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To: VaBthang4
Here is their little memo by the snake RAts! It has backfired on them big time.

Scandals surrounding Enron offer excellent prospects to hurt rightist politicos behind the ’00 Coup. Enron’s calamitous collapse touches every rightist shibboleth from "private accounts" for Social Security to pretensions of personal integrity. The spectacle of Enron, bankrupted by theft, affronts rightist voting blocs as much as it does us on the left. This means the broadest possible mass of the people will be receptive to agitation crying up Enron scandals.

While just how Enron was looted baffles first sight, a criminal spine to Enron scandals is both clear and familiar to the people: a thief (Mr. Lay) gives much cash to a politician (Bush); thereafter, the thief enjoys great favor and wealth as the politician rises to greater power still. That is a clear fact of the circumstance everybody understands, and therefore none can successfully hide.

How can Enron best be used by the left in the forthcoming general election? In two ways. First, to lend a generally criminal air to Republican fundraising, and fundraising by Bush in particular. Second, to depress turnout by rightist voters, by inducing apathy through disillusion.
Republican electoral success depends on great financial predominance. The willingness of rich rightists to donate large sums to Bush is a principal weapon in the enemy’s armory. The exigencies of wartime politics have already acted to reduce his fundraising capabilities somewhat, by rendering unseemly any aggressively partisan activity by a purportedly national leader (as Bush claims himself to be).

By political action emphasizing Mr. Lay’s great investments in Bush, as well as the clear favor Mr. Lay enjoyed, Bush’s ability to raise party funds can be reduced still further. All funds Bush does raise can be tainted with scandal; all party functions he attends can be made occasion for protesting donations by criminals to him.

Any number of Bush’s "Pioneer" bag-men will be discovered still active, tainted by connections to Mr. Lay, and shown to be enjoying presently favors from Bush, just like the ones Mr. Lay did. The press establishment’s public commitment to "campaign finance reform" will force them to echo such sentiments, if they are sharply pressed by, and among, the people.

Rightist voting strength depends on a coalition of free-market believers and traditionalists. It is unwieldy: nothing is so corrosive of traditional mores as free markets; nothing is more traditional than calling for government curbs on thieving merchants.

Mr. Lay’s thieving shows so all can clearly see that markets are neither free nor well regulated, simply rigged, and Bush’s connivance in the thefts makes the realization he is in on the fix just as unavoidable.

Free market believers have no defense against a fact of rigged markets; traditionalists always suspect markets of being rigged. Making Enron into a symbol for all the thimble-rigging, for all the shady accounting and look-away auditing and carnival shilling the rubes that goes in to rigging markets, and shoving it all at Bush and his Republicans by use of Mr. Lay’s cash presents to Bush, must have some depressive and disillusioning effects on both components of the rightist coalition.

Free market believers without much real property of their own, the greatest proportion of them by far, must view with some alarm the routine deception of major accounting firms and mutual funds that Mr. Lay, by leave of Bush, engaged in, to his and his cronies profit. Free market believers with little property know enough to know it is they themselves who are the sheep these wolves seek.

Traditionalists, who are moved by a conscious thrill of virtue when, instead of serving their material interests by voting left, they stand and do the "right" thing by voting for a rightist candidate, with integrity and values, must view with some repulsion the greed displayed by those they have trusted to lead the nation. Mr. Lay’s thieving, and Bush’s cash-bought conniving in it, must become for some of them one more great disappointment, in lives marked by many of them.

5 posted on 02/03/2002 9:49:35 PM PST by TLBSHOW
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To: TLBSHOW
"Second, to depress turnout by rightist voters, by inducing apathy through disillusion."

There it is folks.

Carry your triflin Conservative tails to the local voting booth and do your job!

6 posted on 02/03/2002 10:12:27 PM PST by VaBthang4
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To: TLBSHOW
Thanks for posting the memo!
7 posted on 02/03/2002 10:16:12 PM PST by 1Peter2:16
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