Frank Rich: Eight Years of Madoffs (eight years of Bush administration bamboozles)

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Eight Years of Madoffs
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 10, 2009


(Barry Blitt)

Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace....

***

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11rich.html

[Faygo Kid]

1. Frank is the best.

The investigations must take place.

[Joe Bacon]

2. You brought this on us Frank!

I don't care what such a self centered pompous ass as Frank Rich writes now because I will NEVER forget what this slanderous slug wrote about Al Gore in 2000.

Frank Rich lied any lie about Al Gore and he repeatedly puffed up his man crush on George W Bush and it is all documented in Bob Somerby's Daily Howler.

Until Frank Rich publically apologizes to Al Gore, he can just whizz off!

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

3. Crap, I can't recommend...

The Press Representative of Lynn Woolsey just sent me this article... What I found most hopeful in it was:

"We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama's transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered "where is the outrage, the public outcry" over a government that has acted lawlessly and that "does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency." She asked, "How do we save our country's honor, and our own?"

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can't be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also "resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists."

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that "we must avoid any temptation simply to move on," because the national honor cannot be restored "without full disclosure." She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government's descent into the dark side of torture and "extraordinary rendition." But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike."


I guess we have to display some "Outrage and Public Outcry".... Like we haven't been doing that????? What bubble are they within?

I can't recommend this, and no one else can, so does this information just sink into the dungeon?
ADW

[DeepModem Mom]

4. I think you should post this info in a new post in GD, where more eyes will see it. nt