Yesterday was the Fourth of July, and I took the family up to D.C. for a memorable day. Please feel free to read and comment upon my essay…
July 5, 2006
July 10, 2002
BUSHENANIGANS; or, The Death of Irony
And so it came to pass…
• While his father was Vice-President to Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush owned an unsuccessful oil and gas exploration company called, apparently with a straight face, Bush Exploration. Although the company is not very successful in its search for oil, government tax breaks for the oil industry make it attractive to investors.
• In 1982, Bush sells 10% of his company to James Baker, later Secretary of State to Bush-the-elected, for $1 million. A contemporary report values the company’s actual worth at under $400,000.
• In 1984, Bush Exploration merged with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a modestly successful Midland, Texas oil company and Bush becomes President of the combined business.
• In 1986, Bush and partners sell the now failing Spectrum 7 to Harken Energy Corp for $2 million, despite the fact that Spectrum 7 had posted losses of $400,000 six months before the purchase and carried a debt of $3 million. (In The Buying of the President 2000, Harken?s founder says of the deal “His name was George Bush, that was worth the money they paid him.”) Bush nets more than 200,000 shares of Harken stock and is made a director and consultant to the company. Harken‘s CEO introduces George W. to fellow Texas oilman and entrepreneur David Halbert. Bush becomes an initial investor in Halbert’s fledgling home health-care firm, Allied Home Pharmacy.
• In 1989, Harken sells a subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum, to IMR for $12 million; $11 million of that is in the form of a promissory note by IMR. Harken records the transaction as a $12 million cash sale and declares a profit in its annual earnings.
• A few months later, in early 1990, IMR sells Aloha to Advance Petroleum Marketing for no profit. APM, headed by David Halbert, promises to pay the remaining $11 million back to Harken over three years.
• In June of 1990, Bush sells his Harken stock at $4 a share, mainly to pay off a $600,000 loan that he had acquired to buy a 2% interest in The Texas Rangers baseball team. The loan came from a Midland bank where Bush was once a director. He discloses the sale to the SEC 34 weeks late.
• In August of 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait, causing huge gasoline price increases that drive several small distributors out of business. Harken renegotiates its contract with APM, forgiving $6 million in loans and interest it had made to Aloha and allowing APM to purchase Harken‘s remaining $3 million shares of Aloha stock for $1. In return, APM agrees to pay off the $10 million loan in one year instead of three and to pick up the cost of fixing Aloha‘s leaking underground storage tanks. This write-off helps reduce Harken‘s bottom line.
• Harken files a second-quarter earning statement which reveals that, even before the sudden global decrease in oil distribution, the company had been hemorrhaging money for some time. Harken‘s outside accounting firm investigates the loss and, deciding that no company officer willfully filed fraudulent reports, advises Harken that they will not refer the matter to the SEC’s enforcement division. That outside accounting firm is Arthur Anderson LLP.
• Harken stock plunges to $2.37 a share amid reports of over $23 million in previously unreported losses. The SEC begins an investigation and discovers that IMR was actually an off-the-book partnership of Harken insiders and the purchase was made through a seller-financed loan. In short, Harken sold a portion of its company to itself and claimed an overall cash profit just in time for its 1989 end-of-year report. The SEC directs Harken to revise its 1989 balance sheet and add an additional $9 million to its net loss.
• The SEC investigates George W. Bush to determine if, as a member of Harken‘s Board of Directors, he could have been aware of these off-the-book partnerships and knew of the impending write-offs and loss statements before he sold his stock. In October of 1993, Bush is cleared of any wrongdoing.
• In 1998, while preparing to run for Governor, George W. is forced to sell his interest in The Texas Rangers. During that time, between sales-tax revenue, state tax exemptions and other financial incentives, Texas taxpayers had relinquished more than $200 million in public subsidies to the privately-owned Rangers. Bush’s profit on a $600,000 investment is $15 million.
• Similarly, through a blind trust, Bush must sell his interest in David Halbert’s home pharmacy company, now called AdvancedPCS. Thanks to government subsidization of private home healthcare companies, AdvancedPCS is on its way to becoming a multi-billion dollar business. Although Bush’s initial investment is not known, he declares a capital gain of up to $1 million on the sale of the stock. David Halbert is a leading contributor to Bush’s gubernatorial campaign.
• In February of 1999, after Congressional Republicans spend tens of millions of tax payer dollars investigating a decade-old Arkansas land deal in which the Clinton’s lost money, President Bill Clinton is cleared of all charges in his Senate impeachment hearings and goes on to complete his successful presidency overseeing the most economically prosperous period this country has seen in over a century.
• In 2000, George W. Bush becomes the Republican candidate for President on a platform of cutting taxes and advocating free market capitalism absent government interference. Bush loses the election and is sworn in as President in January of 2001.
• In June of 2002, portions of the 1992 SEC investigation of Harken are leaked to the press. Previously, Bush had blamed the eight-month delay between his actual sale of Harken stock and the disclosure of the transaction on SEC regulators, claiming that they had lost the disclosure statement. Faced with leaked information disproving that claim, the White House recants and shifts blame for the delay to Harken company lawyers. Bush, who holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Business School, admits “I still haven’t figured it out completely.”
• Congressional Democrats call for the release of the full 1992 SEC investigation of Bush and Harken. Bush refuses to release the full report, declaring “You’ve seen the relevant documents.”
• In July of 2002, after a series of commercial scandals reveal a corporate culture that routinely disguises losses as profits and enables top-level executives to cash out on high-flying investments before their value plummets, leaving employees and common stock-holders with virtually worthless stocks, George W. Bush — often referred to as the first “CEO President” of the return-for-your-investment White House — appears before a select crowd in a Wall Street hotel ballroom and vows that his administration would “end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth and breaking our laws,” and asks for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community.”
Irony is now officially dead.
(Details for this timeline were gathered from many media sources, including current and contemporary reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post. However, most of this data was gleaned from The Public i, the website of The Center for Public Integrity, particularly the article Bush’s Insider Connections Preceded Huge Profit On Stock Deal by Knut Royce. Seriously, they did the real work, I just stitched it together. I blame any factual errors on the company lawyers.)
All Contents (except the stuff I stole) Copyright © 2002 S.M. McCord.
Redistribution in full allowed, provided you cite http://www.semitrue.com.
July 5, 2002
THE FOURTH RIGHTS
Got a nickel?
On the front you will see the familiar profile of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, a founding father of the United States, and our third President.
On the back is a representation of his home, Monticello. Jefferson spent the last seventeen years of his life there, trying out new discoveries and inventions, collecting his many books, and writing copious letters and essays detailing his thoughts on this infant nation that he helped create. He died on July 4 1826, fifty years to the day after the 2nd Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the document that he authored and which contained these words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”
(When studying early American history in grade school, we were endlessly amused by the fact that the handwritten “S”, 200 years ago, resembles our contemporary “F”. To this day, I cannot hear the preamble without wanting to interject “We hold thefe truths to be felf-evident … Life, Liberty, and the purfuit of Happineff“. But I digreff….)
July 1, 2002
I FUDGED ALLEGIANCE
In 1966, the last thing my mother expected to get was a phone call from the principal of my elementary school delicately asking why I wouldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
It was my second week of Kindergarten. I had spent the first week sitting invisibly in the back of the wrong classroom, blissfully unaware that my absence in the correct classroom had already precipitated a series of phone calls from the same principal just a few days before. Now that little misunderstanding had been cleared up, and I was ready to start Kindergarten Phase II in the correct class, with the correct teacher, and wearing the correct name tag.
It was a different time. The school did not have to call my mother’s cell phone, or page her out of an important meeting. There was no answering machine with which to leave a message if she was unable to answer the phone. In 1966, my mother was home taking care of my baby sister.
To complete this picture, there is something else you need to know. This particular 1966 took place in California, in a sleepy suburb in the San Francisco Bay area. My father was a few years out of UC Berkeley and raising his family on the barely middle-class income of a mild-mannered reporter for a large metropolitan … actually, for a thoroughly middle-class newspaper in a sleepy suburban working town in 1966.
UC Berkeley had not yet exploded onto the national scene as a bastion of liberal, radical, free-thinking privileged beatniks who wanted to pull out of a losing war in Asia a few years before we actually did. Still, it was a politically delicate time, and the principal of my school used appropriate sensitivity when he called my mother to ask if my family hated America.
No, not really. But in the shadow of Berkeley in 1966 it was not unreasonable to wonder if there were serious political reasons why a five year old boy, when asked to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, suddenly burst into tears and had to be escorted to the school nurse.
I have been thinking about this lately following the more recent news out of California of the ruling by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional because of the words “under God“. The basis of the decision was a case brought by one Michael Newdow, a Sacramento physician who also happens to hold a law degree, who claimed that his second-grade daughter was hurt by having to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a god.”
The appeals court ruling relied upon interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment which requires that “Congress … make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
“When Congress inserted ‘under God‘ into the pledge in 1954″ reads the finding, “its sole purpose was to advance religion.” The ruling goes on to quote a 1954 congressional report which asserted that “including God in the Pledge of Allegiance … would acknowledge the dependence of our people and our government upon the moral directions of the Creator.”
Twelve years later, while I sat sobbing in front of the assembled school office staff — my Mom, and, for all I know, the school psychologist, all gazing at me in earnest concern — I was unaware of the political gerrymandering that had inserted this controversial phrase into our daily routine of social indoctrination. In my second week of kindergarten, the first week of which had been spent in the wrong classroom under an assumed name, the reason I burst into tears upon being asked to join in the Pledge of Allegiance was for this simple reason: I didn’t know the words. My first week had been spent in the “slow” kindergarten.
That awkward scene aside, I did develop a distinct discomfiture with the phrase “under god”. My unease only increased when I joined the Cub Scouts in third grade and found myself reciting the pledge in meetings as well as in school. At seven years old I had probably not yet heard the term “atheist”, but I knew that I was having a lot of trouble buying this whole God thing.
Because I saw this as a purely personal struggle, however, I came up with a uniquely personal solution: when the moment came to utter the phrase “under God“, I quietly substituted the name of one of my favorite cartoon characters: Underdog. (As in “one nation, Underdog, with Liberty and Justice for all“). To this day, the sight of the brave little pooch with his red costume and blue cape, flying off to save Polly Purebred, brings a patriotic tear to my eye.
Judge Alfred Goodwin, writing for the three-judge panel, found that “a profession that we are a nation ‘under God‘ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”
Our political leaders, men and women who have dedicated their professional lives to standing up for liberty and democratic choice, immediately stepped forward with their well-reasoned reactions:
“President” Bush called the ruling “ridiculous,” and promised to appoint “common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott called it “a stupid ruling”. Striking a more conciliatory tone, Majority Leader Tom Daschle called the ruling “just nuts”, leaving the real name calling to Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) who, apparently not wanting to be outdone by Trent Lott, declared “I hope the Senate will waste no time in throwing this back in the face of this stupid judge. Stupid. That’s what he is, stupid.”
It’s nice to know that all those Ivy League educations haven’t gone to waste.
Dissenting Judge Ferdinand Fernandez, appointed by President Bush-the-elected, wrote “under (this) theory of our Constitution … we will soon find ourselves prohibited from using our album of patriotic songs in many public settings. ‘God Bless America‘ and ‘America the Beautiful‘ will be gone for sure.” Fernandez went on to say that the same logic would apply to using “In God We Trust” on the nation’s currency.
Let’s all just take a deep breath for a moment, shall we?
A seven year old being forced to stand up in front of her entire class every morning and choose whether or not to participate in a ritual of social engineering is certainly not the same thing as being in a public rally and listening to a bunch of folks singing “God Bless America“. As an adult, I can easily choose to sing, not to sing, or sing “The Hokey Pokey” if I jolly well want to.
As for our money being emblazoned with “In God We Trust“… Well, that is wrong in so many ways that the idea of even using it to defend the insertion of “under god” into the Pledge of Allegiance is beyond absurd. “In Alan Greenspan We Trust” is more honest, and “In the Unregulated Market System of Free and Open Competition We Trust” is at least as mythic.
We are not “one nation, under god“. We are one nation and many people of many faiths, united by a core of democratic principles and a dynamic and reflective body of laws called the Constitution. And as nihilistic as I may appear to be sometimes, I place my trust in that more than anything else we have created.
It cannot be easy being a politician, always beholden to your lobbyists and, occasionally, the voters. Who seeking reelection would dare be tarnished as being “against god”? I would assume that would explain why, upon hearing of the ruling from California, the Senate stopped debating a defense bill and voted to unanimously pass a resolution denouncing the court decision as evil, while 99 of the 100 House members (the one holdout being Jesse Helms, who could not participate because he is, in fact, dead) gathered on the front steps of the Capitol to stridently recite the Pledge of Allegiance — the same place they sang “God Bless America” on September 11.
And had I been there, I rather like the idea that I might have been able to slip into the crowd and, so quietly that no one else could hear me over the din, sing my own little tribute to the enduring American spirit:
When criminals in this world appear
and break the laws that they should fear
and frighten all who see or hear
the call goes up both far and near
for Underdog! Underdog!Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
fighting all who rob or plunder
Underdog. Underdog!When in this world the headlines read
of those whose hearts are filled with greed
who rob and steal from those who need
to right this wrong with blinding speed
goes Underdog! Underdog!
(lyrics to Underdog © by whomever it is that owns them)