Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The president goes to Wall Street to lecture on bidness ethics, as questions persist about his own corporate past.
Jul 10, 2002 | The sprawling, air-conditioned chamber in the Regent Hotel, festooned with Ionic columns and an ornate dome featuring the signs of the zodiac, once served as the New York Merchants Exchange, which, during the panic of 1857, was marched upon by thousands of unemployed New Yorkers who chanted "We want work!" In the 1860s, the U.S. Customs Service, rampant with corruption and sleaze, moved into the building. One Customs employee from that era was Herman Melville, author of not only "Moby-Dick" but the more relevant short story "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street."
And though it would seem that, in the immortal words of the Scrivener, he "would prefer not to," into this chamber strode President George W. Bush Tuesday, amid the background cacophony of a whole new generation of robber-barons inflicting their distinct version of capitalism upon the public, and a renewed chorus of reporters and critics questioning the president's own credibility as a voice for reform.
Here, before a crowd of 700 dignitaries and money men, he called for a "a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community," where, the president made it clear, the news has not been good.
"We've learned of some business leaders obstructing justice, and misleading clients, falsifying records, business executives breaching the trust and abusing power," Bush said. "We've learned of CEOs earning tens of millions of dollars in bonuses just before their companies go bankrupt, leaving employees and retirees and investors to suffer. The business pages of American newspapers should not read like a scandal sheet."
But Bush turned his modestly delivered 30-minute speech into a high-wire act, balancing the need to act (or at least, to be seen as acting) with the need to not act so rashly as to send the Dow spiraling down even further during these trying economic times. In words that were probably not well-received by observers alarmed by the various Enrons, WorldComs, Tycos, Mercks and Xeroxes, the president chose to reassure the traders just one block away, using the word "confidence" or "confident" 13 times, and praising capitalism in general. He emphasized that the bad guys were in only "some quarters of corporate America." Most businessmen, Bush insisted, "are honest" and "do right by their employees and their shareholders."
"Bold, well-considered reforms should demand integrity," Bush said, slowly and with apparent heartfelt sincerity, underlining that this would come "without stifling innovation and economic growth."
Bush outlined stiffer penalties for those who commit fraud, and suggested other proposals that he said would ensure greater transparency. This would include a group he created by executive order just a second ago, the Justice Department's Corporate Fraud Task Force, which he said would "function as a financial crimes SWAT team, overseeing the investigation of corporate abusers and bringing them to account."
The president did not describe the financial crimes SWAT team as "neat-o" or "super-cool."
The artful hand of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was felt when Bush waxed lyrical. "All investment is an act of faith," he said, "and faith is earned by integrity. In the long run, there's no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character."
The crowd included Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. Reporters were cordoned off from the elites so that we couldn't ask attendees like, say, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y, about her controversial past trading in commodities futures, or perhaps his eminence, Edward Cardinal Egan, about allegations of corruption in his own multinational.
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