Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [7]
Eight and a half months later The Wall Street Journal reported that the president’s son was under investigation for failure to report the stock sales. The chairman of the SEC was Richard Breeden, who had worked for Poppy Bush as an economic adviser. The walls of Breeden’s office were so plastered with photos of Poppy and Barbara Bush that a New York Times reporter observed, “George Bush is Breeden’s Mao.” The general counsel at the SEC was James Doty, the same James Doty of the Baker Botts law firm, who represented GeeDubya when he bought his 2 percent interest in the Texas Rangers with the money he got from dumping his Harken stock. The Houston law firm was founded by the great-grandfather of James Baker III, secretary of state under Bush the Elder and the point man for Bush the Younger in Florida after the disputed 2000 election.
Breeden and Doty never asked for an interview with the subject of their investigation. Since 1993 Breeden, Doty, and other partners of Baker Botts have contributed $210,621 to GeeDubya’s political campaigns, making the firm the president’s number-fourteen career patron. They were beaten out for the number-thirteen spot by Arthur Andersen, at $220,557.
In a letter regarding “George W. Bush Jr.’s [sic] Filings,” SEC investigators observed that Bush was familiar with the SEC’s filing deadlines, having met them when he filed reports of dealings with three other companies in which he owned stock. But with Harken, Bush filed “four late Forms 4 reporting four separate transactions, totaling $1,028,935.” During his first campaign for governor of Texas, Bush repeatedly told reporters he had been “exonerated” by the SEC, and Fleischer repeated the same line in the summer of ’02. But the report issued by the SEC’s enforcement division in 1993 specifically says the investigation “must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated.”
Just as Harken was selling itself its own subsidiary in Hawaii, it set up another corporation on another island. Harken Bahrain Oil company registered in the Cayman Islands in September 1989. The Caymans, like Bermuda, are a convenient offshore address for U.S. companies that want to do business at home but prefer not to pay U.S. taxes. After the furor over tax-dodging corporations broke, Bush made this ringing statement in August 2002: “We ought to look at people who are trying to avoid U.S. taxes as a problem.” Corporate tax dodgers now cost the country seventy billion dollars annually, according to the IRS, all of which has to be made up by average citizens who can’t acquire a mail drop in the Caymans. The Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior even daringly urged corporate tax-dodgers to “pay taxes and be good citizens.” Then the White House had to acknowledge that Harken Energy had set up an offshore subsidiary to avoid taxes. Bad timing.
Harken was not Enron, but it was certainly Enron in the making. What Bush took out of Harken was also twenty times as much as Bill and Hillary Clinton lost in a crummy Arkansas real estate deal that cost American taxpayers seventy million dollars to investigate. By the time Bush signed the Corporate Responsibility Act, Harken was selling at forty-one cents a share. Don’t put your Social Security money in it.
So who are the “regular folks” who have been affected here, and what have those effects been? In this chapter, you, dear readers, are the regular folks. Americans lost $6 trillion when the stock market collapsed after Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. It’s your 401(k) that’s the subject here, your pension, your Social Security, your investments,