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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (279192)	7/22/2002 10:52:31 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 769670

Black and white The politics of corporate cronyism has no gray area between right and wrong By Chris Matthews MSNBC msnbc.com WASHINGTON, July 22 — President Bush says that things aren’t “black and white” in corporate accounting. That assessment may be defensible in accounting terms. In political terms, it’s dead wrong. The politics of this “corporate cronyism” is as black and white as you can get. A few people won by dumping their stock before the big fall that began in the spring of 2000. The tens of millions of others that held onto their stock now deeply resent those people. They hate them for knowing what they didn’t know themselves and taking advantage of that knowledge. THE FACT THAT most of the winners of the Wall Street bubble were rich and are now much, much richer adds to the anger of the losers. That the winners knew from their catbird seats what the losers didn’t gives total license to be angry. We’re not talking superior brains here. We’re talking about corporate leaders knowing with certainty that the ship is going down because they have a direct line to the engine room. Yes, Mr. President, it is a case of black and white. Think of the Titanic. The captain and his top officers are supposed to stay with the ship and get the passengers in the lifeboats. In the cases of Enron, WorldCom and all the rest, it was the captains of industry who the passengers have caught paddling those boats. Whether they broke the rules by putting on women’s clothes or simply had the insight of insiders that the ship was sinking is really not the issue. FEELING THE PAIN Doesn’t it feel better to criticize the big shots for grabbing what they could than whacking yourself for behaving like a lemming? What matters politically here is that the masses who are watching their life’s savings shrink are looking for someone to blame. These big-time business scandals have given them the emotional life preserver they desperately need. Doesn’t it feel better to blame the president’s pal Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay of Enron or the chief financial officer of WorldCom or Martha Stewart than yourself? Isn’t it more satisfying to criticize the big shots for grabbing what they could than whacking yourself for behaving like a lemming? Common sense should have told all of us that no stock market could continue to pay 30 percent to 40 percent annual returns on an amateur’s investment. As one who personally closed his eyes to that common sense, I know the country’s present feeling fairly well. But I don’t think Bush does, at least not yet. The president who has displayed perfect pitch on the terrorism war seems sadly out of synch on this corporate corruption matter. A POLITICAL DISCONNECT He is alone in his deafness. The Democrat-led U.S. Senate voted 97 to 0 last week to punish what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calls “corporate cronyism.” The House of Representatives, run by Republicans, is dying to ditto the tough Senate message. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, no lefty, cited “infectious greed” as the villain of corporate misbehavior. “My view was always that accountants knew or had to know that the market value of their companies rested on the integrity of their operations,” he testified this week. “I was wrong.” There are two possible explanations why the president is out of step with the country’s politics here: 1.) He is blinded to the “black and white” of corporate corruption by his own intimate association with the boardroom world, or 2.) He fears that his own dealings at Harken Energy and his vice president’s dealings at Halliburton are too close to the Enron and WorldCom business, and is afraid of being burned by his own fire. The longer this disconnect continues, the more people will assume the latter. ---------------------------------------------- Chris Matthews, author of “Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think” (Free Press, 2001) and “Hardball” (Touchstone Books, 1999), is a nationally syndicated columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the host of “Hardball.” Tune into “Hardball” at 9 p.m. ET, M-F, exclusively on MSNBC cable.