Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [3]
The “sale” of Aloha Petroleum, from Harken to Harken, was again Enron writ small and so outrageous that the SEC stepped in, declared the accounting unacceptable, and forced the company to restate its earnings. Bush unquestionably knew about the deal.
Even if he had convinced the public that earlier stories about his $848,560 insider trade, his failure to report it to the SEC, his low-interest loans from Harken to buy company stock (a practice he particularly denounced in his Wall Street speech, as though he had never heard of such an unseemly scam before), and the Enron-esque sale of Aloha Petroleum were all what he described as “recycled stuff,” he was still surrounded by bad stories about to break. Enron was ripe for federal prosecution; Bush and Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay, his single largest campaign contributor, had been tight for years. Halliburton was being investigated by the feds for fraudulent accounting practices put in place when Dick Cheney was CEO. Congress was investigating the secretary of the Army for his role in the collapse of Enron, in the fleecing of electricity customers in California, and for his failure to divest himself of Enron stock in a timely manner.
SEC chief Harvey Pitt had so many previous business connections with the firms he was now regulating, he had already had to recuse himself in twenty-nine cases being pursued by the SEC. Bush’s hard-nosed, hard-assed political adviser, Karl Rove, had owned $108,000 in Enron stock and, more important, knew the Enron CEO because he was Bush’s biggest funder. Two of Bush’s economic advisers had worked as consultants for Enron. And the newly disgraced Ken Lay had convinced Bush to dump the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Curtis Hebert, and to replace him with the candidate of Lay’s choice, a Port Arthur, Texas, homeboy. Before giving Bush the word to dump Hebert, Lay had a come-to-Jesus session with Hebert himself, telling him to embrace free markets and deregulation or, Lay said, things would end badly for Hebert. They did.
Considering the circumstances, heckfire and brimpebbles were the best GeeDubya could manage as he wagged his fingers at Wall Street’s corporate criminals. What could he say about Lay: “I never had sexual relations with that man”? What he actually said, as the cock crowed, was, “He was an Ann Richards supporter.” Kenny Boy, I hardly knew ye.
The stock markets responded to Bush in July as they had to bin Laden in September. Three days after Bush’s Sermon on Wall Street, the Dow Jones had lost 7.4 percent of its value and Standard & Poor’s 500 was down 6.8 percent. Three weeks after the speech, with more Harken stuff breaking, the market fell 390 points in one day. It took a corporate-responsibility bill—written entirely by Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes and vigorously opposed by Bush almost until the day it was passed unanimously by the House—to save the president and staunch the stock market’s hemorrhaging.
The Bushies naturally would have preferred to put all this “recycled stuff” behind them and return to their agenda—including shifting Social Security funds into the stock market. But before we leave the subject, consider some wisdom from Jerry Jeff Walker, the Texas singer-songwriter. Walker met the man who inspired his first hit, “Mr. Bojangles,” when they were both in jail in New Orleans. Years later, a reporter for National Public Radio asked Walker if he had worried about winding up in a drunk tank when he was in his early twenties. “No,” Walker said. “It was just one time. You start worryin’ when there’s a pattern.”
With GeeDubya