Ray, Pres. Bush is shell-shocked and demoralized.
This guy is not fit for command; heck he shouldn't
be in the field at all.
Better put him on latrine duty for a while. Yeah I
know; that's a bitter pill for a General to swallow
but sometimes the shift has got to hit the fan.
I saw another demoralized loser on TV yesterday,
Goldman Sachs Chmn. Paulson. Man, those Wall St.
gling glongs are getting real pathetic. Maybe it
comes from having NY AG Spitzer breathe down their
necks.
Paulson had the usual whine "We didn't understand the
bubble, the press didn't understand it, neither did corporates and regulators."
Wrong on all counts. There were many warnings but they
were simply shrugged and laughed off at the time. The SEC has for a long time been aware of serious accounting problems and fraud. Warren Buffett has for years warned against falsifying results by not fully charging wage expenses against earnings, something at the heart of scams like Microsoft, Cisco and others.
Business Week, May 14, 2001:
"""The spread of pro forma earnings has plunged investors into an Alice-in-Wonderland world. SEC Chief Accountant Lynn E. Turner calls pro forma results "EBS earnings"--for Everything but Bad Stuff. "Way too often, they seem to be used to distract investors from the actual results," Turner says. Wall Street, of course, is happy to play along: First Call's Hill says more than 260 companies have persuaded a majority of top financial analysts to abandon GAAP when making earnings estimates."""
"""Under former Chairman Arthur Levitt, the SEC started a campaign against numbers games in September, 1998 (table). Among the results: a financial fraud task force, which SEC enforcement chief Richard Walker says has been "working on some very, very substantial matters, which the public will learn about shortly." They involve some of the largest companies in the country and the biggest accounting firms, he says."""
And Pitt sailed into office with glowing endorsement from the same congress that now would like him fired. Isn't it amazing how the buggers in charge of this whole mess of a system always manage to seem surprised as more walls tumble around them? |
