Enron Ethics

[Mike Nelson]

Uh correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Enron Ethics and corporate greed rampant in the late 90's. Anyone, Jeremy?? Just wondering.

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[jjwq8]

This is a loaded question Mike, and I am unsure of being able to answer it without sounding like an anti-globalisation fanatic.

Corporate greed is a basic tenet of business.

Corporations are established with the sole aim of maximizing investors profit and they are thus by definition and necessity, greedy. Is such greed wrong? No.

Are subterfuge and scams legitimate means of maximizing profit, absolutely not.

Was unethical and criminal practice more rife in the nineties than any other time? I doubt it. Simply that the scumbags participating were embroiled in frauds on a massive scale.

Of greater worry is not that the corporate officers involved were scum, but that they were able to suborn the watchers, those supposedly stand-up guys that audit their actions and decisions.

Is it still going on? Absolutely.
Creative accounting is precisely that.

Greed is human nature. It takes a very special kind of person not to want more.

[flatfloor]

Hi Mike, Jeremy's observations are dead on.

But your question or point is? :)

[Mike Nelson]

I was just bringing up some history, a past post of Jeremy's that made a quip of Enron Ethics. It seemed he wanted to attribute Enron to present occupants of the White House.

And by the way Jeremy, while my company is indeed in business to make money, its not controled by greed. I'm sure you would concede there are plenty of corporations that aren't greedy.

[jjwq8]

Mike,

My use of the term greed is intended to imply the acquisition of wealth that any corporation intending to trade and stay in business must have.

If you are intending that greed is acquisitiveness for it's own sake, to the detriment of all others, then yes I would agree with you.

No corporation trading on greed alone will succeed in the long run since the ethic, if indeed it can be termed such, would infect the officers and turn them against one another, human nature being what it is.

[Unregistered]

You guys should get "Gangs of America," by Ted Nace. The best book I've ever read on the history of the corporation. You can even download it for free (If you want to print 300 some pages) at the web site www.gangsofamerica.com

[flatfloor]

What, America is the only country that has corporations?

Are we supposed to walk around constantly in sack cloth and ashes?

[Kirk Downey]

There was a time when corporations were expected to serve the society no the inverse as we have seen in recent decades. Older laws allowed as how corporations could lose their charter for anti-social activities. There was a recent suit on California seeking to pull Unocal's charter for dabbling in Indonesian internal politics by knowingly funding death squads.

My cousin, who worked for AOL as fairly highly placed executive talked about the current system of quarterly reports. The thing that makes our publicly traded corporations so avaricious is the quarterly report. If a corp doesn't show a profit every three months one after another, after another, after another, after another - the stock price drops and raiders can come in - by up the company - liquidate assets to pay the debt incurred to buy the weakened company and every one could lose their jobs and pensions. If the reports were changed to 6 mos rather than three. the whole avaricious character of contemporary corporations could change. The system is set up to turn calm merchants into rabid profiteers.

We just sit by and gorge ourselves on the proceeds of our post-WWII global dominance. Lets hope our dominance doesn't weaken. Then the corporate canines will start to rip at our flesh the way Ken Lay and his cackling hyenas sunk their teeth into Californians.

Keep your powder dry folks. :noid:

Kirk out