Political ‘outrage’:
bipartisan hypocrisy
Commentary
by PAT MURPHY
President
Bush’s new-found umbrage about hank-panky in corporate America’s
executive suites is the moral equivalent of Bill Clinton indignantly
condemning older men for philandering with young government interns.
Bush,
after all, profited handsomely as director (and member of the audit
committee) of an energy company by quickly cashing in $848,000 in stock
in a firm that a few days later announced it was in the hole. (Yep,
Arthur Andersen was the outside auditor.) Bush also waited another 34
months before filing necessary SEC papers about insider trades.
His vice
president and presumptive Oval Office mentor, Dick Cheney, was CEO of
Halliburton, whose funny-money accounting methods claimed non-existent
profits and is now under investigation. (Alas, Arthur Andersen was
Halliburton’s auditor, too.)
Then
there’s Bush’s Secretary of the Army Thomas White, a former
executive of Enron, where fraudulent bookkeeping began the tumble of
companies dealing in fishy accounting methods. Apparently wanting to
avoid further embarrassment to the president, White’s original,
boastful 116-word entry about his Enron years has been re-written on his
Army Internet site to a single 17-word sentence without hyperbole.
And Bush’s
pick as Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Harvey Pitt, who
promised a "kinder and gentler" SEC and once proposed
eliminating 57 positions as part of a less aggressive enforcer, led the
accounting lobby in blocking a rule to divorce auditing from consulting
businesses.
But if
Bush seems late to the game and hypocritical, Democrats and Republicans
sitting on committees investigating corporate corruption come to the job
with their own unclean hands and hypocrisy.
CNN
estimates that 70 percent of them have accepted campaign funds from the
very accounting firms and corporations now being probed for criminal
conduct.
And if
one wonders why the president is recreating himself as a populist
tough-cop crusader for corporate ethics, the crisis of confidence in
U.S. corporations is a major political issue that touches the pockets of
most voter households: Wall Street estimates that investors and worker
pension funds have lost $6 trillion in the past two years, while CEOs
and others have walked away with multi-million dollar profits before
their companies tanked.
Those
whose memories go back a few years must wonder why President Bush’s
suspicious conduct as a businessman in the 1980s doesn’t deserve the
same zealous oversight that Republicans accorded Bill and Hillary
Clinton’s 1978 investment in the failed Whitewater real estate project
in Arkansas, which netted them a $40,000 loss.
When the
third and last special prosecutor closed the books on the wide-ranging
investigation of the Clintons in 2000, he announced that no criminal
wrongdoing could be found.
By this
time, Congress had written checks for at least $52 million in costs for
an investigation that continued the better part of Clinton’s two
terms, an operation that by any definition was an obsessive Republican
vendetta to nail the man who vanquished Bush the Elder.
Bush the
Younger, however, can breathe easy.
The
special prosecutor law has expired.
And,
besides, any investigation of President Bush and sleazy corporate
accounting practices ultimately would expose plenty of Democrats (such
as presidential wannabe Sen. Joe Lieberman) and plenty of Republicans
(such as the sainted Sen. Phil Gramm) who did the bidding of business
lobbyists that made today’s fraudulent practices easy.