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America’s Homegrown Economic ‘Terrorists’
For the week of July 3 - 9, 2002
Commentary
by Pat Murphy

Through and through, men and women of raw avarice placed their personal greed for wealth above codes of honesty and loyalty to clients and employees and the nation.

Remember the principal objective in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorism manifesto?

He said he would inflict economic havoc on the United States.

He did his devastating best with airborne attacks on New York and Washington nine and a half months ago. Preliminary costs already are in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- rebuilding New York City’s World Trade Center; compensating victims’ families; lost business in the travel and lodging industry; stepped up homeland security safeguards; investigations, detentions and prosecutions; combined military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.

But there also are homegrown economic "terrorists" in our midst who’re wreaking their own havoc -- red-blooded, all-American, flag-waving, God-fearing, free enterprise-loving business CEOs who’ve rigged books of major corporations to fraudulently enrich themselves while robbing millions of American families who trusted them of their security and well being.

Last week’s crash of just one firm, WorldCom, second only to AT&T in the long-distance field, had a devastating impact on employee pension funds in the states of New York and California.

New York’s investment in WorldCom was more than $300 million. California was in for more than $500 million. That’s nearly one billion dollars invested in just one company from two state pension funds.

The bad news will get worse as other pensions funds report their losses.
(More: Idaho Mountain Express News Source)
2002 © The Idaho Mountain Express.

Dan