaking the law by not wearing a seat belt. The covert traffic operation called "Operation Squeegee" was launched on Tuesday and has so far wielded positive results. In a four-hour period this week, officers issued 90 tickets. "It's been very successful," Constable Phil Reid told globeandmail.com on Thursday. During the course of the operation, an undercover officer, dressed in shorts, sneakers or even ripped jeans, approaches a car to wash the window and looks inside to see if all the seat belts are properly fastened. If they are not, the officer then radios a colleague in uniform who stops the car nearby and issues a ticket if necessary. It is an $86 fine for not wearing a seat belt, Constable Reid said. While offering windshield washing to vehicles is illegal in Burnaby, Constable Reid said police often break laws during the course of their work in order to enforce other laws. :o Life as a "squeegee officer" hasn't been easy for the undercover police officers, he said. Officers have had to wash windows ::), endure name calling, been spat at and told to get a job. They have also received cigarettes and donations for their services. Constable Reid said that all money collected by the undercover officers will be donated to a local food bank. "Operation Squeegee" is expected to run throughout the summer. |
| 07/20/02 at 14:23:54 |
| mwishka |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |