After Enron.

• Author: Nader, Ralph
• Position: New laws to prevent corporate crimes will yield few changes unless the public speaks out

The Enron scandal is a supermarket of corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. There are already twelve Congressional subcommittees investigating this proliferating Enron scandal. But Congress, whose members are marinated in campaign contributions from Enron and its accountant, Arthur Andersen, cannot just hold hearings and occasionally return campaign contributions.

The members need to adopt a series of structural reforms to get at deeply embedded and recurring patterns of corporate malfeasance.

If you were looking into the minds of corporate lawyers who are being retained by Enron and Arthur Andersen, they would be saying, "Here we go again. We've gone through scandals before--perhaps not quite as high profile, but we've endured. We're going to string this along. There is going to be a pattern of imperviousness to scandal. The public will tire of it. The media will tire of it. And by a war of attrition, and by continuing to give money to key members of Congress from a variety of non-Enron, non-Arthur Andersen sources, the effort of comprehensive reform will be blunted."

The first stage of making Enron the great engine for long-overdue structural reform is to document the wrongdoing.

And it's not just Enron or Arthur Andersen. It's systemic, as George Will pointed out. There is an epidemic, a corporate crime wave documented in vain by dozens of exposes in the past decade by major media such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and 60 Minutes.

But simply documenting the wrongdoing can be a trap.

The Watergate scandal was exposed ad infinitum in the '70s, and in the end, Senators Sam Ervin and Lowell Weicker, based on their comprehensive and widely televised hearings, recommended thirty-two reforms. Only about two or three were enacted.

Later, the S&L scandals, costing taxpayers half a trillion dollars in bailouts, came and went without authentic reforms.

There is every possibility that this giant pyramid racket will ride itself out and produce a number of books and magazine articles without any fundamental change. Already, you can see Tom Donahue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others developing a strategy of quarantining Enron as just one big bad apple and not characteristic of dozens and dozens of other large companies in inflating earnings, including Lucent, Waste Management, Sunbeam, and many others.

This won't wash if we can link the scandal to the damage it has caused real people in this country: poor people, low income...