"Bushwhacked!"

Harken was not Enron, but it was certainly Enron in the making. What Bush took out of Harken was also twenty times as much as Bill and Hillary Clinton lost in a crummy Arkansas real estate deal that cost American taxpayers seventy million dollars to investigate. By the time Bush signed the Corporate Responsibility Act, Harken was selling at forty-one cents a share. Don't put your Social Security money in it.

So who are the "regular folks" who have been affected here, and what have those effects been? In this chapter, you, dear readers, are the regular folks. Americans lost $6 trillion when the stock market collapsed after Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. It's your 401(k) that's the subject here, your pension, your Social Security, your investments, your savings, and your jobs. You.

Of course George W. Bush and his petty self-dealing at Harken did not cause the collapse of Enron et al. What we are looking at is not causation but connection. If one wanted to paint with a broad brush, surely Bill Clinton, president during the enormous stock market boom of the second half of the nineties, has more responsibility for the eventual collapse than does George W., president for only eighteen months when it happened.

But an even broader brush shows a different pattern. Starting in 1980 with the presidency of Ronald Reagan (or even the 1978 deregulation of the airlines, if you'd like to include Jimmy Carter), this country has been going through a deregulatory mania. Supply-siders, Milton Friedman, free-marketeers of all stripes, "movement conservatives," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- not to mention a motley assortment of anti-government cranks from militias to Republican candidates -- have been trying to persuade us that government can't do a damn thing right and that free markets are the answer to absolutely everything. There's a true-believerism about the free-marketeers that is genuinely unsettling, as though it were a cult or a religion in which certain fundamental assumptions are never questioned. All you have to do to believe is ignore history and experience.

Capitalism is a marvelous system for creating wealth. On the other hand, unregulated capitalism creates hideous social injustice and promptly destroys itself with greed. A marketplace needs rules. From the very beginning, capitalism has required careful regulation. In the market towns of medieval England there were as many as twenty or thirty laws governing just the balance scales, and whether you could put your thumb or any other digit on the scale. Mostly what we've learned from the American experiment is that competition is good, but we need rules because people cheat. And there are some natural monopolies that need regulation or they end up in cartels that rip everybody off.

Government regulation and the much-maligned trial lawyers are the two instruments by which we control corporate greed. It seems to me government is neither good nor bad but simply a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build with, or you can use a hammer to destroy with. The virtue of the hammer depends on the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used.

Of course government regulation is burdensome and often absurd. One famous federal form required employers to "list your employees broken down by sex." "None," read one reply. "Alcohol is our problem."

What has changed in this country over the course of the past twenty-some years is that government has served less and less as a brake on corporate behavior and more and more as a corporate auxiliary, because of the corrupting effects of the system of legalized bribery we call "campaign financing."

And here we find the root cause of the stock market collapse. During the nineties the SEC was increasingly starved for funds by the Republican Congress on the grounds that regulation is bad, and so it suffered a tremendous erosion of its authority. While the press was telling the Enron disaster story and CEOs were stepping forward like Baptists at an altar call to restate their companies' earnings, Bush fought for a bare-bones SEC budget, recommending $576 million in July 2002. (The House authorization at the time was $776 million.) Clinton's SEC appointee, Arthur Levitt, had struggled valiantly for such obvious reforms as expensing stock options and monitoring accounting firms, but the politicians paid no attention during the years of go-go and the all-absorbing crisis over the president's sex life.

Phil and Wendy Gramm made a significant husband-and-wife contribution to the mess. In 1992, just a few days after Bill Clinton's election, Wendy Gramm, in her last days as the lame-duck chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (which was short two of its five members), pushed through a federal rule that exempted energy-derivatives contracts from federal regulation (because regulation is bad). Energy derivatives were just then becoming one of Enron's most profitable lines. According to Robert Bryce's book on Enron, Pipe Dreams, this key piece of deregulation is what allowed Enron to become a giant in the derivatives business. The exemption not only prevented federal oversight, exempting the companies from the CFTC's authority, it even exempted them if the contracts they were selling were designed to defraud or mislead buyers. Five weeks later Enron announced it was hiring Mrs. Gramm as a member of the Enron board, a job that eventually paid her about $1 million in salary, attendance fees, stock-option sales, and dividends. Senator Phil Gramm's Banking Reform Act formally repealed the long-standing prohibition (which grew out of the stock crash of '29) against merging banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies. Then the IRS was emasculated by Gingrich Republicans on the grounds that collecting taxes is tantamount to fascism.

The whole dizzying array of corporate clout-wielders in Washington -- powerful lobbyists who leave no fingerprints on curious little exemptions and special provisions that apply to only one company -- gets larger and more brazen by the year.

George W. Bush didn't invent any of this. His role is to pretty much embody it. He is what people mean when they speak of "crony capitalism." His administration is what we mean by the cliché "setting the fox to guard the hen coop." (Raccoons are actually far more dangerous to chickens -- take our word for it.) Bush is not motivated by greed -- he honestly believes government should be an adjunct of corporate America and that we'll all be better off if it is. Thus his role has been to build upon, to extend, to exaggerate, to further privatize, to cheerlead for, to evangelize about all that the free-marketeers have been preaching over the years.

The odd thing about Bush at midterm is that most of the Washington press corps has yet to recognize just how extreme his ideology is. As governor of Texas he tried to privatize the state welfare system and considered privatizing the University of Texas; he fought for "voluntary compliance" with environmental regulations. With the power of large corporations in this country already grossly disproportionate because of their influence over politicians through money, government is the last effective check on corporate greed. To put a man in charge of the government who basically doesn't believe it should play a role is folly.

The tragedy of having him in office at this time is that the man is congenitally incapable of checking the excesses of capitalism. No sooner was the Sarbanes bill passed than Bush's man at the SEC, Harvey Pitt, busily began undermining it. Pitt's claim to the title of biggest raccoon in the henhouse is rivaled only by the perfectly ludicrous appointment Bush made to the board assigned to implement the new McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reforms -- a man vehemently opposed to campaign-finance reform. There are contenders at Interior, Labor, and EPA as well, but Pitt probably deserves the prize.

Pitt wanted to appoint Judge William Webster to head the new accounting firm oversight board set up by the Sarbanes bill. Webster turned out to have corporate conflicts of interest out the wazoo, and Pitt himself was fired as a result. However, he remained on the job and by January 2003 had managed to actually weaken the rules that had been in effect before the corporate scandals broke. So many fundamental reforms have not been addressed -- the failure to count stock options as a business expense, which gives CEOs an incentive to run up stock prices with tricky accounting; out-of-control hedge funds; derivatives; directors with conflicts of interest; the list goes on. Less than nothing has been done about any of it, so one can guarantee this whole corporate-fraud fiasco is going to happen again.

George W. Bush should declare himself a conscientious objector in his own war on corporate crime.

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Copyright © 2003 by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Excerpted from "Bushwhacked," by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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