Corporate Sleaze Eats Away Our Trust
from the mad-as-hell dept
Dan Gillmor’s latest column makes some very good points about this whole Worldcom fiasco. As he points out, one of the reasons the recession was never that bad was that consumers kept spending. But, when every day we hear yet another story of how greedy corporate sleazes stole money, manipulated numbers, and hid evidence, consumers are (finally, some might say) losing confidence in the whole system. Unless we start forcing real accountability on businesses, nothing’s going to change – and investors won’t be willing to buy back in. It’s bad news any way you look at it. It’s about time something changed for real. Update: Red Herring also has a column where they mock the results of a study of “corporate ethics officers”, who are supposed to keep companies from doing the wrong thing. The writer points out that telling people what’s right or wrong obviously isn’t working. The only way to stop all this corporate sleaze is to create harsh penalties for those who do wrong.
