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The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans still recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.” “Teaching children to read… will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country.” “For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.”

But he was at his deadpan best in the financial district speech: “In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character.” Ah, but seriously, folks—seriously! Telling one of these CEOs not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.

Enron begins to seem like the good old days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery, and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Halliburton—the last concerning alleged improprieties that took place in the late 90s when Dick Cheney headed the company. The business press is taking all this much more seriously than mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, “Phony earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts, directors asleep at the switch—this isn’t just a few bad apples we’re talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown…We have reached the tipping point.” Nocera and his colleagues correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis since 1929.

The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure that such scandals don’t flare again anytime soon to disrupt their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless but silly to the president, who has never known any other way of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy, which he cashed in just before his father’s war on Iraq sent Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to be registered at the SEC within two months’ time; W waited over half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism, and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much as they can are no more than Bush’s birthright. Privately he must be mystified by all the fuss.

Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the SEC—which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the crimes at hand—and a shiny new executive commission to study the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions—the rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems, for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate in deals they are “analyzing” “dispassionately” for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
The Democrats are licking their chops over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November, but it doesn’t mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It’s foolish to suppose the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man many consider prime presidential timber for 2004, Tailgunner Joe Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats not to lose their heads and turn “too populist” on big business’s perfidy.)

If ever the time was ripe for mavericks from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a little good—and, not incidentally, making names and power bases for themselves—that time is now. And once again we must ask, where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) You can pore through Wellstone’s web sites or any news archive and find only a scant few discouraging words on the corporate crime wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial, nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs under investigation has snapped and struck his wife—Paul and Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.

One thing’s for damn sure: In this most pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The Nation once called “the senator from the Left” is scarcely on radar. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone. Is there a politial candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing, reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman? Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with him. Quite a feat when you think about it.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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In our ongoing survey of bars that serve good food at odd hours, we’re pleased to report that Grumpy’s features an exhaustive—though occasionally sticky—menu of sandwiches, burgers, and delightful comfort foods, all of which we’d stand right up against the menus of any other bar anywhere in the city. We recently worked through a bad case of writer’s block by ordering the cajun pepper burger at about 3:30 p.m. It was accompanied by french fries so hot they made us stop worrying about our brains, and start worrying whether we’d ever regain feeling in our tongues. But let’s face it—we come to a place like this for the ambience, for the feeling we get, the people we see, the vibe. OK, we come for the beer. Still, we hope we’re not the first ones to tell you that Grumpy’s has quietly become the Uptown or the C.C. Club of the new millennium. The music is hard, the place fills up with single-speed cyclists and bike couriers, the reassuringly seedy downtown contingent takes over the pool tables and dartboards, and there seems to be an endless loop of Jackass videos on the numerous TV sets stashed around the place. (It’s art, y’know.) If genuine Minneapolis subcultcha has gone back underground to hibernate, this is where it comes to water itself each night. But the place is big enough and magnanimous enough that you can walk right in and feel at home without being a boho or a regular or both. (Grumpy: We’re sorry if this notice brings in the yuppies, but they can fend for themselves.) Grumpy’s, (612) 340-9738

The daily news cycle is a hungry beast with a short memory, so maybe it should come as no surprise that the revelations of Minneapolis FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley came and went so quickly. Still, you’ve got to credit W and company. The administration has dispatched her story with impressive speed and political acumen.

First they took advantage of the cover afforded by the Rowley firestorm to announce sweeping rollbacks in the U.S.’s meager rules against indiscriminate domestic spying, rules spawned by the exposure of prolific FBI abuses in the 1960s. Under the new guidelines set forth in John Ashcroft’s little-noted May 30 diktat, there is no longer any pretense that intelligence agencies need “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity to mount prolonged fishing expeditions into the affairs of private individuals.

The administration then turned to defusing Rowley’s story. Hence the rushed announcement of plans to reorganize the entire intelligence apparatus, even though the particulars are so ill-formed that Bush has no intention of soliciting funds for it this year. Thus, too, the sudden fanfare regarding the arrest of Jose Padilla a month earlier. After the Padilla story had simmered for a couple of days, the administration cheerfully conceded it was less than advertised. It was unlikely Padilla would ever be prosecuted; as a Defense Department deputy told CBS, “I don’t think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk.”

Job well done. Padilla served his purpose, which was to steal the last bit of thunder from Rowley’s Congressional testimony a few days earlier. There’s no mystery as to motive: Her disclosures concerning quashed pre-9/11 leads (along with news of the FBI’s so-called Phoenix memo and some unattended CIA leads) called into doubt a main premise of the Bush program—the frantic contention that what we need most going forward is a vastly expanded repertoire of police powers and resources.

Only the most gullible could believe that a desire to combat terror is the sole agenda here. Every administration since Reagan’s has chased after rollbacks in the civil liberties and curbs on police power wrought in the 60s and 70s by the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and post-Watergate reformers. And it’s usually done in the name of war, be it on drugs, pornography, child abuse, “welfare as we know it,” or terrorism. The present threat is certainly more real and more precipitous than the sham domestic wars of our recent past, but it’s fair to ask how much additional security we can expect to buy with a wholesale surrender of freedoms and privacy rights. The answer, by FBI Director Robert Mueller’s own sidelong admission, is probably not much. Testifying before a Senate committee in May, Mueller said that the 9/11 hijackers “contacted no known terrorist sympathizers [and] left no paper trail. … As best we can determine, the actual hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind.” In short, they seem to have done nothing that would have made them any more visible under the expansive new Bush/Ashcroft rules on snooping, electronic and otherwise, than they already were.

Once the immediate embarrassment engendered by Rowley has passed, we’re bound to see her complaint spun a different way. Why, pundits will be prompted to ask, did FBI administrators refuse to seek a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings? Another sad case of law enforcement shackled by old liberal due process rules and PR concerns. The moral: Slip the shackles! Let the FBI be the FBI! In truth (and Rowley says as much) the agency had ample cause for a warrant under existing standards, but no one in the bureaucratic daisy chain recognized the possible significance of the case or could be bothered to raise their heads to pursue it.

The apparent lesson here is that the old powers of domestic surveillance are quite potent if the FBI is doing its job. American intelligence had plenty of information about September 11, we now know. What it lacked was the coordination or the resolve to add two and two. Bush’s new cabinet department is supposed to remedy this, but no executive “clearinghouse” is going to make the FBI and the CIA/NSA play well together. Jealously safeguarding what they know, particularly from each other, is the foundation of their political power.

The official rejoinder is obvious enough: We have to err on the side of sacrificing freedoms and empowering police agencies, however marginal the gains in domestic security. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Cold comfort, wouldn’t you say, when the most glaring problem exposed to date is the intelligence machine’s failure to do anything with the information it already had?

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.