Meet the Man Who Destroyed Your Retirement He's become one of the GOP's best fund-raisers, dining with some of the country's top business leaders, taking their checks, and flying to Europe with his wife every summer on their dime to hobnob with them. But he hasn't been willing to meet with jobless steelworkers back home, even those who have run after his car begging for help.
At some point when I wasn't paying attention, our local paper, The Blade turned into a kick-ass newspaper. This week they have turned their guns on U. S. Representative Michael Oxley, in a three part series that looks at his legislative record, and how his voting patterns benefit his corporate backers and hurt his constituents in Ohio. Even if you have never heard of Findlay Ohio, his hometown, Rep. Oxley has affected your life, and even today you can see his handiwork on your latest 401(k) statement.
As chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Levitt saw a clear conflict of interest, and in 2000 he decided to try to stop the practice.
He didn't get far.
Standing in his way was the accounting industry and some of its best friends in Congress - including Mike Oxley, chairman of a subcommittee that oversaw the SEC. The industry showered Mr. Oxley and other congressmen with campaign cash. They beat back Mr. Levitt's attempts at reform.
A year later Enron would become a household name - the first in a series of dramatic corporate collapses caused by the failure of accountants, executives, and bankers.
As investors lost billions, reformers demanded changes.
Mr. Levitt had been right.
In 2002, Congress finally granted Mr. Levitt's request in a bill that Mr. Oxley eventually backed. The Findlay congressman has since touted the bill as proof he's cracked down on corporate crooks.
But an investigation by The Blade shows that Mr. Oxley has spent years protecting American corporations from government regulators. Along the way he has become one of the GOP's biggest fund-raisers and the top recipient of campaign cash from the accounting industry.
Oxley successfully fought reform efforts even after the collapse of Enron, and only considered changes when the public outcry became deafening.
As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Oxley has blatantly screwed the small investor and handed huge advantages to large corporations.
Over the veto of President Bill Clinton and the objection of SEC Chairman Levitt, 230 Republicans in the House were joined by 89 Democrats in passing a law that made it much harder for investors to prove they were defrauded by corporations, Wall Street firms, and auditors.
Investors who had filed a lawsuit used to be able to review a firm's records to find proof of fraud - a key step to getting back the money they had lost. But the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 changed the rules: Investors now had to establish they had been defrauded before gaining access to corporate records - a burden critics said was impossible to meet in most cases.
And even if investors met that challenge and won their lawsuits, the new law made it harder for them to collect on their losses.
Supporters of the new law, including Mr. Oxley, argued that many of the lawsuits had little merit, and only the lawyers were getting rich. But San Diego securities lawyer William Lerach cautioned Mr. Oxley during one hearing about what would happen.
"While you claim to be taking a swing at the lawyers, you are going to end up hitting your constituents in the nose," Mr. Lerach testified in 1995.
Seven years later, a congressional investigation identified the 1995 litigation reform law as one of the culprits in the Enron collapse.
It's not hard to fathom just why Oxley would be so quick to bugger his constituents--and just about everyone else in the country. Simply put, the man is a whore in an expensive suit.
Since 1997, J.P. Morgan's PACs have given Mr. Oxley's re-election fund $16,000. His tally ranks in the top 10 percent of J.P. Morgan money given to 380 members of Congress. And that doesn't count the $13,000 the bank gave to Mr. Oxley's PAC.
During that same time, Citigroup's PACs gave Mr. Oxley's re-election fund $23,000 - fourth out of 414 congressional recipients of Citigroup money. That doesn't count $15,000 the bank gave to Mr. Oxley's leadership PAC.
He and his PAC also have received $90,573 in campaign contributions over the same period from seven trade associations that Citigroup or J.P. Morgan helped fund.
[. . .]
Among those that lost money were Ohio's two biggest public pension funds, which lost a staggering $306 million.
While losses to pension funds mounted, Mr. Oxley's fund-raising thrived.
Ten days after he wrote the first letter to Mr. Levitt in 2000 opposing a crackdown on the accounting industry, he received his first accounting contribution of the year - $5,000 from Ernst & Young's political action committee.
Two weeks after he wrote a second letter to Mr. Levitt that year, another $5,000 check arrived - this time from the political action committee of KMPG, another of the country's five biggest accounting firms.
Arthur Andersen, before being dragged down by Enron, also stepped up its giving to Mr. Oxley. The firm had been a steady $1,000-a-year contributor to the congressman but increased that to $4,000 in 2000 and to $7,500 in 2001.
While Arthur Andersen gave much more to other members of Congress, Mr. Oxley began drawing a bigger share of the industry's total campaign cash.
In 2000, his re-election fund ranked No. 7 in accounting contributions in the House with $27,000 in donations. The $98,600 that his re-election fund has received from accounting interests so far this year has pushed him to the No. 1 spot in the House, and that doesn't count an extra $20,000 the industry gave to his PAC.
The Blade article is excellent. Long, full of detail and historical context. This is one of the best pieces the paper has ever published, and it is only the first of three parts.
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