By DAN JUNEAU

Some elected officials and many in the media are having a field day bashing the business community over the corporate scandals that have recently come to light.

Certainly, no one should have any pity on corporate officials who deceive and mislead investors or potential investors. Those who do should pay a price for breach of public trust, especially those who protected their own assets while endangering those of other investors.

The media hype surrounding these scandals often paints with too broad a brush, and many honest companies and their executives are paying a price – financially and otherwise – for the sins of the few.

There are approximately 17,000 publicly traded companies in America, and only a handful have been accused of any illegal or unethical behavior.

Here is what the American business community provides voluntarily in this nation, day in and day out:
– More than 130 million jobs and health care to 177 million people.
– More than $20 billion in charitable contributions every year.
– More than $150 billion annually to clean the environment.
– The creation of a $10.4 trillion gross national product.
– A 40 percent rise in median income over the last decade.
– Wage increases that enabled two-thirds of Americans to own their own homes.

If the American people want to continue enjoying these levels of prosperity, then they have a vested interest in seeing to it that proper regulation is not substituted for the punitive agenda of those who feel their way to higher elected office runs over the corpse of American enterprise.

We do not need to reinvent our system. We need to punish those who abuse it.

The administration of President George W. Bush and the Congress have taken some strong steps to do that, including:
– Strengthening laws against corporate misconduct and improving enforcement of them.
– Making corporate boards more independent of management.
– Removing conflicts of interest from the accounting and stock analyst professions.
– Instituting new protections for participants in pension and 401(k) plans.

Passing appropriate reforms alone will not totally purge abuses from the system. Investors must understand that investments in our financial markets cannot generate large returns without the assumption of risk. Additionally, expecting well-run companies to continue to pile record profit on top of record profit is not healthy for the marketplace.

Stocks of fantastic companies often plunge, not because they had a bad earnings report, but because their earnings did not match what some pencil pushers on “The Street” advised their clients it should be.

Congress cannot outlaw unreasonable expectations of investors, but if that trend continues, the markets will carry chaos forward. The corporate scandals have focused attention on proper levels of protection in our economic system, and that is appropriate. What is inappropriate are the political jackals who are attempting to feather their own beds by impugning the reputation of good companies and the law-abiding men and women who run them.

DAN JUNEAU is the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry.