And Tony Judt corrected him. The following panel was on Shrub, Cheney and the corporate scandals and included Stanley Crouch, John Cassidy, David Brooks, a New Yorker writer, and Hitchens. Remnick brought up Krugman's column from today which went through the shady way Shrub made his fortune. He also asked Hitchens to relate it to Whitewater and he pointed out that the Democrats are probably miffed they got rid of the Independent Counsel. Brooks argued that the Democrats dont' want to be seen as anti-business because most of the citizenry is in the private sector(!) (and not b/c they're funded in large part by business?!) Remnick mentioned to Cassidy that this all went beyond "irrational exhuberance" and into fraud, etc., and he discussed how stock options related to both. (In order to keep the stock prices up, managers manufactured earnings through creative accounting, etc. BTW a study mentioned in a NYTimes Op-Ed today estimates that corporate America has overstated its earnings by at least 20 percent - "About half of the exaggeration reflects the lack of any recorded expense for options; the other half, manipulated operating earnings." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/12/opinion/12CADE.html ) It ended with Hitchens bringing up the Savings and Loan scandals of the 80s. (BTW McCain was implicated in those scandals. Thinking about the next go around, perhaps managment will be forced to try to keep profits and stocks up more by keeping expenses (labor) down rather than by exagerating earnings. If so, welcome to the class struggle and welcome to monopoly capitalism.)
Peter