The Crooks in the White House

This is exciting. Will Dick Cheney keel over from his fifth heart before he becomes the first veep since Spiro Agnew to resign in the face of charges of financial crookery? Or will Bush fire him to divert attention from his own seamy business past?
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All the President's Enrons

George W. Bush is so peeved about corporate America's "wrongdoers" — not to be confused with "evildoers" — that last week he spoke out about them four times in four days. By the time he took a breather, the markets had hit their worst half-year finish since 1970, the Nasdaq was at a five-year low, the dollar was on the skids and, despite much evidence to the contrary, a majority of Americans had told CNN/USA Today pollsters that the country was in a recession.

On Tuesday the president returns to the subject in a full-dress speech on Wall Street. Maybe it's time to try pinning the whole mess on Ann Richards again.

Mr. Bush keeps saying all the right things. He is "deeply concerned." He will "hold people accountable." But words, like stocks, lose value when nothing backs them up. It is now more than six months since the president promised "a lot of government inquiry into Enron." Since then, Playboy has done a better job of exposing the women of Enron than the Bush administration has done at exposing its men. Just as the Justice Department rounded up some 1,000 alleged Sept. 11 suspects and failed to indict a single one of them for terrorist activity, so it has made a big show of its shaky Andersen conviction while failing to indict a single Enron executive or individual Andersen accountant. (Not that all the law-enforcement news is downbeat: last month John Ashcroft's minions held a press conference to boast that a 13-month investigation had led to the arrest of 12 prostitutes in New Orleans.)

The sight of a corporate crook being led away in handcuffs, Giuliani-style, would do far more to restore confidence in Wall Street than any more presidential blather. Mr. Bush says that only "a few bad actors" are at fault. Why is the administration so lax about bringing them to justice?
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Market Extremists Amok

Market extremism doesn't wear hoods, white sheets, or armbands. Skinheads in its ranks are few. Suicide bombers in its cause are even fewer.

But the essence of extremism, as opposed to other specific "isms," is to extend -- harshly, rigidly, and dangerously -- a commitment and ideology that in softer and milder forms can be acceptable or useful. Worship of an unfettered, self-justifying marketplace developed in exactly this harsh, rigid form during the 1980s and 1990s. The infamous practices of Enron -- where market mania turned abusive, with the help of the Bush family -- are only the tip of one berg in an ice field that continues to threaten national political and economic navigation.
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