Capitalists without a clue
Once all-seeing captains of industry, America's CEOs are now playing the Sgt. Schultz dumbo card, braying "I know no-thing, no-thing!"

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Tom the Dancing Bug
Corporate Crime
A Crime Drama in Eight Panels

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The Insider Game

The current crisis in American capitalism isn't just about the specific details — about tricky accounting, stock options, loans to executives, and so on. It's about the way the game has been rigged on behalf of insiders.

And the Bush administration is full of such insiders. That's why President Bush cannot get away with merely rhetorical opposition to executive wrongdoers. To give the most extreme example (so far), how can we take his moralizing seriously when Thomas White — whose division of Enron generated $500 million in phony profits, and who sold $12 million in stock just before the company collapsed — is still secretary of the Army?
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Fiscal Reforms? The Fix Is In
Nothing will change without public outrage
by Arianna Huffington

Well, it seems the most recent scandals have made a WorldCom of difference. Any politician with an instinct for self- preservation (and what other kind is there?) no longer can be seen as standing against corporate reform. So the "genius of capitalism" crowd has adopted a new strategy: publicly embrace reform while working diligently behind the scenes to undermine it.

It's a time-honored Washington ploy--the strategic retreat stage of a three-part campaign that starts with full-bore resistance, moves on to insincere support, then culminates in back-channel efforts to kneecap whatever meager reforms manage to survive the legislative process. For a textbook example of how this game works, one need look no further than the efforts of the Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group made up of the CEOs of 150 of the largest corporations in the nation.
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W's Biz Dealings Reek of Sketchy Ethics, Too
by Molly Ivins

Pardon my rant, but I have had it with the Blame Bill Clinton First crowd. Since the day George W. Bush took office, the Clinton-haters, whose monomaniacal nastiness wasted untold amounts of everybody's time and money in the 1990s, were determined to carry their hyperbolic vendetta into this century.

We are sitting here looking at a huge mess in corporate governance, and before anyone can even get out a useful suggestion, some Republican leaps up and says, "It's all Bill Clinton's fault."

Thank you for that eternally helpful observation, but some of us would very much like to just get on with fixing things. As it happens, Bill Clinton did not appoint Harvey Pitt chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a position from whence Pitt has achieved the almost-unimaginable distinction of getting himself criticized by The Wall Street Journal for being too close to business. Instead, Clinton appointed Arthur Levitt chairman of the SEC, and everyone from Wall Street to Main Street is now wandering around muttering, "If we'd've just listened to Arthur Levitt, we wouldn't be in this trouble." Levitt's strenuous efforts to save the system from itself were blocked by the business lobby.
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