Corporate Crooks

The American Dissident
A Literary Journal of Critical Creative Writing
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
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Critical Reviews

Corporate Crooks: How Rogue Executives Ripped off Americans… For other reviews, consult BookReviews.
and Congress Helped Them Do It!

By Greg Farrell. Forward by Joseph Wells. Prometheus Books. Amherst, NY. www.prometheusbooks.com. 2006. 225 pp.

This book is an excellent read, to say the least. Farrell, an investigative reporter for USA Today, presents the facts and especially the shadows behind them. He describes in a fluid, uncomplicated—not simplistic—manner the overall ambiance that permitted the immense fraud that helped burst the stock-market bubble in the beginning of the millennium, illustrating with the most egregious of the corrupt corporations, including Enron, WorldCom, Health South, Tyco, Arthur Andersen, Citibank, Chase, and Merrill Lynch. Most important is Farrell’s underscoring that corrupt CEOs could not have done what they’d done without the help of our congressmen and women. And the vicious circle is easily understandable for the logic is ever present: the CEOs contribute to the campaign coffers of the congressmen and women, who in turn when asked by the CEOs to “help out,” do their very best to “help out.”

The banks also became corrupt (and still are?) helping corporations disguise billions of dollars in loans. Both Citibank and Chase, for example, helped Enron alone disguise billions of dollars in loans so the corporation could report higher earnings.

Farrell exposes the decline in accounting standards and the profession that paved the way for the elaborate accounting schemes and scams that created extremely wealthy and corrupt CEOs. The latter’s salaries skyrocketed in the 90s. Just the amount of money some of these people were making, thanks especially to stop options and corrupt accounting, is astonishing. CEO Wang of Computer Associates earned $698 million and CEO Eisner of Walt Disney pulled in $699 in a single year, where shareholders got little return. Yet options were supposed to be paid to CEOs for a job well done. Even the New York Stock Exchange, a nonprofit organization, had paid its top manager Richard Grasso, $139 million dollars and owed him an additional $48 million. Corporations began paying their CEOs in stock options, deducting them from their tax bill, but not from their earnings, and thanks to Congress were not required to include those options as expenses, thus were able to inflate their earnings sometimes immensely, deceiving shareholders to believe they were highly profitable, when in fact times they weren’t making any profits at all.

What is troublesome and clearly stated in the book is that today things are not really all that much better than they were in the early part of the millennium where ballooned greedheads Lay, Skilling, Fastow, Causey, Ebbers, Kozlowski, Swartz, Scrushy, Waksal, Grubman and many others were able to shake the living daylights out of the country’s economy. Today, corporate CEOs, many of them, are still corrupt, though the jailing of a handful of them will hopefully rein them in a little. What is really troubling is that the nation’s economy is so dependent on the honesty of the nation’s CEOs. This book is definitely recommended.

—The Editor