“Big business is the elevated province of crooked white men,” a white friend who worked on Wall Street once told me.

Of course, given the ruthlessness of the drug trade and other illegal businesses that are far more racially integrated, I don’t think we can assume that there would be more or less honesty at the top if there were greater ethnic diversity.

A snake is a snake, whether it arrives in a cardboard box or a limousine.

My Wall Street friend actually knew that about snakes but was sure we would have far fewer problems in the world of big money if lawmakers ever rose to the challenge and the national responsibility of putting laws in place that would really paste guys caught with their hands inside the platinum piggy bank.

I agree.

Back when Ivan Boesky’s egg got creamed, this Wall Street buddy of mine took the position that a 20-year sentence would “have put these gold-plated clucks in their place. They are greedy, all right, but they’re cowards first.”

He was probably right because the superficial cleanliness of high financial fraud, of doctored figures, of excessive claims, of blatant disrespect of investors seems more academic than real, more of a game even though white-collar crime can have effects just as brutal as blue-collar or no-collar crime.

So we need to do certain specific things: Our government needs to encourage the reorganization of these corporations so CEOs are not allowed to run almost wild in their greed. And, yes, such culprits should get long sentences for committing their crimes, even if they took place in the suites as opposed to the streets.

It has become part of the kind of capitalism that has evolved in this nation, at least since the big arguments over slavery and profits. The issue was not that one had plantations upon which people worked, from dawn to dusk, from young to old. The issue was that plantation owners could not own the workers as well. They could not buy and sell them like so many animals.

The heaviest point of all and it has been applied over and over and will have to continue to be applied over and over is that the profit motive, morality and ethics have to come together if we are to have civilization as opposed to barbarism under capitalism.

A civilized capitalist surely wants to profit from his goods, but he also does not want his goods to cost his fellow citizens more than their dollars-and-cents price.

A barbaric capitalist, like a crack dealer, does not care what his product does as long as it provides profit. The hell with the world. Hooray for me.

So we have to aim for civilized capitalism and realize that our very humanity guarantees periodic repeats of startling scandals. The flawed nature of the species will always reappear.

Our challenge is to rein in and imprison the crooks to punish them on the level that they deserve, to resurrect investor confidence and to make sure that our very economy is not dealt a great wound by the international decline of trust in American business, a decline that could mean far more trouble to us than the international impact of Sept. 11.

It is clear what we need to do. So let’s get it done. Let your senators and congressional representatives know you’ve had enough.

Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His e-mail address is scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com.