Corporate America has been good to me. Over the past 20 years, I've made hundreds of millions of dollars in innovative tech companies I either launched or financed -- including CNET, Salesforce.com and the service now called Google Voice.
But over those same two decades I've grown disgusted by what corporate America has become. Several words come to mind: venal, corrupt, conniving, irresponsible, unaccountable, amoral. All are accurate, but none alone captures the extent of decay that has left us with a truly rotten system.
Corporations have mutated from organizations that once generated jobs, products and prosperity for the country into voracious, impenetrable monsters legally required to put their own selfish interests first. The result: Corporations now enjoy powers and privileges historically reserved for monarchs, and, like monarchs, the people who run them are largely insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Let me give you a personal example. I recently won an $8.57-million court judgment against the auction house Christie's. The jury found Christie's guilty of fraud, among other things, because it refused to return artwork it failed to sell on my behalf.
Fraud is serious. If a jury had found me guilty of fraud, I'd probably be sent to jail and it would stick with me for the rest of my life. I would be ruined. For Christie's, whose namesake founder has been dead for hundreds of years, it's just a cost of doing business. No one from Christie's will endure any serious consequence because they are protected by a cloak of corporate immunity and obfuscation.
Corporate law makes it so Christie's, a faceless legal entity, is responsible rather than the individual human beings who actually committed the offense. It's the same for many of the corporate banks and financial institutions that brought the global economy to the brink of ruin -- and now are reaping record profits while millions of ordinary Americans remain out of work, struggling to make ends meet and in danger of losing their homes.
I appreciate that few Americans would consider me a "little guy," but when dealing with ossified and entitled corporate infrastructures, we're all little guys. Anyone who has tried to argue with their insurance company or renegotiate their mortgage comes away with the distinct feeling that the deck is stacked against them.
It is.
And it's getting worse.
Just look at the oil washing ashore on the Gulf Coast. Despite appropriately contrite statements from BP executives, the past may be a more telling predictor of what lies ahead. More than two decades after the devastating Exxon Valdez spill, just one person -- the captain of the ship -- has faced criminal prosecution. For its part, Exxon and its army of lawyers repeatedly appealed punitive judgments against the corporation.
Thousands of the original plaintiffs who sued Exxon died before they collected compensation. The corporation meanwhile lives on, and quite profitably: the $507.5 million Exxon was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to pay in 2008 represented a measly 1.1% of that year's profit.
Already, residents and business owners along the Gulf Coast are discovering that there are definite limits to BP's public promises to make whole those affected by the oil spill.
To be sure, the concept of limited liability is an important part of corporate law and a key driver of 20th Century progress. It encourages responsible risk and promotes innovation, which necessarily requires failure. And it provides investors funding new ventures with the assurance that failure will wipe out only their investment, not their entire net worth.
But we have moved beyond limited liability to an era of almost no liability.
"It makes sense to protect the shareholder; it doesn't make sense to protect the managers," Joel Bakan told me recently. Bakan is a professor and author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, a compelling and sometimes frightening look at the rise of corporations.
In the five years since Bakan's book was published, corporations have grown even more powerful and irresponsible, as the financial crisis demonstrated. When the federal government stepped in to prop up institutions it deemed "too big to fail," it created a collusive environment not seen since World War II.
This time, the threat was not to democracy and freedom, but to an entirely undemocratic corporate system in which the guys at the top play by their own rules -- and, even then, ignore them.
It's time to impose new rules.
Let's start by removing the broad legal shield individual corporate employees hide behind -- and subject them to the same laws as the rest of us. In California, I can be fined as much as $25,000 if I throw batteries out with the trash. Yet when Wal-Mart agrees to pay $27.6 million because its employees dumped toxic chemicals at hundreds of stores, the corporate entity pays the fine, issues a blanket corporate apology and moves on with a corporate promise to do better next time.
Instead, individual employees and managers -- all the way up to the CEO -- must answer when they screw up in the same way they are rewarded when they succeed. The threat of public prosecution can be a powerful check on the corporate culture of pathological recklessness that is rapidly devouring America. Only then will we see companies pursuing profit responsibly and ethically -- recalling cars before people are killed, bolstering safety before a mine explodes or accurately calculating risk before a financial instrument melts down.
Joseph A. Palermo: Obama's "Fireside Chat" (FDR or Jimmy Carter?)
Philip Radford: President Obama: Give Us Our Future Back
Rep. Ed Markey: Waking America From the BP Nightmare
Christine Pelosi: BP Disaster: Wake up America and Smell the Crude Oil
Leveraging Social Media For CSR: An Alternative Future For BP?
BP Under Fire: Profit Versus Responsibility
Deutsche Bank's Cohrs to hand over to Jain
Gulf oil disaster: a trillion-dollar corporate crime
Despite Economic Downturn, Corporate Responsibility Remains High on Business ...
Corporate responsibility in a post-BP Digital Age
American Water Issues First Installment of Corporate Responsibility Report
Right now, on an otherwise picturesque walking mall in Central Virginia, we have been looking at an barely started eyesore for several years now. He excuses this atrocity by staying in court and suing everyone else.
Before I take him seriously as a 'businessman', perhaps he could finish the business he started in my neck of the woods.
Before the HuffPo gives him anymore coverage, I would suggest that they look into his background and find out just how many people that he's screwed over.
I would suggest Wikipedia for now. Greater detail can be found by Googling his name and Charlottesville.
Halsey Minor is the last person that I would take business advice from. He's pretty much a pariah in his hometown and all of us here are waiting for him to either tear down that public nuisance and eyesore or finish it like he promised.
I don't see him really taking responsibility for either anytime soon.
HuffPo, post his articles at the peril of your credibility.
If you owed me money and didn't pay up when you promised you would, I'd feel justified in holding onto your gear too.
So, did you pay them yet?
So, FedEx charges much more than UPS to deliver a package, and pays its drivers much less than UPS to deliver that package. That leaves a lot more money for the the king, err, I mean, the CEO.
Vote Green this November!
People like Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes were put in place to coddle the corporations- and to hell with the American people. A mercenary media sang - and sings - their praises. Patriotism doesn't count - except for a form of violent ranting that passes for patriotism. They had their court ideologists, such as the deleterious Milton Freedman, who justified every kind of crime in the name of profit.
Can the crime be undone? Yes, with the right kind of nerve and mindset. But people have to wean themselves off the Fox News and Tea Party trash.
I hadn't planned to fan Andycan,
but must agree on Fox News,
where lies are free,
bias is mixed with just enough truth'
to nix those folks who say its fixed,
And those who say that Reagan was swell
believing Barack is headed to hell are surely
going to make a ploy to take their girl
to White House fame.
Sarah Palin is her name.
After Obama's speech tonight, there should be no doubt who's running this county - it's BP, who must have written Obie's speech, and the other corporate thugs who took over during the last 20 years.
Consider: Life Threatening Danger and What to Do at http://www.aesopinstitute.org
The oil gusher may trigger a cataclysm that results in the death of most life on earth.
The White House needs to determine if that could be the case on an extremely urgent basis.
If it is, a wartime like program to try to prevent reaching a Tipping Point is necessary.
President Obama needs to consider everything conceivable to avoid that life threatening possibility.
In Ticking Time Bomb John Atcheson points out that: There have been two previous such events. One occurred 55 million years ago and the other 251 million years ago. A series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on earth. In some areas it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to recover.
There's evidence the worst such self-amplifying feedbacks may already have been triggered. Atmospheric concentrations of methane are the culprit.
The Gulf gusher may add to the problem if a thin oil slick flows across the Atlantic and could cause a further temperature increase in the Arctic.
Avoiding a Tipping Point is the challenge for all of us.
Deep wells are a threat with many dimensions only now becoming public. Their existence could prove to trigger potential planetary emergencies.
Petroleum can be superseded more rapidly that might be imagined. See: Moving Beyond Oil at www.aesopinstitute.org
My contact information is on that site if you might be interested.
campuses, and cafe's in the 60s,.. such as,.. "We'll probably never see age 30".
Haven't heard many agree that drugs and revolt were a symptom of living with mutually
assured destruction hanging over their heads rather than overly permissive parents.
We inherently new this was insanity being forced on us by "adults" who failed to find
constructive solutions,.. a better way. And look who's overly "permitted" now. multi-
national hogs rooting up the world in "mutually assured destruction"!
I would also ask how low down the ladder you'd go - would a hypothetical $8.00/hour employee who throws out toxic chemicals for Wal-Mart be held as responsible as the hypothetical supervisor how tells him/her to do so? (The $8.00/hour guy would also make a great scapegoat).
What if the supervisor is acting on his understanding of corporate "culture", as informally communicated to him/her by the regional manager (for example, "Gee, Bob, your numbers are looking pretty good, EXCEPT in the waste management area. You should look at that - is all of that money spent really necessary? Remember, review time is coming up."
Conversely, if you do start at the bottom, where do you stop? Is the CEO to be held responsible for every corporate misdeed?
Finally, can't individuals be charged criminally for corporate misdeeds? In severe cases, charge the individual criminally, or name them as a party to a lawsuit.
I think that fining a corporation is a good idea; it hits them where it hurts, and IF the hit is large enough, the shareholders will be looking at replacing key personnel who can influence the corporate actions. The problem may be that the hit isn't large enough, not that it's being directed at a corporation instead of an individual.