If Enron's Skilling Gets 24 Years in Prison, How Many Should Bush and Cheney Get?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS -- CounterPunch
Oct. 26, 2006 -- During my professional lifetime, liberals and the left-wing have focused on failures and misdeeds of the private sector, while libertarians and conservatives have focused on the failures and misdeeds of the public sector or government. It turns out that both sides are right.
The Enron case and the other accounting scandals of this new century are testimony to misdeeds driven by private sector greed, just as the unjustifiable war in Iraq is testimony to the abusive behavior of government.
Justice demands that we be always on guard against a prosecutor's case. However, the devastation wrought by fraud committed by a few at the top of Enron seems real. Thousands of employees lost jobs and pensions, and shareholders took a large hit.
We now know that fraud on the part of the Bush administration launched the ill-fated Iraqi war. The war's financial and human cost dwarf the Enron catastrophe. The out-of-pocket cost of the war to date is $337 billion, with steep future costs for veterans' care and replacement of military equipment. Approximately 3,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and Department of Veterans Affairs documents show that 100,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been granted disability compensation. Estimates of Iraqi civilian "collateral damage" range from 30,000 to 655,000 deaths. America's reputation has been shattered, and the prospects for terrorist "blow-back" are higher.
The most important difference between these two fraud cases, however, is in accountability. The Enron executives have been brought to justice with prison sentences, multi-million dollar fines, and, in one case, by death from a heart attack brought on, perhaps, by the stress of prosecution.
more
{mos_sb_discuss:2}
