Reply #29: Worldcom...

[myrna minx]

http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/2002/07/09/bush /
The first sentence is about Harkin btw-

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What the president didn't mention -- perhaps because nobody asked -- was that his father's appointees and his own personal attorney were running the SEC when he was investigated. The agency's chairman was an ardent loyalist named Richard Breeden, who had served as a top domestic policy aide to George Herbert Walker Bush. (He is now the court-appointed overseer of WorldCom.) Its general counsel was James Doty, the lawyer who had handled the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team to Dubya's syndicate only two years earlier.
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http://www.nypress.com/15/27/news&columns/wildjustice.c...
By Alexander Cockburn


The Crooks in the White House

This is exciting. Will Dick Cheney keel over from his fifth heart attack before he becomes the first veep since Spiro Agnew to resign in the face of charges of financial crookery? Or will Bush fire him to divert attention from his own scummy past? n Over the weekend President Dumbo poked his head above the rubble of the WorldCom scandal and made a stand: "No violation of the public’s trust will be tolerated... Executives who commit fraud will face financial penalties and, when they are guilty of criminal wrongdoing, they will face jail time."

Sunday morning brought more ringing pledges to protect the public weal: "If anybody violates the law, we go after them," SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told Sam Donaldson on ABC’s This Week. In an earlier incarnation Pitt was one of the guys who successfully lobbied the SEC to make it easier for Arthur Andersen and the other big accounting firms to cook the books on behalf of Enron, MCI/WorldCom and others. Bush, flush with campaign contributions from Enron and MCI/WorldCom ($100,000 last summer), duly signaled his gratitude by putting Pitt in charge of the SEC, where he put the agency in snooze mode amid a ripening cloud of scandal involving the biggest names in corporate America.

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