Saturday, January 22, 2005

Nicaragua

If anyone's interested, I just posted every photo I took in Nicaragua last July.

Scary

I actually agree with Pat Buchanan. Sadly, this very seldom seen intelligence on his part is berated by his fellow pundits. What is it that is so unacceptable about disagreeing with the established wisdom regarding why Bin Laden attacked the US?

Friday, January 14, 2005

Words

In a surprise move, President Bush has decided to disclose mistakes made during his first term:

"Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday. "'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. And those words had an unintended consequence. It kind of, some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn't the case."

Oh, words. Yeah, I seem to remember some other words Bush said once:

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”

Good thing those weren't a big mistake.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Trachtenberg

Incriminating pictures edition.

With Kissinger:

Maybe that explains his reluctance to dump Pinochet as a client of Riggs Bank ...

With Mubarak:

From the caption:
[Egyptian] President Mubarak received Mr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg head of George Washington University. Mubarak and Trachtenberg, during their meeting, investigated Egypt’s pivotal role for the economic development of the Middle East and joint educational projects between George Washington University and Egyptian universities.
Egypt: source of four 9/11 highjackers. Coincidence?

With Scalia:


With Bush:


With the ambassador of Tunisia:

OK, so I don't have any objection to that one.

Anyway, for comparison's sake:

Riggs Bank

From Davis Sirota (via the Poor Man), we get a tale of terror and high finance, with presidential connections to boot:

According to the 5/14/04 New York Times, Federal regulators fined the Riggs National Corporation, the parent company of Riggs Bank, $25 million yesterday for "failing to report suspicious activity, the largest penalty ever assessed against a domestic bank in connection with money laundering. The fine stems from Riggs's failure over at least the last two years to actively monitor suspect financial transfers through Saudi Arabian accounts held by the bank." The 5/14/04 Wall Street Journal reported that of particular concern, Riggs failed to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." According to the 4/18/04 Washington Post, Saudi Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, "may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists." According to the Washington Post, federal regulators "called Riggs actions a "'willful, systemic' violation of anti-money-laundering law." Riggs officials have "acknowledged years of deficiencies in reporting to law enforcement hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious financial transactions by foreign customers, particularly those connected with the embassies of Saudi Arabia."

PRESIDENT BUSH'S UNCLE IS A CHIEF EXECUTIVE AT RIGGS BANK
According to the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Jonathan Bush is the President and CEO of Riggs Investment Management - a major arm of Riggs Bank. He is also the uncle of President George W. Bush. The President "credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his 'success' in the Texas oil industry in the early '80s." According to Public Citizen, the uncle Jonathan was a Bush Pioneer, having raised more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000.


Wait, they're with Bush and with the terrorists? That doesn't seem to fit with the administration's decree of the binary dualism of the war on terror. But I digress.

So, Riggs Bank got themselves into trouble trouble because they had illegal dealings with certain saudis. Really? Who could have guessed that there'd be anything but good, prudent, legal banking going on after they opened a branch inside the Saudi embassy?! That's the same building, by the way, that featured in its own segment in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie which focused heavily on the business connections between the Bush family and the House of Saud.

An Untold Story

But W isn't the only Washington president with connections to both Riggs and the Saudi Royal Family (nor is he the best paid). Meet Steven Joel Trachtenberg, the oft' top-hatted president of the George Washington University.



Trachtenberg sits on Riggs' board of directors, where he's taken heat for opposing efforts to close the accounts of such Riggs clients as August Pinochet. But the fun doesn't stop there; according to the Hatchet, GW's student paper:

The connection between GW and Riggs runs deeper than Trachtenberg's position on the bank's board. Robert Allbritton, Riggs' CEO and son of its largest shareholder, is a member of the GW Board of Trustees (Albritton refused through a spokesman to comment). In addition, Riggs is one of four or five banks that handle the University's finances.

Ouch. Well, at least GW doesn't have any connection to Saudi Arabia.

Oh, Wait. There's that whole Saudi Princess thing. Apparently, GW has set up a sort of distance learning program for Saudi royals. Courses in which two Saudi princesses wish to enroll are held in a special classroom in the media building, where the students and professor are recorded with video equipment and desk-mounted microphones; the recordings are taken by daily courier to Riyadh (at least, so said one professor). In effect, the university has set up a satellite campus inside the Saudi royal palace, one-upping Riggs' embassy franchise. (For those familiar with GW, such behavior should come as no surprise; while only medium-sized, the university has 3 separate campuses in DC and Virginia.) And as to that embassy: if Michael Moore found its placement so close to the White House suspect, we should be positively alarmed at its proximity to GW.

GRRRRR

I'm really super pissed, because I just lost a lot of work that'd gone into blogging Riggs Bank's affiliation with Saudi terror money. Man, I really need a frisbee.

Winter break

For those of you who've been checking in, my thanks and apologies for the lack of new material. As current responsibilities make scheduling free time difficult and my absence from Washington keeps me out of the loop, I've regrettably been keeping quite silent of late.

In leu of whatever wit you come here for, try checking out the Poor Man again, or perhaps that perennial favorite, Atrios. Practice your shouting for 1/20, and make plans to constrain spending that thursday. Call your congresspeople about an issue important to you (you know, election fraud, torture-memoing AJ nominees, robbing the future's old people of social security, etc.).

Also, any of you who will be in the District, I'm forming some (rather nascent) plans to hold an inauguration ball alternative. Black tie and all (oh, we do want to be sharply dressed for our tea-drinking repatriation to the Commonwealth). All activities are subject to change, should better suggestions make themselves known.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

I'm in awe

If anyone's out there, go read the poor man. Now. He's really on his game.

Back from the holidays

and what do I find? 109,045 Americans lost their job in December! Not only that, but according to CNN that makes four straight months of 100k+ job loss, which hasn't happened since early 2002. This news is met, as has become tradition at CNN, with positive spin:

"The heavy year-end downsizing does not necessarily indicate a sudden weakening of the economy," said John Challenger, CEO of the firm. "The fact is, job cutting has become a permanent part of the corporate cost-management mix, as demonstrated by the fact that a strong financial sector still found nearly 100,000 jobs to eliminate."

What, then, is our measure of strength in the economy? I may label myself as quite Keynesian here, but I thought the whole point was to maintain the general welfare, if through increasing total wealth, not just to line the pockets of the wealthy. Oh, my bad, leaving people without jobs at Christmas is just good business!

Unsurprisingly, Pat Robertson was saying today that the economy is as great as ever. (I know, I know, why am I watching the 700 Club?) He cited corporate profits at over $1 trillion as a positive sign for the economy. I wonder, though, what corporate profit has to do with the well being of most Americans. And I really would like to hear Pat's reasoned argument for why christians should be happy over insane corporate greed and firing people just before Christmas.