Grimy hands. (Editor's Note).

In the very first issue of this magazine back in 1909, our founder, Senator Robert M. La Follette, warned of the powers of big business. He noted that corporations not only dominate the economy but "rule through the very men elected to represent the people." The battle to take back power from corporations, he said, "will be the longest and hardest ever fought for democracy."

In recent days, we've had the simulacrum of such a battle. A shocked, shocked Congress and a Bush pretending to be a Roosevelt railed against corporate greed and put on the books a new law to combat accounting fraud.

There is a comical edge to George W. Bush's newfound concern about corporate chicanery. Long the captain of capitalism's pom-pom squad, Bush now tries to come across as the Frank Serpico of Wall Street, thundering, "No more easy money for corporate criminals, just hard time."

This is not an easy act to pull off, especially since Bush and Dick Cheney both are personally implicated in the very chicanery at issue today: Bush for alleged insider trading and accounting trickery when he was a director at Harken Energy Corporation, and Cheney for dubious accounting practices when he was CEO at Halliburton, practices the SEC is still investigating. (Bush's "Corporate Fraud Task Force" is finally one task force he couldn't appoint Cheney to head.)

I'm reminded of something my father's been saying lately: "The Republicans care about only two things: God and greed--and in no particular order."

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was hardly more illuminating than Bush. "Infectious greed," he told us, was the cause of the debacle. "It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."

And why is that? Because our elected officials paved those avenues, barely set a speed limit, and took the cops off the beat.

Greenspan himself, he somewhat sheepishly admitted to Congress in July, was in favor of the deregulation of the accounting industry that led to this mess. He had assumed that "regulation by government was utterly unnecessary and, indeed, most inappropriate. I was wrong," he admitted.

For Greenspan, this must have been a nasty plate of crow. A devotee of Ayn Rand, the archangel of free marketeers, Greenspan has championed unfettered markets. But what the current Wall Street scandals so obviously show is that it is the essence of the free market to cut corners, not only on ledgers, but also on environmental regulations, workplace hazards, product safety, and wages and hours. The pressure to show short-term profits is almost irresistible, and if they can't be had legitimately, corporate execs will get them any way they can.

Don't blame a sudden outbreak of "infectious greed." Blame Adam Smith's grimy invisible hand.

While it's amusing to watch Greenspan chow down, and it's well-nigh hilarious to see politicians falling all over each other to denounce the corporations they swathed and suckled along the way, at least some of the nonsense about the magic of the free market is being dispelled.

But the great battle has barely begun. As La Follette urged almost a century ago, we must make our elected officials responsive to the people, not private industry. Only then will full democracy prevail.