Politicians, Businesses Collude in Corruption

Neal Gabler has a new patsy for why there is corruption in big business (“Desperately Seeking Celebrity,” Opinion, Aug. 11). In the good ol’ days of the Ivy-educated upper-crusts like the Bushes, these things never happened, he says; it is only when members of the money-grubbing, lowly, educated middle-class (like the Greek immigrant John Rigas of Adelphia) take over the corporate reins that they succumb to the temptations of wealth and celebrity. What rot!

The collusion between politics and big-business corruption has been going on for some time--and perpetrated by the likes of President Bush as well. It is just that their good ol’ boy network has always protected them. How else do you explain Martha Stewart being investigated for insider trading on a stock she had no direct relationship with while Dubya gets away with it, pretending that while he was on the board of Harken Energy Corp. (and on its audit committee) he did not know?

Sridhar Subramanian

Santa Barbara

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Why does Gabler choose the word “shenanigans” in his fourth paragraph to describe the plundering of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Adelphia? I’ve also seen these legal problems described as “woes.” The world knows what happened--these executives acted deliberately and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Words have power, and choosing to make the deeds sound like a prank (e.g., toilet-papering a house) is a breach of the writer’s ethical responsibilities.

Josh Zuckert

Laguna Beach