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While Wall Street executives breathed a sigh of relief, Main Street was not soothed by President Bush's speech on corporate responsibility. The speech was highly anticipated, but many came away with the feeling that it's going to be business as usual, at least until the next Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal surfaces.

The President's argument is that the system isn't broken, just victim of a few bad apples that have spoiled the bushel. But until investors believe that cooking the books is not the rule but the exception in corporate America, stock prices won't recover.

Make no mistake about it, the president did add something to the discussion. Putting the weight and moral authority of the office of the president behind a move toward reform is a good step. But it all boils down to money: the $100 million earmarked for the SEC and its efforts to enforce current laws.

And his creation, by executive order, of a Corporate Fraud Task Force, may cause a few crooked executives to lose sleep, but by and large it will be business as usual. That is, until the system is overhauled.

The task force will have the resources of the Department of Justice at their disposal, but interagency coordination is hard to implement. It works in theory, but rarely in fact. Take for instance the ATF, FBI and the CIA, or the huge obstacles facing Tom Ridge and his Homeland Security Department. And when it does work, it takes time, lots of time before everything clicks. I'm not sure investors, weary of the scandals, are willing to give them that time, as their savings shrink more and more.

Increasing maximum jail time only works if maximum jail time is actually served. As I wrote last week, few, if any, white collar criminals go to jail. Many get off with just a slap on the wrist and a fine. Even enacting laws against document shredding rings hollow when you realize these actions were illegal to begin with. Morality can't be legislated.

With all the outside auditors, analysts, bankers and regulators pouring over the financials, how the heck did billions of dollars in expenses hide? No one had access to the complete picture, that's how. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing at many of these huge operations, giving the one at the top cart blanche to make all the mis-statements in the world. And consultants and auditors, in their never-ending quest for fees, don't make the hard call, in fear of not getting paid.

Main Street believes that auditors should be independent of the concern whose books they examine. But if you listened to any of the testimony (or lack of testimony) at Monday's WorldCom hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, you see that it isn't just politics that makes strange bedfellows. The potential financial reward can make a lot of normally-upright people look the other way, or offer their help in pumping up that bottom line.

Getting CEOs to justify their compensation packages may offer the only moment of levity in this whole crisis of confidence. I can't wait to see the creative strategies involved in that exercise. According to Reuters, CEO compensation packages in 1980 were 42 times that of the average worker. By 2000, that multiple had risen to 531.

Want even more outlandish statistics? FORTUNE crunched the numbers for 1990 to 2000 and, using the industry leaders in each group, found that the compensation for the top guy at the financial services leader, Citgroup, grew 12,444 percent! The head of the largest conglomerate, General Electric, saw his compensation jump nearly 2500 percent! This while the Consumer Price Index, which determines cost-of-living increases for Social Security and veterans' benefits, rose at a meager 32 percent. And the average New York City teacher's salary rose just 20 percent.

When CEO pay is tied to the performance of their stock, an inherent conflict of interest exists. And when they are the ones that give the numbers to the auditors, independent or not, it's hard to find the truth. That's what the investors at WorldCom are learning, the hard way.

So, a few bad apples co-opted the system for their own advantage. There will always be bad apples. But since we now know that there are flaws in the system that can be abused, we must fix the system so that this doesn't happen again, and again, and again. And that may mean not only the end to cozy relationships but huge CEO compensation packages as well.