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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (1830)	1/30/2002 4:13:17 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5185

Both Duray and Baldur (notice any simularities there?, Duray is Baldur spelled backwards?) have cited Partnoy who has a Brilliant piece on this. Give me a little time, and I will get you some real answers. I'll have my people email your people. Instead of just quessing :))

To: JBTFD who wrote (1830)	1/30/2002 5:05:58 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

the hiding of debts in offshore corporations seems dishonest. Try tell that to Paul H. O'Neill, Secretary Treasure. The Banking Lobby pressured him to avoid looking into offshore accounts! Only after the 9/11 attacks did he look into the matter.

To: JBTFD who wrote (1830)	1/30/2002 5:19:11 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

Which Boot Will Drop Next? From the stimulus fine print to Enron input on top Bush jobs, the story's only getting hotter By Jonathan Alter NEWSWEEK Feb. 4 issue - All of the trappings are there-the fall guy takes the Fifth; the tortured insider commits suicide (it took less than an hour for the Vince Foster-style conspiracy theories to circulate on the Internet); the committee members, on break from fund-raising, posture for the cameras; the president plays the family-values victim, sharing his mother-in-law's Enron portfolio embarrassment in the name of damage control. BUT ENRON IS NOT just another juicy scandal. Enron is a cancer on capitalism, and the big question is how far it has already spread. Even if the new lead prosecutor, Leslie Caldwell, can cut out the tumor with aggressive law enforcement, the disease may be in the nodes of the marketplace, poisoning the rest of the financial system. Enron is a cancer on capitalism, andthe big question is how far it hasalready spread. At least one man thinks so, and his Senate testimony last week, while less sexy than all the finger-pointing, ranks among the most important appearances before a congressional committee in modern memory. His name is Arthur Levitt, a prophet without honor in the Big Casino of the 1990s. Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), says Enron is merely the symptom of a much larger problem. "What has failed is nothing less than the system for overseeing our capital markets," Levitt testified. Enron is the September 11 of financial security-a wake-up call-but Levitt was sounding the alarm well beforehand. When he held the SEC job under President Clinton, he warned repeatedly that a "culture of gamesmanship" was rigging the system with phony numbers, hyped earnings and worthless stock analysis. His calls for reform were rebuffed by members of Congress legally bribed by Wall Street and the green-eyeshade lobby. And reform might still be stifled. Enron may be bankrupt, but the underlying disease lives on, in the fig-leaf accountability proposals of the new SEC chief; the refusal of the White House to embrace real campaign-finance reform; the lame protestations that this is all some tragic aberration. If only it were so. Does anyone seriously believe that those off-shore shelters and off-books partnerships are somehow unique to Enron? Might not Arthur Andersen have offered a few of its other clients the same tips for scamming the IRS, the SEC and the average investor just trying to make sense of quarterly earnings reports written in corporate Sanskrit? Maybe accountants at the other Big Five firms aren't dumb enough to hold shredding parties, but Andersen's basic recipes for cooking the books seem to be, in the argot of the trade, "generally accepted." The above is an excerpt