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Men in suits terrorize American economy
© St. Petersburg Times If there is such a thing as economic terrorism -- and I don't see why there can't be -- then I have to wonder whether we are at more risk from al-Qaida or from the corporations (and their accountants) that are supposed to be the backbone of this nation's strength. Two corporate giants have apparently been caught using a variety of fraudulent accounting tricks to inflate profits and income. Billions of dollars are involved, tens of thousands of jobs are either gone or going, and the people responsible, the ones with the $25-million golden parachutes, are much less likely to spend time in prison than some schlub who holds up a convenience store for $40. I guess it is inevitable in a capitalist economy, but prison exposure for criminal enterprises in the United States is always inversely proportional to the number of miles the defendant has logged in Gulfstreams and Learjets. Bill Clinton campaigned and won using the slogan "It's the economy, stupid," and despite his highly publicized inability to tell the truth under oath or to keep his pants zipped, has been able to point to the fact that he left office with the economy healthy as evidence of a job well done. Now it looks to me, admittedly an economic layman, like a lot of that was accomplished with smoke and mirrors while both the system and the people running it were not only asleep at the switch but had tied one end of their hammocks to it. We can't be sure whether Enron's, WorldCom's and Arthur Andersen's direct effect on the stock market was worse than the effect of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 because those attacks took place before the market opened and trading was suspended. When the WorldCom news broke, the market plummeted 200 points before computer-generated trading started digging it out of the latest of a series of holes, including the one dug earlier by Enron. It was no great surprise to me or anyone else that you-know-who turned out to be the accountants for WorldCom . . . and right after all those Arthur Andersen employees spent all that time in a letter-writing campaign about how their firm was being unnecessarily bad-mouthed, and they were losing their jobs because of it. And that's the real tragedy. Forget the millions of us who are watching our 401(k) funds go down the drain because our economy is apparently in the hands of people who are either incompetent or crooked or frequently both. Thousands of people, the ones with the jobs at the levels that don't have multimillion-dollar severance packages, are getting the shaft, with almost no notice because they work for crooks or morons, take your choice. And it bothers me that I am sure, in my heart, that there are among them a few who said to their bosses, "I don't think this is legal. I think there is something wrong here," and were told to shut up or ship out. Maybe we should be hunting our enemies in their caves in Palm Springs, West Palm Beach and the Hamptons, as well as in the mountains of Afghanistan. Dirty bombs and high-profile attacks like those of Sept. 11 are big attention-getters for those who would destroy the United States, but the people behind them can't be anything but thrilled with the performance of what appears to be a sizable segment of our business elite. The Great Satan, they can tell their followers, isn't only evil, but he is also stupid and eats his young. As a nation we have, of course, the collective attention span of a gnat and are already distracted by the perennial fiddling with the Pledge of Allegiance (look out for Mom and apple pie next week or the flag so people who should be fixing what even Martha Stewart would agree is not a good thing can spend their time in highly publicized grandstanding and ranting). Probably the only good thing to come out of it all is that the president, at least for a while, has stopped mumbling about investing Social Security funds in the stock market. I don't know about you, but under the mattress is starting to look better and better to me.
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