Big edition this week folks. As you all know, we here at the BHC have been on a somewhat slackened pace of late. Summer doldrums, as it were. But, we have sallied forth to bring you the very best of the boneheads; and they have been piling up. NEC is SOL with DoEd. Citigroup gets nabbed for unbusinesslike conduct and the UN is up to no good. 911F hits the screens, well a few screens, anyway, and this, along with soooo much else, has Dick Cheney so steamed, he is now telling senators to fuck off. His days seem numbered.

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Business Solutions

NEC has apparently struck upon a golden business plan: screw poor schools out of federal funding. Little risk, no consequences. Sweet.

Readers of the BHC who may have had qualms about the corporate-critical broadside found in The BHC, Vol 26.1 will likely be rendered less...qualmed by yet another dismal entry in the long litany of corporate malfeasance.

NEC Business Network Solutions pled guilty to two federal felonies: wire fraud and a violation of antitrust resulting from their bilking a federal education program designed to invest poor schools and libraries with internet access. That's right, NEC pounced on the opportunity to filch from an education program for underpriviledged students across the country. NEC will pay $20.7 million in fines and restitution for this behaviour.

Mouthpiece of NEC America, Gerald P. Kenney, somehow managed to say with a straight face: "We made mistakes with E-Rate. We've acknowledged and accepted responsibility for those mistakes, cooperated fully with the government and taken action to ensure that these problems can't happen again."

It appears that NEC conspired, in a nation-wide, mistake-making scheme, to defraud the federal E-Rate program, a program designed to bring computer and internet access to poor school districts around the country via a tax on regional telephone bills. One of the "mistakes" routinely made by NEC was billing E-Rate administrators tens of millions of dollars more than the actual cost of supplied equipment.

Of course, corporations being the entities they are, no one goes to prison. They simply pay back the public funds they stole in the first place and pay a nominal penalty, probably from a slush fund of other stolen public monies. The BHC has no proof of such an assertion, just a gritty feeling.

If there were ever doubts about monster corporations ever doing the right and honourable thing, or even just the honest, legal one, those doubts have been roundly confirmed by NEC, a company which saw fit to screw poor schools and their students, out of millions of dollars by defrauding a federal school program. In an age of corporate wrong doing, this episode is an especially chilling example of just how craven and amoral modern corporate entities have become. And considering the education crisis in the United States right now, the BHC is hard-pressed to imagine a more savage lashing of the civic fabric of this country. With this action, NEC has rendered the notion of privatising the school system laughable as the private sector, once again, finds itself unable to contend with even the laws of the land let alone the considerably more delicate and nuanced task of educating young Americans.


Read the slime...

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CitiGroup Poop

Vindication of the BHC's distrust of corporations, and the princes who run them, is coming swiftly these days: the day after NEC was nailed in an investigation of its fraudulent, criminal behaviour against America's children, the Federal Reserve fined Citigroup unit, CitiFinancial, $70 million for predatory lending practices and loan abuse.

Speaking of corporate princes, Charles O. Prince, CEO of Citigroup, said, "the resolution of this matter is another important step in our continuing effort to address the issues of the past and move forward with standards that define best practices in our business."

Prince spit out the same disingenuous, boilerplate nonsense two weeks earlier when Citigroup coughed up $2.65 billion to settle fraud claims stemming from their close ties with WorldCom.

In Mr. Prince's statement that Citigroup is moving "forward with standards that define best practices in our business", the BHC sees not so much a promise to "move forward", but, in fact, a confession that, hey, we're already there: this is as good as our slimy business gets.


Read it....

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Tianenmen Remembered

Well, sort of:

At least 16 people were seized by police today as the Chinese government blocked demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, on the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters.

The square was open to the public, but police were vigilant for any sign of commemorations for the hundreds of people killed when tanks rolled in to break up a mass protest.

How much longer the Chinese government will be able to continue this kind of behaviour is uncertain. It is amazing that, 15 years later, they still can. Then again, US authorities, emboldened by White House "policies," have done and are doing the similiar things here these days.


Remember the Square....

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That Darn Fact

The US State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was wrong in reporting that terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding the Bush administration had pointed to as evidence of its success in countering terror.

The State Department instead said that the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply. Apparently, to the State Department at least, there is a murky line between decreasing and sharply increasing numbers, hence the confusion.

Seemingly unfamiliar with what an actual fact is, State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said that the administration's bizarre claims of decreased worldwide terrorist attacks were based "on the facts as we had them at the time; the facts that we had were wrong."

Now for your moment of Zen: The facts were wrong. Repeat.

Read these facts, which are not wrong...

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I am the Law

After the G-8 Summit in Georgia last month, George Bush had a press conference, nothing he ever enjoys terribly, although we here at the BHC can't wait for the next one; they are generally sources of enormous amusement and amazement. Well, this one certainly provided a few nuggets o' fun, especially when asked about the Abu Graib prison abuse:

Q: Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.

Now, this asynchronous maundering ought give anyone reading it reason to pause. As usual, he doesn't answer the actual question. But more distressing is the notion that he, as president, needs, or thinks he needs to instruct "our people" to adhere to law. As though confessing that without such instruction, his people would be running about, lawlessly arresting innocent people, locking them up for years without legal recourse, torturing them, stuff like that.


Read the blathering...

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Useless in The Congo

Bush and co. have been right about one thing: UN forces are feckless smurfs in the face of a real crisis. Resolutions, inspections, fine. But when it comes to actually doing something, they continue to draw the ire of those whom such resolutions are meant to help, as they continue their decades-long policy of confronting calamity with quiescence.

Furious anti-United Nations protests exploded across the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday, plunging the peacekeeping mission deeper into crisis and delivering a buffeting the vast country's fragile hopes for peace.

Angry crowds surged through the capital, Kinshasa, burning cars, flinging stones and besieging UN buildings in protest at the peace-keepers' failure to prevent the eastern city of Bukavu falling to dissident rebels on Tuesday.


Read it....

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Supressed by Popular Demand

Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 topped the box office this past weekend while only playing on 868 screens nationwide. Second, if you can believe this, was White Chicks. Yeah ...White...Chicks.... And that played on two thousand, seven hundred and twenty six freaking theatres around this nation. This is a dreadful comment on the frightening state of the corporate entertainment industry. It also demonstrates the healthy hunger Americans have for information which has mostly been denied them by the mainstream media.

But look at the numbers as reported by Variety (subscription, so no link):

Fahrenheit 9/11 opened on 868 screens and brought in $25,115 "per engagement." The next most successful movie this weekend was White Chicks, which also debuted and played on 2,726 screens -- about triple that of Fahrenheit, yet it brought in only $7,190 per engagement. Dodgeball, which had been out a week already, played on 3,020 screens over the weekend and earned $6,126 on average per screen.

Fahrenheit also had the best opening weekend for a Palme D'Or winner, bringing in a gross of $21.8 million compared to Pulp Fiction's $9.3 million after it won at Cannes.

Variety also reports that it marked the first time a weekend's No. 1 film played at fewer than 1,000 theaters since 1994, when "Four Weddings and a Funeral" pulled in $4.2 million from 721 screens.

Some while ago, the White House took the stance that it would not comment about the movie, insisting that any comments they might make about it would only lead to further controversy and thereby spark further interest. No doubt, the White House hoped this movie would just go away and they must be cursing the dumbasses at Disney who drew America's attention to it when they initially denied distribution rights.

Or maybe...the folks at Disney really are closet lefties. And smart ones at that: knowing full well that obstensibly objecting to releasing the movie, a groundswell of support and interest would be forthcoming and, once hitting number one at the box office, this film would prove to be a factor in giving Bush the boot, Disney's ultimate lefty goal. And, in covering their tracks, a week after Moore's film opens, they release some soppy, feel good movie like America's Heart and Soul, thereby making Disney appear to still be an American company populated by real Americans who love America. Mwwwhaaahaaa!


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Frank Off

Telling someone to eff off or to go eff themself, especially when that someone is a Senator on the Senate floor, is not something people generally do when things are going well. Dick Cheney was clearly having a bad day when he blew his lid and told Senator Leahy to fuck off after Leahy had been critical of Cheney and Halliburton's obvious bad behaviour on their no-bid Pentagon contracts. A Cheney spokesman confirmed that there had been a "frank exchange of views."

Bush, Cheney and the whole, fetid bunch of them have been having rather a lot of bad days lately and there is an obvious rotten smell. Well, they might be feeling that they are approaching their last days when their chance to swear at senators and congressmen will come to end.


Read about the angry man...

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Cronies R' Us

A fascinating story appeared in the Chicago Times detailing the unrelenting cronyism endemic in the Bush administration's appointments to the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Most official are there through connections to Bush and/or the GOP. Whoa! Now there's some big news. C'mon, this happens in every administration, doesn't it? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense of, well, yes. But no in the sense that no other administration has ever been on an install-freedom-and-democracy mission on quite the scale we are seeing, or not seeing, in Iraq. To most readers of the BHC, cushy crony appointments for friends of the ruling junta should not be at all hard to believe, but the details still make for some interesting reading. One thing is instantly recognisable: the Bush administration has a keenly developed talent for cronyism. And while this has and will continue to be a standard operating procedure for most administrations, the Bushites have raised the bar to new and lofty heights. Let's have a look at some of this season's cronyist players, shall we:

-- Stuart Bowen Jr., former longtime aide to President Bush, lobbied for company wanting work in Iraq and landed contracts worth up to $30 million for said company. He was also inspector general at the CPA. As Inspector General, he was the "corruption watchdog" overseeing the very company he got the contract for. Bowen worked for the Bush-Cheney legal team during the Florida recount.

-- Thomas Foley, having no foreign policy experience and multiple ties to Bush and other top-tier Republicans was in charge of "reviving the Iraqi economy". Now being an Harvard Business School contemporary of Bush's, that might mean almost anything. Clearly, Bush has no idea how to do such things; it is quite likely neither does Foley. But hey, what's minor detail like that when you're a major fund raiser for Bush's presidential campaign? Well, it seems that Iraq was a little too dusty and grim, so Foley came back to a Bush appointment to the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

-- April Foley is Thomas Foley's sister-in-law. She, too,was a Harvard colleague of Bush's. She holds a presidential appointment as vice president of the Export-Import Bank. The BHC has no idea whether she knows anything about banking or not. But that is of little or no consequence, it's the ol' alma mater that really counts.

-- James Haveman was the top health-care official in Iraq. He was a former state health-care administrator who got his job through the intercession of his former boss, John Engler, the Republican former governor of Michigan.

-- The CPA housing adviser, Michael Karem, 57, is a former Reagan administration appointee to HUD who resigned in 1982 after an influence-peddling investigation. The investigation went no where, but Michael? Well, he's just peddling right along.

-- The top reformer of the Iraqi university system, John Agresto, was a protege of Reagan-era education czar and loser-gambler extrodinaire, William "Scruples" Bennett. He was also president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, where the board's composition included a one Joyce Rumsfeld. Yeah, that Rumsfeld.

-- Of course: Halliburton Co., CEO Dick Cheney's former gig. Cheney is still receiving cheques from those good ol' boys. As we know, Halliburton is, by far, the biggest contractor in Iraq, mostly through no bid contracts.

-- In charge of reviving the Iraqi economy: Michael Fleischer, brother of Bush's former press secretary, Ari Fleischer. Ari "got my resume to Bremer" Fleischer landed interviews that led to dear brother's appointment.

Now, the Bush's entrourage must be somewhat aware of this gargantuan crony tumour they are nuturing. But even in the face of such awareness, however vague, crony recipient, Michael Fleischer spoke of a new world Iraqi's will adopt from America: "[it] is a new world for the Iraqis. Under Saddam Hussein, it was all done by cronies. The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

Such a fascinating lack of awareness. Or maybe not. Maybe they're perfectly aware and are just lying. We have never really been able to figure that one out for sure.


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Things were piling up. They still are.