At last. Someone who knew the same people I knew in the government. Ray Evans Harrell
In Oversight We Trust By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN everal years ago an Indian journalist friend of mine, who was working in Indonesia, remarked to me that corruption in the Indonesian bureaucracy was so endemic that when he paid a bribe to renew his residency permit, the Indonesian official he paid off actually gave him a receipt for his bribe so my friend could be reimbursed by his newspaper. For anyone who has worked abroad, such stories are not unusual. But they are also a useful prism for examining the epidemic of corporate cheating now wracking America. Here's why: I don't blame President Bush for any accounting fraud at WorldCom or Enron. I blame him for something more important. You see, what really distinguishes American capitalism from most other countries' is not that we don't have C.E.O. crooks, but others do, or that we never have bogus accounting, bribery, corruption or other greedy excesses, but others do. No, we have all the same excesses that other capitalist nations have, because fear and greed are built into capitalism. What distinguishes America is our system's ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform those excesses - better than any other. How often do you hear about such problems being exposed in Mexico or Argentina, Russia or China? They may have all the hardware of capitalism, but they don't have all the software - namely, an uncorrupted bureaucracy to manage the regulatory agencies, licensing offices, property laws and commercial courts. Indeed, what foreigners envy us most for is precisely the city Mr. Bush loves to bash: Washington. That is, they envy us for our alphabet soup of regulatory agencies: the S.E.C., the Federal Reserve, the F.A.A., the F.D.A., the F.B.I., the E.P.A., the I.R.S., the I.N.S. Do you know what a luxury it is to be able to start a business or get a license without having to pay off some official? Sure, we have our bad apples, but most of our bureaucrats are pretty decent. In fact, our federal bureaucrats are to capitalism what the New York Police and Fire Departments were to 9/11 - the unsung guardians of America's civic religion, the religion that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll get rewarded and you won't get ripped off. Which is why I find Mr. Bush's constant denigrating of "the bureaucracy" so offensive. After his own E.P.A. issued a report in June linking fossil-fuel use to global warming, Mr. Bush dismissed the study by saying that he "read the report put out by the bureaucracy," as if that explained why it couldn't be credible. During the campaign, on Nov. 1, 2000, Mr. Bush, in one of his many trashings of the federal bureaucracy then and since, declared: "The I.R.S. just announced they're going to hire an additional 2,079 bureaucrats. My opponent talks about fighting for the people against the powerful. But it works out a little differently under his plan. In his case, more audits for people, more power for the I.R.S. And that's the heart of his agenda: a fundamental belief in the federal government, a lack of trust and faith in ordinary Americans. . . . I trust people; he trusts the government." That is the real George Bush - a man who trusts his C.E.O. cronies more than the bureaucratic regulators who oversee them. And that's why he brought in the Harvey Pitts of the world to weaken that oversight. Well, count me among those naïve fools with a fundamental belief in the federal government - not because I have no faith in ordinary Americans, but because I have no trust in ordinary Big Oil, ordinary Enron or ordinary Harken Energy to do the right thing without proper oversight. If our markets are rattled right now and foreigners are starting to wonder, it isn't just because people are worried about WorldCom or Enron. It's because they're worried about the S.E.C. and the I.R.S. They are worried about the unique American software, designed to regulate the whole system, being undermined by people who have no real respect for it. What triggered the 489-point one-day rise in the Dow last week? It was word that Congress had agreed on a plan to create a new independent oversight board for the accounting industry. Reading the polls, Mr. Bush is suddenly all for it. Good. Maybe now he'll appreciate that so much of America's moral authority to lead the world derives from the decency of our government and its bureaucrats, and the example we set for others. These are not things to be sneered at by a president. They are things to be cherished, strengthened and praised every single day. Forum: Join a Discussion on Thomas L. Friedman's Columns (Moderated) Click Here to Receive 50% Off Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. 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