smCOLUMN SEVENTY-FIVE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
SECTION SIXTEEN
EMAIL PAGE SEVEN
sm
COLUMN
SEVENTY-FIVE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
BY PETER BEINART
THE BUSHIES: BLAME EVERYTHING ON BILL CLINTON
Subject:
FW: TRB: Backward
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 10:05:36 -0700
From: "venire" <venire@znet.com>
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
The
anti-Clintonists are STILL at it!
Linda
R
From
The New Republic
TRB
FROM WASHINGTON
Backward
by
Peter Beinart
Post
date: 07.09.02
Issue date: 07.22.02
Lots
of arguments are wrong; fewer are absurdly wrong. But the absurd ones are
sometimes the most revealing. By stretching facts and logic past the breaking
point, they lay bare the ideological assumptions that more plausible assertions
often disguise.
So
it is with the right's suggestion that Bill Clinton is to blame for today's
corporate scandals. "If you're looking for someone who set the moral tone
for the decade of the '90s, I don't think you have to look any further than the
former president's behavior," explained House Ways and Means Chairman Bill
Thomas on CNN late last month.
"It's
impossible to understand Enron," editorialized The Wall Street Journal,
"outside the moral climate in which it flourished... the Clinton years,
when we learned that `everybody does it.'" Or, as Steve Forbes put it
recently, "If you want to look at the tone of the '90s, it started right at
the top, at the White House, where the attitude was anything goes."
Yes,
that's right: Respected conservatives are actually suggesting that Enron and
WorldCom cooked their books because Bill Clinton lied about a blow job. It's not
an argument that takes a lot of deep thinking to rebut. First of all, corporate
fraud wasn't invented on Clinton's watch. When Ivan Boesky was arrested for
insider trading, Michael Milken was busted for market manipulation, Charles
Keating was running a fraudulent savings and loan, and Gordon Gekko was
declaring that "greed ... is good," Bill Clinton was an obscure
Southern governor, and the man setting the moral tone "at the top" was
Ronald Reagan. Maybe Boesky and Milken lost their moral bearings because the
Gipper was a divorcé who neglected his children.
Second,
Republican-leaning CEOs aren't exactly the demographic group most likely to take
their moral guidance from Bill Clinton. And among those constituencies that did
see Clinton as a role model---for instance, the African American poor---the '90s
were a period of remarkable moral advance. From 1991 to 2000, while our
"first black president" inhabited the Oval Office, teen pregnancy
dropped 22 percent. Between 1993 and 1999, the crime rate dropped by roughly the
same amount, and the welfare rolls declined 49 percent. Divorce, teen drinking,
teen suicide, and abortion also grew more rare. As the magazine of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute put it in 1999, "The alarm bells
rung by cultural conservatives seem to have been heeded by many Americans, and a
new pattern of recovery and even reversal has emerged." Does The Wall
Street Journal hold Bill Clinton responsible for that as well?
The
right's urge to blame Clinton stems partly from its refusal to acknowledge the
basic tension within conservative ideology between cultural traditionalism and
economic libertarianism. Whether it's Hollywood or Wall Street, conservatives
hate to admit that it is the cultural amorality of the profit motive itself that
sometimes produces moral rot. So when movie moguls or corporate chieftains
choose the bottom line over basic decency, conservatives are reduced to
suggesting that the scoundrels lost their family values at Woodstock (or by
watching Clinton) rather than admit that they are simply following the
structural incentives of an inadequately regulated free market.
Indeed,
when it comes to big business, conservatives frequently deny that structural
incentives matter at all. Even if they can't show that the corporate malefactors
were corrupted by Clinton, they insist that what matters is that they were
personally corrupt---bad people who did bad things because, well, that's what
bad people do. As George W. Bush said in his corporate-responsibility speech
this week, "[U]ltimately, the ethics of American business depends on the
conscience of America's business leaders." Or, as the Journal put it,
"Capitalists being human---some will lose their moral bearings."
This
is willful naïveté. When bureaucrats perform inefficiently or welfare mothers
live on the dole, conservatives don't call them bad apples who lack the moral
instinct for hard work. They blame the legal structures that govern their
behavior---the fact that bureaucracies are insulated from market competition or
that welfare mothers (formerly) received checks whether they worked or not.
And
it is the legal structure governing corporate America that has produced the bad
behavior we are learning about today. During the '90s accounting firms realized
they could boost profits by consulting for the companies they audited. And
because the government never stepped in to prevent this mounting conflict of
interest, accounting firms like Arthur Andersen developed a strong incentive to
overlook fraudulent bookkeeping. Was every auditor equally willing to turn a
blind eye? Of course not---just as not every welfare mother was equally willing
to receive a check for sitting at home. But the overall structure created a
corrupting pressure. And so it is not surprising that in the late '90s, as the
accounting industry was publishing a handbook titled Make Audits Pay:
Leveraging the Audit Into Consulting Services, the number of audited
companies subsequently forced to restate their earnings was rising year after
year.
Similarly,
the penalties for corporate fraud were diminishing. In 1995 Newt Gingrich and
the newly elected Republican Congress---having vowed to restrict lawsuits in the
Contract with America---pushed through a bill making it much harder to sue
companies for misleading their investors. And that same year the House and
Senate froze the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),even
though the agency (as the General Accounting Office would later find) already
lacked the staff to adequately monitor corporate balance sheets. As David Ruder,
a former Republican head of the SEC, told The New York Times in 1995, "The
Republican Congress is dealing with the SEC as though it is the enemy, instead
of the policeman on the beat." And, as conservatives often remind liberals,
when you undermine the policeman on the beat, crime goes up.
Which
brings us back to Bill Clinton. If conservatives are serious about blaming him
for Enron and WorldCom, they should focus not on Monica Lewinsky but on the
decline in white-collar law enforcement that occurred on his watch. But, if they
do, they'll notice that Clinton vetoed the 1995 bill that shielded corporate
executives from shareholder lawsuits, and his SEC chief, Arthur Levitt, proposed
barring accounting firms from consulting for firms they were simultaneously
auditing. Unfortunately, Clinton's veto was overridden---a slight majority of
PETER
BEINART is the editor of TNR.
Copyright
2002, The New Republic ##
* * *
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN SEVENTY-FIVE
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX
OF COLUMNS
The
Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
info@blacklistedjournalist.com
THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ