Bush and the Texas Land Grab

Democrats and media hounds are baying under the wrong tree. The point in President Bush's business career where he took outrageous shortcuts was not at Harken Energy, but rather when he was grabbing land for a new baseball stadium in Arlington for his Texas Rangers baseball team.

Mr. Bush broke no laws. Neither do the overwhelming majority of corporate executives. The cloud over the business world comes not so much from law-breaking as from avaricious bruising of the public interest.

The challenge is not catching criminals but injecting public scrutiny into a culture of cronyism in which executives, accountants, regulators and "independent" board members all ooze empathy for each other.

When Asia had its economic crisis in 1997-98, Americans properly trashed its "crony capitalism." But we suffer from the same affliction ourselves, and President Bush will not address the issue seriously because cronyism has been his way of life — the Bushes call it loyalty.

I have a stack of court documents from Arlington that portray the "sordid and shocking tale" of the Rangers stadium, as one lawsuit puts it. Essentially, Mr. Bush and the owners' group he led bullied and misled the city into raising taxes to build a $200 million stadium that in effect would be handed over to the Rangers. As part of the deal, the city would even confiscate land from private owners so that the Rangers owners could engage in real estate speculation.