Freeze ’em high: There was a halting quality to George W. Bush’s delivery of his Wall Street speech on corporate corruption, in contrast to his cool, U.S. marshal style when speaking of terrorism, cosmic evil and other things he knows nothing about.

Perhaps he was hindered by a little knowledge of his subject. It can happen to anyone.A Canadian Press story said he sounded “determined” but lacked the “passion he regularly brings to the subject of rooting out terrorism.”

It’s too bad he didn’t find a way to connect the problem to evil, with which he feels comfy. He came close when he said the business schools should teach “right and wrong and not surrender to moral confusion and relativism.” I admire anyone who can find space in a speech on corporate greed to include an attack on political correctness and a little blurb for family values — or whatever that odd phrase was meant to mean.

There was a halting quality to his solutions, too: doubling maximum jail time for financial fraud to ten years; a temporary freeze on “improper payments to corporate executives.” As Texas governor, he approved 152 executions in six years, many dubious, and never seemed to feel that was excessively harsh.

On Wall Street, he said “the punishment must be as serious as the crime,” so I guess he doesn’t think the crime is too serious.Yet he felt a need to “reaffirm the basic principles and rules that make capitalism work.” That sounds serious. No one had anticipated a need to reaffirm capitalism at this point.

The end of the Cold War seemed to terminate the challenge from socialism. Future trouble might come from retrograde forces such as Islamic fundamentalism, not from cracks and rot in capitalism itself. Yet a piece in The Globe and Mail says the system is “malfunctioning,” and a poll finds that fifty-five per cent have lost faith in the stock market.

Recently, my financial adviser, always a markets booster who never, to my knowledge, showed even mild irreverence on the topic, sent out a letter headed: “Remaining U.S. CEOs make a break for it: Band of roving chief executives spotted miles from Mexican border.” The letter went on to say, “Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break . . . plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.”

I don’t know if she wrote it or just passed it on, but I consider her behaviour far more ominous for the capitalist system than the calibrated snickering on Leno or Letterman.

I suppose there were calibrated eyerolls at the speech when the President, who sold off a pile of stock in Harken Energy in 1990, just before the price dropped, said “responsible business leaders do not jump ship during hard times” and talked about their “willingness to be held accountable for their actions.”

Or, as Satirewire put it, “Bush vows crackdown on corporate corruption unless it happened in 1990. Also exempts executives whose last name begins with B.”

The false dichotomy rides again: Canadian pundits were unimpressed by protesters at the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Alberta. “Their critique, such as it is, of the modern world” is “total,” wrote Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail.

“The anti-everything-that-works movement,” said Mark Steyn in the National Post. Rex Murphy on CBC said they know what they’re against but not what they’re for. Lazy negativity is an odd charge to level at a movement typified by teach-ins, alternate summits, Web sites with detailed analyses of technical documents, even books on globalization initiatives such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) that never happened.

Graham Fraser in The Toronto Star took a more original tack. He recalled his father, journalist Blair Fraser, asking in the 1960s whose trip to North Vietnam more affected U.S. policy on that war: radical Jane Fonda’s or “very respectable New York Times” reporter Harrison Salisbury, who found that U.S. bombing was ineffective?

It’s an odd argument. U.S. media hardly paid attention to Vietnam, and certainly not critical attention, till domestic protesters — including their own kids — forced the issue. Without the radicals, and not just movie stars, it’s doubtful the New York Times would have sent one of their own stars over.

At any rate, just as food for thought, consider Colombia, site of the world’s longest and bloodiest ongoing conflict (3,500 deaths a year and counting). Since 1992, twenty-nine journalists have been killed there, some murdered, others caught in the line of fire.

By May of this year alone, forty-four union leaders had been murdered; last year, there were 129; in the past decade, 1,500. This omits other slain dissidents: from churches, rights groups etc. Stats globally are comparable. To state the obvious: There would be no conflict for journalists to risk their lives in if the protests weren’t mounted first.

I mean no disrespect to the journalists, many of them deeply committed to justice and peace. But I doubt they felt they were in a competition about influence with the protesters.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.