THE POT CALLS THE KETTLE BLACK: The House passed its version of the corporate fraud bill today and judging from
the remarks of House speaker Dennis Hastert, you'd think Congress is made up of selfless, green-visored, penny-pinching men and women committed to protecting the public purse from abuse, misappropriation and mismanagement: "Today's message from Congress to CEOs and corporate boardrooms is clear . . . If you steal, cheat or commit some other white-collar crime, you'll face the same consequences as law-breaking street thugs by spending time behind bars."
It's also "clear," Mr. Speaker, that you and the 432 congressmen who voted for this bill are demagogic hypocrites.
Combine all the losses associated with the corporate accounting scandals and the figure doesn't approach the nearly incomprehensible accounting fraud, looting and waste knowingly perpetrated each day by the federal government. Columnist
Mark Steyn offers up just a few examples:
"Pick any Federal agency you like. WorldCom's $4-billion is less than a third of the $12.1-billion Medicare misplaces every single year. It's less than a thirtieth of the $142-billion the Federal Government has overspent its supposedly binding budgets by in the last five years. It's less than one-sixtieth of the new US$248-billion farm subsidy bill, three-quarters of which goes to a bunch of multimillionaire play-farmers like Ted Turner and David Rockefeller."
And let's not forget that the granddaddy of all federal frauds, Social Security, is what
Milton Friedman calls "the biggest Ponzi scheme on earth."
All this brought to you by the Republican and Democrat "street thugs" in Congress.
