Dear Dave Ellen: "Why US press didn't give Bush a Burning"
You know that 'liberal press' you're always bitching about, Dave? Here's something from an even more 'liberal one' ... in a 'foreign land' ... just for YOU, Davey ... SMMMOOOOOCHHHH!!!! - bia
PS: Ray Duray says 'hi.' He's on vacation unavailable for 'Net contact directly with good friends like you.
The papers knew about Dubya's deals in 2000.
Strangely, they kept quiet
Harold Evans
Sunday July 14, 2002
The Observer
The crimes of the capitalist pigs - the old Marxist rhetoric may
be exhumed for the occasion - are a running serial these days in
the US. Book cooking has consumed more energy than
bookkeeping. The most notorious scandals have been exposed
in sectors freed from regulation in the Nineties.
Last week another candidate for obloquy emerged, the Harken
Energy Corporation, and along with it one of its directors and
consultants from 1986 to 1990, GW Bush. This is the very same
GW Bush who told several hundred business leaders last
Tuesday, as their President, that he was determined to jail any
of them caught with a hand in the cookie jar.
Why the activities of oilman Bush in the Eighties and Nineties
should be headlines now is a mystery. He made his fortune in
business by flouting securities laws and finding protection
among his father's friends. He was unable or unwilling to give
details of this last week, except in ways that added to the
confusion. The real mystery, important in a democracy, is one
memorialised by Sherlock Holmes. The dog in Dartmoor
mystery Silver Blaze, you will recall, did nothing in the night;
and that was the curious incident.
The curious incident now is why the people's watchdog press
didn't bark when new, unflattering evidence emerged just before
the 2000 presidential election. This is not a question the press
itself is bothering to probe, which at least demonstrates a
consistent talent for inertia.
The sequence of events is telling. When Bush sold his Harken
stock in June 1990, he did not report the sale to the US
Securities and Exchange Commission, as required by law. He
was eight months late.
The requirement should alert the SEC to the possibility of insider
knowledge. And delay conceals from investors information about
the faith the company's leaders have in their enterprise -
information that can move markets. Bush's sale, when it
eventually was reported, aroused the SEC's curiosity because
he unloaded more than 200,000 Harken shares for $850,000 just
before it cratered.
The SEC, whose inquiry took place while his father was
President, did not press any charges; nor did it specifically
exonerate Bush Junior.
But that was then. In October 2000, when candidate Bush was
saying he would run the White House like a business
corporation, a more thorough investigation was carried out, this
time by journalists. Bill Minutaglio and Nancy Beiles, with Knut
Royce of the the Center for Public Integrity, had their scoop
published in Talk magazine, edited then by my wife, Tina Brown.
They made a series of discoveries. One, that Bush had also
been late in reporting four transactions involving Harken stock
while he was a director.
Two, Bush himself was never interviewed by the SEC - a 'very
strange' fact, according to one Republican SEC investigator.
And the general counsel of the SEC then was James Doty, who
represented Bush in his purchase of the Texas Rangers
baseball team. Three, that Bush and his fellow Harken directors
made a series of manoeuvres that can now be seen to be a
mirror image of the scandalous practices of their friends at the
disgraced Enron.
Fearing to report losses in 1989, Harken sold 80 per cent of one
of its own subsidiaries, Aloha Petroleum, to a partnership of
Harken insiders at an inflated price, a transaction that masked
the losses, and pushed up the stock price, whereupon they sold
their personal stakes.
The following February the SEC ordered Harken to amend its
annual report, declaring 1989 losses of $12.5m - by which time
Bush had sold most of his shares.
All this, and more, was fissile material in the run-up to the 2000
election. Astonishingly, it was ignored. The New York Times,
the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and all the big TV
and radio shows, except Tom Brokaw on NBC, failed even to
report the Harken revelations, about which they are now making
a fuss.
Why? Three reasons.
First, the election reporters got themselves trapped in a narrative
that was resistant to fact: Gore was a a poseur, and Bush was
an amiable Forrest Gump. No fact that did not fit the
preconceived pattern saw ink or breathed air.
Second, they were vulnerable to spin when the Republicans
found material to keep the stereotypes going.
Third, there was outright prejudice against Clinton and Gore. It
was described a few weeks later by Eric Alderman of MSNBC:
'Where is the New York Times' famed Whitewater reporter, Jeff
Gerth? Where's the Washington Post special investigations
unit? Where is the scandal-mongering Matt Drudge.'
Bush has changed his story about the late filings. Then, he said
the SEC must have lost the papers. Now, he blames his own
lawyers.
None of the news organisations that failed the public in 2000 has
fessed up. The New York Times murmured that there had been
some vague mention of this in 2000. The Wall Street Journal
grossly misrepresented its own negligence, referring only to one
late filing and claiming it did report what it signally did not.
The general theme on the Right is that anyway it is all the fault
of the bad example set by you-know-who. That blow job, you
must believe, entirely destroyed the moral fibre of a generation of
American businessmen.
· Harold Evans is former editor of the Times and Sunday Times.
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