Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (1982)	1/31/2002 12:09:00 PM
From: ksuave	Respond to of 5185

From Today's Bush Watch:Enronizing The Media It's remarkable how apt a metaphor Enron has become for our national condition, gaining deeper and broader meaning with each passing day. Business journalists say that Enron is the result of systemic problems in our corporate world; in this it's meant not just that everyone's doing it, but that everyone's required to do it. If an investment advisor doesn't give a 'strong buy' recommendation on a stock, no matter the actual merit, then the investment house issuing the stock will no longer give him any business. If an accounting firm does not approve a company's balance sheets, no matter how dubious, they will lose millions in 'consulting' fees. 'It's all about controlling the story,' said one investment banker interviewed on television - to stay on the gravy train, to ever 'work in this town again,' you must play the game; and so it is that all the Wallstreet analysts, advisors, consultants, brokers and auditors lie as terms of employment; lying willingly, willfully, constantly. 'It's all about controlling the story.' Yes, it is. At the formative stages of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, his career-long advisor Karl Rove placed a call to Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, owner of NBC. Rove gave Welch a proposition - if Welch could get the broadcast networks on board with Bush, then they would be rewarded with their own flavor of 'deregulation;' a removal of the legal restraints that heretofore prevented unlimited mergers and media acquisitions. Welch did make those calls to his fellow network heads; was there a resultant tilt in media bias in Bush's favor? Did the media studiously ignore evidence of Bush's military desertion, his drug use and arrest, his manifold business failures? Did the broadcast media bury the shocking story, revealed in the New York Times, that elements of the military conspired with the Republican party to illegally cast overseas ballots after Nov. 7th, then drummed up a phony issue of 'patriotism' to force the acceptance of those ballots? To name a few. Has the Bush administration returned the favor? Has Michael Powell at FCC been working steadfastly to remove all legal impediments to media mergers and acquisitions? Can you say 'quid pro quo?' It's been observed that there's a lot we're not allowed to discuss these days, supposedly in the cause of the 'war on terror.' The question of Bush's illegitimacy, his apparent negotiations with the Taliban for an oil pipeline, the staggering inconsistencies and unaccountability's surrounding the events of Sept. 11th. But this is not just a 'sense' of not being allowed to discuss them - as far as the national discussion takes place in the broadcast media, we are actually, factually, prevented from discussing them. The deal was cut. Our media has been 'Enronized,' our broadcast news is now no different from those Wallstreet shills selling cheerful lies, our White House just another scam whose inflated stock value doesn't reflect the true rot within. Mussolini said in his time that fascism should rightly be termed 'corporatism,' in that the state was now formed of, by and for the corporations. The up-to-date term might be 'Enronism.' --Kent Southard bushnews.com