from the bigdumbHoosier Archive - 07.01.2002
Re-reg!
How many times in the past year or so have you heard some tassle-loafered, snaky eyed corporate type tell you about how corporate accounting shenanigans are aberrations, and that the vast majority of people in those big-bucks jobs are wonderful, honest people working for a brighter tomorrow? Are you sick of hearing it yet?
Now, I'd just like to hear somebody explain to me WHY we ought to believe this. Are corporate executives selected based upon their love of the common man, or their vision for a better future? Are they selected based upon their honesty and selflessness? Heck, they're usually not even much interested in their corporation's product. They're mostly born of privilege, and trained in an atmosphere of elitist disdain for the drooling masses. If their lives weren't centered on their careers to the exclusion of all else, what chance do you suppose they'd have of reaching the top? They spend their young adult years clawing their way to the top over the backs of other exec types. They wallow in excessive wealth; they live in a network of those of similar backgrounds and need never venture outside of it.
If you don't sit on the board of a major corporation, then you need the government to be on these folks like buzzards on road-kill. You don't have the time, and you sure don't have the power. That means regulation, backed by toothy, consistent enforcement. Repeat after me: "We want regulation". Did that feel uncomfortable? Of course it did, you've been subjected to constant brainwashing for twenty years about how regulation is bad, and unnecessary. Remember 'greed is good'? Good for whom?
By regulation, I don't mean a stern speech from the president. I mean genuine support for regulators as they do their job. Adequate funding: plenty of regulators, well paid, well respected, secure in their jobs. Regulators who aren't merely fattening up their resume so they can get a job for twenty times the salary in the industry they're supposed to be regulating.
Perhaps most of all, we the public, need to start really supporting the idea of real regulation with a moral outrage. We need to make re-regulating business and industry a major political priority. We need to see effective regulators as at least necessary, and sometimes even heroic.
