BuzzFlash
presents Southern Style
by Rebecca Knight
July
16, 2002
No Moral Authority
by Rebecca Knight
"Public officials should call on Americans to be responsible, but lectures do not replace leadership. Leaders must lead by example. Leaders must be responsible, and in our great democracy, the top responsibility rests with the President of the United States."
-- George W. Bush
Can you believe that quote? Do you think even Bush believes what he said? If you do, I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge at a bargain price. How does he do it? What type of personality defect allows the leader of the free world to make such astounding statements knowing all along that he has no intention of living up to what he says?
Harry Truman, a leader of moral courage and strength, coined the famous phrase "The Buck Stops Here." George W. Bush has revised the phrase to read "The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here" by his words and deeds. Whenever attempts are made to hold him responsible for his personal actions and/or actions of his administration, he has attempted to blame lawyers, accountants, advisors, Democrats, Clinton, Gore, and anyone else he can think of.
Of course, this is not the first time in history that a president has made such sweepingly hypocritical statements. The times we are living in are eerily reminiscent of the Watergate era. Bush and Cheney are embroiled in numerous scandals, just as Nixon and Agnew were. In that vein I predict that Cheney will resign within the next twelve months, especially if the Democrats win back the House and keep the Senate in November, making Democrat Richard Gephardt the Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency. The resignation of Cheney would give Bush the right to nominate a Republican as vice president, just as Nixon appointed Gerald Ford.
Recently I researched the events that led to the resignation of Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew. It makes for very interesting reading. Agnew was not the first vice president to resign, just the first to resign in disgrace with a criminal record. Agnew resigned in 1973 within two months of the Wall Street Journal breaking the story of a bribery scandal in which he received a $10,000 pay-off in his temporary office in the basement of the White House.(1) He pleaded no contest to a single charge of failing to report $29,500 of income received in 1967. He was fined $10,000 and placed on three years probation.
It appears that the troubles of Cheney are far more serious than those of Agnew. Cheney maintains that Halliburton had a firm policy against doing business with Iraq during his term as CEO, but the company's subsidiaries signed contracts with Iraq worth $73 million with Cheney at the helm.(2) Cheney also led Halliburton to feed from the federal trough receiving $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.(3)
Judicial Watch is suing Cheney for misleading shareholders of Halliburton about the company's value. They claim that Cheney, other company officers, and Arthur Andersen boosted the share price of Halliburton.(4) Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch intends to call Cheney to testify. Cheney cannot sidestep this case since the Supreme Court ruled that a sitting president or vice president has no immunity from civil litigation. Cheney even appeared in a promotional video for the disgraced Arthur Andersen.
The SEC is investigating Halliburton for accounting practices during Cheney's tenure. Cheney may be called to chat with the SEC since he signed the company's financial statements in 1998 and 1999. Current Halliburton CEO, David Lesar, said Cheney was aware that the firm was counting projected cost-overrun payments as revenue. Lesar said, "The vice president was aware of who owed us money and he helped us collect it."(5)
And what about Bush? On Saturday Bush stated that restoring confidence in the integrity of business leaders is "perhaps the greatest need of our economy." How will that be accomplished when Bush is hip deep in reported corruption through insider trading with Harken Energy? Bush and Cheney, who ran as a CEO-M.B.A. team, have no credibility on the integrity of business leaders.
Bush says he has been "fully vetted" on the Harken situation. That is an outright lie since the SEC never even interviewed Bush on the situation.(6) Bush also said that the SEC had cleared him of wrongdoing. Also not true. The Poppy Bush SEC chose not to pursue the matter, but stated that Bush had not been exonerated.(7) The general counsel of the SEC then was James Doty, who represented Bush in his purchase of the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Bush advised reporters to look at the minutes from the meetings to confirm that what he was saying is true, but the minutes have not been released and the White House refused last week to release them. However, the Boston Globe reported this on Saturday: "Records from a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation include 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."(8)
Poppy Bush was president at the time, in perfect position to notify his son of events that might impact Harken and his personal stock holdings. Poppy's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, sent the president a secret memo warning that hostilities between Iraq and Kuwait were likely. At the time, Harken's only pending contract was for drilling project in Bahrain. The outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf would have ruinous implications for Harken. The Gulf hostilities broke out less than two months after Bush sold his Harken shares and Harken stock dropped in value. Its shares lost twenty-five percent of their value on the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, which would have cost Bush nearly $250,000 had he still owned his shares.(9)
Bush unloaded more than 200,000 shares of Harken stock just before the value plummeted. Who was the willing buyer waiting to snap up these shares? It appears it may have been Harvard Management Company, Inc., whose sole client is Harvard University where Bush got his M.B.A.(10)
Many in the media maintain that there is nothing to the ten-year-old Harken controversy. Really? Then why does Bush not release the minutes to the meetings and why can Bush not get his story straight? Why was a twenty-year-old land deal relevant enough to cause a more than $70 million investigation into the Clintons' involvement, but the Harken questions are not important? The Clintons lost money on that deal, but Bush made hundreds of thousands. This is another example of the media's double standard.
The entire situation reeks! It reeks even more because it was all known during campaign 2000, but the media barely mentioned it and the voters yawned. It was more important to harangue Gore over his choice of clothing or similar trivial matters.
It's not just Bush and Cheney who are involved in big business corruption. Many working in their administration are also involved. Thomas White, Secretary of the Army, was the former Enron vice chairman of Enron Energy Services, which was implicated in manipulating electricity prices in California. White sold $12 million worth of Enron stock between June and November of last year. Paul O'Neill, Secretary of the Treasury is the former chief executive of Alcoa. After taking his office, O'Neill delayed selling his shares in Alcoa until they had appreciated by thirty percent. Larry Lindsey, the White House economic adviser, was a paid Enron consultant while devising the Bush campaign economic plan. Why have none of these people been dismissed or asked to resign by Bush? It could be that they are kept around for the sole purpose of taking the heat off of Bush himself.
Not only have they not been asked to resign, Bush recently appointed Deputy Attorney General, Larry Thompson as the head of the new corporate crime task forced. Mr. Thompson was as a director for Providian, a credit card company that paid more than $400 million to settle allegations of unfair and deceptive business practices.
Congressman Henry Waxman has written to Bush requesting that he and members of his administration do the honorable thing and donate profits made through questionable stock sales to charities set up to help displaced workers. Nice try Henry, but we know they won't do the honorable thing.
Bush and Cheney are attempting to hide behind executive privilege as did the Nixon administration. Sam Ervin, who chaired the committee investigating Watergate had this to say about Nixon's attempts to hide behind executive privilege: "The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere. What he says is executive privilege is nothing but executive poppycock." U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan ruled against the Bush administration's motion to dismiss the lawsuits involving the Cheney energy task force. He said that the Bush administration has a disturbingly broad legal view of confidential advice to the president that would keep a huge amount of government information secret. He also accused the Bush administration of making purposefully misleading statements.(11)
To say that Republican attempts to lasso the Democrats with similar big business corruption are wobbly is an understatement. In the 2000 presidential election, WorldCom gave seventy percent and Arthur Andersen gave seventy-one percent of their political donations to Bush. From 1989 through 2001 Enron gave seventy-four percent of its political donations to the Republicans. Enron also gave $300,000 to the Bush inaugural fund in 2001 and helped out with the costs of the 2000 Florida recount.
Democrats have attempted several times to enact legislation to eliminate or restrict corporate corruption, but the Republicans voted them down. Now Bush is proposing many of the same ideas.
In April 2002, 214 Republicans voted against a Democratic substitute amendment to the Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act of 2002 that would impose tougher regulations on corporations than the Republican bill. The amendment would have imposed criminal penalties on CEOs who falsify financial reports. The amendment failed 202 to 219.
In April 2002, 218 Republicans voted against a Democratic motion to recommit the Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act of 2002 that would have included in the bill language similar to the Democratic substitute, adding public regulator and executive accountability provisions, including criminal penalties for false certification of financial statements. The motion failed 205 to 222.
In April 2002, 214 Republicans opposed a Democratic substitute amendment to the Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act that would create a public regulator to oversee auditors. The regulator would have authority to set auditing standards and conduct more thorough investigations. The amendment was rejected, 202-219.
In April 2002, 214 Republicans voted against a Democratic substitute amendment to the Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act of 2002 that would, among other things, seek to curb conflicted investment advice by prohibiting analysts from owning stock in companies they research and barring them from having their pay tied to the revenue of their investment banking firm. The amendment failed 202 to 219.
In April 2002, 214 Republicans voted against a Democratic substitute amendment to the Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act of 2002 that would, among other things, replace the executive responsibility provisions in the bill to require executive certification of financial statements. The amendment failed 202 to 219.
In April 2002, 209 Republicans voted against the Democratic substitute amendment to the Pensions Security Act of 2002 that would have mandated independent investment advice for employees with company stock, required a 30-day notice of any limitation on company stock sales and would have mandated equal representation of employees and employers on pension boards. The amendment failed 187 to 232.
In June 2002, 191 Republicans voted against the Neal (D-MA) motion to recommit the Retirement Savings Security Act of 2002, which would have closed a loophole that allows corporations to locate their headquarters offshore in order to avoid paying federal taxes. The motion failed 186 to 192.(12)
The evidence against the Bush administration and the Republican Party on corporate influence and corruption is significant. It is time for the Democrats to use this issue in the upcoming election. Get the facts out and hold the Republicans accountable.
I can sense a bit of déjà vu in looking at the current political situation of Bush and Cheney. Both are under fire and being investigated as Nixon and Agnew were. Perhaps the investigations are not as intense as the Watergate era, but the potential for the same type scenario exists. This is especially true if the Democrats control Congress after the fall elections and it is the reason those elections are so critical.
The Republican Party hounded Clinton for his entire eight-year term with investigation after investigation and cries about the "rule of law." It is time that they are held accountable in the same fashion!
"Well, I'm not a crook."
-- Richard Milhous Nixon
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(1) http://www.apbonline.com/media/gfiles/agnew/
(2) http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/6/24/80648.shtml
(3) http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm
(4) http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_2119000/2119981.stm
(5) http://www.msnbc.com/news/780130.asp
(6) http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/lackof13.htm
(7) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1447-2002Jul13.html
(8) http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0713-01.htm
(9) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jul2002/bush-j09.shtml
(10) http://www.newsmakingnews.com/catharvardpubinteg.htm
(11) http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/07.14D.jge.bush.view.p.htm
(12) http://www.investorsbillofrights.com/GOPfailed.phtml
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Rebecca Knight is a native Tennessean, who grew up in Nashville, and currently resides in a small town near Nashville. Ms. Knight's political awareness evolved through the civil rights movement, the Vietnam era, the Watergate era, and the cold war. The debacle of the 2000 election increased her sense of responsibility for political activism. You may contact Rebecca Knight via e-mail at tennessee_gal655@yahoo.com.
© 2002 by Rebecca Knight
