http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/022004_levitt.html
WHY I JOINED THE CARLYLE GROUP AND OTHER REVELATIONS FROM FORMER SEC CHAIR ARTHUR LEVITT, JR. - by Suzan Mazur – Two and half years after September 11 th and a year and half after a series of corporate accounting scandals which destroyed hundred of billions in shareholder and pension equities, the man regarded as a paragon of virtue discloses in a semi-private talk why he chose to join one of the most vilified companies in America. He also discloses some parts of his background that call into question his reputation. If you've wondered why it's so hard to change the way money works, you need only look at the cynicism of Levitt's remarks and see his belief that we don't understand what he has told us.
FTW's regular readers will recognize many of the names mentioned by former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt. They will remember that in 2001, just months before September 11 th, FTW decried the purchase of Mexico 's largest drug money laundering bank, Banamex, by Citigroup under then CEO Sandy Weill. They will remember our early post-9/11 stories focusing on the Carlyle Group and its insidious insider connections, as well as the fact that the bin Laden family were investors, and that Osama's brother had been attending a Carlyle meeting just blocks from the White House on that fateful day.
The point is that in the financial world Arthur Levitt is regarded as the clean, no-nonsense SEC boss. As the accounting scandals of 2002 destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder equity, much of it in pension funds, Washington and New York insiders lamented, “if only Arthur were here.” Now that those scandals have faded from view and contemporary memory Arthur Levitt, the icon, cynically and disingenuously discloses his positions on a wide variety of subjects. We see him now not as a protector of integrity but as a man who is cut from a mold similar to that of one of his predecessors at the SEC, William Casey. The same William Casey who was Ronald Reagan's CIA director and who masterminded an explosion of CIA-shepherded drugs into the bloodstreams of America's children and into Wall Street's stocks, bonds and bank accounts.
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