WASHINGTON --Consumer advocate Ralph Nader Friday called on the Securities & Exchange Commission to reopen its investigation into President Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock, just two months before its value sank under the weight of bad earnings reports.
Bush has recently criticized companies for bookkeeping scandals and plans a policy speech on the subject Tuesday.
Bush, who was a member of Harken's audit committee, sold the stock for about $848,000. The SEC at the time investigated for possible insider trading law violations but did not charge Bush.
"I think it would be wise for the SEC ... to reopen that investigation in order to get the full facts before the American people," said Nader, who ran for president against Bush and former Vice President Al Gore. "When President Bush was asked about this by a reporter earlier this week, he brushed it aside, saying the he had been adequately vetted. That's not a sufficient answer."
Nader said Bush's 1990 stock sale was unethical.
"He engaged in very late filings with the SEC," Nader said. "He sold the stock just before some very damaging news was disclosed."
The White House this week blamed the late filings on a mix-up among corporate lawyers. Bush's representatives in the past had said the SEC lost the documents.
Nader and his group Citizenworks are calling for reforms in the corporate world, including an end to offshore tax shelters, tightening of laws governing corporations' financial reporting and jail time for those who violate them. The group also calls for investors to group together to protect their interests from what it calls predatory and greedy management.
CHICAGO – Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) brought some 2,000 delegates attending the national convention of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to their feet with a ringing call for “the people’s agenda.”
Standing before a banner bearing the convention theme “Justice Now, Justice Always,” Davis drew cheers as he ticked off a list of demands of the people’s movement: livable wage, affordable prescription drugs and health care, higher minimum wage, public education, equal opportunity and affirmative action.
ACORN, founded in 1970, organizes low- and moderate-income people in communities across the country. The June 29-July 1 convention included large, lively delegations from Chicago, New York, California, Missouri and Minnesota, and smaller groups from a range of states, including Oregon, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland and Massachusetts. Participants were primarily African- American but also included Latinos and others.
Convention participants attended workshops and picketed the homes of officers and board members of Household International, the home mortgage company that is the principle target of ACORN’s national campaign aimed at “predatory” lenders who target low-income families that have difficulty arranging financing to buy or repair homes. Delegates also staged a demonstration in support of immigrant workers on the last day of the convention.
Capturing the spirited mood of the June 30 opening session, Maude Hurd, ACORN president, said that despite the Sept. 11 attacks, “we still have the same old fight.” Hurd cited victories won by ACORN during the past two years. Among these, in New Orleans ACORN and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100 worked to win a first-ever citywide minimum wage increase through a public ballot initiative. In Massachusetts and other states, ACORN waged successful campaigns for regulations against predatory lending. “We are going to fight on issues that affect our members and we are going to win,” Hurd said.
Other speakers talked of a need for a people’s movement to “save our country.” SEIU international Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger said, “How do we save our country? Organize, radicalize, mobilize.” Burger lambasted corporate CEOs and their allies in the Bush administration for favoring the rich at the expense of the rest of the country. “How greedy can they get?” she asked, warning: “We have to do more before our Constitution, our democracy, even our way of life is taken away.”
In an appeal for an alliance of labor and community organizations to fight the people’s battles, Burger said, “We need your help, you need our help. Together we can take back our government, and our country.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) charged that, for the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress, “everybody comes before the people,” and said that with their drive to repeal the estate tax, Republicans are putting “rich dead people before poor people.” Congress should block tax cuts for the rich until everyone has an affordable place to live, she declared.
Assailing the Bush administration’s anti-immigrant policies, Schakowsky said, “Since Sept. 11, this administration has had a hard time distinguishing between terrorists and immigrants who come to this country only to make their lives better. They deserve a living wage along with everybody else.”
Later, delegates boarded buses to travel to the upscale communities where Household International officials live. Although police forced demonstrators away from the gated entrance to the property of Household CEO William F. Aldinger, Betty Coy said the effort was worthwhile.
“We accomplished two things,” she told the World. “We let the community know they had a ‘shark’ for a neighbor and we hope we built more support for our campaign against predatory lending.”
ACORN defines predatory lending as the practice of imposing unfair and abusive loan terms on borrowers by taking advantage of a borrower’s lack of understanding of extremely complicated transactions, and use of outright deception in getting people to sign. The damage is increased by the fact that predatory loans are made in such concentrated volume in poor and minority neighborhoods where better loans are not readily available.
Betty and Gary Coy are typical of the thousands of victims of the “sharks.” For them, what started out as an effort to refinance their existing mortgage and consolidate their credit card bills with a loan from Household became a nightmare as they found themselves entangled in a web of “settlement costs,” “discount points,” “credit insurance” and stiff “prepayment penalties.”
Coy said instead of owing less than $70,000 on the original mortgage, the family now owes more than $132,000 and the monthly payment ballooned from $900 to $1,900. Public pressure saved the Coy home, with Household offering to lower the interest rates on their loans from as much as 21.8 percent to 5 percent.
While it may take a while to reach the convention’s goal of “saving our country,” saving the Coy’s home is certainly a step in that direction.
Here are a handful of myths that cause what's left of Europe's left to misperceive U.S. foreign policy:
Myth 1: America is temporarily dominated by self-serving isolationists who reject treaties designed by sensible Lilliputians to tie down the superpower Gulliver.
Reality: In the past decade, the U.S. saved Europe from becoming an economic vassal to Iraq, which was on its way to conquering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A few years later, as Europe temporized, we led NATO's defeat of Serbia's takeover of the Balkans. Recently, we drove Islamist terrorists, who threaten Europe as much as America, from their training bases in Afghanistan. Is it too much to ask to protect our 250,000 troops defending freedom abroad, along with aid workers and journalists, from a treaty enabling publicity-hungry prosecutors to harass them?
Myth 2: (flip side of first myth) We're interventionist bullies, with no regard for the sovereignty of countries whose threatening leaders are better dealt with diplomatically.
Reality: Saddam Hussein has been jerking around the United Nations for seven years, ignoring his surrender agreement and buying off French and Russian defenders while building a nuclear and germ-warfare capability for delivery by North Korean missiles or, more likely, through terrorist cutouts. Sanctions, dumb and smart, have dismally failed; the danger of nuclear blackmail grows to head-in-the-sand Parisians and Berliners as well as vulnerable New Yorkers. Brits and Turks may reluctantly help us, but European handwringers and Arab monarchs want a free ride.
Myth 3: The Bush administration, with its disdain for treaties, does not understand the nuances of dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, which must never be allowed to feel humiliated.
Reality: Lo and behold, when the U.S. withdrew as promised from the outdated ABM treaty, the clear skies did not fall. Contrary to all European fears and dire predictions, Vladimir Putin was induced to put the best face on the inevitability of a U.S. missile defense against rogue nations and terrorists. In return for this (and, mistakenly, for being allowed to get away with secret sales of nuclear know-how to Iran), Russia is allowing us to give it $10 billion or more to safely reduce its unneeded nuclear stockpile. No humiliation; only relief all around.
Myth 4: Europe holds the high moral ground in providing aid to the Palestinian "resistance," while Bush, in thrall to the Jewish lobby, refuses to force Israel to abandon its "occupation."
Reality: America has broken free of the decade-long romance with a terrorist and is now trying a radical new idea of encouraging Palestinians to set up the first democratic Arab state. Yasir Arafat may be elected its president to attend formal ceremonies with Israel's president whatsisname, but power would rest in a parliament with parties that would elect a prime minister. This chief executive, strengthened by an independent judiciary and free press, would extract the "painful compromises" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Israel is prepared to make after the terror war ends. This would demolish —
Myth 5: America is in the clutches of hard-line, hard-nosed, bellicose warrior-executives, while Europe is the continent of highminded peace-seekers.
Reality: America is the place seized with an intelligently moralistic, Wilsonian vision of peace with its necessary component of freedom. Because the old "realism" has failed in the Middle East, does it not make sense to impose some idealism on the players? With new leaders freely elected in the West Bank and Gaza, and with a federal government created after the deposal of the dictatorship in Iraq, the Arab world would have its chance to catch up with the rest of the world. The leap into the present might fail while daring greatly, but the treadmill of more despotism leads nowhere.
Myth 6: The political popularity of Colin Powell will enable State Department worldliness to triumph over the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney cowboy mentality, enabling Europe's multilateral impotence to harness American superpower.
Reality: Colin's a good soldier and political loyalist. If he were tempted to threaten, Haig-like, to quit, he knows that Bush has Condi Rice waiting in the wings. Powell will lose a few, win on occasion, but will stick around through the next election. Rectifying a decade-old strategic error and bringing Europe along to remake the world is too much fun.
ITHACA -- Hunger and poverty in the United States are severe enough to significantly impair the academic and psychosocial development of school-age children and adolescents, according to two studies at Cornell University.
"The level of food deprivation in this wealthy nation puts millions of children at risk for multiple developmental problems," says Katherine Alaimo, a community health scholar at the University of Michigan. Alaimo and Cornell researchers looked at how hunger is linked to depression, suicide, and development of adolescents and school-age children.
Researchers found that young people, ages 15 to 16, in homes where there is not always enough to eat, are five times more likely to attempt suicide. They also are four times more likely to suffer from chronic, low-grade depression and are almost twice as likely to have been suspended from school, as well as having more problems getting along with their peers.
Young people, ages 6 to 11, who live in food in families without enough food are twice as likely to have seen a psychologist, more likely to have repeated a grade, and more likely to have significantly lower math scores.
One in five American children live in poverty, the highest level of childhood poverty among developed nations, and that almost 4 million children live in homes where at times, due to lack of economic resources, there is not enough food. Previous studies had shown that depression is a common result of insufficient food, particularly among people who are on near-starvation diets. In the Cornell study, 60 percent of the adolescents who lived in homes with inadequate food intake had at least one suicidal symptom (thoughts of death or suicide or desire to die) and almost 20 percent attempted suicide.
"Food is fundamental and food insufficiency, like other material deprivations such as homelessness, is stressful for both parents and children and can cause depression, anxiety and other emotional problems," says Alaimo.
Has our depraved economic greed finally taken our society to critical mass?
Bush talked of getting tough with corporate wrongdoers yesterday, but his words failed to halt a serious market slide.
Of course, as the CBS Evening News reported (only some ten years after the Harken story first broke in the alternative media!), Dubya is guilty of financial-disclosure irregularities himself.
You have to wonder:
Was there a particuler point, on a specific day, when the fall of Rome became an unavoidable certainty?
A communist/socialist notion always seems to me to hold that anything communal is good, even if it's communal suffering.
Maybe especiallyif it's suffering.
I might go back to the idea that people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are content together.
Face it, is there a group of people on the face of the earth who have suffered more than the Russians? Misery might actually be the glue that holds them together.They know how to suffer.
It has emerged in the United States that Vice-President Dick Cheney took part in a promotional video for the disgraced accounting firm Andersen.
The news comes as an anti-corruption pressure group prepares to sue Mr Cheney for alleged fraudulent accounting practices.
In the video Mr Cheney - then Chief Executive of the oil company Halliburton - describes how Andersen gave advice "over and above" what would normally be expected from auditors.
Last month, the firm was convicted of obstructing justice by shredding documents relating to the failed US energy giant Enron.
The developments came hours after President George W Bush tried to distance himself from corporate fraud, proposing tougher penalties as a way of restoring confidence in the wake of recent business scandals that have shaken the US.
'Good advice'
The Andersen video, obtained by the Wall St Journal newspaper, is a further embarrassment for President Bush's administration.
Correspondents say its business connections are fast becoming a serious liability.
The video was recorded in 1996.
"I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating over and above the just sort of normal by-the-book auditing arrangement," Mr Cheney says in a short section of the video.
Andersen's reputation has been destroyed in recent weeks after it emerged that it had destroyed documents for one of its clients, Enron.
Enron has admitted to grossly exaggerating its profits to attract investors.
'Share overvaluation'
In a separate development, pressure group Judicial Watch, says Mr Cheney deceived investors while he was a director of the oil company Halliburton in the 1990s.
In a case being filed in Dallas, Texas, Mr Cheney is alleged to have engaged in practices which led to the overvaluation of the company's shares.
Judicial Watch says Mr Cheney deceived investors while he was a director of the oil company Halliburton in the 1990s.
It is also suing for access to records of Mr Cheney's energy task force that drew up the Bush administration's energy policy last year.
"To look the other way for the vice-president would be to set a precedent that the Washington elite are above the law," said Larry Klayman, chairman at Judicial Watch.
But Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said, "We don't believe the case has any merit."
Details of the lawsuit are likely to emerge during a news conference in Miami on Wednesday.
Harsher punishments
In a speech in New York's financial district on Tuesday, President Bush said he wanted to tighten measures against corporate fraud.
He announced a doubling - to 10 years - of the maximum prison sentence, and the formation of a special investigative task force.
But Judicial Watch said that Mr Bush's rush to crack down on corporate fraud seemed intended to deflect attention away from his and Mr Cheney's own business practices.
Mr Bush has already faced questions about his work as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy Corp a decade ago, when the firm faced an inquiry for masking huge losses.
When Cheney was head of Halliburton he'd travel to the Middle East and beg the OPEC ministers to cut output and drive up the price of oil so he could have more fun being head of a company that sold oil drilling supplies and exploration equipment, and wouldn't have to lay off a lot of people.
I wouldn't call that a scandal, but colluding in that manner with oil producers in the US is illegal.
"In other words: He (George W. Bush) parlayed a failing company into stock in another company that he bailed out of just before it, too, began to fail; he used the proceeds to support his minimal investment in a baseball team that he eventually cashed in for $18 million. Where do we get in line for that kind of work?"
WASHINGTON -- Before selling his stock in a Texas oil company, a transaction that prompted an insider trading inquiry, George W. Bush was informed as a company director that the firm was suffering a cash ''crisis,'' newly released records show.
The internal corporate documents, released by the Securities and Exchange Commission, provide the most detailed view yet of Bush's knowledge of Harken Energy Corp.'s financial problems when he sold his shares for $848,560 in June 1990.
Bush's lawyer said Wednesday the information, while new to the presidential campaign, was provided to the SEC as part of its investigation a decade ago and contributed to the agency's finding that Bush's trading was appropriate.
''The SEC did their job by the book, and this is old news,'' attorney Robert Jordan said. The Bush lawyer added that ''the company's financial situation was well-disclosed to the public'' through filings at the time with the SEC.
''By the time Bush sold his stock, the cash crisis had been largely resolved,'' said Jordan. ''By May 21, 1990, the major shareholders had agreed to a credit agreement which put $26 million into the company immediately.''
Insider trading allegations have been an issue in both Bush's run for governor in Texas and his presidential bid. The SEC in the last month released several hundred pages of corporate documents from its investigation under the Freedom of Information Act.
Bush has said he had no knowledge the Texas-based company was going to report a $23 million loss two months after he sold his stock. ''I absolutely had no idea and would not have sold it had I known,'' he said during his 1994 campaign for governor.
SEC investigators concurred there was no evidence Bush knew that the loss would be of that magnitude. At most, the investigators found, Bush was aware of a projected $4 million loss, which was ''consistent with Harken's publicly reported trend'' of losses, states an SEC investigative document obtained by AP. The same document projecting the $4 million loss, Jordan noted, projected a profit for the fourth quarter.
The Harken documents released under FOIA detail Bush's knowledge of the company's problems.
As a Harken director, he received memos in spring 1990 that referred in stark terms to the company's cash-strapped condition as banks demanded it pay down its debts. One document said the company was in the midst of a ''liquidity crisis'' and another told Bush the company was ''in a state of noncompliance'' with its lenders.
Bush also was informed that a company plan to make a public stock offering to generate cash was being abandoned because one of its lenders objected.
''On the eve of filing this offering, the Bank of Boston refused to grant waivers and consents necessary to allow the offering to proceed,'' Harken said in a letter to the SEC in 1991. ''Bank of Boston refused to alter its position and instead made demands that it be removed from the company's credit.'' The company solved the crisis when two of its biggest stockholders loaned it the $43 million it needed.
Bush served on three committees inside the company and also was paid as a consultant.
Even after his stock sale, Bush remained on the company's board of directors until 1993.
The SEC investigators never interviewed Bush about what else he might have known about the company's financial situation before selling the stock.
The investigators noted that Bush did not initiate the sale of his stock, that he was approached by a broker and checked with the company's general counsel about the propriety of the sale before carrying it out.
''It appears that Bush did not engage in illegal insider trading because it does not appear that he possessed material nonpublic information or that he acted with'' wrongful intent ''when he sold the Harken stock,'' SEC investigators wrote in a March 1992 summary obtained by AP.
When Harken announced its $23 million quarterly loss on Aug. 20, 1990, its stock held steady for more than two hours, then plummeted to $2.38 a share. The next day it rebounded to the previous day's $3 high. Regulators said the fact that the stock didn't immediately plunge and recovered so quickly was further evidence that the information could not be viewed as important to a reasonable investor.
At the time of the investigation, Bush's father was president of the United States and the SEC was run by one of his biggest political supporters, Richard Breeden. The SEC's then-general counsel, James R. Doty, was another staunch presidential supporter.
SEC's enforcement chief at the time, William McLucas, said in an interview that the Bush investigation ''was handled the same way any insider trading inquiry would be handled.''
New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, who reviewed the SEC investigative documents at AP's request, said the agency made a sound judgment legally and ethically to close the insider trading probe without interviewing Bush.
''We're dealing with investigators here who are not political appointees,'' he said.
Gillers said the evidence contained in the SEC documents was ''fairly persuasive against proceeding'' against Bush.
The man who was responsible for the investigation, William McLucas, is a Democrat. He found no wrong doing on the part of our current President Bush. McLucas is the man who was an independent investigator of Enron and WorldCom. If there was anything wrong, this is the man who would have found it.
ASHINGTON, July 9 — A small, secretive group that used television advertisements to attack George W. Bush during his campaign for president has re-emerged to point to links between oil companies with questionable accounting practices and the Bush administration.
The group, American Family Voices, paid for a 30-second commercial that will be shown until Thursday on cable news programs here and in New York. The commercial calls President Bush "sly like a fox" for talking down his dealings with Harken Energy, an oil company on whose board he once sat.
Twelve years ago, Mr. Bush sold stock in Harken just before it reported a $23.2 million loss, and he reported the sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission eight months late. The commercial also criticizes Vice President Dick Cheney for ties to Halliburton, an oil services company that the S.E.C. is investigating.
The commercial even suggests that the commission's chairman, Harvey L. Pitt, is unfit for the job because he was once a lawyer for several accounting firms, including Arthur Andersen.
American Family Voices said the commercial was timed to coincide with Mr. Bush's speech on corporate responsibility. Michael Lux, president of the group, said it wanted to reach "opinion leaders" in New York and politicians in Washington.
Mr. Lux, a consultant who works for American Family Voices under contract, would not say who donated the money for the television time. But the group and its advertising agency, the Glover Park Group, have significant links to the Clinton administration. Mr. Lux was an aide to President Bill Clinton, and the partners at Glover Park include Joe Lockhart, who was once Mr. Clinton's press secretary, and Carter Eskew and Michael Feldman, two advisers to Al Gore's unsuccessful campaign for president in 2000.
Mr. Lux said 12 donors responded to a request for money, and he hinted that the contributors included a trial lawyer, an executive in high technology and a prominent person in Hollywood.
Mr. Lockhart would not say how much American Family Voices paid the agency to create the advertisement, but he said the broadcasting time cost about $100,000.
Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said the committee had nothing to do with the commercial. But Ms. Palmieri said that James Carville, once a top campaigner for Mr. Clinton, was involved with American Family Voices.
The absence of direct involvement by the Democratic Party did not assuage the White House. "Given the source of the ads, given that they come from James Carville," said Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman, "they represent the most partisan of partisan attacks."
In the last year, from a sea-green brick building in Washington, American Family Voices has criticized Mr. Bush's tax breaks for corporations and has sponsored a Web site called The Daily Enron, which chronicles corporate accounting scandals.
The group was formed in 2000 with money from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. It has four employees, led by Mr. Lux. It has Section 501(c)4 tax status, which means it cannot run advertisements mentioning specific candidates within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary. The status also lets the group keep the identities of its backers a secret.
How everyone and his cousin has suddenly adopted, almost in entirety, several decades worth of leftwing criticism of Big Business excess and corruption.
It's as if (the People's Republic of) Madison, Wisconsin grew huge overnight and subsumed the whole United States. Madison having been a place where the need for making errant corporations accountable to the citizenry was discussed at a well-attended seminar a good quarter century ago.
But what it actually is...is a confirmation of a radical philosphical tenet: historical and dialectical materialism.
That, in case you tend to read action-adventure novels more than Engels, is, partly, the notion that the old is constantly decaying, with the new rising to take its place.
But the process is usually very slow, and barely noticed, a truly evolutionary phenomenon.
However, at a certain point, you get an effect much like enough heat being applied to water, causing it to -- suddenly -- break into a rolling boil.
This issue has been drawing increasing heat for many, many years (thanks to principled and unrelenting critics on the Left), and it finally, quickly became a matter perceived as intolerable by the general populace.
Today, it's so hot you could cook Polish sausage on it, if you had a pot.
It'll be interesting to see exactly where this goes.
Because those old Madison radicals held seminars on a lot of other, related questions as well.
In the two weeks since President Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock became the focus of a media maelstrom, the prestige press has given the so-called scandal 50 times the coverage it gave to the Clintons' Whitewater land deal during a comparable period.
In the 14 days after the New York Times broke the Whitewater story on March 8, 1992, the entire mainstream press corps gave the scandal just 14 mentions, a Lexis-Nexis search reveals.
But in the two weeks since the Harken story has re-emerged, the focus of the Washington press corps has been far, far more intense.
From June 28 to July 12, 2002, the media have devoted no fewer than 711 reports to the Bush stock sale, more than 50 times the coverage it gave Whitewater at a similar point in that story.
In fact, throughout the entire 1992 presidential campaign (from March 8 through Election Day), when the media's interest in a potential candidate's skeleton closet should have been most intense, the press reported on Whitewater a grand total of 27 times.
Contrast that with the 2000 campaign, when Harken Energy first appeared on the national  media's radar screen. With precious little to indicate that then-candidate George Bush had done anything whatsoever wrong, the press still managed to squeeze out 87 reports during the same March through Election Day period - more than three times the coverage Whitewater received.
As we noted Wednesday, Judicial Watch's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney generated unusual media interest. Here's how unusual: It was the first time all three  no-longer-so-big TV networks covered Judicial Watch, whose many attacks on Bill Clinton's corruption they routinely ignored.
In fact, Fox News Channel reported tonight, the lawsuit against Cheney was the first time  the words "Judicial Watch" passed the lips of Peter Jennings, the snooty Canadian leftist  millionaire who reads the news for ABC.
Nuggets exposed by Media Research Center today:
"When Judicial Watch was suing Clinton administration officials the networks, on  the rare occasions when they deigned to even mention the group, made sure viewers realized it was 'conservative.' But when the organization run by Larry Klayman  filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Vice President Dick Cheney, it suddenly became  a non-ideological 'watchdog group,' 'Washington watchdog group,' 'legal   group,' 'legal activist group' or 'legal advocacy group.'"
(Curiously, Fox News Channel and United Press International did refer to Judicial  Watch as "conservative" Wednesday.)
"When CNN's Aaron Brown on Tuesday night remonstrated critics who charged bias   stemming from his Monday night focus on Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock,  he lectured his critics to think about where they'd be if the shoe was on the  other foot, i.e., if Bill Clinton were President. But when the subject was Bill  Clinton, Brown frequently commented on how he found it distasteful to be even  reporting allegations against the then-President."
"Seeing the widespread media interest in the Judicial Watch lawsuit against Vice President Cheney over accounting practices at Halliburton when Cheney ran the company, Brit Hume observed on his FNC show Wednesday night: 'It's worth  noting that Larry Klayman never got much coverage when he was going after Bill Clinton.' Morton Kondracke added: 'Deemed a crank in those days.'"
I remember quite a few people posting what a radical conservative group that judicial watch was and how the group should just be ignored.
So Judicial Watch sues Cheney and reporters shouldn't mention their name as the plaintiff? That's stupid.
Maybe the vice president of the United States getting sued isn't newsworthy.
As for the Harken story getting a lot of attention, well there's a rather precipitous stock slide going on, in addition to stories on Worldcom and Enron and God knows what else. You don't think that has something to do with the coverage?
No, they out to get the Presiden. That's the only answer.
When are you conservatives going to shed this victim mentality when it comes to the media? No one else is a legitimate victim of anything in your collective minds. Why should you be?
So Judicial Watch sues Cheney and reporters shouldn't mention their name as the plaintiff? That's stupid.
Maybe the vice president of the United States getting sued isn't newsworthy.
Rick you miss the point entirely. When Judicial watch was sueing Clinton, it was hardly news to the media. They white washed it. And when the media did report on Judicial watch it was always labeled as a "Consevative" group. Now all of a sudden they are lebeled as some sort of watch dog group.
"When Judicial Watch was suing Clinton administration officials the networks, on the rare occasions when they deigned to even mention the group, made sure viewers realized it was 'conservative.' But when the organization run by Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Vice President Dick Cheney, it suddenly became a non-ideological 'watchdog group,' 'Washington watchdog group,' 'legal group,' 'legal activist group' or 'legal advocacy group.'"
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When was the last time, if ever, you heard the media describe something from the left as being liberal?
As for the Harken story getting a lot of attention, well there's a rather precipitous stock slide going on, in addition to stories on Worldcom and Enron and God knows what else. You don't think that has something to do with the coverage?
No, they out to get the Presiden. That's the only answer.
The Harken story is what, 12 years old? People have tried to use it on Bush before, but nothing wrong was done or ever proven. Yes Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing are legitimate news stories. I just do not think they are political issues. The media is trying to turn this on Bush. Why doesn't the media just report the story instead of trying to politisize it?
When are you conservatives going to shed this victim mentality when it comes to the media?
When they start reporting the news fairly and when they quit putting in personal bias.
No one else is a legitimate victim of anything in your collective minds. Why should you be?
The markets have lost confidence in his policies, totally, and everyone with any brains is bailing OUT.
I disagree, I know big surprize, I think people are bailing out of the market because of the way corporations are keeping their books. It is all the accounting scandels that are weaking the market, not Bush's policies.
The man President Bush tapped to lead his corporate crime watchdog team was a director of a San Francisco credit-card firm that just two years ago paid more than $400 million to settle charges that it cheated consumers.
Larry Thompson, named to lead the Bush administration's white-collar crime task force, served on the board of directors of Providian Financial Corp. at the same time regulators found that the firm systematically charged excessive fees and used deceptive sales tactics to bolster its bottom line.
Thompson sat on Providian's board and served as chairman of the firm's audit and compliance committee from June 1997 until his unanimous confirmation by the Senate as deputy attorney general on May 10, 2001.
He sold his Providian stock -- said to be worth as much as $4.7 million -- to comply with ethics rules. The sale came just months before the firm disclosed looming problems with credit card defaults that led to the collapse of its stock and thousands of layoffs.
The revelations could be a potential embarrassment for Bush, who on Tuesday announced the creation of a white-collar crime task force to crack down on the type of corporate chicanery that has undermined public confidence in the stock market...
PAPERS SHOW BUSH KNEW OF A CRISIS AS HE SOLD STOCK
WASHINGTON - Harken Energy Corp. was in bad financial shape, facing a painful liquidity crisis and restructuring when George W. Bush sold some $850,000 worth of shares in the firm in June 1990. Evidence in government files indicates he had at least partial knowledge of the company's troubles before he sold the stock.
Records from a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation indicate that Bush, who served on Harken's board of directors and was a member of a special committee to deal with the financial troubles, had been warned about the company's financial crisis by its president, Mikel D. Faulkner, and other officers before selling his stock.
On April 20, 1990, Faulkner wrote to the members of Harken's board that the company was facing a liquidity crisis and that crucial plans to sell new shares of stock were diminished, due to a slumping oil market. The firm was also facing pressure from its lenders, especially the Bank of Boston, which ''greatly intensifies our current liquidity problem,'' Faulkner wrote.
On May 18, 1990, according to the SEC files, Harken's senior vice president, Bruce N. Huff, wrote to Harken's special committee - made up of Bush, Faulkner, and director E. Stuart Watson - to alert them of the ''negative repercussions'' that could occur if they did not approve a series of waivers and extensions of corporate loans.
The Bank of Boston refused to renegotiate its loans, and the stock sale had to be put off. ''The immediate focus of the company was at that time redirected to raising cash,'' Huff acknowledged in a 1991 letter to the SEC. ''By June 1990, the company was constrained by its worsening cash and credit situation. ... The company was in the midst of the severe cash crisis.''
In June of 2000, the Harken stock was trading for between $.69 and $1.00. 7 months later on January 29, 2001, the stock traded for $6.97. The stock went up as much as 1000% of what it might have been when Bush sold.
So if he had "insider information", it sure didn't serve him very well.
In St. Paul I pay about $80.00 every quarter for a family of 5. That goes up to about $120 - $130 during the summer due to watering our garden which takes up 80% of our lawn.
It does keep the mowing to a minimum. Only takes about 10 minutes to do. I usually mow the neighbors yard while I'm at it because it seems silly to just do our yard.
Anyway, I don't grow anything for I'm not a gardener. However, my wife grows mostly plants. Tons of flowers and plants and bushes and roses and vines and grasses and herbs and other stuff I don't have a clue about.
I water it and that's about it.
We don't do many vegetables for there's no room left.
I would like to point out to those who mistakenly believe that Democrats are "for the working man" while Republicans are the "party of the rich" that of the 12 wealthiest senators, nine are Democrats.
The 12: John Kerry, D-Mass.; Jon Corzine, D-N.J.; Herb Kohl, D-Wis.; Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.; Lincoln Chaffee, R-R.I.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill.; Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.; Mark Dayton, D-Minn.; Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; John Edwards, D-N.C., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
How can anyone claim to be for the working man, yet be against the business owner? Don't working people depend upon the businesses they work for? If you punish the employer, who ultimately suffers?
NADER WANTS RENEWEWD PROBE OF BUSH STOCK SALE
WASHINGTON --Consumer advocate Ralph Nader Friday called on the Securities & Exchange Commission to reopen its investigation into President Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock, just two months before its value sank under the weight of bad earnings reports.
Bush has recently criticized companies for bookkeeping scandals and plans a policy speech on the subject Tuesday.
Bush, who was a member of Harken's audit committee, sold the stock for about $848,000. The SEC at the time investigated for possible insider trading law violations but did not charge Bush.
"I think it would be wise for the SEC ... to reopen that investigation in order to get the full facts before the American people," said Nader, who ran for president against Bush and former Vice President Al Gore. "When President Bush was asked about this by a reporter earlier this week, he brushed it aside, saying the he had been adequately vetted. That's not a sufficient answer."
Nader said Bush's 1990 stock sale was unethical.
"He engaged in very late filings with the SEC," Nader said. "He sold the stock just before some very damaging news was disclosed."
The White House this week blamed the late filings on a mix-up among corporate lawyers. Bush's representatives in the past had said the SEC lost the documents.
Nader and his group Citizenworks are calling for reforms in the corporate world, including an end to offshore tax shelters, tightening of laws governing corporations' financial reporting and jail time for those who violate them. The group also calls for investors to group together to protect their interests from what it calls predatory and greedy management.
--CNN
I thought the Green Party pinned a medal on the Consumer Lawyer Whose I Don't Speak and put and put him in hibernation for the next three years,
I'm not saying this to stick up for Bush. He doesn't have to worry.
Not with pipsqueak groups like Citizenworks nipping at his heels.
Wasn't it David Pipsqueak who took on and defeated Goliath
Musclehead?
And, along the same lines...
ACORN CONVENTION TARGETS PEOPLE'S NEEDS
CHICAGO – Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) brought some 2,000 delegates attending the national convention of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to their feet with a ringing call for “the people’s agenda.”
Standing before a banner bearing the convention theme “Justice Now, Justice Always,” Davis drew cheers as he ticked off a list of demands of the people’s movement: livable wage, affordable prescription drugs and health care, higher minimum wage, public education, equal opportunity and affirmative action.
ACORN, founded in 1970, organizes low- and moderate-income people in communities across the country. The June 29-July 1 convention included large, lively delegations from Chicago, New York, California, Missouri and Minnesota, and smaller groups from a range of states, including Oregon, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland and Massachusetts. Participants were primarily African- American but also included Latinos and others.
Convention participants attended workshops and picketed the homes of officers and board members of Household International, the home mortgage company that is the principle target of ACORN’s national campaign aimed at “predatory” lenders who target low-income families that have difficulty arranging financing to buy or repair homes. Delegates also staged a demonstration in support of immigrant workers on the last day of the convention.
Capturing the spirited mood of the June 30 opening session, Maude Hurd, ACORN president, said that despite the Sept. 11 attacks, “we still have the same old fight.” Hurd cited victories won by ACORN during the past two years. Among these, in New Orleans ACORN and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100 worked to win a first-ever citywide minimum wage increase through a public ballot initiative. In Massachusetts and other states, ACORN waged successful campaigns for regulations against predatory lending. “We are going to fight on issues that affect our members and we are going to win,” Hurd said.
Other speakers talked of a need for a people’s movement to “save our country.” SEIU international Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger said, “How do we save our country? Organize, radicalize, mobilize.” Burger lambasted corporate CEOs and their allies in the Bush administration for favoring the rich at the expense of the rest of the country. “How greedy can they get?” she asked, warning: “We have to do more before our Constitution, our democracy, even our way of life is taken away.”
In an appeal for an alliance of labor and community organizations to fight the people’s battles, Burger said, “We need your help, you need our help. Together we can take back our government, and our country.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) charged that, for the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress, “everybody comes before the people,” and said that with their drive to repeal the estate tax, Republicans are putting “rich dead people before poor people.” Congress should block tax cuts for the rich until everyone has an affordable place to live, she declared.
Assailing the Bush administration’s anti-immigrant policies, Schakowsky said, “Since Sept. 11, this administration has had a hard time distinguishing between terrorists and immigrants who come to this country only to make their lives better. They deserve a living wage along with everybody else.”
Later, delegates boarded buses to travel to the upscale communities where Household International officials live. Although police forced demonstrators away from the gated entrance to the property of Household CEO William F. Aldinger, Betty Coy said the effort was worthwhile.
“We accomplished two things,” she told the World. “We let the community know they had a ‘shark’ for a neighbor and we hope we built more support for our campaign against predatory lending.”
ACORN defines predatory lending as the practice of imposing unfair and abusive loan terms on borrowers by taking advantage of a borrower’s lack of understanding of extremely complicated transactions, and use of outright deception in getting people to sign. The damage is increased by the fact that predatory loans are made in such concentrated volume in poor and minority neighborhoods where better loans are not readily available.
Betty and Gary Coy are typical of the thousands of victims of the “sharks.” For them, what started out as an effort to refinance their existing mortgage and consolidate their credit card bills with a loan from Household became a nightmare as they found themselves entangled in a web of “settlement costs,” “discount points,” “credit insurance” and stiff “prepayment penalties.”
Coy said instead of owing less than $70,000 on the original mortgage, the family now owes more than $132,000 and the monthly payment ballooned from $900 to $1,900. Public pressure saved the Coy home, with Household offering to lower the interest rates on their loans from as much as 21.8 percent to 5 percent.
While it may take a while to reach the convention’s goal of “saving our country,” saving the Coy’s home is certainly a step in that direction.
--Fred Gaboury, Susan Webb, People's Weekly World
You do know that an ACORN is a nut don't you ? :)
Myth America 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Here are a handful of myths that cause what's left of Europe's left to misperceive U.S. foreign policy:
Myth 1: America is temporarily dominated by self-serving isolationists who reject treaties designed by sensible Lilliputians to tie down the superpower Gulliver.
Reality: In the past decade, the U.S. saved Europe from becoming an economic vassal to Iraq, which was on its way to conquering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A few years later, as Europe temporized, we led NATO's defeat of Serbia's takeover of the Balkans. Recently, we drove Islamist terrorists, who threaten Europe as much as America, from their training bases in Afghanistan. Is it too much to ask to protect our 250,000 troops defending freedom abroad, along with aid workers and journalists, from a treaty enabling publicity-hungry prosecutors to harass them?
Myth 2: (flip side of first myth) We're interventionist bullies, with no regard for the sovereignty of countries whose threatening leaders are better dealt with diplomatically.
Reality: Saddam Hussein has been jerking around the United Nations for seven years, ignoring his surrender agreement and buying off French and Russian defenders while building a nuclear and germ-warfare capability for delivery by North Korean missiles or, more likely, through terrorist cutouts. Sanctions, dumb and smart, have dismally failed; the danger of nuclear blackmail grows to head-in-the-sand Parisians and Berliners as well as vulnerable New Yorkers. Brits and Turks may reluctantly help us, but European handwringers and Arab monarchs want a free ride.
Myth 3: The Bush administration, with its disdain for treaties, does not understand the nuances of dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, which must never be allowed to feel humiliated.
Reality: Lo and behold, when the U.S. withdrew as promised from the outdated ABM treaty, the clear skies did not fall. Contrary to all European fears and dire predictions, Vladimir Putin was induced to put the best face on the inevitability of a U.S. missile defense against rogue nations and terrorists. In return for this (and, mistakenly, for being allowed to get away with secret sales of nuclear know-how to Iran), Russia is allowing us to give it $10 billion or more to safely reduce its unneeded nuclear stockpile. No humiliation; only relief all around.
Myth 4: Europe holds the high moral ground in providing aid to the Palestinian "resistance," while Bush, in thrall to the Jewish lobby, refuses to force Israel to abandon its "occupation."
Reality: America has broken free of the decade-long romance with a terrorist and is now trying a radical new idea of encouraging Palestinians to set up the first democratic Arab state. Yasir Arafat may be elected its president to attend formal ceremonies with Israel's president whatsisname, but power would rest in a parliament with parties that would elect a prime minister. This chief executive, strengthened by an independent judiciary and free press, would extract the "painful compromises" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Israel is prepared to make after the terror war ends. This would demolish —
Myth 5: America is in the clutches of hard-line, hard-nosed, bellicose warrior-executives, while Europe is the continent of highminded peace-seekers.
Reality: America is the place seized with an intelligently moralistic, Wilsonian vision of peace with its necessary component of freedom. Because the old "realism" has failed in the Middle East, does it not make sense to impose some idealism on the players? With new leaders freely elected in the West Bank and Gaza, and with a federal government created after the deposal of the dictatorship in Iraq, the Arab world would have its chance to catch up with the rest of the world. The leap into the present might fail while daring greatly, but the treadmill of more despotism leads nowhere.
Myth 6: The political popularity of Colin Powell will enable State Department worldliness to triumph over the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney cowboy mentality, enabling Europe's multilateral impotence to harness American superpower.
Reality: Colin's a good soldier and political loyalist. If he were tempted to threaten, Haig-like, to quit, he knows that Bush has Condi Rice waiting in the wings. Powell will lose a few, win on occasion, but will stick around through the next election. Rectifying a decade-old strategic error and bringing Europe along to remake the world is too much fun.
HUNGRY KIDS PRONE TO SUICIDE, FLUNKING
By Susan S. Lang
ITHACA -- Hunger and poverty in the United States are severe enough to significantly impair the academic and psychosocial development of school-age children and adolescents, according to two studies at Cornell University.
"The level of food deprivation in this wealthy nation puts millions of children at risk for multiple developmental problems," says Katherine Alaimo, a community health scholar at the University of Michigan. Alaimo and Cornell researchers looked at how hunger is linked to depression, suicide, and development of adolescents and school-age children.
Researchers found that young people, ages 15 to 16, in homes where there is not always enough to eat, are five times more likely to attempt suicide. They also are four times more likely to suffer from chronic, low-grade depression and are almost twice as likely to have been suspended from school, as well as having more problems getting along with their peers.
Young people, ages 6 to 11, who live in food in families without enough food are twice as likely to have seen a psychologist, more likely to have repeated a grade, and more likely to have significantly lower math scores.
One in five American children live in poverty, the highest level of childhood poverty among developed nations, and that almost 4 million children live in homes where at times, due to lack of economic resources, there is not enough food. Previous studies had shown that depression is a common result of insufficient food, particularly among people who are on near-starvation diets. In the Cornell study, 60 percent of the adolescents who lived in homes with inadequate food intake had at least one suicidal symptom (thoughts of death or suicide or desire to die) and almost 20 percent attempted suicide.
"Food is fundamental and food insufficiency, like other material deprivations such as homelessness, is stressful for both parents and children and can cause depression, anxiety and other emotional problems," says Alaimo.
--Albion Monitor
Has our depraved economic greed finally taken our society to critical mass?
Bush talked of getting tough with corporate wrongdoers yesterday, but
his words failed to halt a serious market slide.
Of course, as the CBS Evening News reported (only some ten years after
the Harken story first broke in the alternative media!), Dubya is guilty of financial-disclosure irregularities himself.
You have to wonder:
Was there a particuler point, on a specific day, when the fall of Rome
became an unavoidable certainty?
Now who should get the blame for the current crisis of confidence in our economic markets?
Come on! As much as I dislike Dubya, I can't really blame him for Worldcom, Enron & the like.
This isn't anything new. It was going on just as much when Clinton was in office.
Was there a particuler point, on a specific day, when the fall of Rome became an unavoidable certainty?
I'm sure the thought of the U.S. crumbling excites you to no end but, it ain't gonna happen.
I don't think Dennis wants the US to crumble.
But he wouldn't mind if we all had to stand in line for shoes.
And given his propensity to hang around K-Marts and Dollar Stores, I'm guessing they would be bad, ugly-ass shoes.
Now that's the Rick I know an love.
A communist/socialist notion always seems to me to hold that anything communal is good, even if it's communal suffering.
Maybe especiallyif it's suffering.
I might go back to the idea that people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are content together.
Face it, is there a group of people on the face of the earth who have suffered more than the Russians? Misery might actually be the glue that holds them together.They know how to suffer.
We probably don't.
ANDERSEN VIDEO PUTS CHENEY ON SPOT
It has emerged in the United States that Vice-President Dick Cheney took part in a promotional video for the disgraced accounting firm Andersen.
The news comes as an anti-corruption pressure group prepares to sue Mr Cheney for alleged fraudulent accounting practices.
In the video Mr Cheney - then Chief Executive of the oil company Halliburton - describes how Andersen gave advice "over and above" what would normally be expected from auditors.
Last month, the firm was convicted of obstructing justice by shredding documents relating to the failed US energy giant Enron.
The developments came hours after President George W Bush tried to distance himself from corporate fraud, proposing tougher penalties as a way of restoring confidence in the wake of recent business scandals that have shaken the US.
'Good advice'
The Andersen video, obtained by the Wall St Journal newspaper, is a further embarrassment for President Bush's administration.
Correspondents say its business connections are fast becoming a serious liability.
The video was recorded in 1996.
"I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating over and above the just sort of normal by-the-book auditing arrangement," Mr Cheney says in a short section of the video.
Andersen's reputation has been destroyed in recent weeks after it emerged that it had destroyed documents for one of its clients, Enron.
Enron has admitted to grossly exaggerating its profits to attract investors.
'Share overvaluation'
In a separate development, pressure group Judicial Watch, says Mr Cheney deceived investors while he was a director of the oil company Halliburton in the 1990s.
In a case being filed in Dallas, Texas, Mr Cheney is alleged to have engaged in practices which led to the overvaluation of the company's shares.
Judicial Watch says Mr Cheney deceived investors while he was a director of the oil company Halliburton in the 1990s.
It is also suing for access to records of Mr Cheney's energy task force that drew up the Bush administration's energy policy last year.
"To look the other way for the vice-president would be to set a precedent that the Washington elite are above the law," said Larry Klayman, chairman at Judicial Watch.
But Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said, "We don't believe the case has any merit."
Details of the lawsuit are likely to emerge during a news conference in Miami on Wednesday.
Harsher punishments
In a speech in New York's financial district on Tuesday, President Bush said he wanted to tighten measures against corporate fraud.
He announced a doubling - to 10 years - of the maximum prison sentence, and the formation of a special investigative task force.
But Judicial Watch said that Mr Bush's rush to crack down on corporate fraud seemed intended to deflect attention away from his and Mr Cheney's own business practices.
Mr Bush has already faced questions about his work as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy Corp a decade ago, when the firm faced an inquiry for masking huge losses.
--BBC
Wasn't it Martin Heldt who, many moons ago, posted about both the Bush and Cheney "scandals"?
History might just absolve him.
said Larry Klayman, chairman at Judicial Watch.
Wait a minute, isn't he the "I'll sue my mother, right wing conspirator" that many spoke of? I guess this doesn't matter since he is behind it then.
When Cheney was head of Halliburton he'd travel to the Middle East and beg the OPEC ministers to cut output and drive up the price of oil so he could have more fun being head of a company that sold oil drilling supplies and exploration equipment, and wouldn't have to lay off a lot of people.
I wouldn't call that a scandal, but colluding in that manner with oil producers in the US is illegal.
"In other words: He (George W. Bush) parlayed a failing company into stock in another company that he bailed out of just before it, too, began to fail; he used the proceeds to support his minimal investment in a baseball team that he eventually cashed in for $18 million. Where do we get in line for that kind of work?"
--The Baltimore Sun
And for this JOE....
Story last updated at 10:26 p.m. on Wednesday, September 6, 2000
Bush sold oil stock when company had cash crisis
By Pete Yost
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Before selling his stock in a Texas oil company, a transaction that prompted an insider trading inquiry, George W. Bush was informed as a company director that the firm was suffering a cash ''crisis,'' newly released records show.
The internal corporate documents, released by the Securities and Exchange Commission, provide the most detailed view yet of Bush's knowledge of Harken Energy Corp.'s financial problems when he sold his shares for $848,560 in June 1990.
Bush's lawyer said Wednesday the information, while new to the presidential campaign, was provided to the SEC as part of its investigation a decade ago and contributed to the agency's finding that Bush's trading was appropriate.
''The SEC did their job by the book, and this is old news,'' attorney Robert Jordan said. The Bush lawyer added that ''the company's financial situation was well-disclosed to the public'' through filings at the time with the SEC.
''By the time Bush sold his stock, the cash crisis had been largely resolved,'' said Jordan. ''By May 21, 1990, the major shareholders had agreed to a credit agreement which put $26 million into the company immediately.''
Insider trading allegations have been an issue in both Bush's run for governor in Texas and his presidential bid. The SEC in the last month released several hundred pages of corporate documents from its investigation under the Freedom of Information Act.
Bush has said he had no knowledge the Texas-based company was going to report a $23 million loss two months after he sold his stock. ''I absolutely had no idea and would not have sold it had I known,'' he said during his 1994 campaign for governor.
SEC investigators concurred there was no evidence Bush knew that the loss would be of that magnitude. At most, the investigators found, Bush was aware of a projected $4 million loss, which was ''consistent with Harken's publicly reported trend'' of losses, states an SEC investigative document obtained by AP. The same document projecting the $4 million loss, Jordan noted, projected a profit for the fourth quarter.
The Harken documents released under FOIA detail Bush's knowledge of the company's problems.
As a Harken director, he received memos in spring 1990 that referred in stark terms to the company's cash-strapped condition as banks demanded it pay down its debts. One document said the company was in the midst of a ''liquidity crisis'' and another told Bush the company was ''in a state of noncompliance'' with its lenders.
Bush also was informed that a company plan to make a public stock offering to generate cash was being abandoned because one of its lenders objected.
''On the eve of filing this offering, the Bank of Boston refused to grant waivers and consents necessary to allow the offering to proceed,'' Harken said in a letter to the SEC in 1991. ''Bank of Boston refused to alter its position and instead made demands that it be removed from the company's credit.'' The company solved the crisis when two of its biggest stockholders loaned it the $43 million it needed.
Bush served on three committees inside the company and also was paid as a consultant.
Even after his stock sale, Bush remained on the company's board of directors until 1993.
The SEC investigators never interviewed Bush about what else he might have known about the company's financial situation before selling the stock.
The investigators noted that Bush did not initiate the sale of his stock, that he was approached by a broker and checked with the company's general counsel about the propriety of the sale before carrying it out.
''It appears that Bush did not engage in illegal insider trading because it does not appear that he possessed material nonpublic information or that he acted with'' wrongful intent ''when he sold the Harken stock,'' SEC investigators wrote in a March 1992 summary obtained by AP.
When Harken announced its $23 million quarterly loss on Aug. 20, 1990, its stock held steady for more than two hours, then plummeted to $2.38 a share. The next day it rebounded to the previous day's $3 high. Regulators said the fact that the stock didn't immediately plunge and recovered so quickly was further evidence that the information could not be viewed as important to a reasonable investor.
At the time of the investigation, Bush's father was president of the United States and the SEC was run by one of his biggest political supporters, Richard Breeden. The SEC's then-general counsel, James R. Doty, was another staunch presidential supporter.
SEC's enforcement chief at the time, William McLucas, said in an interview that the Bush investigation ''was handled the same way any insider trading inquiry would be handled.''
New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, who reviewed the SEC investigative documents at AP's request, said the agency made a sound judgment legally and ethically to close the insider trading probe without interviewing Bush.
''We're dealing with investigators here who are not political appointees,'' he said.
Gillers said the evidence contained in the SEC documents was ''fairly persuasive against proceeding'' against Bush.
The man who was responsible for the investigation, William McLucas, is a Democrat. He found no wrong doing on the part of our current President Bush. McLucas is the man who was an independent investigator of Enron and WorldCom. If there was anything wrong, this is the man who would have found it.
Vast Left Wing Conspiracy
Secretive Group Re-emerges With Advertising Hostile to Bush
By DANIEL ALTMAN
ASHINGTON, July 9 — A small, secretive group that used television advertisements to attack George W. Bush during his campaign for president has re-emerged to point to links between oil companies with questionable accounting practices and the Bush administration.
The group, American Family Voices, paid for a 30-second commercial that will be shown until Thursday on cable news programs here and in New York. The commercial calls President Bush "sly like a fox" for talking down his dealings with Harken Energy, an oil company on whose board he once sat.
Twelve years ago, Mr. Bush sold stock in Harken just before it reported a $23.2 million loss, and he reported the sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission eight months late. The commercial also criticizes Vice President Dick Cheney for ties to Halliburton, an oil services company that the S.E.C. is investigating.
The commercial even suggests that the commission's chairman, Harvey L. Pitt, is unfit for the job because he was once a lawyer for several accounting firms, including Arthur Andersen.
American Family Voices said the commercial was timed to coincide with Mr. Bush's speech on corporate responsibility. Michael Lux, president of the group, said it wanted to reach "opinion leaders" in New York and politicians in Washington.
Mr. Lux, a consultant who works for American Family Voices under contract, would not say who donated the money for the television time. But the group and its advertising agency, the Glover Park Group, have significant links to the Clinton administration. Mr. Lux was an aide to President Bill Clinton, and the partners at Glover Park include Joe Lockhart, who was once Mr. Clinton's press secretary, and Carter Eskew and Michael Feldman, two advisers to Al Gore's unsuccessful campaign for president in 2000.
Mr. Lux said 12 donors responded to a request for money, and he hinted that the contributors included a trial lawyer, an executive in high technology and a prominent person in Hollywood.
Mr. Lockhart would not say how much American Family Voices paid the agency to create the advertisement, but he said the broadcasting time cost about $100,000.
Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said the committee had nothing to do with the commercial. But Ms. Palmieri said that James Carville, once a top campaigner for Mr. Clinton, was involved with American Family Voices.
The absence of direct involvement by the Democratic Party did not assuage the White House. "Given the source of the ads, given that they come from James Carville," said Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman, "they represent the most partisan of partisan attacks."
In the last year, from a sea-green brick building in Washington, American Family Voices has criticized Mr. Bush's tax breaks for corporations and has sponsored a Web site called The Daily Enron, which chronicles corporate accounting scandals.
The group was formed in 2000 with money from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. It has four employees, led by Mr. Lux. It has Section 501(c)4 tax status, which means it cannot run advertisements mentioning specific candidates within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary. The status also lets the group keep the identities of its backers a secret.
Seems to me the Clintons had a clean bill of health from the SEC as well inre: Whitewater.
That didn't stop the Republicans.
Secretary of Education Rod Paige put his finger on the crucial problem when he said that, in selecting teachers, states "maintain low standards and high barriers at the same time." You don't have to know much, but you do have to jump through all kinds of hoops, in order to become certified to teach in the public schools.
Actually, the story is straightforward -- lacking the mysterious twists of Whitewater. In 1990, Bush was out of the oil business and raising money to buy a share of the Texas Rangers baseball team. A board member of Harken Energy Corp., Bush sold $848,000 of the company's stock two months before the company reported millions of dollars in losses, which sharply dropped its stock price after the sale.
Geez.
It's all rather amazing.
How everyone and his cousin has suddenly adopted, almost in entirety, several decades worth of leftwing criticism of Big Business excess and corruption.
It's as if (the People's Republic of) Madison, Wisconsin grew huge overnight and subsumed the whole United States. Madison having been a place where the need for making errant corporations accountable to the citizenry was discussed at a well-attended seminar a good quarter century ago.
But what it actually is...is a confirmation of a radical philosphical tenet: historical and dialectical materialism.
That, in case you tend to read action-adventure novels more than Engels, is, partly, the notion that the old is constantly decaying, with the new rising to take its place.
But the process is usually very slow, and barely noticed, a truly evolutionary phenomenon.
However, at a certain point, you get an effect much like enough heat being applied to water, causing it to -- suddenly -- break into a rolling boil.
This issue has been drawing increasing heat for many,
many years (thanks to principled and unrelenting critics on the Left), and it finally, quickly became a matter perceived as intolerable by the general populace.
Today, it's so hot you could cook Polish sausage on it, if you had a pot.
It'll be interesting to see exactly where this goes.
Because those old Madison radicals held seminars on a lot of other, related questions as well.
You know about hatred, fold. You are filled with it.
In the two weeks since President Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock became the focus
of a media maelstrom, the prestige press has given the so-called scandal 50 times the
coverage it gave to the Clintons' Whitewater land deal during a comparable period.
In the 14 days after the New York Times broke the Whitewater story on March 8, 1992, the
entire mainstream press corps gave the scandal just 14 mentions, a Lexis-Nexis search reveals.
But in the two weeks since the Harken story has re-emerged, the focus of the Washington
press corps has been far, far more intense.
From June 28 to July 12, 2002, the media have devoted no fewer than 711 reports to the Bush
stock sale, more than 50 times the coverage it gave Whitewater at a similar point in that story.
In fact, throughout the entire 1992 presidential campaign (from March 8 through
Election Day), when the media's interest in a potential candidate's skeleton closet should
have been most intense, the press reported on Whitewater a grand total of 27 times.
Contrast that with the 2000 campaign, when Harken Energy first appeared on the national
 media's radar screen. With precious little to indicate that then-candidate George Bush had
done anything whatsoever wrong, the press still managed to squeeze out 87 reports during
the same March through Election Day period - more than three times the coverage Whitewater
received.
More media bias
As we noted Wednesday, Judicial Watch's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney
generated unusual media interest. Here's how unusual: It was the first time all three
 no-longer-so-big TV networks covered Judicial Watch, whose many attacks on Bill Clinton's
corruption they routinely ignored.
In fact, Fox News Channel reported tonight, the lawsuit against Cheney was the first time
 the words "Judicial Watch" passed the lips of Peter Jennings, the snooty Canadian leftist
 millionaire who reads the news for ABC.
Nuggets exposed by Media Research Center today:
"When Judicial Watch was suing Clinton administration officials the networks, on
 the rare occasions when they deigned to even mention the group, made sure viewers
realized it was 'conservative.' But when the organization run by Larry Klayman
 filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Vice President Dick Cheney, it suddenly became
 a non-ideological 'watchdog group,' 'Washington watchdog group,' 'legal
  group,' 'legal activist group' or 'legal advocacy group.'"
(Curiously, Fox News Channel and United Press International did refer to Judicial
 Watch as "conservative" Wednesday.)
"When CNN's Aaron Brown on Tuesday night remonstrated critics who charged bias
  stemming from his Monday night focus on Bush's 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock,
 he lectured his critics to think about where they'd be if the shoe was on the
 other foot, i.e., if Bill Clinton were President. But when the subject was Bill
 Clinton, Brown frequently commented on how he found it distasteful to be even
 reporting allegations against the then-President."
"Seeing the widespread media interest in the Judicial Watch lawsuit against Vice
President Cheney over accounting practices at Halliburton when Cheney ran
the company, Brit Hume observed on his FNC show Wednesday night: 'It's worth
 noting that Larry Klayman never got much coverage when he was going after Bill
Clinton.' Morton Kondracke added: 'Deemed a crank in those days.'"
I remember quite a few people posting what a radical conservative group that judicial watch was and how the
group should just be ignored.
Wolvie:
Your hero Rush Limbaugh covered all that yesterday.
I don't think he referred Jennings as a "snooty Canadian leftist
 millionaire who reads the news for ABC" but he probably just didn't think of it.
I'm sure the poobah's of the virulant right wing value millionaires, and Lord knows enough of them are snooty so that's hypocrisy on their part.
Canadian and leftist: That's meant as a rank insult.
Lie down with dogs, Wolvie, and you'll get up with fleas. I'd find better sources than whoever this guy is.
Your hero Rush Limbaugh covered all that yesterday.
Nice to know that you know things about me that I do not.
Lie down with dogs, Wolvie, and you'll get up with fleas. I'd find better sources than whoever this guy is.
Since you want to go this route fine.
:::SIGH:::
Typical liberal response. If you can't dispute the FACTS, go with insults. Please try to dispute the facts Rick.
So Judicial Watch sues Cheney and reporters shouldn't mention their name as the plaintiff? That's stupid.
Maybe the vice president of the United States getting sued isn't newsworthy.
As for the Harken story getting a lot of attention, well there's a rather precipitous stock slide going on, in addition to stories on Worldcom and Enron and God knows what else. You don't think that has something to do with the coverage?
No, they out to get the Presiden. That's the only answer.
When are you conservatives going to shed this victim mentality when it comes to the media? No one else is a legitimate victim of anything in your collective minds. Why should you be?
So Judicial Watch sues Cheney and reporters shouldn't mention their name as the plaintiff? That's stupid.
Maybe the vice president of the United States getting sued isn't newsworthy.
Rick you miss the point entirely. When Judicial watch was sueing Clinton, it was hardly news to the media. They white washed it. And when the media did report on Judicial watch it was always labeled as a "Consevative" group. Now all of a sudden they are lebeled as some sort of watch dog group.
When was the last time, if ever, you heard the media describe something from the left as being liberal?
As for the Harken story getting a lot of attention, well there's a rather precipitous stock slide going on, in addition to
stories on Worldcom and Enron and God knows what else. You don't think that has something to do with the coverage?
No, they out to get the Presiden. That's the only answer.
The Harken story is what, 12 years old? People have tried to use it on Bush before, but nothing wrong was done or ever proven. Yes Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing are legitimate news stories. I just do not think they are political issues. The media is trying to turn this on Bush. Why doesn't the media just report the story instead of trying to politisize it?
When are you conservatives going to shed this victim mentality when it comes to the media?
When they start reporting the news fairly and when they quit putting in personal bias.
No one else is a legitimate victim of anything in your collective minds. Why should you be?
Again your words not mine.
I disagree, I know big surprize, I think people are bailing out of the market because of the way corporations are keeping their books. It is all the accounting scandels that are weaking the market, not Bush's policies.
BUSH'S CORPORATE-CRIME COP CHEATED CONSUMERS
The man President Bush tapped to lead his corporate crime watchdog team was a director of a San Francisco credit-card firm that just two years ago paid more than $400 million to settle charges that it cheated consumers.
Larry Thompson, named to lead the Bush administration's white-collar crime task force, served on the board of directors of Providian Financial Corp. at the same time regulators found that the firm systematically charged excessive fees and used deceptive sales tactics to bolster its bottom line.
Thompson sat on Providian's board and served as chairman of the firm's audit and compliance committee from June 1997 until his unanimous confirmation by the Senate as deputy attorney general on May 10, 2001.
He sold his Providian stock -- said to be worth as much as $4.7 million -- to comply with ethics rules. The sale came just months before the firm disclosed looming problems with credit card defaults that led to the collapse of its stock and thousands of layoffs.
The revelations could be a potential embarrassment for Bush, who on Tuesday announced the creation of a white-collar crime task force to crack down on the type of corporate chicanery that has undermined public confidence in the stock market...
--From the San Francisco Chronicle
PAPERS SHOW BUSH KNEW OF A CRISIS AS HE SOLD STOCK
WASHINGTON - Harken Energy Corp. was in bad financial shape, facing a painful liquidity crisis and restructuring when George W. Bush sold some $850,000 worth of shares in the firm in June 1990. Evidence in government files indicates he had at least partial knowledge of the company's troubles before he sold the stock.
Records from a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation indicate that Bush, who served on Harken's board of directors and was a member of a special committee to deal with the financial troubles, had been warned about the company's financial crisis by its president, Mikel D. Faulkner, and other officers before selling his stock.
On April 20, 1990, Faulkner wrote to the members of Harken's board that the company was facing a liquidity crisis and that crucial plans to sell new shares of stock were diminished, due to a slumping oil market. The firm was also facing pressure from its lenders, especially the Bank of Boston, which ''greatly intensifies our current liquidity problem,'' Faulkner wrote.
On May 18, 1990, according to the SEC files, Harken's senior vice president, Bruce N. Huff, wrote to Harken's special committee - made up of Bush, Faulkner, and director E. Stuart Watson - to alert them of the ''negative repercussions'' that could occur if they did not approve a series of waivers and extensions of corporate loans.
The Bank of Boston refused to renegotiate its loans, and the stock sale had to be put off. ''The immediate focus of the company was at that time redirected to raising cash,'' Huff acknowledged in a 1991 letter to the SEC. ''By June 1990, the company was constrained by its worsening cash and credit situation. ... The company was in the midst of the severe cash crisis.''
--From the Boston Globe
In June of 2000, the Harken stock was trading for between $.69 and $1.00. 7 months later on January 29, 2001, the stock traded for $6.97. The stock went up as much as 1000% of what it might have been when Bush sold.
So if he had "insider information", it sure didn't serve him very well.
I suppose they are mostly freeloaders, and morally corrupted individuals.
I don't know but, I wonder how many of those people make sure they pay their cable TV bills?
I don't have Cable btw.
I do however always make sure to pay my water bill.
:-)
What's a water bill? I have rabbit ears on the house for TV and a well for water. How much is the average water bill anyway?
In St. Paul I pay about $80.00 every quarter for a family of 5. That goes up to about $120 - $130 during the summer due to watering our garden which takes up 80% of our lawn.
Wow! That's a big garden. Keeps the lawn mowing to a minimum, I bet. What do you grow?
It does keep the mowing to a minimum. Only takes about 10 minutes to do. I usually mow the neighbors yard while I'm at it because it seems silly to just do our yard.
Anyway, I don't grow anything for I'm not a gardener. However, my wife grows mostly plants. Tons of flowers and plants and bushes and roses and vines and grasses and herbs and other stuff I don't have a clue about.
I water it and that's about it.
We don't do many vegetables for there's no room left.
Sounds prettier than my grass/weeds mixture. If you need the exercise, you are always welcome to mow my yard for me.
Thanks for the offer but, mine (and my neighbors) is just about perfect for me.
:-)
From a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune.