Though Democrats blame the recent wave of corporate scandals on Bush Securities and Exchange Commission chief Harvey Pitt, in reality it was the Clinton SEC that a turned a blind eye to the spreading corporate corruption of the late 1990's.
That's the contention of respected CNN moneyman Lou Dobbs, who revealed Saturday that the SEC didn't even bother examining collapsed energy giant Enron's financial data for the last three years of the Clinton administration.
"You may not know this," Dobbs told WABC Radio's Mark Simone. "Three years of filings by Enron, the SEC did not even review them from 1997 to 2000."
Had the corporate watchdog agency given the failed business giant appropriate scrutiny, said Dobbs, "that could have certainly changed that company's history."
Though Clinton administration SEC chief Arthur Levitt generally receives high marks from the media for his performance as the longest serving chairman in SEC history, Dobbs said the brewing Enron debacle was just one of several 1990's accounting scandals his agency failed to pursue aggressively.
"For four years fraud charges have been hanging over two former executives of Sendit as a result of their acquisition of CUC," Dobbs complained. "Nothing has happened, absolutely nothing."
"(Sunbeam's) Al Dunlap, you remember 'Chainsaw Al.' He stepped in there and started selling barbecue equipment through the winter," recalled the CNN host. "And some auditors stepped in there and realized it didn't make a lot of sense in recognizing the revenue."
"These games have been going on for a very long time but it started really about 1997," Dobbs said.
The financial commentator observed that had the Clinton SEC cracked down on the corporate corruption of the 1990's, "there's a very good chance" that the more recent wave of corporate scandals could have been prevented.
Though Dobbs didn't say so, the Clinton SEC did aggressively pursue other allegations of financial impropriety, at least when they were leveled against Clinton political opponents.
Just a month after he replaced New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as Mrs. Clinton's opponent in New York's U.S. Senate race, Rep. Rick Lazio found himself the target of a full blown SEC probe into a meager $13,700 profit he made on an investment with a securities firm that had donated to his past campaigns.
SEC chief Levitt initiated the probe into Mrs. Clinton's opponent after New York State Comptroller Carl McCall, a close political ally of the Clinton White House, urged a full federal investigation.
Republicans immediately criticized the SEC probe as politically motivated, with New York Gov. George Pataki complaining, "It's kind of strange. I don't believe they did a very detailed analysis, or any investigation at all, when Mrs. Clinton made $ 100,000 in one day on pork bellies, and yet they do investigate a stock transaction by her opponent."
While SEC bloodhounds engaged in a full court press on the Lazio case, the corporate robber barons at Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Tyco had a free hand to implement the profit-inflating schemes that would eventually cheat investors out of billions.
By late August 2000, the Clinton SEC was forced to drop its Lazio probe due to lack of evidence.
