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American Morning
'Morning Buzz'
Aired January 14, 2002 - 07:17 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right now we're going to take a look at the Morning Buzz, see what people are talking about.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's all about the pretzel. Monday it's all about the pretzel and it'll be about the pretzel in the news media, not to, you know, not to diminish the importance of the potential seriousness of what happened. But I mean the media will beat this thing and beat this thing. I mean we will learn more about pretzels and nerves...
COOPER: Not since Elizabeth Taylor choked on a piece of chicken...
CAFFERTY: Exactly.
COOPER: ... has so much been made about a little piece of food.
CAFFERTY: They need warning labels on the bags now. You know, pretzels can be a contact sport that can lead to (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: I heard...
COOPER: The president is only eating soft food now, though. Did you notice that? Last night he was prescribed a salad and soup and...
ZAHN: You know, it's odd, coming in this morning on the radio I actually heard someone saying that this may go a long way in convincing people that it's not a good idea to be in shape because the president's resting pulse rate...
CAFFERTY: Right. Sure.
ZAHN: ... and his blood pressure is so low that it might have exacerbated this. Now come on.
COOPER: Because he's really in such -- he's in such good shape...
ZAHN: That's the spin on this that...
COOPER: ... but he's got a (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
ZAHN: ... don't exercise because you, too, may hurt yourself with a pretzel. CAFFERTY: You know, the other thing is I don't know about you guys, but I occasionally, that thought occurs to me if I'm eating and I'm by myself, what would I do if I started to choke on something. I mean it's a little scary if you don't have somebody around to do the Heimlich maneuver and stuff and, you know, you worry about it.
ZAHN: They said all the president...
COOPER: I think the media...
ZAHN: ... reported is that the dogs looked at him a little funny. They hadn't moved.
CAFFERTY: They were just afraid they weren't going to get dinner on time.
ZAHN: The other story that I think deserves some attention this morning is a front page story in the "Washington Post" talking about the danger that continues to exist now with al Qaeda. You know, no matter whether you've incapacitated these guys or decapitated them, the fact remains that a lot of people with loose ties to al Qaeda are living out of Afghanistan. Since the World Trade Center two other big terror plots have been revealed, one, of course, to do damage to military installations in Singapore and the other, of course, to do some severe damage to the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
COOPER: Yes. But, you know, this...
ZAHN: This is concerning.
COOPER: It is. But I think you can make too much of this. You know, I mean some of these al Qaeda guys just turn out to be, you know, isolated groups. I mean I don't know if you read the thing in the "Times" over the weekend about the group in the Philippines. You know, it's like 40 or 50 guys running around in the jungle. It doesn't seem like this huge international conspiracy. I think we can blow this out of proportion too easily.
CAFFERTY: But the story in the "Post," the one that I think you're referring to, points out that of bin Laden's top 10 guys, we've killed two.
ZAHN: Right.
CAFFERTY: Eight of them are still out there. These are bin Laden's guys. This is the, you know, the thing we went into Afghanistan, presumably, to rip up by the roots. We haven't gotten it done yet and the idea that these guys are in, somewhere and able to perhaps give permission for plots to go forward...
ZAHN: Sure, and then...
CAFFERTY: ... is very scary.
ZAHN: ... and because of what you just said, it's almost impossible to determine what the scope of a potential operation might be.
CAFFERTY: Yes.
COOPER: I think we're just, I don't know, what do you think of this Enron thing? It seems to me it's not a political scandal. It seems that it's a financial scandal, but I don't know, it seems like the media is trying to make too much out of it.
ZAHN: I don't think we know that yet, do we?
CAFFERTY: No, but what we do know so far is there's no indication -- at least in anything I've read or seen or heard -- that the White House or the administration played ball on any of these cries for help that came out of Houston and out of this company.
COOPER: Right.
CAFFERTY: And the point that the "Newsweek" guy made about Bob Rubin as a private citizen apparently trying to go to bat for Enron, look for that to come up in some political ads as the off year election...
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: Well, sure, a key Democrat doing the same thing...
COOPER: Right.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: ... the Republicans are going to be (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
COOPER: Also, but Enron was the seventh largest company in the United States. I certainly hope it has lots of contacts with the U.S. government, you know? And if it doesn't, that would concern me. I mean it's natural that they would call up the U.S. government. The fact is, or it seems at this point the Bush administration really didn't take any drastic steps to try to stop it.
ZAHN: Well, I think we could all agree, can't we, that it is a bipartisan problem?
COOPER: Well, that is certainly true.
ZAHN: When you have over 70 U.S. senators taking some...
COOPER: Well, you know, my personal...
ZAHN: ... form of contribution from Enron.
COOPER: Where were the Wall Street analysts? Where were the responsible executive board members? Where were the, you know, the responsible company executives? Those are the guys who dropped the ball.
ZAHN: But... CAFFERTY: In the late '90s, though, you remember how the mania was on Wall Street. As long as the stock price was up there...
COOPER: Right.
CAFFERTY: ... as long as the shareholders were happy, as long as the people were making money on the stock, buying it and selling it, there were no rules. It was, it was a hysteria on Wall Street.
COOPER: This point now in "Time" magazine, "Time" and "Newsweek" on the covers this week, "Newsweek" has the Enron scandal, as they're calling it. But "Time" magazine chose not to do it. In fact, they show a rather pretty young woman. It'll be interesting to see which covers sell more. That's the cover of "Time" there. I think we have the cover of "Newsweek."
ZAHN: I/'m interested in both of those covers.
COOPER: Are you?
ZAHN: How is that for playing it safe?
CAFFERTY: Right there in the middle.
ZAHN: I am.
COOPER: Like I bond that.
ZAHN: Coming back to the Enron scandal, I thought William Safire made a very interesting point in the "New York Times" this morning about whether it, in fact, is government's responsibility to have warned the public in some way...
COOPER: Right.
ZAHN: ... once they got the first indication the company was in trouble. Is that the government's responsibility, not necessarily to bail out the company, but to warn those employees who had a lot of their, in many cases, their lifetime savings...
(CROSSTALK)
CAFFERTY: You know what this...
COOPER: And Safire...
(CROSSTALK)
CAFFERTY: ... comes down to? These guys were allowed to keep a lot of what they were doing off the books and out of the public view. All of these partnerships that allegedly they were involved in were not a part of their regular quarterly reporting mechanism. They had deals going on that nobody knew about. And that was apparently what eventually contributed to the downfall.
What they need to probably eventually do is look at the regulations for reporting business activities, change the way these companies are, you know, doing their disclosure about what their activities are. There's too much wiggle room in a lot of these earnings reports and quarterly reports that come out of these companies. They can get around a lot of stuff by -- you know, and Enron's a big example of that.
ZAHN: Sure.
COOPER: We'd like to know what you think at home. You can e- mail us your comments at am@cnn.com and we'll read some of them in the next hour.
ZAHN: No, Anderson will read every single one.
COOPER: I will. I promise. I mean really.
CAFFERTY: And he answers them all.
ZAHN: All right.
COOPER: Not all of them.
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