The arrest last week of former Enron executive Andrew S. Fastow was a masterpiece of news carefully crafted for public consumption. The widely distributed picture of the perp in pinstripes and handcuffs being brought to justice by grim-faced FBI agents was worth a thousand words of assertions that the government is cracking down on corporate crime.

What the picture did not show was the government – the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Bush administration and much of Congress – committing a crime all its own. The post-Enron cleanup is being mugged.

The SEC’s own initiative to appoint a new board of audit overseers, once hailed as being aggressively ahead of the legislative curve, now is bogged down as the search narrows to find board members who will balance oversight with a demonstrated ability to look the other way. During the summer, when accounting reform was all the rage, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt was solidly behind John H. Biggs, head of the pension fund TIAA-CREF and a persistent advocate for, and practitioner of, honest accounting, to head the board. Now that the rage has subsided, Mr. Pitt is backing away from Mr. Biggs, re-opening the job search for a candidate the accounting industry will find more amenable to the status quo.

This change of heart did not occur, however, merely because the accounting industry has the ear of the chairman of the government agency that regulates it. Members of Congress have applied considerable pressure on the SEC to appoint, as Rep. Michael Oxley – Republican of Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and good friend to the accounting industry puts it, “a moderate person.” Mr. Biggs, after all, holds some pretty radical views – auditors should not compromise their independence by being consultants for the same clients, businesses should rotate auditors to keep the relationship from getting too cozy, stock options should be booked as expenses, not as free money.

As if helping to weaken accounting oversight weren’t enough, members of Congress are working to make sure there’s no enforcement, in the unlikely event wrongdoing should be spotted. The Senate has approved a sizeable increase in the SEC budget to hire the watchdogs necessary to enforce the post-Enron reform law. The House, despite passing the reform law, has yet to provide the money.

The White House’s complicity in this corporate reform scam is twofold. First, it refuses to put any pressure whatsoever on the House, controlled by its own party, to provide the funding to enforce the law everyone wants credit for passing. Second, it continues to support Harvey Pitt, despite overwhelming evidence that he simply is not up to the job. It was one thing for President Bush to support Mr. Pitt last spring after it was revealed that the head of the SEC had met privately with executive of firms under SEC investigation, a clear violation of ethics rules. Now it has been revealed that Mr. Pitt did it again, just last month, and the president still sees nothing wrong.

It is always dangerous to assume that a mere change in personnel will fix things gone terribly wrong, but in this case it’s worth a try. As long as the government is setting up photo-ops to calm a skittish investing public, perhaps the next one should be of Harvey Pitt cleaning out his desk.