Financial reform: Luce thinking

While failure might breed success, success certainly breeds failure

Organizations inevitably undermine their aims and ultimately themselves

No good reform won’t be corrupted

And today’s morsel from the cockeyed pessimist:

No language won’t be perverted.

As we know, there are people who have made a lucrative career out of that last
one. They are able to take the semantic purpose of a word or phrase and twist
it completely around.

Some, like my super spinnerman friend Frank Luntz, have turned this into a
lucrative art form. But he’s hardly alone in this pursuit of distortion.

Consider former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and our word du jour, “innovation.”

As in Paulson testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and
saying, “As I think about it, it’s very hard to regulate against
innovation.”

What an innocent word it is, defined as “something new or different.” That
would be for the normal person, who would see innovation as something desirable
to which we want to aspire. Unfortunately, the distortionists have taken the
expression and used it as the justification for creative cheating and a
rationalization for blocking effective reform.

They paint dire pictures about how restraints will stifle credit, drying up
businesses that will be starved of the money they can only get if the bankers
and investment houses are allowed to concoct imaginative ways to keep the cash
flowing.

Unfortunately, it usually ends up flowing into their own pockets. But hey, it’s
“innovation.” That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It is. Except far too often
it’s not, when shady operators have no fear of the law.

Unless our politicians enact reasonable protections, we can paraphrase Clare
Boothe Luce and know for sure that “No bad deeds will be punished.”

Visit Mr. Franken’s website at www.bobfranken.tv.