Posted on 07/14/2002 4:15:31 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:07:28 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Capitalism and freedom are not for a corrupt people. Only those who regulate themselves based on a strong inner core can handle freedom. As our president said, capitalism requires CHARACTER.
That lesson was forgotten during the past decade. It's time we straighten up, this is just as much the fault of the media and the American people. The people stood silent while the media excused wrongdoing. The media crooned "Everyone does it" and the people shrugged. Now we have a decent man in office and the media is pointing their filthy fingers at good men. If the people stand silent again we no longer deserve freedom or prosperity.
I'd like to see someone ask Levitt for all his correspondence on the independent auditor rule that he received from both houses of Congress and from Bubba.
No way was this scuttled due to disinterest.
Nice spin by the author, though.
Did Rubin, whose firm is a major lender to Enron, ask Fisher for the same thing that Enron's Kenneth Lay asked Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill for, a bailout, some form of government financing? No - the request was both more subtle and potentially more damaging to the good health of America's markets.
WHAT Rubin asked for, by all accounts, was for Fisher to call the debt rating agencies and ask them to find an "alternative" to a downgrade of Enron's securities. This was an astounding request. The rating agencies are meant to be neutral arbiters of the financial strength of the entities they rate. Rubin's request was akin to the owner of a team faced with playoff elimination asking the league commissioner to get the referees to call the next game so that the owner's team doesn't lose.
The Clinton administration had a simple way to resolve this tension: law enforcement had to yield to fund-raising. It must have been difficult enough to persuade a CEO to come to the White House for coffee at $50,000 a cup. With pending securities-law investigations in the background, it would have been impossible. So the dogs had to be called off.
CLINTON's chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was Arthur Levitt Jr., former head of the American Stock Exchange and son of a legendarily upstanding New York state comptroller. To his immense credit, Levitt saw the outlines of many of the disasters that have since emerged and sought to address them before they got out of hand.
But with his proposals lacking the promise of fund-raising, improved poll numbers, or the Nobel Peace Prize, Clinton had no interest in them.
THE system is in far worse shape when a central and respected figure like Robert Rubin feels free to try and rig the game than when an Ivan Boesky - who even before his arrest was thought by most in the financial market to be a shady character - is trading on inside information.
Where in the world is Robert Rubin?
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