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- iHaveNet.com: Economy
by Arianna Huffington
America, it seems, can't wait to get back to business -- risky business -- as usual. No matter how atrocious business has been.
A
The problem is, this victory dance is being done on top of the same shaky financial system that nearly toppled over, sending us all
plummeting into the economic abyss. And while the market is over 9,100 (with another 10 percent gain predicted by the end of the year)
and Goldman,
We've seen this headlong rush to move on before. And it should be making us very afraid.
In 2003, I wrote a book called "Pigs at the Trough"
detailing the corporate greed and malfeasance that brought us the financial scandals at
So when I was asked by my publisher to release an updated and expanded version of "Pigs," I was delighted to do so. It's out in bookstores now.
Of course, when I originally wrote "Pigs," I didn't know that in just six years America would find itself in the midst of a slew of fresh
corporate outrages that would lead to a worldwide economic meltdown. But I can't say that I was surprised. The reason is simple: the system
that allowed the scandals at
Yes, there were window-dressing changes, and Band-Aid legislation. But the guiding philosophy -- that the free market would regulate itself, and that Wall Street always knew best -- remained in place. Indeed, it was given a much freer rein.
So it's been deja vu all over again. With one big difference that makes this current crisis so painful: the scale of it all. In 2003, the corporate crooks were largely playing with shareholders' money. The new batch of pigs is playing with taxpayer money -- trillions of it. And if we don't reform the system, given the exponential worsening of things between 2003 and now, the next financial collapse will surely be more than we can withstand.
What we are experiencing is not so much "Back to the Future" as it is "Forward to the Past."
And how's this for an ironic connection: Bernie Madoff will serve his sentence in the same North
Carolina prison where John Rigas and his son Tim have been since 2007. As you may recall, John, the
founder of
It's as if nothing has been learned since the last go-round.
It's just that the numbers have gotten much larger -- and the risks to our well-being much greater.
Two days before
Similarly, in 2002, on the same day WorldCom stunned the world with the magnitude of its accounting fraud, the company's inner circle began an extravagant, all-expenses-paid vacation in Maui. There was outrage and recrimination. But we quickly moved on. And six years later were outraged by the $443,000 luxury spa retreat executives of AIG took just days after the government unveiled the first $85 billion of the taxpayer-funded bailout package for the insurance giant.
And the media share a big part of the responsibility.
Back in 2003, just as the likes of Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis
Kozlowski and John Rigas were being called on the carpet, the financial press was anointing a new set of corporate
kings. Among them, future
As Connie Bruck reports in the New Yorker, in 2005 Countrywide was named one of Fortune's "Most Admired Companies" and
And instead of holding the Horsemen of the Financial Apocalypse who are still in charge accountable, those in the financial media are ready to move on, searching for the next superstar cover boys.
With so many both on Wall Street and in the media tripping over themselves to return to the pre-meltdown status quo, it's easy to get blinded by the premature exuberance and hop on the green shoots bandwagon. But we must resist and demand fundamental reform. We cannot allow Wall Street and its lobbyists -- as I warn in "Pigs at the Trough" -- "to embrace reform while working diligently behind the scenes to undermine it."
If we are going to truly rebuild our free market capitalist system, we have to break the cycle of shock, followed by outrage, followed by a few high-profile show trials, followed by the punishment of a few culprits, followed by some meaningless reforms... and then we all move on. Until it starts again.
The question is, does the political will to create and implement new rules for Wall Street exist, or will the result be a series of tough-sounding-but-ultimately-toothless reform measures that allow the cancer of greed and corruption that has infected our political and financial systems to spread and become even more destructive?
Does our body politic have the strength to save itself?
Available at Amazon.com:
Also at Amazon.com, Arianna Huffington's Books
© Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Economy | More Pigs at the Trough: What Enron and WorldCom Can Teach Us About Goldman and AIG