Posted on 07/09/2002 12:03:15 PM PDT by dead
President George Bush says he's outraged at the scams that have sent big-name companies crashing, and he's not going to take it anymore. Feeding the polls, Bush tells the nation he wants new laws to bring criminal charges against dirty-dealing CEOs who fake company books and destroy not only the public's trust but its savings as well.
In common parlance, what these execs are doing is called fraud, and common knowledge says Bush already has the power to do something about it. Yet again, the president is ducking a tough issue in favor of a PR operation. The problem for Bush is how to seem to be attacking corporate scoundrels while keeping their campaign contributions coming. This is, after all, an election year, and the GOP badly wants to recapture control of the Senate and widen its margin in the House.
If Bush really wanted to address the situation, all he'd have to do is to pick up the phone, call Attorney General John Ashcroft, and ask him to launch an investigation of any one of these CEOs for fraud, conspiracy, theft, obstruction of justice, or perjury. The president could also turn to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can refer a civil case for criminal prosecution. Bush doesn't need additional legislation to do this. All he has to do is call. He refused to do that in the Enron case, even though his administration knew about the scandal months before the company went public with its bankruptcy. And he hasn't done it with any of the subsequent double-dealings.
Perhaps Bush's inaction stems from his own history of stumbling in the corporate back alleys. Last week, the media revived a case from the early '90s, where it looks like Bush was involved in insider trading with the stock of an oil company of which he was an official. He dumped the shares shortly before the firm tanked, then failed to report his activity to the Securities and Exchange Commission for months. The ensuing investigation, handled by an agency whose director was a Bush appointee and whose general counsel was Bush the younger's own former attorney, was dropped.
Though Bush has shown he can play the game, too, he's not quite ready for the majors. The big difference between him and a guy like Kenneth Lay is that Lay at least was successful. Before he left the world of commerce for a life in politics, Bush lost money time and again. "It was dreadful," one investor told The Wall Street Journal. "I think we got [back] maybe 20 cents on the dollar," said another.
The hapless Shrub took shelter under his family tree. Nowhere is this blue-blood network more evident than in the feeble activities of the president before he became governor of Texas. Consider this chronology, put together largely from research done by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington for its book The Buying of the President 2000.
• 1979-83: Fifty Bush family investors and friends, led by uncle Jonathan, a New York Republican Party official and an investment manager, fork over $4.7 million to set up young Bush in a company called Arbusto. It's a flop, and in 1982 gets a new name: Bush Exploration.
• 1984: Spectrum 7 Corporation, an Ohio oil exploration outfit owned by Dubya's Yalie pal William DeWitt Jr., buys out Bush Exploration, setting up young Bush as CEO at $75,000 a year and giving him 1.1 million shares of the firm's stock. Another flop. The company's fortunes soon sink, with $400,000 in losses and a debt of $3 million.
• 1986: In the nick of time, Bush and partners merge the failing Spectrum with Harken Oil, a Dallas exploration company, with a $2 million stock purchase. Bush puts up about $500,000 and gets a $120,000 annual consulting fee along with $131,250 in stock options. Harken is a small outfit, looking for oil opportunities within the U.S. Then out of the blue comes Harvard Management Corporation, an investment adviser for Harvard University's endowment portfolio. It pumps millions into the venture.
• 1990: Although Harken has no international expertise, it gets the attention of the Bahrain National Oil Company, which unexpectedly appears on the scene and bypasses big oil's Amoco and Chevron to sign a production agreement with the little Texas concern. The contract grants Harken exclusive rights to what seems to be a promising offshore area squeezed between two productive tracts owned by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Wall Street Journal speculates Bahrain was trying to cozy up to Daddy Bush, who was plotting an assault on Iraq after Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.
Bass Enterprises Production Company finances the Bahrain drilling with $25 million, and Harvard Management raises its investment. A couple of members of the Fort Worth Bass family have places on Team 100, an elite business group contributing to the Republican National Committee.
In June, Harken drills two dry holes in Bahrain. The future looks bleak. Dubya dumps two-thirds of his Harken holdings (212,140 shares), for $848,560. He uses some of this money to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball club. This is a lot of stock to dump on the market all at once, and brokers say it was purchased by an unnamed institutional investor.
That August, Harken posts a loss of $23 million.
• January 1991: Daddy Bush attacks Iraq.
• February 1991: Dubya, as the official in charge at Harken, reports his big stock sale to the SEC—eight months late.
• April 1991: The SEC begins an investigation into Harken dealings. Chairman Richard Breeden, who had been appointed by the senior Bush and served him as an economic policy adviser, hails from Baker & Botts, a big Texas oil law firm where he was a partner. Inside the SEC, James Doty, general counsel and the official in charge of any litigation that might come out of the Harken investigation, is another alumnus of Baker & Botts. And as a private attorney, before joining the government, Doty represented the younger Bush in matters related to Dubya's ownership of the Rangers.
• 1993: The SEC ends its Harken investigation following perfunctory interviews.
The good people of Baker & Botts continued looking out for Shrub. Since 1993, Breeden, Doty, and other lawyers there have given him $182,050 for his various political campaigns, making the firm one of his biggest supporters.
That's how the network functioned in the Harken affair. Dubya also has historic mentors among his kin. During the Second World War, for example, the government investigated his grandfather, Prescott Bush, and his maternal great-grandfather, Bert Walker. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act, officials seized Bush stockholdings, charging that "huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort."
When it comes to business, the contemporary Bush men have been equally good role models for Dubya. Think about it:
• Dubya brother Neil Bush made the news during the late 1980s because he was a director of Silverado Savings & Loan, which went broke and ended up costing taxpayers about $1 billion. In the Silverado case, federal investigators accused Neil of conflicts of interest, but he was never prosecuted. The Resolution Trust Company, set up to bail out bankrupt S&Ls, brought a civil suit against Bush and other Silverado officers. The case was eventually settled for $26.5 million.
• Prescott Bush Jr., a brother of Bush Senior, was reported in 1989 to have arranged investments in two U.S. firms by an alleged front company for the Japanese mob, a task for which he was allegedly paid $500,000. Prescott denied any knowledge of mob involvement.
• In 1991, Jonathan Bush, the Daddy Bush brother who spearheaded the family effort to get Dubya set up in business, was himself fined $30,000 in Massachusetts and several thousand in Connecticut for violating registration laws governing securities sales. He was barred from securities brokerage with the general public in Massachusetts for one year.
• Then there's George W.'s other brother, Jeb, currently standing for re-election as governor of Florida, who defaulted on a $4.5 million S&L loan in 1988, plunging the thrift over the edge. Jeb and his partners paid but 10 percent back.
With his own personal landscape a minefield of weird business dealings, Bush the younger has to watch his step. For him, leaving a few stones unturned might be a wise choice. Thus does he find himself at once making a show of righteous anger and shielding his wealthy friends. "You need to know that by far the vast majority, by far, of corporate America are above-board," he said, "and doing their job just the way you'd expect them to do."
Hi bvw, so pleasant to 'see' you again. I could not find any bio info. on Ridgeway or Cassandra Lewis. My point was that there are quite a few hack 'writers' explaining bidness to all us folks. I'd expect most of those writers have never run a business much less have a masters degree in business administration from Harvard.
yap yap:)
Really, i expected better from you, dead. What happened?
Why is this RAT propaganda posted here?
To annoy you.
The Voice is its own company. It used to be owned by Leonard Stern until 2000, when he sold it to a group of private investors. It's now a little mini-empire of loony left newspapers called "Village Voice Media." They own the LA Weekly and OC Weekly and a few others. Which is a longwinded way of saying: They have no relationship to the TribCo or the WashPostCo. Post away. We could use the laughs.
(Amusingly, the Voice was once owned by Rupert Murdoch.)
One of the purposes of this website is to analyze the articles published in the various media outlets, to validate the truths and knock down the lies.
I'm sorry, but I find all-cheerleading articles all the time a bit tedious, and certainly of no use in separating the wheat from the chaff in the liberal talking points.
If you don't like reading such articles, avoid them. I don't think the headline was in the least bit misleading in alerting you as to the content.
Seems to me that dead already stated he posted it to (paraphrased) give you practice refuting it and ripping it to shreds.
So long as it doesn't conflict with JimRob's guidelines, I have no problems with that.
Can't rip the 'Rats to shreds if you're gonna hide from what they're saying.
But you have been around, and I am surprised you have not seen this before and also the debunking of it. That surprises me. So why post it now? Someone egging you on?
Riiiight. This is gonna be SUCH a big problem. First of all, how many corporate scandals have truly come out thus far, about six or seven? That leaves only, oh, at least several hundred thousand other companies out there that have been completely untouched by any of this. They'll keep on donating happily. Those donations, especially in off-years like this one, usually aren't about ideology or quid pro quo (well, they're NEVER about quid pro quo unless you're, say, a Democrat), but purely out of hopes that it'll get them some access. No matter what happens in November, Bush will still be president for at least two more years afterwards, and they fear alienating the party in the White House. Ridgeway's an idiot.
If Bush really wanted to address the situation, all he'd have to do is to pick up the phone, call Attorney General John Ashcroft, and ask him to launch an investigation of any one of these CEOs for fraud, conspiracy, theft, obstruction of justice, or perjury. The president could also turn to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can refer a civil case for criminal prosecution. Bush doesn't need additional legislation to do this. All he has to do is call.
Uh huh. And if he did do any of this, how long would it take for Dashole, Gephardt and the James Ridgeways of the world to start screeching like a bunch of poodles with their tails being stepped on, claiming that Bush is abusing the powers of his office by issuing orders J. Edgar Hoover-style in an attempt to "get" and "destroy" people he doesn't like? And what about all those thousands of poor innocent employees that might be out of jobs if Big Evil Bush crushes these corporations?
This is nothing but BS rhetoric, standard-issue Bush-hate with no substance whatsoever. Which, of course, is why it's appearing in the Village Voice, where it will be completely ignored by anyone but the hardest of the hardcore leftist ideologues that wouldn't vote for Bush or any Republican even if the Democrats suddenly started trying to reinstitute slavery.
I usually check the Village Voice on Tuesday afternoons to find out what they're up to. I like Hentoff (though I found his article this week to be a rehash of his previous efforts.) And this week’s “Man on the Street” section (Al Gore Seems to Be Positioning Himself for a Run in 2004. Excited?) was a real hoot.
Ridgeway is sometimes interesting. He's a leftist, but was not a fan of Clinton, so that counts for something. I have not seen some of these specific accusations in print before, and was curious to see what the people on this site knew of them.
As I said, nobody forces anybody to click on and read any article around here.
He was an evil genius, manipulating the gullible free world into supporting his global domination people crushing schemes, who was also a complete dolt who didn't know what time of day it was.
They're liberals. Logic is not their strong point.
That's because as conservatives, we want to be informed about what the other side is up to, not merely spoon-fed rah-rah articles from publications on our side of the fence. It's the left's refusal to read, watch or listen to any information or argumentation that doesn't already conform to their dogma that makes them so ineffectual and - to be blunt - stupid, ignorant and uninformed. Give me posts from the Voice, The Nation and The New Republic any day ... as long as it's only a part of my reading habits, not the sum of them.
...not to mention being a mirror of the immoral, drug infested, crime-ridden area they reside in--NYC.
Dude, what decade are you in? Dinkins isn't mayor any more. Some guy came in called Giuliani - you may have heard the name - and cleaned up the place inside of a few months.
The following is a quote out of a Washington Post article dated July 3, 2002 related to the insider trading issue....
The White House provided the first four pages of an SEC memo from 1992 which said, "Based upon our investigation, it appears that Bush did not engage in illegal insider trading because it does not appear that he possessed material nonpublic information." Bartlett said the information about the losses at issue was available only to Harken's executive committee, of which Bush was not a member.
Pleeeeeease, pretty please. ahaha
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