Maybe ex-Hydro One president Eleanor Clitheroe was just taking the advice of all those fiscal conservatives who want government to operate more like a business.

Her own alleged misconduct might not of had the scope of, say, the CEOs at Enron and WorldCom but according to her former employers who fired her for “inappropriate behaviour,” Clitheroe billed $300,000 in limos, borrowed money to renovate her house and bought personal items with her Hydro One credit card.

As a result of these allegations, Clitheroe has lost a job that provided her with a $CDN6 million-dollar severance package (which she will not receive, though she is still eligible for a $CDN150,000 annual pension), along with other perks.

Clitheroe’s deal was a result of former Ontario premier Mike Harris’ plan to privatize Hydro One. That’s when salaries went up to the point that Clitheroe, a former Ontario deputy finance minister, was paid $2.2 million-dollars last year. (By contrast, her replacement, Tom Parkinson, will earn $400,000.)

If he could find Canada on a map, our neighbour down south, American President George W. Bush, might have included her in the bushel of corporate apples he took to task earlier this month over the scandals that have plagued companies such as Enron, WorldCom, Xerox and Tyco and have resulted in a dive in the stock market.

In a plan that has been widely written off as toothless and ineffective, Dubya has pledged stiffer penalties for corporate malfeasance and thrown in a nifty sounding financial crimes SWAT team for good measure.

Even if Bush’s plan got to the root of the structural problems that led to the corporate infamies in the first place — which would involve, among other things, beefing up oversight organizations and banning basic conflicts of interest like auditors working as consultants for the same companies they scrutinize — there’s something so outrageously disingenuous about the first MBA president (as he keeps reminding us) chastising the corporate sector for breaking the rules.

While the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating Dallas-based Halliburton Co. , where U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney formerly worked as chief executive, Bush himself is ducking questions about the 1990 SEC investigation of Harken Energy Corporation, when Bush, who used to be a director, dumped a pile of stocks just before the price dropped.

Meanwhile, Harvey Pitt, head of SEC and the man in charge of cleaning up this mess, has his own checkered past. During the Clinton administration, Pitt, then head of the accountants’ lobby, helped block a SEC plan to ban auditors from being hired as consultants by the companies they audited. Fast-forward a decade and, thanks to Pitt, you have the compromised auditors of Enron and WorldCom.

It’s no coincidence that at the same time American-style capitalism prevailed, the public sector began to be widely denigrated by conservative politicians who thought governments should be made to run like businesses. In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who famously labeled government as “the problem not the solution,” deregulated the savings and loans associations.

Although the ensuing scandals cost taxpayers billions, the privatization of public services and the attacks on so-called Big Government have persisted.

Like Reagan, conservative politicians like former premier Harris and Bush favour the private sector over the public. They deregulate, privatize, ease environmental protections, erode public services, gut socialized medicine and public education, cut funding to oversight bodies and limit the power of unions and other associations that protect people without power from being abused.

With tens of thousands out of work and some $USD630 billion-dollars lost from pension plans, the Bush administration has conveniently placed the blame on what Alan Greenspan has dubbed the “infectious greed” of a few bad CEOs. They were greedy, it’s true, but that’s only part of the problem.

If WorldCom cooked its books, if Enron CEOs were fraudulent, if auditors looked the other way, and if Eleanor Clitheroe is proved to have abused her position, it’s because their respective governments allowed them to. Instead of protecting the people they were elected to serve, they helped line the pockets of wealthy executives.