Posted on 07/27/2002 5:42:33 PM PDT by gcruse
There was a major scandal in Wall Street this week when a rogue US corporation was found not to have been fiddling the books. "We can't imagine how this has been allowed to happen," said the shame-faced auditors. The chief financial officer immediately resigned in disgrace as it was revealed that the firm's profits were exactly what he'd claimed they were, with no trace of false accounting or the artificial inflation of share prices. However, it is thought the chance of this happening in other US corporations remains very slim. The only thing that is surprising about the wave of financial scandals engulfing America is that everyone is so surprised. Well, who'd have thought it - the most aggressive capitalists making inexplicably huge profits turn out to have been cheating! You stop regulating big business and the directors take advantage to make themselves huge illicit fortunes! And we'd all thought they'd made those extra billions by doing a paper round every morning before work. The most common method of fraud has been to artificially inflate share prices by exaggerating company profits. Suspicions should have been raised when the revenue for the last financial year was given by an eight-year-old boy who excitedly announced the official figure to be a billion, trillion, gillion, quillion, zillion! Or when the figure at the end of the annual report had two zeros scrawled on the end in red felt tip pen. For a country obsessed by crime, Americans are having to learn that criminals come in a variety of guises. Police officers are making up for lost time as public opinion turns against the new hate figures in US society. America's isolated accountant community, for many years shunned due to their strange stripy suits and incomprehensible language, are now being openly persecuted. "We're not all fraudsters," implored a spokesman. "In fact only 3.34% in the last fiscal quarter rising in line with projected forecasts," he went on, but already he seemed to be losing the journalists' attention. Secret video footage has just been released showing traffic cops dragging an innocent auditor out of his car and beating him up. "Thought you could offset projected profit short fall by excluding capital outlay huh, you four-eyed geek?" (punch!) "Trying to overstate company revenues by hiding loan repayments, eh? God, you pinstripe punks make me sick." (kick!) In the nearby financial district, auditors reacted angrily, not rioting exactly, but the nearest equivalent for accountants. Desks were left untidy, computer keyboards were left uncovered by polythene dust sheets, lids left off fountain pens. Witnesses said they had not seen such untidy scenes since the great double-entry ledger protests of 1968. As the stock markets crashed, millions of ordinary citizens lost their pensions and savings, and George Bush announced that he would take tough action to deal with whoever had done so much damage to American interests. US bombers were dispatched to mete out the usual punishment, but then swiftly called back when it was explained to the president that the perpetrators worked in Wall Street and bombing New York might not go down too well right now. Then his advisers sat him down and very slowly explained the nature of modern corporate fraud from start to finish, finally declaring: "So you see, Mr President, that's why billions of dollars have now disappeared." "I understand. So did anyone see the getaway car?" "No, it wasn't stolen sir. It was fraud." "So these are counterfeit dollars we're looking for. Do we have the numbers?" "Sir, it's not real money, these are just figures in a computer." "Geez, they shouldn't have left the money in the computer, that's always the first thing these guys steal." The reason that this crisis is so damaging to the president is that this sort of unfettered capitalism is exactly what the global village idiot is all about. Not only is he the champion of unregulated business, but Enron and their like also paid for his election campaign. Maybe it was Enron's auditors who counted up the ballot papers which handed him victory after getting less votes than his opponent. Bush has promised to be tough on these super-rich fraudsters, so we can expect them to go to prison for the rest of their day. Because something tells me that America's billionaires will receive less punishment than an ordinary US citizen would. Of course wiping out the pensions and savings for millions of ordinary people is a crime that deserves the sack. But once they're unemployed let's just hope they don't make any false claims for minor social security payments because then they'd really be in trouble.
WFTR
Bill
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