I Can't Believe There Isn't a Conrad Black Thread

Ta!

On the other hand, the trial, and media coverage is starting to turn into a circus, I'm concerned that we're possibly looking at a mistrial.

[ 21 March 2007: Message edited by: marzo ]

The jury selection process shows how regular Americans now regard the wealthiest few not as heroes but as thieves

Naomi Klein
Friday March 23, 2007
The Guardian

First for its elucidation of Black's (and undoubtedly Harper) concept of the Anglosphere:

quote:Although the consolidation of the Anglosphere as a political bloc receives far less scrutiny than US military interventions, it has been a crucial plank of Washington's imperial projects. The movement recently gained some notoriety when it emerged that on February 28 the White House had hosted a "literary luncheon" for George Bush and Dick Cheney's new favourite writer, ultra-right British historian Andrew Roberts, author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, an Anglosphere manifesto. But it is Black who has been the linchpin of Anglosphere campaigns for two decades, using his British and Canadian newspapers to reach out and collectively hug his beloved US. In Britain, this took the form of using the Daily Telegraph as a beachhead against "Euro-integrationism" and insisting that Britain's future lies not with the EU but with Washington. This vision reached its zenith, of course, with the Bush-Blair team-up in Iraq.

and for its peek into the class anger (apparently) felt by a random selection of Americans, the potential jurors:

quote:But in 2007, Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom's collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively globalised. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in order to whittle the group down to 12, plus eight alternates, she found men and women who had "lost every dime" in the WorldCom collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks to outsourcing, and who'd had their finances ravaged by identity theft.

Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of dollars, jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. "Who could possibly do that much work or be that much capable?" one asked. A mechanic's apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works, "I'm barely getting by as it is, living at home". No one said: "More power to you."

Many appeared to regard North America's ultra-rich the way Russians see their oligarchs - even if the way they amassed their fortunes was legal, it shouldn't have been. "I just don't think anyone should get that amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom," one juror wrote. Others said: "I feel that there is corruption everywhere"; anyone paid as much as Black "probably stole it"; "I am sure this goes on all the time and I hope they get caught". John Tien, a 40-year-old accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate lecture about the accounting scams endemic in corporate America that Black's lawyers asked the judge to question him in private, to prevent his views from influencing the other potential jurors.

quote:After all, the new witness was Richard Burt, the former long-time Hollinger International board and audit committee member and former U.S. assistant secretary of state, U.S. ambassador and chief arms-control negotiator.

Lean and elegant, Mr. Burt has a certain cachet that was lacking, say, in his immediate predecessor on the witness stand, a little dumpling of a chartered accountant and audit partner with KPMG Canada, Marilyn Stitt.

Ms. Stitt's testimony I found nothing shy of bizarre.

On day one, she described how in the early part of 2002, she was going through some documents at Hollinger International and noticed something awry: The company had made $80-million in non-competition payments to various executives, including Lord Black, two years earlier when Hollinger sold off most of its Canadian newspapers to CanWest Global Communications Corp., but these payments hadn't been publicly disclosed as required.

Her knickers clearly in a knot, she marched into the office of Jack Boultbee, then the company's chief financial officer and now a defendant here, and told him the payments had to be disclosed in the 2001 annual report.

Right here

quote:Originally posted by Michelle:
Awesome typo! [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] (Or, I guess that would be a "braino". I wish I'd come up with "braino".)

It took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong. Now, I see: Naomi Campbell is a SuperModel Who Throws Stuff.

What can I say; I'm in Alberta and I refuse to type "Klein". Those days are over, banished, never to re-Klein.

Still, it's an interesting commentary on a cross section of the American public... I mean the article by K...n, not the SuperModel Who Throws Stuff.

Especially in comparison to Blatchford's column as Sharon excerpts.

quote:...a little dumpling of a chartered accountant and audit partner with KPMG Canada...

Blatchford? Pot? Kettle? The condition of your panties, Ms. Blatchford?

quote:Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
What I find sad however is he will never be tried for the real crime against canadian society that him and Rat-boy committed. They made their initial fortunes by buying up community papers and firing most of the staff. They gutted the journalistic integrity of most of Canada's small town papers before moving to bigger papers. That to me was their biggest crime.

But if they can only get sent to jail for stealing money from other capitalists then so be it thow the book at them.

I am most incensed at Lord Crossdresser of Safe Harbour for pillaging the Dominion Stores pension fund but I guess that isn't a crime in Canada. [img]rolleyes.gif" border="0[/img]

Others have also shortchanged pension plans but Conrad is just so smarmy about it.He deserves every bit of schadenfreude directed his way. Both he and his floosy. Itis my fondest wish that they end up with all their posessions in a shared shopping cat. The rusty one with the bad wheel that keeps going sideways.

[img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]

But what I think this case will turn on for the jury is this. If David Radler - with his 40-year track record as Lord Tubby's loyal sycophant - is guilty, how can Conrad Black not be at least equally guilty if not moreso?