AUSTIN, Texas—Our personal trainer the president, up and running after his colonoscopy (I did not need to know about that), is trying out a new role—Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior. This has approximately the same effect as opening the refrigerator door and finding Fidel Castro inside. Smoking a cigar. "Hard to believe" barely begins to hint at the surrealism of this development.

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The Bush people are going to force us to take this nonsense seriously. I guarantee we will soon be hearing about the Pepster's long-cherished populist beliefs. Ever since the man told us he was the Father of the Texas Patients' Bill of Rights (which he first vetoed and then refused to sign), I have been resigned to the Red Queen quality of his political act. Just grab a flamingo and get ready to play croquet here.

In the interest of lending some verisimilitude to this new pose—Dubya Does Nader—let us pass lightly over Bush's own business career, including insider dealing and the time he dumped his Harken Energy stock just before the announcement that the company was going bankrupt. In violation of SEC rules, Bush failed to report that sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission until eight months after the fact. The SEC contented itself with a warning letter but has specifically stated that Bush was "not exonerated."

And let's also pass over his six-year record as governor of Texas, an unbroken stretch of kissing corporate butt, including firing an agency head for enforcing state law against one of Bush's biggest contributors.

Instead, let us concentrate on the repairable. A few things the Pepster can do to bolster his brand-new image as a champion against corporate malfeasance. How to Pretend to Be a Populist in 10 (or so) easy steps:

1. Appoint someone to head the SEC who has not spent his career as a lawyer for accounting firms, including advising them to destroy documents in case of lawsuit. Chairman Harvey Pitt has been criticized even by The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, not a bastion of flaming liberalism, for being too easy on his old accounting clients and for having lost all credibility after his meeting with Xerox's auditor.
   
2. Stop the government loans to Enron, which is still manipulating Third World energy markets while applying for $125 million in taxpayer money from the Inter-American Development Bank.
   
3. Come out in favor the Sarbanes bill, now stuck in the Senate. It's the only serious proposal to deal with corporate chicanery—the Republican plans are a sick joke. Call off Sen. Phil Gramm, who is working closely with the White House to block the bill. He has already done enough damage as the Senator from Enron.
   
4. Stop actively working with the business lobby to block the accounting reforms that would prevent Enron from happening again.
   
5. In order to avoid the appearance that you have been bought outright by corporate contributions, try not to make a recess appointment to the Federal Elections Commission of someone who has long sworn to oppose every effort at campaign finance reform and who is now destroying the McCain-Feingold bill.
   
6. As you stated in your hilarious radio address, "We must have rules and laws that restore faith in the integrity of American business." So how about reinstating the Clinton policy, which you reversed last year, against giving government contracts to corporations that have repeatedly violated federal laws?
   
7. Supporting the repeal of the alternative minimum tax is probably not smart when giant corporations are already paying less in taxes than the janitors who clean their floors.
   
8. It's not a good time to push for repeal of the estate tax, a move that will benefit only the richest 2 percent of Americans.
   
9. Your proposal to relax New Source Review standards at the Environmental Protection Agency stinks: It allows dirty coal-fired power plants and the nation's other biggest polluters to operate indefinitely and to increase their pollution by massive amounts.
   
10. Next, do something about the other 90-odd actions taken by your administration to help polluters since January 2001, including shifting the cost of cleaning up Superfund waste sites from the polluters to the taxpayers and the recent EPA decision to reverse a 25-year-old policy that flatly forbids dumping mining and other industrial solid waste into the nation's waterways. Your administration decided that all waters across the country are now open to industry for waste disposal. Allowing industry to increase profits at the expense of the public's health and the nation's natural heritage does not fit the "higher calling" to which you said business should aspire.
    
11. Ix-nay on the Republican effort to block closing the Bermuda loophole in the federal tax code. They've taken to doing things like walking out of committee meetings to keep the bill from coming up. It would clearly pass overwhelmingly if it got to the floor. Time to call the boys in for a chat.

© 2002 Creators Syndicate

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