WTF Is It Now?!?

CROOK OF CRAWFORD'S 'CRACKDOWN' FAILS TO CONVINCE KNOWN UNIVERSE
Boo-farking-hoo. pResident Dumbass is struggling to take the political high ground on corporate corruption after a speech setting out his plan of attack was poorly received and his vice-president faced a lawsuit concerning the company he ran before standing for office.

With questions about his own past behaviour as a company director raised before his speech, Snippy the Chimp now has to deal with questions about Dick 'Chicanery' Cheney's "management" of the Texas energy company Halliburton, of which he was chief executive for five years.

Judicial Watch said after pResident Evil addressed Wall Street on Tuesday that it would file a shareholder lawsuit alleging Mr Cheney and Halliburton had engaged in accounting fraud. It said Hopalong Hypocrite's rush to crack down on corporate fraud seemed intended to deflect attention away from his and Mr Cheney's own business practices.

Economists said they had not expected Karl's Little Krackhead's speech to be some kind of "miracle cure" that would rally wary investors. "Shoot, if he really wanted to instill confidence, he would resign from office, and take his whole crooked administration with him," fumed one investor. - From The Sydney Morning Herald. Mostly.


FRATBOY FRAUD FAILS TO HOSE CANADA
"Bush smirked and slouched his way through a speech whose words he didn't appear to believe in."

To understand why the U.S. president laid an egg on Wall Street yesterday with his call for higher ethical standards in business, you have to look again at what he said the day before.

Asked on Monday about the propriety of a sham transaction in the early 1990s at Harken Energy Corp., where Bush was a member of the all-important audit committee of a troubled firm trying to disguise its losses, Bush characterized this now commonplace malfeasance as merely "an honest difference of opinion as to how to account for a complicated transaction."

Asked on Monday what he knew about the deceptive transaction by which Harken hid $10 million (U.S.) in losses, Bush simply grinned and said, "You need to look back on the director's minutes." ... That's the context in which Bush appeared in New York not 24 hours later, calling on his country's business leadership to join him in "a new era of integrity in corporate America."

Yesterday's call to morality lacked passion, conviction and substance — a predictable outcome, given Bush's reluctance to betray his class. - Snipped from David Olive's column in The Toronto Star, courtesy of smirkingchimp.com.



CORRUPT* COWSTALKER'S CORPORATE CORRUPTION CA-CA FAILS TO KILL CONFIDENCE CRISIS
Sifting through the wealth of responses to the Bush speech, we're surprised that negative criticism is so strong on both sides of the aisle. Nearly everyone was incensed by Bush's flaccid response to a very serious domestic crisis that has yet to see the bottom. Just check the recent quarterly negative earnings on your mutual funds or the millions of dollars lost by your institutional retirement plans and you'll see where the outrage is coming from. It will probably get worse in the days to come. And, as noted yesterday, it's amazing how little Bush has gotten to the roots of the country's corporate corruption problem. He said nothing about the corrupt system of massive stock options to CEO's.

The White House has sent out Harken talking points to its operatives and friends in the media, but both the talking points and Bush's responses to reporters are vague and catch-22's. For example, Bush told reporters at his press conference that, for clarification of his financial activities as a Harken board director, "You need to look back on the director's minutes." But the White House refuses to release such records, claiming it doesn't have access to them, and refuses to ask Harken for such records. Then why did Bush tell the reporters that they need to look at those records as proof of his innocence? This is a stonewall. - Politex, at Bushwatch.

*alleged


"There wasn't a lot of news in that speech," said Michelle Clayman, chief investment officer at New Amsterdam Partners, which manages $1.5 billion. "There was a lot of finger-wagging and there was a lot of tut-tutting." - Washington Post.

"In his 27-minute speech on corporate responsibility, Mr. Bush spent less than 30 seconds tackling the issue that many believe is central: the issuance of huge amounts of stock options to top executives. Until this problem is addressed, true change will be slow to come to boardrooms." - Gretchen Morgenson in the NY Times.

"Shrugging off President Bush's attempt to restore confidence with a Wall Street speech on corporate responsibility, scandal-weary investors dumped stocks again today, driving the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 300 points and pushing both the Nasdaq composite index and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index to five-year lows." - Ben White in the Washington Post.

"President George W. Bush's speech on corporate ethics has failed to impress American editorial writers. Major newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, consider the presidential recommendations as too little, too late. The business-friendly Wall Street Journal dismisses the address as political grandstanding. And the West Coast press - while covering the speech in their news pages - have not thought it worthy of an editorial.

The New York Times says Mr Bush's speech was "disappointingly devoid of tough proposals to remedy underlying problems" in accounting and corporate governance. "The biggest disappointment was Mr. Bush's failure to insist on a forceful reform of the accounting industry," according to the paper. "He focused mainly on tougher penalties for white-collar criminals plus extra resources to pursue them. But he offered less on both scores than reformers in the Senate," the Washington Post says. The Wall Street Journal, for its part, accuses Mr Bush of jumping on the reform bandwagon and playing politics with corporate scandals. - BBC News.