Posted on 06/29/2002 9:24:46 PM PDT by HAL9000
WASHINGTON - WorldCom's revelation this week that it fudged its accounts by $3.8 billion, followed by Xerox's saying it had booked billions of dollars in revenue before it should have, could whip the politics of corporate corruption into a Republican disaster.Democrats already were honing a populist attack line against President Bush and Republican lawmakers, arguing that they were too cozy with corporate America and out of touch with average people.
The mushrooming scandals over fraudulent accounting, which began last year with Texas-based energy giant Enron, could make those attacks stick and drive Democrats to victory in November's congressional elections, analysts on all sides say, especially if a weakening economy increases public anxieties about financial security. New polls suggest that concern about the economy is starting to rival fears of terrorism.
But Democrats are still far from turning this into a political tidal wave that could carry them into power like the post-Watergate surge in 1974 that gave them near veto-proof control of Congress.
First, they must convince voters to care more about WorldCom than world terrorism. Then they must persuade them that Republicans are responsible for a corporate crime wave. But the record shows that Democrats joined Republicans in a bipartisan crusade to deregulate telecommunications in 1996, which paved the way for WorldCom's rise and fall.
Bush made it clear yesterday that he was not going to let Democrats stake out the high ground on the issue.
"Corporate America has got to understand there is a higher calling than trying to fudge the numbers, trying to slip a billion here and a billion there," he said at a fund-raising event for Rep. Connie Morella (R., Md.) in Bethesda, Md.
"You have a responsibility to this country to always be aboveboard," he said.
Administration officials said the President planned to deliver a major address on corporate responsibility next month. His regular radio address today also will be on that subject.
Despite Bush's pronouncements, Democrats smell GOP blood.
Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) opened yesterday's business on the Senate floor with a denunciation of "a deregulatory, permissive atmosphere that has relied too much on corporate America to police itself." He listed companies that have been in hot water, including Halliburton, where Vice President Cheney was chief executive.
The Bush administration and its "laissez-faire attitude" toward business helped create today's problems, Daschle said afterward.
"This crisis is shedding light on the Republican Achilles' heel, which is their close relationship to corporate America," said Marshall Wittmann, a former strategist for the Christian Coalition and now a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington research center.
"The only thing stopping the potential for a Democratic tsunami is the overlay of the war. At this point, Americans are more concerned about personal security than financial security. Once losing jobs becomes more of a threat than physical safety, that could have a major impact even in November."
Americans are already worried about the economy.
In a bipartisan poll released this week, 51 percent of Americans said the economy was just fair and 20 percent called it poor.
"The economy continues to be a major concern for voters," said Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Terrorism remains the top national subject at kitchen tables and water coolers, in part because officials in the Bush administration keep issuing new warnings of possible attacks. A majority of Americans, 55 percent, still talk frequently about it, more than any other subject, according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, a nonpartisan research organization.
The collapse of Enron and other business scandals trail far behind. The poll, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, was taken before revelations about WorldCom, but during a spate of stories about other business corruption.
Newly energized, Democrats have escalated their months-long effort to blame Republicans for bowing before corporate America and fostering an "anything goes" business climate.
Some of them trace the erosion of corporate ethics and government oversight to the 1995 Republican takeover of Congress.
"When the Republican leadership came in... the main goal of their effort was to try to deregulate corporate America. Well, they did a lot of that in the last years," said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D., Mo.).
"Now we see some of the results of that. You have corporations going overseas to avoid paying federal taxes, while we're at war... . We have people trying to misstate earnings so they can get stock-option prices up... and then have to restate the earnings after they've cashed out of corporations, leaving the employees with nothing."
Some Democratic consultants advise their candidates to make the theme of GOP-aided corporate corruption a centerpiece of their campaigns. They are compiling lists of controversial votes in Congress to highlight in anti-Republican ads and hope to force GOP lawmakers to take new high-profile votes in coming weeks.
"We're going to lay this out in detail for you," Gephardt said.
Republicans counter that they are working to combat corporate corruption and note that they were not alone in supporting deregulation of business.
"If we were stonewalling, it would be true that we were in trouble," said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign organization for Republicans in the House of Representatives. "But we're out there offering proposals and solutions."
He noted that Democrats took money from WorldCom and supported deregulation of the telecommunications industry. Indeed, former Vice President Al Gore helped lead the drive to deregulate the industry. And Gephardt was among those who voted for it.
So, The Philidelphia Inquisitor thinks that the terrorist alerts are the Bush Version of the perfected Clinton Technique of "Wag the Dog!" Where were these slimebags when our sailors and airmen were sending cruise missles inland the night before Monica's testimony?
Will somebody remind me to stuff this fishwrap down the editor's/ombudsmans throat the next time there is a successful terrorist attack?
Oh, BTW, ONLY the inquisitor could possibly consider the PEW Research Center a NON-PARTISAN think tank. Sheesh!
Regards,
TS
This statement proves that they're smoking crack in the Inquisitor Press rooms. This could be the single best example of fantasy masquerading as news ever written. Somebody call Brent Bozell!
Regards,
TS
That's refreshing to hear since most nitwit conservatives around here claim corporations have NO "responsibility to this country".
I am voting for the politician who vows 20 year mandatory prison sentences for CEOs found guilty of massive fraud.
Classic. Just classic. Can I have my own TV Station to tell the truth for a while. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top?
It will be the perfect opportunity to show how the waste fraud, & abuse in government makes the private sector look puny by comparason- and we all know who was in charge from 1992-2000, when the worst occurred.
Really? Nitwit conservatives claim corporate America has no responsibility to obide by the law, do they?
Sounds more like another leftist with a reading comprehension disorder.
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