[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12233-12234]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            CORPORATE FRAUD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 23, 2002, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, later today President Bush is 
scheduled to give a major speech, it is billed, on corporate 
responsibility. His advisers have told us he is going to get tough on 
corporate wrongdoers. He is even calling for jail time for those who 
defraud shareholders and who violate Federal law. In addition, the 
President's advisers let slip recently he is reading a biography of 
Theodore Roosevelt who had a well-deserved reputation for battling 
corporate greed. All of this must

[[Page 12234]]

mean that the President is very serious about ending this season of 
executive greed and corporate misgovernance in America.
  But to use the bully pulpit like Teddy Roosevelt did, you have got to 
have credibility on the issues at hand. For many of us, the President's 
credibility on corporate issues has been a problem since his vast, but 
inexplicable, success as a businessman was revealed a number of years 
ago. As recently as yesterday, the President and the White House have 
sought to offer new explanations for why he did not report in a timely 
manner his 1990 sale of $850,000 worth of stock in a Texas-based energy 
company just weeks before its value plummeted.
  It sounds a lot like Enron. It sounds a lot like WorldCom. It sounds 
a lot like Adelphia. It sounds a lot like these corporate scams that we 
have all been so critical of. Previously, the President said he thought 
regulators lost the documents. He pointed at the regulators. Then last 
week the White House said it was a mix-up by the lawyers, the son of 
the President's lawyers; and then yesterday he gave the most plausible 
explanation. He said, ``I still haven't figured it out completely how I 
made the $850,000.'' He has not figured it out.
  While there are many decent and honest corporate executives and 
accountants in this country, those who lack integrity have only been 
emboldened by the permissive environment created by this administration 
and by those on the other side of the aisle in congressional leadership 
who never met a regulation that they liked. Companies like Enron and 
WorldCom and Arthur Andersen obviously believed they could mislead 
investors with impunity as long as this President, this friend of 
corporate America, was in office.
  And why would they not? In the middle of the Enron scandal, President 
Bush, on behalf of his corporate friends, proposed a zero-growth budget 
for the Securities and Exchange Commission even though the SEC itself 
complained it was too short-staffed to go after these corporate abuses. 
President Bush supported a weak pension reform bill in the House even 
though thousands of employees in Texas and around the country lost 
their retirements because of fraud and mismanagement by the President's 
friends and his single major contributor and fundraiser at Enron. And 
the President endorsed an accounting reform bill in the House that had 
no teeth since it was strongly supported by his friends in the 
accounting industry.
  Does it sound familiar? President Bush has refused to ask for 
reauthorization of the Superfund tax which would require corporate 
polluters, again friends of the President, which would require 
corporate polluters to pay for cleanup of the messes that they make. 
Instead, he wants to saddle taxpayers with those cleanup costs. The 
President joined the prescription drug industry, for whom they had a 
fundraiser raising literally $3 million from the drug industry itself 2 
weeks ago, in supporting and pushing through the House a Medicare 
prescription drug plan that, first of all, privatizes Medicare, and 
second undercuts seniors' purchasing power and enables the drug 
industry, the most profitable industry in America, to continue to 
sustain its outrageous drug prices.
  The President has openly supported the idea of turning the Medicare 
program over to the health insurance industry, again friends and major 
contributors of the President, and the Social Security program over to 
Wall Street, again major friends and political supporters and 
contributors of the President.
  Sadly, Mr. Speaker, the list goes on and on and on and on and on. So 
later today as the country listens with rapt attention to the 
President's plan for reversing the trend of corporate greed and 
misdeeds, you will understand if I view this speech with a healthy 
degree of skepticism.
  Civil rights leaders said years ago, ``Don't tell me what you 
believe, tell me what you do and I'll tell you what you believe.''

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