At 25/01/02 20:27 -0800, Michael Perelman wrote: >Keats, Charles. 1982. Magnificent Masquerade: The Strange Case of >Dr. Coster and Mr. Musica (NY and London: Garland). >Philip Musica, a NY swindler, who created the false identity > of Dr. Coster, took over McKesson Robbins. He weathered the > Depression by creating fictitious profits from a Canadian > firm. false invoices were forged to obtain very positive > financial reports for auditors. His machinations went > unnoticed until 1940, when internal political difficulties > rather than a failure to pay dividends led to the discovery. > > >I believe that he was seriously considered as a person with presidential >potential.
Yes why not? He clearly had some qualities generalisable to being a president. And don't politicians fall usually because of internal political difficulties rather than strict logical application of standards. I would like to take the wider economic point further. During recessions we always hear of financial scandals. That of course does not mean that they do not occur at other phases of the economic cycle: they just do not become manifest as scandals. We need to draw a wider conclusion: absolutely all economic activity occurs within a penumbra of understandings, webs, and alliances around the strict exchange of commodities and their mathematical accounting. The signals of mutual sympathy, alliance and understanding are also use values of great psychological and material importance, although they are not traded as commodities and do not have a declared price. The bourgeois legal model in which atomised bourgeois right, and atomised bourgeois legal obligations, are applied impartially in a way that reflects the ideal conventions of the exchange of commodities, exists nowhere in pure concrete form. There is always a contradiction between this ideal of a fragmented bourgeois right and the reality of human social and economic intercourse. It becomes overtly antagonistic when other contradictions have precipitated a crisis of the system. Western accounting systems are to a large extent fuzzy fiction. They get exposed at times of crisis, but unfortunately people think that the particular case is the exception, rather than the norm. Chris Burford London
