[wordup] Casualties of War

[Adam Shand]

Via: rebecca <rebecca at wetafx.co.nz>
From: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&u=/020214/7/13tju.html

CASUALTIES OF WAR
Wed Feb 13, 9:01 PM ET
By Ted Rall

NEW YORK - The numbers are almost impossible to fathom. In less than a
year, Enron went from the nation's seventh-largest corporation to
Houston's biggest producer of jobless people. More than 4,000 employees
hit the streets; many watching helplessly as their locked-in 401(k)s
evaporated. Meanwhile, their bosses cashed in their own chips and walked
away with bulging pockets. In 2000, the year before Enron went bankrupt,
CEO Kenneth Lay collected $8.3 million in salaries and bonuses. Between
October 1998 and November 2001, Lay sold 1.8 million of his shares of
Enron stock for a cool $101 million. Oh, and Lay was on the boards of
Compaq and Eli Lilly until December 2001. He owned $6.7 million of stock
in those companies. His total earnings during the `90s are estimated at
more than $300 million.

Americans were losing the war on terror long before September 11th.

As it turns out, some of our deadliest foes have been working deep
within the system. Even with 2,800 9-11 victims to his credit, Osama bin
Laden has nothing on these home-grown corporate terrorists. Thoughtless,
greedy captains of industry like Lay have laid off more than 15 million
Americans since 1990, simply to pump up the value of stock given to them
for nothing.

They fired people when their companies made money and they fired people
when they lost money. Either way, the more they fired the more they
earned. How many of those 15 million died because they could no longer
afford health insurance? How many more have slipped off the ladder of
downward mobility and plunged into abject poverty? Osama bin laden and
Ken Lay shared a common target-innocent American workers.

Enron is anything but an anomaly. It's a media-ready parable for
post-deregulation capitalism. Enron is what happens when we trust
business to do the right thing, when we believe in the magic of the
marketplace, when a corrupt government abdicates its duty to protect
workers and consumers against guys who think they deserve $101 million
to run a company into the ground. There have already been thousands of
Enrons. Unless we do something soon, there will be thousands more.

The United States may be the only place on earth where there is both
unemployment and understaffing. Lines are longer than they've ever been
in banks, grocery stores and airports, but employers save money on staff
and pass the inconvenience on to us. It's a simple equation:
unemployment scares those who keep their jobs, who are willing to work
harder for less pay, whose misery mutates into rudeness, which draws the
wrath of sucker consumers who are too busy yelling to know that they're
angry at the wrong people. Sure, actual business failures are a part of
economic natural selection, but putting 4,000 people out of work while
you collect $101 million is not an act of God -- it's a crime.

The Bush Administration has already made clear that it's willing to bend
the rules in the pursuit of terrorists abroad. Why not go after domestic
terrorism the same way?

On September 24, less than two weeks after the suicide attacks on New
York and Washington, Bush ordered the assets of Osama bin Laden and Al
Qaeda frozen. Why weren't the assets of Lay and his fellow execs' --
millions in cash, securities and real estate -- immediately frozen? This
would prevent them from moving or hiding those assets before Enron
employees and shareholders get their day in court. And it would send a
clear message to other practitioners of creative bookkeeping.

Innocent before proven guilty, you protest? Bush didn't worry about such
pretty legalisms before signing his executive order.

On October 7, he ordered the bombing of Kabul, beginning a campaign that
ultimately led to the fall of the Taliban government. We should conduct
a precision airstrike on Enron using fiscal means. Nationalize the
company, liquidate every asset down to the last paper clip and divvy up
the cash among the newly-unemployed. This is a common method of dealing
with rogue corporations in other countries; it should be applied to all
companies that break the law.

Beginning in January, U.S. forces have been charged with abusing Afghan
prisoners. Northern Alliance troops released from U.S. custody reported
that they were locked up in shipping containers, deprived of food and
water, and beaten until their ribs snapped. The Bush Administration
played fast and loose with the Geneva Convention, first stating that
captured Talibs were "unlawful combatants," then paying lip-service to
the treaty while nonetheless refusing to grant POW rights to the
prisoners languishing in dog pens at Guantánamo.

If guys who fought on our side in Afghanistan deserve such rough
treatment, surely the fate held in store for Lay, his fellow Enron
executives and anyone else accused of corporate terrorism should be a
thousand times worse.

"I am deeply troubled about asserting these rights," Lay told Congress
on as he took the Fifth on February 11th. "It may be perceived by some
that I have something to hide." Want Lay and other Enron terrorists to
talk? Dress them up in orange jump suits, put them on a USMC diet and
leave them alone with a few good men for a few good weeks. Terrorists,
as Bush has said repeatedly, don't have rights.

Anything less would be hypocritical.

(Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent coverage of
the Afghan war titled "To Afghanistan and Back," will be published in
April.)