THE MORALLY ILL

The titans of telecom and corporate America are falling like the princes and kings in a Shakespearean drama. But their hubris has cost them little more than their jobs. The riches and reputations remain intact, as if they were Teflon dons. They have yet to face any real comeuppance. No one but investors and employees has yet to pay for their corporate crimes, save a poor group of accountants who thought they had dug into secure, if monotonous, careers. But if there is one thing the WorldCom debacle finally shows us, it's that the problem is not about numbers — it's about people and the temptations they succumb to when they should know better.

All over the media last week, people were asking how this could happen, seemingly shocked and almost puritanically innocent about the level of greed and immorality in corporate America. But greed and immorality are not rare traits that bubble to the surface only once a generation. A public that is willingly ignorant to the inner workings of corporate America — one that accepts too easily that it is too difficult to understand Byzantine balance sheets — is one of the things that allows corporate crooks to get away with it.

The American people should consider ourselves watchdogs of corporations just as we consider ourselves watchdogs of our president and Congress. Wall Street loves to apply the pressure and not ask the tough questions or analyze realistically how companies and people can respond to it. The Street is swift to turn a blind eye to even the most traditional corporate performers if they fail to keep it going in this terrible economy — another contributor to the temptation corporate leaders face to fudge the numbers.

One of these people accused of corporate misconduct or one of the CEOs who stepped aside before the trouble started should just answer one question for us: Why? Why do you risk the long-term future of your company and its employees, the viability of entire industries, the investments of people poorer than you, and the viability of the stock and bond indexes that weigh so heavily on our economy, just to make one quarter — or two, or five — look good?

One of these people should write a book and, if they have any sense of right and wrong left, distribute it free on street corners. The book should tell us why they did it — at what point pressure or ambition or greed shaped itself into reason enough that they did something they knew to be terribly wrong.

Many people are calling for greater regulation of corporate ethics and for the accused to go to jail. But the lobbying and legal power behind corporate America will keep us from seeing and real controls or punishments be carried out. The best punishment for these people would be to have them face the truth, acknowledge it and tell it.

Otherwise, for now, they seem to be able to hide behind God, ignorance or some past corporate good deeds that encourage people to look at them as two separate souls — a good one in personal life and the one who screws around on the job. That's insulting. There is only one thing to tell these corporate crooks: The truth will set you free. If not, a message: The devil is calling, and he's coming to collect.