The accounting scandals surrounding Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and a host of other giant corporations has served to generate great suspicion in American corporations. The dishonest practices that at once gave huge boneses to executives and then left shareholders with devastating losses has generated nearly endless blind indignation for corporations as a whole.
In many quarters, it isn't merely an anti-corporate sentiment that has emerged. It is broadly anti-capitalist. Frequently, I have seen the call for greater government oversight and involvement in business.
Most capitalists have failed to help reverse the sentiment, backing CEOs as though they are infallible heroes. Unfortunately, I have been among the few ardent capitalists to cheer when crooked CEOs were sent to the big house. Prison is where criminals belong, and I make no distinction between white collar crime and any other crime.
I hate see capitalism take body blows for fraud. Fraud is not capitalism. It's deception and theft. Capitalism is honest trade. And corporations aren't inherently evil. Crooked people have been using the corporate structure for ill gains. Punish the guilty- the crooked people.
But, as long as there is a huge anti-corporate, anti-CEO, anti-white collar crime sentiment out there, I would like to see the anger directed to the most recent batch of crooked executives, CEO Franklin Raines, and CFO Timothy Howard.
They happen to be top executives of the darling government-supervised corporation Fannie Mae.
It seems they have done just exactly what Enron and all the others have done- cook the books in order to show bogus gains for the dual pupose of artifically inflating the value of the stock and raking in huge executive bonuses.
But how could this happen? This is a corporation overseen by the government!
Well, either corporations are inherently evil, or crooked people do crooked things.
If corporations are inherently evil, I will kindly ask anti-corporate commentators to call for the disolusion of government corporations, since government is the desired tool of oversight of the corporation. You woudn't ask business to police business. Why would you then ask government to police government? It doesn't make sense. So, bye bye: Fannie Mae, Fannie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Commodity Credit Corporation, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, Amtrak, and all the myriad government corporations.
I won't hold my breath on that. Is it because corporations are not inherently evil after all?
Article comments
1 - spiderleaf
The problem is that business has been policing business and it's only when the gov't steps in are the crimes brought to light.
Arthur Anderson and the big accounting firms are supposed to provide impartial oversight, but ended up cooking the books with Enron et al.
In so far as calling anything inherently evil, I will have to leave that to the president.