John Ashcroft's justice department's big investigation this year was just as shocking as when Claude Rain's character discovered that gambling was going on in the back room at Rick's. They labored mightily and discovered that there were (shock) whores plying their trade in New Orleans! That is what happens when the authorities are more interested in peeking into our bedrooms than stripping the covers off the goings on in America's boardrooms. That is where the real whores are plying their trade - and the customer doesn't even get kissed first.

Well, the chickens are roosting in the Wall Street coop. When company managers are compensated based upon the speculative value of common stock and not the profitability of the company's operations how is anyone surprised when the books are cooked and the stockholder's fleeced. Irrational exuberance has given way to infectious greed and no one has addressed the compensation issue that enabled the crash of 2002.

When the CEOs and CFOs are compensated by bargain stock purchase options they are not being given a stake in the company's future - they are being given a motive to inflate an already artificially high stock price.

The President's parlay of a failed oil patch company, Spectrum, into a place at the Texas Rangers table was simply a example of a peripheral player scooping up a load of crumbs according to those rules. Value did not matter. Movement of the stock price did.

The fact is that there is no rational connection between prices on the exchanges and the company profits or losses. The fact is that when the public buys stock on the exchange they are not investing in the company. Except for initial public offers not one cent flows into the company's treasury. Buyers on the exchange are not "investing in the company" or even in American Business. They are betting at the Big Casino that the next better will pay more than he did.
It ain't Clinton's fault that the bet was a bad one. It ain't Dubya's fault either. The problem is systemic and it hasn't been addressed - and won't be.