Views > June 8, 2006

Rot in the Barrel

By David Moberg

Take a moment to savor the convictions of top Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. Anything short of those verdicts would have been outrageous. That’s especially true after a defense—”we did nothing wrong and didn’t know what was happening anyway”—that was more of the fraud that pumped Enron up, then brought it crashing down.

Keep in mind that Lay and Skilling aren’t anomalies in the corporate world. Besides the rogue’s gallery of CEOs already convicted or awaiting trial, new stories are breaking about self-enrichment and cover-ups in the corporate ranks.

A federal oversight agency reports more than a dozen executives and the board of Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance enterprise, were involved in misleading accounting tricks that generated more than half of the $90 million its CEO collected from 1998 to 2003. Meanwhile, federal regulators and prosecutors are investigating some 20 companies for backdating stock options for executives to their lowest point in the market, so they would be worth more when cashed in.

The problem, however, isn’t just these bad apples. It’s the barrel they’re in. No effective system exists to hold corporations accountable to the public, their workers or even their owners. This is partly the fruit of decades of governmental deregulation that entrenched a culture of unaccountability. Enron was a prime case, profiting not only from deregulation of energy markets but also deregulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, just before its chairwoman Wendy Gramm—the wife of former Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm—joined Enron’s board.

But the rise in corporate crime also reflects the shift in American capitalism toward a short-term perspective of meeting quarterly targets. This shift stems from a financial mentality that rewards making profits by cooking books, exploiting tax loopholes, looting worker pension funds, pursuing strategically pointless mergers, speculating in complex financial derivatives and much more. Shady accounting to unjustly reward executives is just an extension of the financial shenanigans that accounting firms, lawyers and advisors devise as building blocks of today’s corporate strategy.

Exorbitant executive salaries are integral to this wholesale corruption. Investors in Home Depot have been outraged that CEO Robert Nardelli has pocketed $245 million over the past five years while its stock has declined and the value of its main competitor soared. Even worse, Nardelli ran roughshod over investors at the annual meeting recently, refusing to answer questions or even release shareholder vote details.

Many investors want to require that directors be elected by majority vote, that shareholders approve CEO pay packages and that executives give up pay and bonuses if received on the basis of inaccurate earnings statements. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering some modest changes, and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is promoting broader legislation, The Protection Against Executive Compensation Abuse Act.

More openness and accountability to shareholders is a start. But it’s not just shareholders, including workers with pension funds, who lose from executive fraud. The direction of corporations becomes skewed, endangering their long-term viability and their contributions to the nation’s economic well-being. When companies like Enron set a standard for fraud, they hurt any company that is trying to compete fairly, thus encouraging foul play throughout the system. Executive overpayment fuels the growing inequality that deprives the vast majority of their fair share of national income.

Greater accountability to shareholders just isn’t enough. These public corporations must also be made more accountable to the public and to their employees. The rot is so pervasive that we need a new barrel as well as new apples.

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• Reader Comments

  Wonderful article, and, sadly, completely accurate.

  Corporate America is a short-sighted Ponzi Scheme cloaked as free-market capitalism and market choice.

  It has nothing to do with profits, good management, market share, products, or services. It’s about self-dealers, manipulators, and con-artists. And they get rewarded well for it.

  The mainstream media celebrates these thieves until someone gets indicted or a company goes bankrupt. Many people just don’t get it.

  The cycle just repeats itself over and over again all in the name of “freedom”, the American Dream, and unregulated capitalism.

  This is not about hard work, equal opportunity, or freedom. It’s about greed, deception, and manipulation, and about many voter’s faulty perceptions, values, and assumptions as to what a free and fair market is really about.

  It’s not just about Democrats or Republicans either. It’s about the entire system that needs to be overhauled. It just so happens that with the Republicans in power, the problem has grown exponentially. It is simply unsustainable, as all Ponzi Schemes are.

  Posted by K on Jun 9, 2006 at 6:31 PM

  As a foreigner to your US internal debates; I’m amazed the CEO of Fannie Mae received $90mio. For doing less than nothing.

  Mussolini was shot BEFORE being hanged from that lamp-post ?

  What are you waiting for ?

  Posted by frog on Jun 12, 2006 at 2:26 PM

  ktkt,

  1. You should look up the definition of “Ponzi Scheme.” It’s utterly hysterical of you to call “Corporate America” a Ponzi Scheme. There are examples of fraud, sure, but some fraud does not a Ponzi Scheme make.

  2. “It has nothing to do with profits, good management, market share, products, or services.”

  Actually, for the vast majority of corporations, it does have to do with those things you listed specifically because they are the only path to lasting success, which so many corporations have achieved. They certainly didn’t achieve lasting success with “self-dealing, manipulating, and conning.” Here is something about Corporate America that is short-term: fraud. When it happens, it only lasts so long before the fraud is uncovered.

  3. How do you propose, specifically, to “overhaul the system.” Can you think of any negatives associated with your proposed overhaul that might accompany what you see as the positives?

  Jeff C

  Posted by jeffc on Jun 15, 2006 at 10:20 AM

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