Bush Shafts Enron Victims

[EV_Ares]

By Robert L. Borosage - TomPaine.com

Wall Street's investment banks just got another one step closer to making defrauding investors an accepted line of business. And Enron's employees who lost their pensions and the small investors who got fleeced in the Enron frauds just got shafted again - this time at the urging of President George W. Bush.

Wall Street's most powerful investment banks and their friends in high places lobbied the U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to reject the recommendation of the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Justice Department support defrauded investors in their appeal to the Supreme Court. The case before the Supreme Court is called Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, but the Court decision will directly impact the millions of victims of Enron's collapse - and say much about the honesty of U.S. markets.

Briefs in support of the defrauded investors were filed by dozens of state attorneys general, by the Council of Institutional Investors and some of the nation's largest pension funds whose investments are at risk if Wall Street banks can concoct fraudulent schemes with impunity. Yet, in an unprecedented failure to meet his responsibilities to the public, Solicitor General Clement, who represents the United States before the Court, decided to punt.

Clement is not exactly a neutral party. He's a star of the right-wing bar. He clerked for Laurence Silberman and Antonin Scalia, among the most partisan and reactionary judges of our time. He served as an aide to Sen. John Ashcroft. He is an activist in the right-wing Federalist Society that seeks a return to 19th century jurisprudence.

And this spear carrier for the right got his marching orders from the top. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson called directly and arranged for President Bush to weigh in personally.

(((entire article @ link below)))

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061407H.shtml

[rpannier]

1. The 'Let Them Eat Cake' crowd is on the March Again

Afterall, what's the financial destruction of thousands of little people when the profits of corporations and their multi-millionaire buddies are at stake.

[Bitwit1234]

2. Think that's why someone deposited several piles of crap

in the capital building. Interested in finding out....how did the person find the time to deposit these turds, what with all the "security" around us provided by this administration. And if they didn't personally "deposit" it, how could they have found the time to smear it around. Something is stinky here and it just aint the turds.

But then there is another explanation, since rove the "Turd Blossom" is so full of it maybe he just had to find room for more.

[City Lights]

3. Lil' Boooosh only cares about the haves and the have mores.

Everyone else gets screwed. :mad:

[Coexist]

4. sick.

[Hubert Flottz]

5. Poppy and Little King George have their pensions...

Everyone else can go to hell, like the people in New Orleans...That's Compassionate Conservatism in action.

[Gatchaman]

6. I have to laugh at people with big retirement plans

who think their 401k's and other schemes are actually going to make them rich when then they retire, which will of course be at some artificially early age. "What?", I ask them, "Do you actually think they're going to let you keep all that money?"

It's a crime against humanity that these companies get away with ripping off people like this, but I don't see it changing any time soon.