• Tom Delay : WorldCom CEO Tom Delay : WorldCom CEO Los Angeles Times, on Tom DeLay After more than a decade of power in Congress and a full term controlling the White House, the iron discipline of the conservative
• Tom Delay : WorldCom CEO
Tom Delay : WorldCom CEO
Los Angeles Times, on Tom DeLay
After more than a decade of power in Congress and a full term controlling the White House, the iron discipline of the conservative movement is cracking. The most visible fight is at its intellectual core, but the unrest rising around a congressional scandal is far more potent…
DeLay accuses his critics of using “fiction and innuendo” to accuse him of a string of ethical breaches. If it’s that simple, why would House Republicans, led by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, have bothered to purge the ethics committee of its leader, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), two other GOP legislators and several staffers? Their mistake was to have admonished DeLay for several infractions, including the strong appearance of trading political favors for campaign donations…
Most House Republicans are standing by DeLay, but their nervousness increases as next year’s midterm elections approach. The mounting charges, and a criminal investigation involving DeLay in Texas, may threaten the House leader’s reelection next year. More important is the fodder that DeLay is providing Democrats, and not just in Texas.
… By demolishing the ethics committee rather than getting out in front of the criminal investigations, House leaders weaken the politically vulnerable among their own rank and file…
Journal Star, Peoria, Ill., on white-collar crime
You could say our tears are of the crocodile variety over the conviction Tuesday of former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers for committing fraud against the company he ran into the ground while simultaneously enriching himself at the expense of thousands of employees and investors. It’s encouraging to see people who wear white collars being held accountable for their crimes, too. Ebbers’ amounted to $11 billion worth of accounting deceit, considered the largest such scandal in U.S. corporate history. He is the biggest fish yet caught in the federal government’s net to stop corporate corruption.
Unfortunately, that’s a mighty wide net…
The defenses are always the same. They didn’t know. They didn’t purposely cook the books. They’re guilty of nothing more than trusting the wrong people. They’re all just a bunch of innocent hayseeds. Come on. It’s one thing to be incompetent. It’s another to be crooked. Of course, CEOs cannot know or be responsible for the acts of every single person in their employ. What they can do is establish a culture, set a tone, in which corruption like the above is simply not tolerated. Clearly that wasn’t done at WorldCom or at any number of other corporations…
