Bush, the Mighty Regulator (Not!)

[DavidCPA]

Is it just me or does Bush sound very disingenuous talking about cracking down on the accounting abuses of big business? First, he has taken more big business political donations than any politician in history. Is there any company that he doesn't owe a favor to? Second, I have been waiting for him to slip up and say something like, "If anyone knows something about corporate accounting abuses and insider trading, it's me." The taint he carries from his past personal business dealings (Harkin, Rangers, etc) is pretty dark. Third, this is a problem he can't turn over to President, excuse me, Vice President Cheney due to the investigation into Haliburton's questionable accounting.

I nominate Donald Rumsfeld for the joint position of SEC chief and Secretary of Defense. He can root out terrorists and bad journal entries at the same time.

Can you tell that my company's stock went down over $2.00 today even after we announced better than expected earnings and no one is questioning our accounting? This is what the stock analysts call a bull(shit) market.

-DavidCPA

[Dirt]

Yeah, the LA Times was saying that a lot of people are criticizing Bush, much of what he proposes either doesn't really present a solution to the problem or is already in place.

[wumpus]

One thing's for sure: Dubya is no Warren G.

[Monkeybutt]

One thing's for sure: Dubya is no Warren G.

The rapper? :P

[Aszurom]

No, Kenny G. is the rapper.

[DavidCPA]

http://www.salon.com/politics/wire/2002/07/11/harken_bush/index.html

I wish my company would let me borrow $180,000.

-DavidCPA

[Mark Asher]

The rich get to abuse the system and get richer -- yeah, I'd like to see it stopped too, but I'm not holding my breath.

This story will probably fade away too. It doesn't look like there was anything illegal about it, though it does make Bush look a bit two-faced for condemning the practice now. Bush probably thinks $180,000 is walking around money. Who would be concerned about pocket change like that?

[Jim F.]

It's like the whole Martha Stewart thing. The woman has million in cash, owns a billion dollar company, and wipes her ass with hundred dollar bills. The she sells off stock a day before an annoucement that the company's petition to sell a new drug is denied, saving herself something like $30,000, and people freak out screaming "insider trading!'. Seriously, that's less than pocket money for the woman. The problem is, people really don't like her. The press thinks she's too cutsey. So when she does something that maybe might be kinda wrong, she gets crucified. Her company, which is still damn sound and worth a fortune, takes a huge stock hit. Just wish I had the money lying around to snatch up 1000 shares while it's still in the toilet (for no good reason).

As for Bush fixing bad accounting. He's an idiot. He is so beholden to these companies that he can't sneeze without asking permission from them. Enron was so deep in the Bush administration that they were appointing Enron executives to government positions. And we expect the administration to crack down on these people? Bah

And we as invenstors (those of us who dabble in the market) are the ones that get boned. We get told that these companies are making all this money, trusting in the system to protect us from the lies, and it all breaks down. Most of it has to do with existing laws as well. The company I work for had a initiative come down from the top saying that we need to charge our time towards capitalizable projects so that our profits would grow. It's double talk and numbers games. The company is still paying employees the same amount of money, but thanks to the law, they can spread the cost out over 10 years, meaning that only 10% of the employee salary is reported...even though it was all paid out! That makes for artificial profits. Yes, it saves money in taxes, but it also misleads investors because they think the other 90% of the employee salary cash is sitting in an account somewhere, ready to pay debts and keep the company afloat...but it isn't.

It's so frustrating.

[Tyjenks]

I think it is pretty much hypocritical for the majority of politicians to be railing against "irregular accounting practices" and "profit taking through stock options", that is fraud and theft to you and me. (Maybe not to you David :wink: )

They all accept loads 'o cash from major companies and PACS and are beholden to them all. I wonder if we examined the finances of our trusted officials and representatives in D.C., how many have made a fortune off a friendly tip from their associates. I would be surprised if the number was not large.

They will continue to shout at the top of there lungs as long as it is a guy on the other side of the aisle being looked at. When their contributors pop up in the news, it will be so quiet you will hear the crickets chirping in the corners of the Congressional chambers.

I have a friend that works at Ernst and Young. He says that the problem is not as widespread as the media is making it. That is pretty hard to swallow when there is a new well-known company in trouble every other day or so.

NEWS UPDATE:

Bristol-Myers/Squibb has approx. 1 Billion dollars in accounting irregularities.

[Met_K]

This just in, our government is corrupt.

Oh, wait, no, sorry, I must've mistaken that news flash for something important. We've known our government was corrupt since the mid 1800's.

[Tyjenks]

This just in, our government is corrupt.

Oh, wait, no, sorry, I must've mistaken that news flash for something important. We've known our government was corrupt since the mid 1800's.

Do any of us still believe that our vote can make a differnece?

Has it always been the case that we are voting for the lesser of two evils?

I guess the answers for me are:

no and yes (whether we admit and/or realize it or not)

[Monkeybutt]

In the intrest of fairness,(and to stir some more shit up).Senator Dachele's corprate links....http://www.nypost.com/commentary/52305.htm

[Jason McCullough]

'I wish my company would let me borrow $180,000.'

This one is really going to hurt Bush, because it's on the list of things he's suggesting should be banned.

'They all accept loads 'o cash from major companies and PACS and are beholden to them all. I wonder if we examined the finances of our trusted officials and representatives in D.C., how many have made a fortune off a friendly tip from their associates.'

Few politicians get rich in office; they make their money during periods between holding elective office/retirement, marking time on various corporate boards. Corporations are perfectly happy to shower ex-politicians with money for their connections. Insider trading among politicians, by contrast, requires way the heck too much involvement while they're in office for it to be a general problem.

'Daschle's problems.'

Daschle refusing to release his tax returns and maybe, just maybe, using political influence for donations (shock!) isn't in the same galaxy as insider trading.

[Anonymous]

>"The taint he carries from his past personal business dealings"

It's insane, this guy's taint.

[Sean Tudor]

WARNING : Politically incorrect comment follows - read at your own risk.

If anyone takes politicians for their word then they really need a frontal lobotomy.

And that goes for all the ridiculous election promises these fuckwits in government make as well.

The only difference between a used car salesman and a politician is - absolutely nothing.

[Monkeybutt]

WARNING : Politically incorrect comment follows - read at your own risk.

If anyone takes politicians for their word then they really need a frontal lobotomy.

And that goes for all the ridiculous election promises these fuckwits in government make as well.

The only difference between a used car salesman and a politician is - absolutely nothing.

Nothing politcally incorrect there,it's the truth. :lol:

It's the squeaky clean,honest types that scare me.You know they have a secret goat porn collection in their closet. :P

[Jason McCullough]

Right, everyone involved in politics is a corrupt liar. McCain, Truman, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan, Moynihan, Scoop Jackson, Bradley.....

[Mark Asher]

Right, everyone involved in politics is a corrupt liar. McCain, Truman, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan, Moynihan, Scoop Jackson, Bradley.....

Well, I think it's safe to say that politicians often don't say what they think.

Social Security reform is a good lie detector. Seems like both sides know it needs to be fixed, but no one can grow balls big enough to risk pissing off the gray panthers. I'd say that kind of lack of legislative activity is less than honest.

[Tyjenks]

Can someone close to D.C. turn the government around and see if there is an on/off switch or a reset button on the back?

Because we certainly seem to be stuck and none of the keys are working.

All they do is find something, anything to pin on the opposite party. Never offering solutions, never getting much done. Just efforting to stay in office.

That's not exactly true. Politicians do get a lot of grandstanding in when they are not wasting our money further bloating the government.

I do not know why I continue on this track in this thread as it should be obvious to me by now that I am preaching to the converted.

[Jason McCullough]

Can someone close to D.C. turn the government around and see if there is an on/off switch or a reset button on the back?

Because we certainly seem to be stuck and none of the keys are working.

All they do is find something, anything to pin on the opposite party. Never offering solutions, never getting much done. Just efforting to stay in office.

That's not exactly true. Politicians do get a lot of grandstanding in when they are not wasting our money further bloating the government.

I do not know why I continue on this track in this thread as it should be obvious to me by now that I am preaching to the converted.

Well, in the current scandal the Democrats are attempting to translate Bush's vulnerability on the issue into more SEC enforcement, less CEO crime, etc. It's one thing to run scandals just for the sake of harassing the opposition, another because it clearly indicates the positions of your opponent.

[Tyjenks]

some stuff

Are you following me around?

Is there anyway my post can be taken seriously after I totally fell victim to your baiting last week without it seem like I am baiting you?

Seriously, though I am not sure I understand your point. I am either too tired, your post was confusing, or I am a dope. Maybe a combination of these 3.

[Jason McCullough]

some stuff

Are you following me around?

Is there anyway my post can be taken seriously after I totally fell victim to your baiting last week without it seem like I am baiting you?

Seriously, though I am not sure I understand your point. I am either too tired, your post was confusing, or I am a dope. Maybe a combination of these 3.

What on earth are you talking about?

[Tyjenks]

I am not sure. Long week. Need sleep.

I will attempt to resume this discussion tomorrow. Please ignore my last post as it was obviously the nonsensical ramblings of a dufus.

[Jason McCullough]

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/07/12/harken/index_np.html

'When President Bush sold more than 200,000 shares in Harken Energy Corp. in June 1990, he said he did not know the company was in bad financial shape. But memos from the company show in great detail that he was apprised of how badly the company's fortunes were failing before he sold his stock -- and that he was warned by company lawyers against selling stock based on insider information.'

Batten down the scandal hatches, rough sailin' up ahead.

[Ben Sones]

Well, a scandal among all three of the people that subscribe to Salon Premium... ;)

[mtkafka]

Does it matter? We're all alive, isnt that what matters? Golly G.

etc

[Brian Rucker]

Here's a LA Times article ( http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-aloha12jul12.story) on Harken's Aloha deal featuring Bush on the auditing oversight committee. It's got everything including references to Enron and defensive quotes from the Palestinian rep of the Saudi's that owned 13% of the company.

There are times you just smell blood in the water. September 11th and Enron. How unrelated can things be? In the case of America's corporate run foreign policy - not very. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceburg here. Bush is more of a joyrider and stooge than villian but Cheney's Haliburton was a big profiteer from both the war and oil industries - combine that with some Arthur Andersen magic and voila!

Here's the beauty - we'll never be able to do anything meaningful about the influence of corporate money in politics because the politicians are just as addicted to the money as the corporations are to cheap oil and deregulation. Even the Democratic party, which has some claim as the real reform party, is looking for ways around finance reform.

We are screwed. Have a nice day.

[mtkafka]

...and people thought the corruption model in Civ 3 democracies were unrealistic! I think Sid realized after so and so years in the business that capitalism is as much a haven for corruption as communism!!!! maybe not......

etc

[DavidCPA]

Well, a scandal among all three of the people that subscribe to Salon Premium... ;)

I am one of the three :wink: . Stuff like this is why I like the site.

This subject is drawing the interest of the mainstream media. They were peppering him with questions the other day at his news conference. It probably won't last long but it is good to see the press pay attention to heavier topics than Bush working out or giving a tour of the White House.

-DavidCPA

[DavidCPA]

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/07/17/bush_comments/index.html

With Bush's assessment of Chaney's chances of coming clear on the Haliburton investigation, it is my professional opinion that Chaney will be forced to resign in 9-12 months.

-DavidCPA

[Mark Asher]

It's certain that Cheney profited much more from Haliburton than the Clintons did from Whitewater. If there's a hint of a scandal, it is incumbent upon Congress to investigate. Cheney's just a heartbeat away from being the President.

Instead of $70 million and seven years, how about just $40 million and four years to investigate Cheney? Hey, if he's clean he has nothing to worry about, right?

[Jason McCullough]

Honestly, I know that it's really easy for reasonable political inquiries (Whitewater, way, way back; like maybe the first month, after which it pretty obvious nothing untoward happened, was perfectly justifiable) to take on a life of their own and become a community-destroying cancer on politics. Maybe Democrats should refuse to play the game on the principle of being slimy, even though they have Bush dead to rights on Harken - it's a perfect example to point out that the adminstration's interests relating to the market, taxes, capital formation, and disclosure run counter to those of the vast majority of the country.

Then again, that's a recipe for losing, over and over and over, as the right manages to twist themselves into whatever necessary ideological contortions to be shockingly offended by whatever the hell a powerful Democrat may or may not have did or created the appearence of impropriety in doing, while tittering behind their hands at the sucker Democrats refusing to throw the comparable sucker punch out of high-road distaste.

Clinton beat the elder Bush because he was willing to play by the game of Lee Atwater: demagogue the hell out of everything. However, Democrats, by and large I think, tend to pick much more intellectually defensible positions when it comes to slime politics and scandal - look at Clinton's 92 campaign. I don't recall defamation and insults from Clinton; just repeating as effectively as possible how bad Bush's economic policies were for the country.

Clinton did all sorts of mean things to Bush, but they were on the issues. By contrast, Bush spent most of the election repeating that Clinton was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, moral relativist who renounced his US citizenship on a college-era trip to the USRR. He had the whore of Babylon for a wife, favored kindergarten indoctrination of children into homosexuality, and.....horror of horrors.....cheated on his wife. He's Slick Willie, the no-good, black-loving literal incarnation of the dark side of Elvis Presley, with the transferred power of black sexuality to lure your daughters into miscegenation and lesbianism. He has slicked-back hair, won't shut up about Woodstock, and is going to confiscate your property and ship it to inner city parasites.

Sure, the Democrat do the same thing: crude racebaiting and ludicrous Nazi comparisions come to mind. I think they're an order of magnitude less common, though, and they aren't used as the mainstream approach to forwarding your political agenda, as in the GOP. If you don't believe me, look at any given day over on the National Review's website, or search for that memo Gingrich handed out in the early 1990s which directed candidates in the use of perjorative terms to describe Democrats and their policies. I can't find it online; I'll post bits when I get home.

Republicans intentionally try to drive down voter turnout in elections. They opposed the moter voter bill because it would make the registration of people more likely to be Democratic voters easier. The GOP party brass sent their congressional staff down to Florida to stage a protest that shimmied right up to the edge of political violence (pounding on windows, encircling counters), in hopes of forcing the vote recounters to shut down their operations. John Fund of the WSJ praised this completely craven act of political intimidation as a "bourgeosie riot." John Stockman, Reagan's OMB director, stated in a famed (among policy types) interview in Reagan's first term that the reason the administration was running massive deficits was to starve government and force unpopular cuts: rather than convince the public why it should eliminate any federal programs, they planned to force the government into fiscal crisis and use it as an backdoor to shove unpopular spending cuts down the public's throat. In 1994, Gingrich and company attempted the process all over again through shutting down the government.

In just about every way I can think of, the GOP exhibits a overriding contempt for democracy, thinking the public too clueless and in thrall to the conspiracy of corporate-owned centrist media to understand the obvious superiority of their positions. They need to be defeated at the polls, and I honestly don't care anymore how it's done. To use a line from a particularly bad Tom Clancy novel, after reading David Brock's confessional, and then seeing him subsequently smeared as "having been committed to a mental ward" with unsourced comments and sneering hackwork discrediation by Jonah Goldberg, Matt Drudge, and the rest of the echo-chamber conservative press, the gloves are fucking off. It's time for the Democrats to do all they can, legally (in contrast to quite a bit the GOP has done), to get them the hell out of office.

Whew. Oh, the Clancy thing:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425158632/qid=1026962725/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-8173861-9454440

I cannot describe how bad the book is.

[Jason McCullough]

Oh, a non-Bush related followup: AOL lied, lied lied about their earnings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21983-2002Jul17?language=printer

[Mark Asher]

Read that AOL article. Someone needs to put a stop to that kind of book juggling.

[DavidCPA]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=580&e=1&cid=580&u=/nm/20020718/bs_nm/media_aoltimewarner_dc_14

Robert Pittman, the main AOL executive mentioned in the Post article, resigned today. Of course that probably means he has a golden parachute the size of Texas to console him in this most disheartening situation.

-DavidCPA