Remora

"...they have a large exposed rear and exposed flanks..."
-- NPR War correspondent.

Ah, those large exposed rears! For a second, I was thinking that NPR had finally gotten around to reviewing one of my favorite movies, Kelly the Coed: part 5 -- in which the exposure of the rear is an essential, uh, plot element. I mean, isn't it about time Fresh Air took on Vivid Videos? But Alas, the war goes on...

LI has redounded a bit too much lately, about Iraq. Let's turn to the toast economy, shall we?



HealthSouth's collapse, last week, was masked by the war -- as, for that matter, were the tax shenanigans of the D.C. Bush-ites, the busy troops bringing us the Great Giveaway. HealthSouth is serious business. These great structures, with their CEO Humpty Dumpties sitting on them, redefining the language of profit and loss, cause a lot of collateral damage when they have their great falls. One of our best friends here, S., is a physical therapist working at a Health South Hospital. She is pregnant, she is a recent homeowner, and she is just the kind of person who is put at risk by the likes of the CEO of Health South, Richard Scrushy.



To rehash the story:



Last year, Health South made one of those surprising earnings announcement that almost invariably indicate the midnight scuttling of rats in the accounting department.  At the beginning of last year, as the death bell for Enron was ringing out  the dead in the energy and telecom sectors, scary news was being heard from the health sector. Forbes, in October, summed up the year's spiral for Health South like this:



"Healthsouth Chairman Richard Scrushy was complaining about Medicare reimbursements when we wrote about him earlier this year. He's still complaining, but he's got bigger problems. A raft of shareholder suits charge that Scrushy and another director sold $100 million worth of shares knowing that a clarification in Medicare billing rules on group therapy would reduce annual operating earnings at the rehab hospital chain by $175 million.



HealthSouth's stock has plunged 75% since the earnings reduction announcement Aug. 27.But maybe it's bondholders who have the real beef. The suits claim that HealthSouth knew about the Medicare billing clarification as early as May 17. Scrushy insists he had no knowledge of it until August. Interesting, that May 17 date. That's when HealthSouth sold $1 billion in debt to investors, extending notes that would have expired in 2003 for an additional ten years. The company got a 7 5/8% rate. Not bad, given that the bonds have since fallen to 69 cents on the dollar, which if negotiated today would mean a 14% coupon for HealthSouth. In short, HealthSouth got a good deal issuing that debt when it did."



Ah, innocence. One ponders another CEO's parental concern with his stock options outweighing his concern for his company. But wait! There was a twist with this announcement. Rather than confessing to a possible fraud, the confession itself was part of a larger fraud.

The HealthSouth saga was, as is so often the case, all about the CEO, Richard Scrushy. Scrushy swung a  member of elephantine proportions in his home town of Birmingham, Alabama. He'd gotten his name on various University of Alabama buildings. He was celebrated in the newspaper as an entrepeneurial sage. Like Stephen Hilbert, the CEO of CONSECO of Indianapolis, another grounded high flier with a taste for younger, prettier wives, located in an out of the way burg that was perfect for camoflaging on-going revenue stripping, Scrushy was famed for a variety of tasteless moments. There's one of those NYT portraits of the guy, by Simon Romero that drypoints with just that hint of acid the true bizarreness that can be overlooked in a Southern town if you are willing to throw around one hundred million dollars:





"For a city that had grown accustomed to Mr. Scrushy's public persona in recent years, the disclosure of the problems at HealthSouth came as a jolt. Mr. Scrushy (pronounced SCROO-shee) was known as much in Birmingham for his extravagant tastes, which included a Hummer oversize S.U.V., a luxurious Florida estate and a lead singing role in his own country music band, as he was for his philanthropy."





Romero's article -- and by the way, that it is Romero's and not Kurt Eichenwald makes us wonder if something is up there on the NYT business page --today frontloads a few pretty shocking grafs, bad news for Scrushy:





"At least one official is said to be planning to submit documents, including copies of invoices and receipts, that would show how Richard M. Scrushy, HealthSouth's former chairman, oversaw the creation of a sophisticated electronic surveillance system that may have intimidated senior officials into keeping quiet.Last week, the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Weston Smith, HealthSouth's former chief financial officer. Mr. Smith is cooperating with investigators in their effort to show how Mr. Scrushy pushed senior executives to inflate earnings to prevent a decline in HealthSouth's share price. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating."



But worse is in the meat of the article, the twist in Scrushy's summer confession:



"The S.E.C., in the case it filed last week, said that the controversy over the Medicare rule was simply a ruse and that Mr. Scrushy, along with several other HealthSouth executives, had been inflating and distorting the company's financial results almost since its inception. The company is accused of inflating earnings by $1.4 billion and assets by $800 million from 1999 through mid-2002, although the fraud is said to have taken place for a much longer time. Like other health care companies, HealthSouth routinely adjusted its revenues to estimate how much it would be paid by insurers.



But Healthsouth used those adjustments to manipulate its earnings, according to the S.E.C. complaint, and falsified records to deceive the company's auditors.After years of falsifying earnings, Mr. Scrushy had been looking for a way to reduce Wall Street expectations so he would not have to inflate profits as much in the future, the regulators said."




Wow. You have to wonder about the brass, or the desperation, of a guy like this. Meanwhile, Alabama has to face up to the costs of erasing Srushy's name on various and sundry public buildings. Surely there's a market in this -- selling governments erasable tags, good for stadiums and college facilities. If your donator CEO goes belly up, just flick a switch and presto-chango! The name changes to Smith or something. Until you program in the next CEO's name.

Remora

The US government, and the British government, in their wisdom, have decided that it is all right for US photographers to show Iraqi troops surrendering, and it is all right for US journalists to interview Iraqi POWs, but that it is a war crime for Iraqis to do the same thing. The broadcast of Iraqis interviewing -- or rather mistreating -- obviously scared prisoners has been shown through out the Arab world by Al Jazeera,and you can see it here, from the Netherlands RTL4. It is not pleasant watching. However, censorship, in this case, is merely feeding the Beast -- a point deliberately misunderstoon by our patriot censors who are bravely manning the media, feeding us figures that don't match the images. When the NYT asked ABC news about the Al Jazeera broadcast, here was the reply -- supply your own satire:

David Westin, the ABC News president, said he decided ABC News should not show those pictures. "I don't think there's any news value in it," he said.

Among other censorship news: the widely reported figure of 8,000 Iraqi troops surrendering in the first days of the conflict has dwindled to 2,000 troops in further re-telling. Here's the NYT take:

"The first few days were intense, but perhaps the easiest part of a complex war. Many of the Iraqi soldiers the allies confronted were ill motivated and ill trained. Some surrendered, and many simply vanished. Even so, some of the celebrated capitulations have turned out to be less than advertised. American officials were quick to announce the surrender of the commander of the 51st Iraqi Division. Today, they discovered that the "commander" was actually a junior officer masquerading as a higher-up in an attempt to win better treatment."

Remora

Peter Dixon, 34, photographer, lives in London: "Just because war has started doesn't mean that my opinion has changed. The war is still illegal. Marching today is even more important than before. What else can we do?"
--Guardian, Anti-war protesters take to the streets.

LI has been revolving Peter Dixon's question in our little pointy head since participating in the last Austin Anti-war rally Thursday. And we have been sharpening our big idea, which is that the antiwar campaign must either doom itself to irrelevance by playing the game of the politics of expression (hey, we are trying to get into punditspeak, where pronunciations are always from on high, and use the modals of necessity -- must and should, as if we were all Nemesis, Jrs. down here) or turn into a movement against the upcoming occupation.

We went to the Stop the War coalition website, which is the Net hq for the people that organized the huge demonstrations on February 15. Unfortunately, our feeling is that the SW people have only one campaign strategy, which is to repeat February 15. That might work in the UK, but it certainly won't work in the U.S.

Why shouldn't the focus be on stopping the war, you ask? Because this war is moving with extraordinary rapidity, and will stop itself -- at least the first phase -- pretty soon. If you simply want the war stopped, it will soon be stopped.

No, what we don't want is what is forecast in Nicholas Hoffman's column in the New York Observer, which turns the jaded eye of some Joseph Conrad character upon the probable effects of the war. Oddly enough, the horror and nightmare Hoffman evokes is synonymous with Robert Kaplan's idea of sweetness and light, as adumbrated in this month's Atlantic. Robert Kaplan is one of the intellectual architects of the war, and he cuts through the facade of propaganda about the war thrown up by figures of fun like the ineffable Hitchens. We are going to do a post on that Kaplan article -- it is so deliciously open about Bush's foreign policy, which is a sort of Sadism as dreamt up by a backwoods evangelical.

...

To stop the occupation, the antiwar movement, at least that bit of it that shows itself in Austin, Texas (which we assume is a sample of the larger, national movement) is going to have to stop concentrating exclusively on the same demographic Fox comedy shows are aired at: the young and the restless. The speakers at the rally we went to referred repeatedly to their students. They are recruited from academia; they are wholly honorable in their sentiments; but just because they occupy a niche in this country where radicalism can be comfortable, they are limited by their vocabulary and attitudes to what they are used to. So, for instance, the broadcast to the wrong niche. The youth of America might be important consumers of CDs and blue jeans, but they are no longer the chosen vehicle of the kind of efficient political movement that can actually stop the occupation. Polls show that, just as in the Vietnam war and the Korean war, the demographic with the strongest aversion to this war is the Retirement set --- that's right, people above 55. Some of them made it to the rally Thursday, but they were not at all enlisted by the speakers.

This is from a WP poll published on March 4th:


"The poll also found that some of the strongest doubts about a war with Iraq are coming from a seemingly unexpected source: older Americans, who were far less likely to support taking military action than young adults -- a dramatic illustration of how President Bush's policies have reopened divisions in the electorate that were largely absent immediately before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 17 months ago. At the same time, large majorities of Democrats and minorities expressed opposition to taking military action against Iraq."

From those constituencies, the older group and the minorities were dramatically under-represented in the march, while the young constituted easily 65 percent of the marchers. I suppose that the older segment was well represented on the platform -- there were gray haired musicians playing Dylan songs from 1962. And that is good. But there was no Spanish-language music, there was no rap, there was nothing to appeal to the East side of Austin. And there were no Rotarians up there. There should be.

This is a delicate moment, and it requires coalitions between libertarians and leftists, conservatives and liberals. And the art of making those coalitions is, alas, untaught among grassroots organizers, who more and more come from a narrow segment of this society: academia.

However, we have to appeal to the Business Week reader. Especially as we move into the occupation phase, the cost of the enterprise will start to wake up the businessman type. But they will be thrown back by their instincts into the prowar camp if they believe being anti-occupation is not serious. If, that is, they believe that it is the equivalent of being cool in a coffee house, or being indignant as a form of emotional refreshment. No, the indignation we need is to the death, in the bone -- one willing to give up being right and righteous, always a nice hierarchizing move, for being efficient.

Reruns

-- Well, to see what LI has been thinking about Iraq, I went back in time -- difficult to do, since my archive is in horrible shape -- to September, 2001. LI was on the case about Iraq at that time -- erroneously, it seems, since LI's assumption was that 9/11 was connected to the Iraqis. But we made a few remarks we still hold to. And we believe the logic of our previous positions fits neatly with our position now, which is that the anti-war movement, if it is going to do anything, better turn into an anti-occupation movement. War is now the fact in the case, whether you support it or not. Occupation isn't, however. And that is the next big struggle. But it will be lost before it has begun if the antiwar movement doesn't show some flexibility.
Anyway, this is from a post made on 9/26/01, and the next post is dated. The firstg post was an extended commentary on a Michael Kelley column about the wickedness of the left. I extract this paragraph:

"I've already had my say about this in earlier posts, but to reiterate: the era since the Cold and the Gulf War ended has not been a glorious one for American foreign policy. The dual containment of Iran and Iraq ignored the reality of change in Iran, and enforced a horrendously immoral -- let's even use Kelly's word, evil -- policy in Iraq, to wit, the refusal to aid or countenance a democratically oriented overthrow of Saddam Hussein for fear that such an overthrow would destroy the country and expand the sphere of Iranian influence, and the consequent turn to the compromise of sanctions, which was premised on the insane proposition that an unarmed populace could be prodded into overthrowing a heavily armed, violent dictator by being systematically starved. With, of course, the codicil that even if the population, by some miracle, was able to successfully bring some tyrannicide to fruition, that it would allow the political fruit of its courage to be wrenched away from it, leaving the structure of the regime alone. Exchanging, in other words, one tyranny for another, in a nightmarish succession of Ba'athist strongmen.
Yeah, let's see, what were the terms Kelly used? "Foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism"? I think I could throw a few more insults on that pile, but that will do for starters.

[edit]

[9/19/2001 10:55:08 AM | roger gathman]
Dope.

One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.

The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.

Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.

For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:


"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.

"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "

Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.

But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!

As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.

Remora

So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?

Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.

Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.

No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,

"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."

are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.

So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.

Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.

Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.

Letters

Our friend H. sent us this answer to our question (stolen, of course, from Lenin), what is to be done?

"Since you asked, some short, swift campaign to get the bastards in syria,
jordan and iran to open their fucking borders and let the refugees in and
house them and treat them with dignity."

A friend of ours in Memphis reports on the debilitated intelligence that is driving public opinion:

"I bought a crazed tabloid "newspaper" (Weekly World News) at the supermarket (a first time for every purchase) with the headline "CIA's shocking revelation: Saddam Plans Move to France! . . .he'll be made French ambassador to the US!" I thought this was so brilliantly funny that I was laughing as I came to the register to check out. The cashier looked curiously at me so I explained, holding up the cover. "Well, is he?" said said cashier."

Our friend T. in NYC wrote a literary detective's account of the belligerant's excuses in a letter on St. Pat's day:

"Well, hell, I did have a discontinuous thought re war this weekend. It was a thought as I recalled that Zizek gave an account of a film about a CIA agent sent to get a code breaking gadget from the Eastern Block, a gadget that will allow the West to decipher KGB codes. Arriving in the East, the agent finds everything going wrong; the KGB are onto him. What went wrong, was there a mole? No and no: the mission was a ploy. The CIA already had the gadget, and the agent was sent to make the KGB think that they do not possess it, so that the KGB will continue to use the gadgets.Thus: the "International Community" writ US-UK-Spain asserts that Iraq has gadgets and that anything contrary to that is a ploy. Further asserted by this version of the IC is that until we wage war, Iraq will continue to use such gadgets, and if they are not used, well, this is a further ploy on the part of Saddam; i.e. so long as we think that they have them, they will continue to not use them. There is also an always-already to all this as well: ah ha! Sadaam might not have these gadgets because they are always-already sold to terrorists."

The World Weekly News, by the way, will be crucial to the way we survive this war. Reading the World Weekly News, and then reading the New York Times, has a strange effect -- because so much of the NYT really does read like the World Weekly News. Is that a mere coincidence? Hmm. For instance, read this list of ways you can tell if your neighbor is a time traveller, and then read this report from Baghdad by NYT reporter John Burns about how eager Iraqis are to be liberated by the ever so friendly American missiles raining down on Satan's city. The surrealists recommended automatic writing to free up the poet's soul -- LI recommends the WWN.

"-Lack of body hair -- Modern humans are less hairy than cavemen and evolution experts predict people of the future will be even less hairy.

-Great stock tips -- While time travelers may conceal their wealth and pose as ordinary middle-class suburbanites, their ability to "guess" which stocks are will go through the roof may strike you as uncanny.

-Missing pinky toe -- Scientists say that as man continues to evolve, our pinky toes will gradually disappear over the next thousand years.

-Slips of the tongue -- May refer to current events or people in the past tense, for example, saying, "Boy, George Clooney sure was a great actor."

-Pet dog belongs to an unknown "mystery" breed -- Your neighbor will probably counter that the unusual-looking pooch is "just a mutt."