- Posted By Rosalinda February 2, 2004
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- (Source: The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind)
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- O'Neill has revealed that the Bush administration under
puppet master Dick Cheney conducted massive fraud way beyond Iraq.
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- As Treasury Secretary, O'Neill says:
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- (1) he told President Bush, the "principals committee,"
(senior cabinet members), and his "economics" colleagues that
there was no real surplus from which to pay out tax cuts;
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- (2) he refused a request by Kenneth Lay of Enron to bail
out Enron the way LTCM was bailed out;
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- (3) he launched a campaign against the "Generally
Accepted Accounting Procedures" (GAAP) as a license to steal, and
pushed for laws that would hold CEO's reponsible for wrongdoing.
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- After battling AEI nuts like Lawrence Lindsey over mythical
surpluses for a year, O'Neill took on the corporate cronies of the Cheney
gang. At an NSC meeting on Jan 10, 2002, O'Neill revealed that Enron's
CEO Kenneth Lay had called both O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans,
begging for government intervention to prevent the rating agencies from
downgrading Enron.
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- O'Neill said "No," and began a campaign to
force new laws and regulations to make CEOs bear the entire responsiblity
for wrongdoing by their companies. CEOs began badgering the White House
to shut O'Neill up; "the scandals were hurting the President."
Karl Rove was worried that "anger about Enron ... tapped into submerged
doubts about Bush and Harken Energy, Cheney and Halliburton."
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- O'Neill refused to back down, and enlisted the support
of his "ally" Greenspan.
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- At a meeting of the Economics "principals,"
Suskind's book describes that after the demise of Enron, Global Crossing,
and dozens of other firms, even the usually unflappable Alan Greenspan,
was slamming the table, and "lifting his voice like Lear, railing
at heaven's vault," telling the SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, Lindsey,
and the White House other top guns: Glenn Hubbard and Mitch Daniels that
"There's been too much gaming of the system, until it is broke. Capitalism
is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism."
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- Pitt, and the other White House economics czars were
saying "stick to GAAP," that's the only law that counts.
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