Enron Guys Convicted. How about Fannie Mae?

Good. Enron’s crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, have been convicted in federal court of lying to investors in the meltdown of Enron back in 2000. Writes Greg Farrell in USATODAY:

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling said they always relied on the lawyers and accountants who signed off on Enron's earnings statements. Jurors said they should have relied on the truth.

This is a principle that goes to the foundation of law. People have an obligation to know what the law is and what is going on in the institutions they lead. If you are CEO of a major company about half of your job should be checking up on what people are telling you. Otherwise you are not doing your job.

So now the federal government has got convictions in nearly all of the headline corporate scandals that surfaced when the economy went south in 2000.

Last year, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers of encouraging his subordinates to cook his company's books. The year before, former Adelphia CEO John Rigas was convicted of fraud and misuse of investor funds. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau won a conviction last year of former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski and his CFO, Mark Swartz.

Now, could we please deal with the government’s rotten apples?

For a start there is Fannie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage bond issuer. The Wall Street Journal opines that the regulator’s report on FNMA’s tangled accounting indicates that “the internal rot is even worse than we ever imagined.”

Then there is the outrage in Congress that the executive branch, backed up by a warrant from the judicial branch, dared to execute a search warrant on a congressman’s Capitol Hill office. Excuse me, but I don’t see the problem with this. I seem to remember a Contract With America twelve years ago that declared that Congress should obey the same laws as the rest of America.

It’s easy to rag on business, and many people do. But business is continually reinventing itself. You could say that it has reinvented itself at least twice in the last century. And whenever it is a little slow to clean up, why there are a dozen sleek United States Senators ready to do it for them.

But government doesn’t seem to get it. Nor does education, a vast rent-seeking monster. Nor does the non-profit sector, a vast mirror of vanity.

Some of us are getting a little impatient out here. Putting corporate crooks in jail is just a start. We want the same enthusiasm for catching government crooks.