Would You Trust a Crook with Your Social Security Check?

[Octafish]

George Walker Bush thinks America is an ownership society. Sounds good, if everybody's truly rich. But in Smirk's drug-addled mind, it's like the Bible says: There has always got to be poor people in the world. Otherwise, where's the point in bein' rich?

How George W. Bush made his millions

By Joseph Kay
1 August 2002

Much has been written over the past month about President George W. Bush’s actions while at Harken Energy. This is, indeed, a significant history: in the early 1990s Bush made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a deal that reeks of the same insider trading and accounting fraud the president now claims to oppose. (See “On eve of Wall Street speech: Bush’s past business dealings come back to haunt him,” 9 July, 2002).

However, the media has paid far less attention to what Bush did with the $850,000 he made through the sale of Harken stock options and the manner in which he transformed that windfall into the $15 million that now constitutes the larger part of his personal fortune. If anything, this story is even more revealing.

If the Harken deal was a smaller scale version of the accounting scandals at WorldCom, Enron and other firms, Bush’s purchase and sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team reveals other characteristic features of the past several decades of American capitalism: the plundering of public assets for private gain, the confluence of political and economic power, the defrauding of the American people.

By the time he cashed out in 1998, Bush’s return on his original $600,000 investment in the Rangers was 2,400 percent. Where did all of this money come from and what did Bush do to get it? Much of the story was first reported nationally by Joe Conason in a February, 2000 article for Harpers Magazine. A report from the public interest group, Center for Public Integrity, and recent columns on July 16 in the New York Times by Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof have filled in some of the details.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/bush-a01.shtml

[Cha]

1. No! That's why I don't want bush anywhere

near my future Social Security check!

[Octafish]

2. Me too. HARVARD Foundation, though, took a risk on Bushler...

One would think Hahvahd would watch out for, em, the criminal class...



Memos: Bush knew of Harken's problems

EXCERPT...

The SEC later investigated whether or not Bush traded his stock in light of insider information that may have had an adverse impact on the company's stock price. An April 9, 1991, SEC memo found Bush had filed late insider-trading forms on four different occasions, and that SEC staff had opened an investigation "with respect to Bush's sale of 212,140 shares to Harken stock prior to Harken's announcement on August 20, 1990 of a loss of $23.2 million."

The SEC found that Bush had erred in filing late forms, but decided not to prosecute a case against him. In an October 1993 memo, the SEC declared "the investigation has been terminated as to the conduct of Mr. Bush, and that, at this time, no enforcement action is contemplated with respect to him." But the letter states that the investigation's termination "must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result" from the investigation.

While the case against Bush did not go forward, many questions remain unanswered. Smith, the Los Angeles broker, insists he was approached by a client who, in spite of the company's problems, eagerly wanted a large chunk of Harken stock. Both Smith and the White House dismiss allegations that the purchase was made by an investor interested in bailing out the president's son.

Just who bought the stock remains a mystery. Records show that during the second quarter of 1990, only two institutional investors purchased large quantities of Harken stock. One was Harvard University, which owned 30 percent of Harken. The school purchased 918,450 shares during the spring of 1990. The other was a mutual fund management company called Quest Advisory, which purchased 357,900 shares. But the buyer of Bush's stock, meanwhile, remained anonymous.

CONTINUED...

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/07/12/harken/index.html