Corporate Malfeasance

CORPORATE MALFEASANCE: "You see now what it means to have an administration that's committed to fighting and working on behalf of the powerful, and letting the people of this country get the short end of the stick." -- Former Vice President Al Gore (at a fundraiser aptly titled "Capture the Country 2002" -- "capture" being to deprive of freedom, "capture" being defined as to take by force, to take prisoner). "The Bush administration should realize they have been in the White House for a year and a half and should stop looking for places to lay blame and show some leadership instead." -- spokesman for Democrat National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

It's no surprise that democrats are trying to blame the Bush administration for the corporate malfeasance now being uncovered. By blaming others, democrats hope to obfuscate the facts and avoid public reproach their own culpability, and evade responsibility for the ethical damage done to society by their own philosophy of moral relativism. The democrat accusations cannot be reconciled with the facts, but many in their constituency and on the Marxist hate-business left will simply take it on faith that all this actually makes sense. If de-regulation that supposedly took place in the 1990's (under republican Congresses and signed into law by Bill Clinton, having nothing whatsoever to do with Bush) is to blame, how come the financial shenanigans that began in and took place during the 1990's are being uncovered now, when there has been no change in any regulatory (or de-regulatory) scheme? WorldCom admits they started distorting their numbers at least 2 years ago (during the Clinton-Gore administration), and Enron grew to inflated proportions in the years before that (during the Clinton-Gore administration). Now that there's a new cop on the beat, the Ashcroft Justice Department, a new cop that's actually intent on enforcing the law and prosecuting corporate malfeasance (in contrast to what the Reno Justice Department occupied itself with) democrats are now trying to blame the cops for catching the crooks who thrived during the Clinton-Gore administration. Democrats hope that people will simply knee-jerk associate republicans with big business, and forget Al "information superhighway" Gore's close ties to Silicon Valley where the now-burst hi-tech bubble became most over-inflated; and forget Bill Clinton's own close ties to California's hi-tech community that poured huge sums of money into his campaign coffers.

In a speech in Tennessee, Gore criticized the Bush administration because "They haven't gotten Osama bin Laden" -- a particularly disingenuous criticism considering his own administration's refusal to accept the capture of bin Laden when he was offered to them on a silver platter. Here's what Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American Clinton fundraiser who tried to negotiate bin Laden's capture, said: "[Sudan's] President…offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas. Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center [emphasis added]. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening." Clinton and Gore weren't interested -- their assaults on the Constitution and their schemes to mortgage our national sovereignty in service to U.N. globalists were of more pressing importance.

Gore attacked Bush for corporate malfeasance, claiming that Bush "ought to be instructing the people in charge of these [regulatory] agencies to lay down the law." But this administration's enforcement of the law is precisely what the democrats are so angry about, because many of the people who committed their egregious conduct during the Clinton-Gore administration are now being exposed. This sudden insistence on strict enforcement of the law is also rather amusing, coming from the man who crowed that Bill Clinton would "go down in history as one of our greatest presidents" on the very day that Clinton was impeached for grand jury perjury and obstruction of justice. Tipper Gore also got into the act, trying to blame the Enron scandal on Bush: "It seems to me this administration has a lot of people who are simply interested in getting rich." Never mind that top Enron executives spent November 2000 election eve in Al Gore's campaign headquarters; that Enron was the top corporate booster of Gore's Kyoto Treaty; and that thanks to the Clinton administration, Enron got several hundred million dollars of government-guaranteed loans for a power plant in India, which went belly-up and left the American taxpayers on the hook. Meanwhile, Fox News noted that the Gores are "moving to Nashville, where they have purchased their third home -- a $2.3 million mansion that sits on more than two acres in the city's affluent Belle Meade section." And in the ultimate hypocrisy, democrats whine that Bush has reneged on his promise to "change the tone in Washington". Change from what? Why, change from the gutter attack politics of Clinton and Gore, of course, which Gore and the democrats apparently feel free to continue.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker observed, "corruption has been widespread since the 1990s…we have a lot of people trying to figure out how to get around the rules." That would be during the administration of the president who believed, as Steve Forbes put it, "the only sin was getting caught"; the president about whom a federal judge wrote, "The record demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence that the President responded to plaintiff's questions by giving false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process." And "[T]he President's contumacious conduct in this case, coming as it did from a member of the bar and the chief law enforcement officer of this Nation, was without justification and undermined the integrity of the judicial system...". False, misleading, evasive, contumacious -- a judge's summary of one of the worst and most dangerous presidential administrations this nation has ever had -- and Clinton's second-in-command now has the gall to attack those who are trying to clean up their messes. Regarding Gore's new plan to cast aside his focus group-created personality and become authentic, the Los Angeles Times opined, "His authenticity is conceptually unrecoverable. There is nothing left for the authentic Al Gore to be or to do or to say. … Gore has abandoned his truth fatally, fully, permanently."

So another chapter of Bill Clinton's legacy -- disrespect for the law -- is written, to take its place alongside our degraded military capability (why didn't we attack Iraq months ago?); the neglect of international terrorism (repeated attacks against America by radical Islamists but not a scintilla of interest by Bill Clinton in grabbing bin Laden when offered the opportunity to do so); and the massive fires now destroying western forests (thanks to the Clinton-Gore administration's embrace of extremist environmental policies). Incidentally, another of Clinton's attempted (but thankfully failed) legacies, his cynical effort to destroy our Constitutional liberties and hand our national sovereignty over to the world's rogues and the European Union -- the International Criminal Court -- came into being this week.

I think there is an interesting backlash effect going on with these sorts of statements that the left is not yet aware of. It is caused by the fact that the left no longer has the only megaphone in town. People today hear another side to these sorts of things, and the minute they do it is apparent which side is lying.

One does not have to understand much about the inner workings of business to know that things happen pretty slowly in multi-billion dollar companies. If all you ever heard is that Bush has been on the job for a year and a half and here is this big scandal, you might fall for it.

That was the normal course of events even five years ago. Today, with all the alternative news outlets out there, Joe Sixpack is likely to hear at least once that this stuff has been going on since the early 1990's, and the minute he hears it, he's going to know it's true because it just makes sense. The scale of these scandals alone suggests years of creeping incrementalism, finally blowing up in somebody's face.

Then Joe hears Gore pulling a stunt like this. And he hears Katie Couric try to sell him the same stuff. Only now, he looks at them and thinks, "they're lying on purpose."

I don't think the left understands yet that this is going on. The "big lie," echoed across the media spectrum, has been the best tool the left ever had to maintain power. But its day has passed. The lie doesn't stay believed any more. And once it's exposed, all the people who told it are exposed as liars.

That the politicians were lying to them is no surprise to most people. That the news media is full of Democrat liars is news to many people. I think the press Democrats are killing themselves by continuing to parrot "the line," as though people will never hear anything else. Today they might.

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