"If we don't cheat, we can't compete."
Is this the new credo of American business? One wonders after listening to the whining of some in the business community who insist that they can't compete in the marketplace unless they can avail themselves of the cheap labor of illegal aliens. Then there are the prohibited "protection payments" paid by Chiquita Banana to Columbian drug lords to ensure that business runs smoothly in the Southern hemisphere. And, of course, there are bribes paid to some of Capitol Hill's finest to ensure that the payors thereof are recipients of the government's largesse, thereby improving their "market share" of your tax dollars.
And who can forget the likes of Bernie Ebbers, Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay-moguls who made millions through deception and duplicity while ordinary Americans lost their shirts buying stock in companies like WorldCom and Enron. The motive-greed. The means-banks, accountants and lawyers who knowingly and willfully cooked up sham transactions to make it appear that the high flying, publicly traded companies appeared fiscally sound when, in reality, they were on the ropes financially. Everybody cooks the books-right? That's what it takes to compete in the arena we call Wall Street. So they say.
The effects of the loss of honesty and integrity in the marketplace were painfully obvious to me this week when I had occasion to appear at a press conference in Washington D.C. with victims of the Enron scandal. Their stories were heartbreaking. I watched as Charles Prestwood, an Enron retiree, explained with trembling lips how he lost all of his retirement savings-$1 million-when he was locked out of his account as his Enron stock crashed. George Maddox, a 74 year old retiree who worked for Enron and its predecessor for 30 years, lost his entire life savings when Enron imploded. Others told similar stories. Their plans for retirement were dashed, as were the dreams of thousands of others, when the truth about Enron was revealed. The strain of their ordeal was written on the faces of these men and their wives.