The legacy of the 90's is the legacy of the Little Lie. That is a lie which was told to help the teller, but was defended on the grounds that it HAD to be told to serve or protect a greater good.
Before Bob Shrum or Lanny Davis hit the speed dialer to call me, I am not blaming this on Bill Clinton. He didn't invent the Little Lie, although his "It depends on what your definition of is is" will certainly be used, for the next two million years, to define it.
We did it to Clinton. They did it to Newt.
The blizzard of ethics complaints lodged by one side against the other's leader were largely based upon the Little Lie. A relatively small indiscretion was seized upon as the worst outrage since Watergate. Indeed, we spun the press furiously to get them to append the word "-gate" to each scandal thus giving it appropriate mass.
Big Time Political Operatives on both sides of the ledger were part of it. We routinely hired very smart researchers to look at every vote of an incumbent; find a minor section of a major piece of legislation for which he or she had voted; and then ran television ads which made it sound like that vote was likely to cause the end of civilization.
The Little Lie told, not because we might have received a win bonus, because it was important to elect our candidate for the benefit of the voters.
Almost every sitting member of the House and the Senate has been the (perhaps) reluctant beneficiary of that kind of campaigning.
So, we should not be shocked when we learn that corporate executives have been engaging in the Little Lie. The Little Lie might have moved revenues to one quarter while booking the related expenses in another. A small bookkeeping maneuver, once accomplished became easier. And once revenues declined became more necessary.
It enriched them personally. But they were employing tens of thousands of people, allowing hundreds of thousands more to successfully invest in their stock, and successfully providing a product or service to the marketplace.
This past Saturday there were two more stories that made one's shoulders sag, and one's head shake sadly.
The first had this headline in the Washington Post atop a story by David S. Hilzenrath: "Former Rite Aid Officials Indicted; U.S. Says Executives Inflated Profits, Diverted Funds." It is the now oft-told story: inflating the company's earnings, destroying evidence subpoenaed by the government, tampering with a witness and secretly moving company funds to private business.
The second was a story about the president of Amtrak, David Gunn, threatening to shut down the national railway system by midweek if they don't get a $200 million loan guarantee. In testimony before a Senate committee, again according to the Post, Gunn "said Amtrak lost $200 million more than previously believed in fiscal 2001 - $1.19 billion instead of $990 million."
How can the president of Amtrak - and its board - miss by more than TWENTY PERCENT in knowing how much it lost? Choose your feasance: Non- (They were too dumb to know what was going on) Mis- (they chose not to know what was going on) or Mal- (they knew, but chose not to disclose). In any event, Gunn should be gone.
Last week, this reached tabloid temperature in a story about drug maker Imclone. Imclone's stock collapsed after the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve an anti-cancer drug.
The mother-of-all-media Martha Stewart, dumped her stock in that company just before the FDA ruling became public and is now up to her gardening bandana in a scandal based upon her having received insider information.
Whether or not Ms. Stewart was given an illegal tip-off to bail out, her broker at Merrill Lynch has been placed on administrative leave not, presumably, for forgetting to make the next pot of coffee in the brokerage break room.
The good news in all this is: The corporate Little Lies are being uncovered. And the political Little Lies are being ignored.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today the difference between mis- mal- and non-feasance, and the usual things.
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