Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[sarai]

Devil in the Details: Of the CEOs, by the CEOs, for the CEOs
Issue Date: 7.23.02

Give George W. credit where credit is due: He promised us an administration with business principles, MBAs, wall-to-wall CEOs. And, to his woe (and ours), that's just what he's got.

In the president's cabinet, we have Commerce Secretary Don Evans, the former CEO of Tom Brown Inc.; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at various times the CEO of G.D. Searle, General Instrument Corporation and Gilead Sciences; President George W. Bush himself, former CEO (Ceremonial Events Officer) of the Texas Rangers; Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton; and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa. So you can see how the administration has become the odd man out in the debate over corporate reform.

Because nobody's more loyal to his lodge than a CEO. When a CEO arranges for a fellow CEO to serve as an outside director on his company's board, he can be sure he's picked up one more vote for his own gargantuan pay package. And when another CEO asks him to be an outside director, he knows he's there for the very same reason.

So is it any surprise that the Bush White House is sticking with CEOs even unto the end while congressional Republicans are frantically erasing those CEO numbers from their PalmPilots (so long as they're sure their fundraisers still have them)? Phil Gramm has never met a CEO he didn't like, excepting those socially conscious idiots, but even Gramm has voted for some tough penalties for criminal CEOs -- which offends this admin- istration's sense of justice (i.e., its double standard). But then, Gramm isn't Bush. He doesn't have CEOs on his team, scripting his every burp. He doesn't have Cheney coming by at nap time to defend the CEO's sovereign right to loot, or O'Neill to tuck him in and tell him that these mishaps are all part of the genius of the system. ("Should I meet this genius?" Bush wonders. "Probably bore me to death.") A different team might tell Bush that the reliability of financial reports really is a big deal, that he should try not to upset investors unduly, that he's sending the market due south. But his guys know what really matters: themselves and their buds.

In a land where they suddenly feel like strangers, where stony faces and disparaging words now mark their passage, America's CEOs know there's one house where they're always welcome -- if they can just buy that boy a second term.

http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/14/devil1.html