CORPORATE CORRUPTION HYPE: Andrew Sullivan
examines the outrage, fingerpointing and foreign reaction over recent corporate accounting scandals in America, and judges them to be overblown relative to the massive economic growth of the last twenty years. In response to a recent accusation by the Democrats' doughy 2000 election standardbearer that these corporate scandals are the result of the Bush Administration "fighting and working on behalf of the powerful, and letting the people of this country get the short end of the stick," Sullivan writes:
" . . . what we're seeing now is less a portent of the future than a retroactive snapshot of what was going on a few years ago. From Enron to Andersen to Tyco, these were Clinton era abuses, in some cases exposed by the Bush era Securities and Exchange Commission. The same goes for Xerox and WorldCom. If these abuses had occurred as the first stock meltdown had been occurring, they might have been able to define an era. But now, in a different, more sober age, they seem like symptoms of a period already past. In some ways, they were deeply consonant with Bill Clinton's cultural ethos. When the president of the United States acted as if the only ethical criterion that mattered was what he could get away with, it's not entirely surprising that this attitude seeped outward into the general zeitgeist. I'm not saying Clinton was responsible for this corporate corruption - just that his administration was responsible for policing it and for setting the moral tone of the country. And the boom began to spiral out of control at exactly the time that Clinton was fighting impeachment and desperately needed economic exuberance to insulate him from potential political suicide. No-one in the White House had an incentive to poop the party then. So although the Democrats have done much to associate George W. Bush with his old friend Kenneth Lay, Lay's cultural resonance is far more complicated. Perhaps that's why it's hard to think of this current spate of scandal as something new and significant, as opposed to old and predictable."
