Hey, you, get off my moral high ground
Tuesday, July 9th, 2002George W. Bush has learned that there is corporate corruption in America, and he is shocked, shocked. And he intends to do something to change the appearance that nothing is being done about it: by creating the appearance that something is being done about it. Predictably, this new commitment to improve capitalism’s image will make no enemies on Wall Street.
In today’s speech, Bush did not discuss his own dishonest business dealings. All the Republican spokesmen and pundits are riding the media circuit today, repeating the White House party line: the SEC cleared George W of any wrongdoing years ago. That would be the same SEC whose chairman owed his job to young George’s daddy, then-President George H. W. Bush. Enron, the single biggest financial contributor to the younger Bush’s political campaigns, is barely being mentioned in the corporate media, never mind the President’s speech.
Bush insists that corporate managers who defraud stockholders will be held to account in this new climate of Honest Bidness. There will even be a new Task Force assigned to prosecute accounting fraud. But is it really surprising that government intends to protect stockholders? They are, after all, the people who own the country. What Bush does not intend to do is prosecute corporate misdeeds against the public at large. As long as Microsoft, big tobacco companies, and big pharmaceutical companies continue to turn a profit for stockholders, at the expense of the public, they will have no worries about the Bush administration. Violations of anti-trust law, marketing cigarette smoking to minors, price gouging the sick—all these are good for some corporate bottom line, and therefore aren’t considered criminal, or even wrong, by the corporate shills who run our government.
So how bad will it be for cheating CEOs if George has his way? The maximum penalty for mail and wire fraud will be doubled to 10 years under the Bush proposal. By way of comparison, the average penalty for first-time offenders sentenced for trafficking of crack cocaine is already 10 and a half years.
