Following Enron's [and Worldcom's] demise Congress enacted Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to ensure the transparency of management practices for public companies. Enron's financial engineers had created off-book derivatives that worked just like an off-shore toilet: they would dump all their "phantom" debt there, but unfortunate for Enron's executives, the flusher didn't work. The debt was actually real. Enron was able to hide its debt so long as its energy revenues were growing. Once that stopped the house fell down.

Years ago when Tenant, Columbia and others were building out their networks, they purchased thousands of local community hospitals. They were viewed as undervalued assets. These large health conglomerates issued bonds to finance their acquisitions, and the first thing they'd do upon purchasing a small community hospital would be to sell the land it was on to one of their REITs. The community hospital then would begin paying rent to the REIT, and that in turn ultimately financed the acquisition. Community hospitals were effectively refinanced and mortgaged, instead of being free and clear of debt burden. No longer did the community hospital operate as an entity standing on fully paid for land. Historically, before the massive reconsolidation by Wall Street, Community Hospitals paid no rent. Why is this important?

During the Clinton years much was said about "bridging the digital divide." On Charlie Rose recently Leo Apotheker, CEO of German software giant SAP referred to enterprise-wide computer networks as a "nervous system." In listening I drifted back to the time just before the event of 9-11. What if government computers (at C.I.A., F.B.I., etc.) had all been able to "talk" and share/analyze/intelligate aggretized data? What if there had been an interchangeability and exchangeability? Aren't these largely the kind of "hi-tech" public works projects we need in today's economy?