Grimy hands.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

In the very first issue of this magazine back in 1909, our founder, Senator Robert M. La Follette, warned of the powers of big business. He noted that corporations not only dominate the economy but "rule through the very men elected to represent the people." The battle to take back power from corporations, he said, "will be the longest and hardest ever fought for democracy."

In recent days, we've had the simulacrum of such a battle. A shocked, shocked Congress and a Bush pretending to be a Roosevelt railed against corporate greed and put on the books a new law to combat accounting fraud.

There is a comical edge to George W. Bush's newfound concern about corporate chicanery. Long the captain of capitalism's pom-pom squad, Bush now tries to come across as the Frank Serpico of Wall Street, thundering, "No more easy money for corporate criminals, just hard time."

This is not an easy act to pull off, especially since Bush and Dick Cheney both are personally implicated in the very chicanery at issue today: Bush for alleged insider trading and accounting trickery when he was a director at Harken Energy Corporation, and Cheney for dubious accounting practices when he was CEO at Halliburton, practices the SEC is still investigating. (Bush's "Corporate Fraud Task Force" is finally one task force he couldn't appoint Cheney to head.)

I'm reminded of something my father's been saying lately: "The Republicans care about only two things: God and greed--and in no particular order."

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was hardly more illuminating than Bush. "Infectious greed," he told us, was the cause of the debacle. "It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."

And why is that? Because our elected officials paved those avenues, barely set...