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To: kech who wrote (121165)	7/2/2002 9:05:29 AM
From: qveauriche	Respond to of 152472

Nor did he mention Terry McAuliffe's cozy deal With Global Crossing. Liberals will love to play the notion that greed is somehow a unique attribute of capitalism,and not to be found in the hallowed halls of bureaucracy. they seem to think that there are no Andy Fastow's in the socialist paradise. Unlike bureaucratic corruption, which as I write this involves sums of money that would tower above Enron and WCOM combined, corruption gets discovered, gets brought to light in a private sector environment, because the investor class is always there, demanding results,not always with sufficient diligence. So in the market Andy Fastow can deflect the truth with smoke and mirrors for quarters. The bureaucratic Fastow can deflect the truth for decades; perhaps forever. The notion that honesty will prevail if greater oversight and power would simply be transferred to the inscrutable byzantine halls of government is a sick joke. Thoughtful reforms are needed. But the wholesale argument that capitalism as we know it is irretrievably broken is deserving of contemptuous ridicule. As is any Clintonista who presumes to lecture the Bush's on ethics. Paul Krugman is a brilliant man. Heis nonetheless human, and I assume that he is motivated to write things like this in part because of the bitterness he feels over the eventual exposure (by Bill Clinton's own conduct, and not that of Ken Starr)of Bill Clinton for the scum that he is. Brilliant people can have ideological blinders like the rest of us. I remember my visionary constitutional law professor, the esteemed Milner Ball, rightly proclaimed to be the brightest mind to grace the halls of the Univ. of Georgia Law School, one day in class dismissively stating, as if it were so self evident as to not be worthy of discussion, that capitalism was an antiquated relic in an irreversible decline to irrelevance, and that socialism was clearly emerging as the enlightened and prevailing system of political economy. It was the Fall of 1986,that he made this statement, literally within months of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To: kech who wrote (121165)	7/2/2002 9:06:44 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Where is the conflict of interest? One might argue that there was a conflict of interest if Krugman had written articles FAVORABLE to Enron. The SEC fails on two major issues: (1) Its enforcement arm (and budget) is woefully inadequate. It has done virtually nothing to use more of the filing fees it gets for this purpose. Its filing fees greatly exceed its entire budget. (2) The SEC takes a band-aid approach by filing mainly civil instead of criminal actions. Most of the problems we have been reading about lately concern only one issue: fraud on the market. That's the real issue, not obstruction of justice or filing false statements. The real victims are investors, both individual and institutional. If fraud on the market were pursued as the MAIN issue, and if the consequences were a minimum of two years in jail, there would be a marked improvement in company reporting. Finally, in cases of fraud on the market, the entire corporate board of directors, including all officers, should be held personally accountable (irate shareholders going after corporate assets--which they already own--is counterproductive). Currently corporate officers and directors are almost never held personally accountable. Additionally, no corporate funds or assets should be used to defend any officer or director accused of a criminal violation. There is about a 90 percent probability that this solution will not be adopted. There's too much influence on the administration and Congress to go easy on big campaign contributors. So one might also say that there is no chance of a major improvement in corporate behavior as long as corporate executives think they can get away with it, meaning as long as there is no true campaign finance reform. Art Bechhoefer