Independence daze: Sleepwalking past the corporate crime wave

We're going to hear this Independence Day about how America has never been stronger.


The trouble is, it's not true.

The business scandals that couldn't get worse after Enron did get worse with WorldCom. The scandals that were supposedly the work of "a few bad apples," to use President Bush's phrase, instead turned out to be so pervasive that daily revelations of wrongdoing have become the norm.

If a foreign power had inflicted this damage on the U.S. economy - hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars in nest eggs wrecked, entire regional economies pulverized - it would have been seen as an act of war deserving the most severe retribution.

Instead, the damage is the work of our homegrown business elite - the best paid fifth column in history.