If MARTHA gets 5 months, BUSH deserves 5 years.

[Octafish]

Martha's inside trading netted her less than $100,000. Smirko's HARKEN deal netted him, what, $500,000? If it's good enough for Marth, the lying Little Turd from Crawford should be in jail, too.


ALOHA, HARKEN ENERGY!

Welcome to Hawaii

The Insider Game

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

July 12, 2002 - The current crisis in American capitalism isn't just about the specific details ---- about tricky accounting, stock options, loans to executives, and so on. It's about the way the game has been rigged on behalf of insiders.

And the Bush administration is full of such insiders. That's why President Bush cannot get away with merely rhetorical opposition to executive wrongdoers.

To give the most extreme example (so far), how can we take his moralizing seriously when Thomas White ---- whose division of Enron generated $500 million in phony profits, and who sold $12 million in stock just before the company collapsed ---- is still secretary of the Army?

Yet everything Mr. Bush has said and done lately shows that he doesn't get it. Asked about the Aloha Petroleum deal at his former company Harken Energy ---- in which big profits were recorded on a sale that was paid for by the company itself, a transaction that obviously had no meaning except as a way to inflate reported earnings ---- he responded, "There was an honest difference of opinion. . . . sometimes things aren't exactly black-and-white when it comes to accounting procedures."

CONTINUED...

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/AlohaHarken.htm

[malatesta1137]

1. more like 500

Bush has killed thousands. Life in prison with no parole for this cancer.

[Octafish]

6. War criminal. Just like his father.

"It has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were killed... We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to justice."

-- Ramsey Clark

{WARNING: Graphic Image from Gulf War 1)

http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm

[goddess40]

2. Life without parole

Isn't treason a hanging offense? I don't believe in the death penalty but if the shoe were on the other foot the right would be howling for a public hanging.

[Octafish]

7. Traitors deserve nothing better.

Nobody deserves the best like the Little Turd from Crawford:

Bush & Bin Laden - George W. Bush Had Ties to Billionaire bin Laden Brood

The unexplained death of Salem, Osama bin Laden's oldest brother, in 1988, brought to an abrupt end a long and intriguing relationship between President Bush and the head of the bin Laden family fortune.

By Roger Miller

The world now associates the bin Laden name with Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect be hind the terror atrocities of Sept. 11. As President George W. Bush leads an intense international manhunt for Osama, few Americans realize that Osama's eldest brother, Salem, was one of Bush's first business partners.

A photograph from 1971 has surfaced and been printed in English papers showing Osama, age 14, and his brother Salem, age 19, enjoying a summer holiday at the Astoria Hotel in Falun, Sweden. Christina Akerblad, the hotel owner, told the Daily Mail, "They were beautiful boys, so elegantly dressed. Everybody loved them."

Osama embraced Islamic fundamentalism and is now the world's most wanted man. "Salem went on to become a business partner of the man who is leading the hunt for his brother," the Daily Mail's Peter Allen said. "In the 1970s, he and George W. Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Mr. Bush's home state of Texas."

President Bush and the bin Laden family have been connected through dubious business deals since 1977, when Salem, the head of the bin Laden family business, one of the biggest construction companies in the world, invested in Bush's start-up oil company, Arbusto Energy, Inc.

CONTINUED TREASON...

http://www.americanfreepress.net/10_07_01/Bush___Bin_Laden_-_George_W__B/bush___bin_laden_-_george_w__b.html

[NV Whino]

3. 500 is not enough

[Octafish]

8. After the trials, I hope the feds put 24/7 webcams on these gangsters.

Lots o' BFEE links here!

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/International_War_Crimes.html


BTW: A heary welcome to DU, NV Whino! Like that spirit!

[Hell Hath No Fury]

4. AMEN!

Martha does it and gets jail.

Bush does it and gets the White House.

Until Bush is sitting in an orange jumpsuit in jail, there can be no justice.

[Octafish]

9. The hypocrisy seems to escape them.

From the original source above, "The Catbird Seat":

Hemorrhaging Concealed

But The Public i has found that Harken was bleeding profusely even before Bush unloaded his stock. Harken effectively concealed the hemorrhaging by selling a retail subsidiary through a seller-financed loan but recording the transaction in its 1989 balance sheet as a cash sale. Securities and Exchange Commission records suggest that Bush, a company director who sat on Harken's audit committee and was a paid consultant to the firm, may nonetheless have been unaware of the sleight-of-hand accounting or, for that matter, other significant company actions Nevertheless, SEC accountants cried foul when it discovered Harken had recorded the 1989 sale as a capital gain.

But it was months after Bush's June 1990 sale of the stock at $4 a share, for a total of $848,560, that the SEC directed Harken to recast its 1989 annual report and to publicly disclose the extent of its losses that year, according to records reviewed by The Public i.

It is unclear how a timely acknowledgement of the true losses would have affected the value of the stock when Bush sold. But most investors look at a company's balance sheet, among other indicators of corporate well-being, before parting with their money.

Two months after Bush's sale, Harken reported for the first time in a quarterly report that it was losing a lot of money, and the stock dropped to $2.37 a share. By the end of the year, it was trading at about $1.

CONTINUED...

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/AlohaHarken.htm

EDIT: tippo - can't spell hypocricy. I mean hypocrisy.

[Jacobin]

5. Five years for a mass murderer?

You liberal, you.

:-)

[Octafish]

10. ... "a jury of your peers has found you guilty of treason."

When it comes to the BFEE, gosh, there's a lot of criminality.



Maybe they'll let me be the prosecutor's helper.

From The Catbird Seat:

Ex-Andersen Partner Kept Enron Papers

Associated Press

HOUSTON - A former Arthur Andersen partner who illegally shredded documents related to Enron Corp. testified yesterday that he preserved several potentially embarrassing records.

David Duncan, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges in April, said he kept records related to allegations of questionable accounting practices brought last August by Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins.

"I believe I retained (documents) relevant to the Watkins allegation matter in a separate folder," Duncan told attorney Rusty Hardin in a second day of cross-examination at Andersen's obstruction trial.

Andersen claims neither the firm for Duncan broke any laws and that Duncan took the plea deal under threat of extensive prison time.

In his questioning yesterday Hardin focused on the important documents that survived the shredder in an effort to show the jury there was no conspiracy to cover up auditing work on Enron's books.

CONTINUED bad news for the crooks of the BFEE:

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/AlohaHarken.htm

[Octafish]

11. Bush is a CROOK! Kick for HARKEN and ALOHA

Martha Stewart is getting the coverage, but George Bush deserves a jail cell for what he did in business. If he had been punished then, he wouldn't be the squatting occupant he is now:

A Brief History of Bush, Harken and the SEC

By John Dunbar

WASHINGTON, October 16, 2002 — In 1976, George W. Bush was a freshly minted graduate of the Harvard Business School looking for a job.

He had $20,000 left over from his education trust fund, a well-known last name and some great connections. He decided to follow in his father's footsteps by getting into the oil business, and moved back to his childhood home of Midland, Texas.
The early years

In 1977, Bush organized his first company, Arbusto Energy Inc. (Spanish for bush), an oil exploration venture. After an unsuccessful 1978 run for the House of Representatives, Bush returned to the oil business, attempting to take Arbusto public in 1982 with disappointing results. Bush changed the name of the company to Bush Exploration that same year and struggled on.

Ivy League Underwriter
When Harken was in financial trouble in August 1990, its largest investor helped the company stave off disaster. Aeneas Venture Corp., the venture capital arm of Harvard Management Company, entered into a joint venture with Harken. Harvard Management invests Harvard University's huge endowment.
Read the full report >>

CONTINUED with lots o' links:

http://www.public-i.org/report.aspx?aid=196