George Bush did worse things than Martha Stewart...

[Octafish]

Bush is a crook. He knew HARKEN's stock was going down. Why? He was on the board of directors and had just approved ENRON-like accounting gimmickry. Smirko

Harken Energy Corporation Internal Documents

March 15, 2004

In his July 8, 2002, press conference, President George W. Bush told reporters "to look back on the directors' minutes" for details of his knowledge of and involvement in the financial reporting of Harken Energy Corporation that was the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in the early 1990s.

Bush, who was a director of Harken during the period in question and was himself investigated for insider trading (the SEC determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against him), did not answer specific questions about his knowledge of the company's sale of Harken's Aloha Petroleum subsidiary. Harken reported the gain from the sale before it had received payment from the ultimate buyer, Advance Petroleum Marketing, Inc.

Yet Bush chaired a special committee of board members set up to review the terms of a $12 million note held by Intercontinental Mining and Resources Ltd., which was set up by Harken insiders to purchase Aloha, according to an internal Harken document dated March 14, 1990 that was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

SNIP...

The March 14, 1990 Shareholders Notes and the March 14, 1990 minutes from the Board of Directors meeting suggest that Bush was aware of some of the details of the Aloha transaction; the decision to renegotiate the terms of the deal with Advanced Petroleum Marketing was unanimously approved by the board.

CONTINUED...

http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=450

OT: Did you notice that AwOL Bush is no longer mentioned on the evening news?

[LeinesRed]

1. Joe Conason

is also talking about this in the Observer.

[Octafish]

6. Bush had friends, but Martha had none

Thanks for the heads-up! Conason's a good guy. This might be the article:

Bush had friends, but Martha had none
Stewart's improprieties pale in comparison to Bush's Harken dump

by Joe Conason

It's a good thing to be king -- as a certain disgraced diva might tell us -- but not always such a good thing to be queen.

Even Martha Stewart's advocates found her conduct difficult to defend as she faced sentencing and, perhaps, the ruin of the company she has spent her life building. Yet the government brought no charge of illicit trading against her, and the court vacated the specious securities-fraud counts, despite suspicions that inside information had spurred her unloading of ImClone shares before their value plummeted. Prosecutors ultimately accused her of nothing but attempting to conceal the facts about those trades, in part by lying to federal investigators.

Perhaps that was enough to justify her conviction, reduced as those charges were after all the hype. Besides, the taste-marketing maven appears to have believed herself exempt from the rules and laws that govern ordinary people, which is why so many of them celebrated her conviction. The government warned that should Ms. Stewart not be held accountable for her offenses, her escape from punishment would encourage lawlessness.

Ms. Stewart's partisans retort that she was a target of selective prosecution. From right-wing columnists to left-leaning law professors, the converging opinion held that she was brought to book more on account of her celebrity than her culpability. Defenders of the feminist Democrat spanned the spectrum from Rosie O'Donnell to William Safire. Not everyone in the Stewart camp feels she was chosen to make an example of a successful woman in a male corporate world, but many agree that she suffered by exclusion from an "old boys' network" that historically has protected powerful corporate crooks.



CONTINUED...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16571

[Q]

2. Ask any Republican or Democrat...

...Bush* is above the law.

[Octafish]

7. You're right, Q.

I wonder why our side has been so, um, slow to attack the Little Turd from Crawford. Starting with Bill Clinton. Where was he during Selection 2000?

[Redleg]

3. This news is beginning to make some smaller papers.

I hope it gets the ball rolling.

[Octafish]

8. New Book: "House of Bush, House of Saud"

... The story's gone from drip to trickle. This guy's got the goods on the BFEE (sounds like he reads DU, too):

Guerrilla of the Week
Editor's Pick, March 15, 2004

Last week, Salon ran what should have been a blockbuster scoop. Entitled, "The Great Escape," the article was an excerpt from a book released today called "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties." In it author Craig Unger exposes, among other things, how 140 mainly Saudi nationals were whisked out of the U.S. on private jets in the days immediately following 9/11 while no other commercial aircraft was allowed to leave the tarmac. Unger originally broke the story of the flights in an October 2003 Vanity Fair article. But in last week's Salon article, he lists the actual passenger manifests, and shows how the authorization for the flights came from the highest levels of the White House and the intelligence agencies.

Unger found that passengers on the flights included Osama bin Laden's sister, and more ominously, a Saudi national later identified by Abu Zubaydah, the captured Al Qaeda operative alleged to have planned the USS Cole attack, as a fellow Al Qaeda terrorist. In other words, the U.S. government aided the escape of a man who may have been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Unger's disclosures should have been front-page news. But the story was all but ignored by the mainstream media. This week's release of the book may change that.

SNIP...

Unger: The Saudis are enormously important for several reasons. One is, it's not just that they have the largest oil reserves in the world. It's partly the ease with which they are able to extract oil that allows them to just turn on the spigot and they can lower or raise the price of oil at their will. So in a certain way we are enormously dependent on them and having a close relationship with them has been a key part of… Oil is a strategic resource for the United States. It's enormously important to us - we need that in some way and we have to sort of deal with that in some way, so it's not surprising that we would turn to the Saudis for that. The question is that, in being so addicted to cheap Saudi oil, have we not looked aggressively and have we turned a blind eye to their role in fostering terrorism? And when 9/11 happened, suddenly I think it became much more difficult to turn a blind eye and you start to see this long term relationship start to unravel….

CONTINUED...

http://www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc4097.html

[Cleita]

4. Yeah, but he isn't a rich powerful woman who is also a

Democrat, so his crimes get a pass.

[Octafish]

9. People across America smell a skunk -- even South Carolina...

Stock-dumping
Unsuspecting buyers hurt

March 10, 2004

WHEN a corporate insider learns of impending events that will send a firm's stock price plummeting - or soaring - it's a crime for the insider to cash in on this private information. If the insider sells shares just before bad news becomes public, unsuspecting buyers are stuck with the ensuing losses. If the insider buys shares before good news is known, unsuspecting sellers are robbed of gains that were just around the corner.

Homeware queen Martha Stewart has been convicted of using insider knowledge to dump her ImClone stock in 2001 the day before a major setback caused the price to plunge - thus buyers who purchased her shares were cheated.

Most Americans don't know that President Bush was involved in a similar situation in 1990. Here's the story:

After graduating from Yale, Bush entered the Texas oil business, mostly using investment money from his father's wealthy Republican backers. The son was largely a failure. His first firm, Arbusto (Spanish for bush) Energy Inc., drilled numerous wells, but lost money. His rich backers wrote much of the loss off their taxes.

CONTINUED (requires Registration, but well worth the time)…

http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Editorials/200403098

[number6]

5. Dick and Bush should go to jail 10 times before

Martha gets a traffic ticket ...

[Octafish]

10. BFEE provides many, many targets of prosecutorial opportunity...