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Strategies & Market Trends : Guidance and Visibility -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: augieboo who wrote (64557)	8/2/2002 3:33:25 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 208838

Bush Plays Father of Wall Street There is an almost comical edge to George W. Bush's newfound concern about corporate chicanery. His every impulse is to let capitalism run its unregulated course, but now that the American public is up in arms over one corporate scandal after another, he's had to switch on a dime. Now he tries to come across as the stern father of Wall Street, lecturing about the need for "higher ethical standards." This is a hard act to pull off, especially since Bush and Dick Cheney both have egg on their wingtips. Bush for alleged insider trading and accounting trickery when he was a director at Harken Energy Corporation, and Cheney for dubious accounting practices at Halliburton, when he was CEO there, practices the SEC is still investigating. Bush's speech on July 9 did have a couple of laughers in it, especially the line "In the long run, there's no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character." As if capitalism had any motivation other than the maximization of profit. As if wealth had anything to do with character. I'm reminded of something my father's been saying lately: "The Republicans only care about two things: God and greed--and in no particular order." In his speech, Bush announced the creation of a "Corporate Fraud Task Force"--one of the first task forces he couldn't appoint Cheney to head. And he made a few tepid proposals for tightening regulations on corporate fraud and abuse. (For a list of fundamental reforms, go to the web page of Ralph Nader's CitizenWorks for a list of 31 steps that need to be taken. That's www.citizenworks.org, and click on "important corporate reform proposals.") But at least Bush's speech wasn't studded with the syntactical errors that marked his press conference the day before. Twice in one answer, Bush pronounced "malfeasance" as "malfeance," which you wouldn't have known had you read the transcript in The New York Times, which cleaned up the President's mess for him. But I watched the press conference live, and I heard it with my own ears, and the White House confirms my hearing. Here is its transcript: "There was no malfeance involved. This was an honest disagreement about accounting procedures. . . . There was no malfeance, no attempt to hide anything." Somebody please get that man an English tutor! progressive.org