Molly Ivins: "And the corrupt corporate culture has in turn bought
the political system. Medicare "reform" is a huge
boondoggle for the drug companies. The energy bill is
nothing but corporate subsidies. We have seen people
like Dennis Kozlowski and Ken Lay loot their
corporations. We are now watching the looting of an
entire country. "
End the Looting of America, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16121
The cockroach theory: Where there's one, there are many: finance rife with corruption
AUSTIN, Texas -- I do not think it premature to
conclude that the entire financial industry of this
country is riddled with fraud. As Allan Sloan of
Newsweek observed, this is not a case of "a few bad
apples," it's the Cockroach Theory -- you see one, you
know there's a whole nest of the nasty maggots.
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Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America
By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
from Powells from Amazon
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Jack A. Blum, a Washington lawyer and expert in
money-laundering and other forms of tax evasion, wrote
the following for an academic conference held earlier
this year at the University of Texas: "Corporate
managers have spent the last century developing tools
for avoiding regulation and taxation. They brag that
acts of tax avoidance are part of corporate
productivity. For them, each dollar of tax not paid
because of their machinations is the added value they
bring to a company. Tax avoidance is a profit center.
Avoidance of regulation and supervision is an equally
high priority. Corporate contributions and the
personal contributions of senior corporate managers
have funded anti-regulatory think tanks and
anti-regulatory scholarship. Political contributions
have turned theory into reality."
Blum points out that the tools used to avoid taxes and
regulation -- shell subsidiaries, partnerships and
joint ventures, foreign subsidiaries, special purpose
entities and sophisticated transfer pricing techniques
-- have long been in use, but:
"The difference is that when they were first used,
their purpose was to avoid state regulation and hide
from state law enforcement. ... Today ... the
techniques are being used to beat what is left of
federal taxation and regulation. Corporations have
turned international borders into barriers that block
national level taxation and regulation. The
international community has failed to produce
effective machinery for cooperation in the areas of
regulation and taxation, and as a consequence, the
social control of corporate behavior stops at the
border."
The social control of corporate behavior also stops
with this administration. George W. Bush's first
choice for chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Harvey Pitt, famously planned "a kinder,
gentler SEC." Pitt proved himself so unable to get
tough, even after Enron, that he was replaced with
William Donaldson, a former head of the New York Stock
Exchange -- but of course, that was before the stock
exchange was hit by its own scandals.
At the Treasury Department, John Snow, master of
paying no corporate taxes and the golden parachute, is
now in charge. Bush's Federal Power Commission, with
one member banished by Ken Lay of Enron and another
selected by him, couldn't be bothered to notice the
enormous fraudulent "energy crisis" in California
until $30 billion had been sucked out of that state.
Talk about the lunatics running the asylum. Former
lobbyists for special interests now dominate the top
of the bureaucracies -- not to regulate, but to
facilitate corporate rip-offs. Michael Powell at the
Federal Communications Commission thinks more media
mergers will be good for the nation. At the Interior
Department, it is rip and run, all-out exploitation of
natural resources, leaving nothing but a trash heap
behind -- a trash heap, incidentally, that the
taxpayers will have to pay to clean up, since the
Superfund for toxic waste cleanups has been allowed to
lapse entirely.
Richard Todd, writing about the mutual fund scandal in
the Times Sunday Magazine, asked:
"Were these laws and rules taken seriously by anyone
-- or was it common knowledge in the industry that
they were routinely flouted? Who was in on the deal?
Was all this done more or less in the open with a
genial nod and wink among hundreds of guys who
understood the game? Or was the money inhaled like
cocaine in a surreptitious instant in the back room?
Did non-players know? Did 'my' broker know?"
I don't know about his broker, but try talking to
young people in the financial industry, and you will
get an earful.
There is a hero in all this, New York State's attorney
general, Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is not only doing a
hell of a job on his own patch, he has literally
forced the SEC into action. As Spitzer said before
breaking the latest financial scandal, the mutual fund
mess, "Heads should roll at the SEC."
Normally, the press would pick up this storyline:
"Huge mess, but one honest man fights valiantly
against corruption and powerful special interests."
But here's an interesting thing about media in our
day: The Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- one
of the weirdest publications on earth -- continually
derides Spitzer as "an ambitious politician." No
shine, Sherlock? What?! You cry in disbelief. Surely
no one in electoral politics is ambitious?! The Wall
Street Journal's editorial page itself should get, I
suspect, some of the credit for a corporate culture
gone mad with greeed (it needs three eee's).
And the corrupt corporate culture has in turn bought
the political system. Medicare "reform" is a huge
boondoggle for the drug companies. The energy bill is
nothing but corporate subsidies. We have seen people
like Dennis Kozlowski and Ken Lay loot their
corporations. We are now watching the looting of an
entire country.
Read more in the Molly Ivins archive.
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal
monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling
author of several books including Molly Ivins Can't
Say That Can She?