Is This Really How CEO's Talk?!

Ron Suskind has a great little piece in the NYTimes today about the last big financial crisis the Bush administration "dealt" with -- Enron. Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill are portrayed as indignantly prescient, saying that earnings are an odd measure of corporate health and that dividends should be cited instead. But one line is just jaw-dropping in it's degree of self-satire.

An article about the meeting appeared a few days later in The Wall Street Journal. The next day, Mr. O’Neill was in Florida addressing chief executives of America’s top 20 financial services companies. They piled on. One told the Treasury secretary that he’d “rather resign” than be held accountable for “what’s going on in my company.” A phalanx of outraged financial industry chiefs, many of them large Republican contributors, called the White House. Real reform was a political dead letter.

Resign... rather than be held accountable for "what's going on in my company." Isn't that your fucking job?!? If this is the sort of negligence and incompetent management at the top of our great corporate institutions, they deserve every painful moment of this financial crisis.