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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (270363)	7/5/2002 1:36:51 PM
From: Arthur Radley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

J, Did you finish the legal work on that cocker spaniels adoption paper already. Damn! You are fast. Look out the window and see if the Bellevue van is pulling up to the curb...Bad boy! Bad Boy! Just to help you with some of the details...and don't forget Shrub's pappy was the President and had those hand-picked SEC cronies making the rulings on Shrub's illegal dealings. Hell, J! Do you think that Shrub has Pitts in place because he is as good a lawyer as you are and will protect ALL AMERICAN citizens. "Bush Does Not Measure Up to Own Standards As part of its ongoing strategy to paint Enron as simply a business scandal, the White House leaked news yesterday of President Bush's plans to release a new set of standards for executives and accountants. It's a move not without risk for Bush since it invites journalists to compare Bush's own actions as a Texas oil company executive against his freshly minted standards. As apparently weak as Bush's new rules are, a comparison will show that oil executive George W. Bush would not have passed muster himself. Back in 1986 Bush's oil company, Spectrum, was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. As tends to happen in the Bush clan, a group of businessmen close to his father absorbed Spectrum into their company, Harken Energy. George W. Bush was facing bankruptcy one day and the next day he had $600,000 worth of Harken stock in hand, a $80,000-a-year salary and a stock option arrangement that allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40% below market value. In all, the deal put well over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years -- even though Harken itself lost millions. Bush also borrowed $180,375 from the company - a loan that was later "forgiven." (In 1989 and 1990 alone - according to the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filing - Harken's board "forgave" $341,000 in loans to its executives.) Such lavish executive compensation from Harken would suggest a company doing quite well. Not so. One Wall Street analyst called Harken's web of insider stock deals and mounting debt "a lot of jiggery-pokery," an apt description of Enron today. Harken also owed more than $150 million to banks and other creditors. But, Harken wasn't producing anything - unless of course you count the rich flow of fees, stock options, and salaries for its top executives, including George W. Bush. As Jeffrey Skilling might say, "you gotta know when to hold-em, you gotta know when the fold-em" and Bush knew both. It was spring 1990 and Iraq was threatening Kuwait thereby also threatening Harken Energy's only pending contract, a drilling project in Bahrain. And, Harken's Smith Barney financial advisors had just delivered a hand wringing report voicing alarm at the company's rapidly deteriorating financial condition and mounting debts. The company established a restructuring board to which Bush was appointed. But, the only restructuring Bush did involved his own finances. In June 1990 Bush pulled a Skilling. Claiming ignorance of the Harken's financial difficulties or the Smith Barney report, he sold his 212,140 shares of Harken Energy banking $848,560.00. Even though the sale fell squarely under the SEC's insider stock sale rule requiring almost immediate formal notice, Bush did not report the sale until seven months later - after US troops had finished fighting Desert Storm. At the time the SEC was headed by George H. Bush appointee, Richard Breeden and no action was taken against the President's son for his tardiness in reporting his insider trades. Of course, reporting such a sale at the time it occurred could have been both revealing and embarrassing. Bush sold his Harken stock less than thirty days after his father's National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft sent the President a secret memo warning that hostilities between Iraq and Kuwait were likely. Did dad share this information with his son? If so, W. Bush traded on "non-public" information of an extraordinary nature indeed. Less than two months after Bush sold his shares hostilities broke out in Gulf and Harken's stock dropped like a stone. The shares lost 25% of their value alone on the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. Had Bush held his shares until then he would have lost nearly a quarter of million dollars. Harken's stock fell to as low as .25 a share. Today it trades under a dollar. So, as President W. Bush unveils his new business executive's ethical standards, journalist might want to ask him to try them on himself.