Corporate Criminals Beyond Martha

Lee Drutman writes in TomPaine.com that last week's conviction of Martha Stewart is just a pinprick compared to the far more serious and damaging corporate abuses engineered by executives at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the like. Stewart is merely "a tiny tiny drop in a big big bucket. If government prosecutors are really serious about sending a message on corporate crime, it seems they've got a whole ocean to fry."

Drutman is of course right. But prosecutors need to start someplace. Ebbers, Skilling and others have all been indicted in those larger corporate fraud scandals. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is beginning to make it tougher for corporate directors to pretend they don't know what's going on and for the SEC to complain it lacks resources to investigate and punish corporate misconduct. Yes, it is going to take a long time, but the culture of permissiveness -- very much like the liberal, leftist sentiments that Republican corporate executives love so much to parody -- infecting America's corporations is indeed starting to change.

 Posted by glenn