Glenn Reynolds has a few modest proposals about making CEOs and others accountable,
Also, let’s extend CEO responsibility to political candidates: let’s make every candidate face personal criminal responsibility for any illegal campaign contributions, just as CEOs are proposed to be liable for any accounting shenanigans that occur on their watch!
Absolutely. The most bizarre point of the whole Enron/WorldCom/whatever mess was when Al Gore came out and said,
I believe that a president of the United States facing this kind of situation ought to be restoring confidence in our economy and ought to be instructing the people in charge of these agencies to lay down the law.
Lay down the law? That’s quite a stark turnaround from Gore’s previous stock phrase, “No controlling legal authority.” How can Gore demand the government hold CEO’s accountable for their company’s financial statements when the former VP still claims he didn’t realize his speech at a Buddhist monastery was a fundraising event?
Whatever else you think of them, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were masters of phrase parsing and the sort of doubletalking nonsense that we’ve heard from Enron executives. In fact Enron executives’ claims that they were never informed about the problems in their company sound like they were plagiarized from Gore’s equally unbelievable claims that his staff kept him completely in the dark about his own fundraising.
And then there’s George W. Bush who completely whiffed on his own SEC violations. Rather than admit that he made a serious mistake in violating SEC laws about disclosure of stock sales while he served as director of Harken Energy Corp., Bush chose to dissemble and chalk it up to an innocent mistake. Give me a break. The law says insiders need to report stock sales within 10 days and Bush waited 34 weeks in one of the four late disclosures.