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Re: Scott vs. Scott
I'll agree that Rosenberg doesn't give McNealy his due. But his point about McNealy being wrong when it comes to regulation of business is well taken. The 1990s were an era of laissez-faire capitalism, where CEOs were given every incentive to defraud their investors to line their own pockets. Capitalism has its excesses, and regulation is required to rein them in. Today we're seeing the consequences of that unchecked freedom in the plummeting stock market. If it was just CEOs being hurt, I wouldn't give a damn, because they profited so much from the rise in stocks. But its not; middle class people bought into the idea that the stock market was a good place to put their money over the long haul. They bought into the idea that you could look at a company's financial statements and figure out whether they had a promising future or not. They got screwed over in a major way because the CEOs took that free hand they had been given and slapped their stockholders silly with it. People are losing their ability to retire, their life's savings, because a bunch of CEOs felt the need to line their own pockets by being creative and original exactly where such qualities are anathema: in the books. When McNealy says his fellow CEOs are rolling over, paws up, he's wrong to fight it, plain and simple. Capitalism is based on trust. The recent scandals have proven the worth of the old Russian saying Ronald Reagan was so fond of: "Trust, but verify." It's clear now that without regulation, the people we trusted to do the verification were captives of the corporations they worked for. Without re-regulation of the auditing business, without banning auditors from accepting consulting business from their clients that gives them the incentives to defraud the public to protect their own business, then the verification part of capitalism doesn't work, and either the masses take their money and run, or they overthrow the system, because ultimately they won't just sit there and take it while they're (*we're*) being fucked over seven ways to Sunday. It's in the self-interest of the capitalists and CEOs out there to ensure that neither of those happen.
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