Yet another large corporation is being charged with illegal accounting practices. I have mixed feelings about this. First of all, right is right and wrong is wrong. When individuals running a company participate in illegal activities, they should be investigated and prosecuted. It's that simple. But every time a company is accused of something illegal, from the woodwork comes rhetoric about evil corporations, greedy capitalists, workers with broken backs, and overpaid executives. This is tired rhetoric as old as the haves and have-nots, but this talk is on the same level as the X-Files era government conspiracy theories. Many anti-capitalist groups want to remove the face from corporate America and demonize the executives without any facts.
From what I can tell so far, Nortel has fallen into the same type of deceptive accounting practices that devastatedWorldCom but on a somewhat lesser scale. I'm starting to think that there are people out there who are thrilled when this happens because it somehow "proves" that corporations are immoral and should be brought down. It's like the juror after the Martha Stewart trial who said their verdict "sends a message to bigwigs in corporations. They have to abide by the law. No one is above the law." I thought juries were not about sending messages, but helping to determine an individual's guilt or innocence.
To those of you out there who think corporations deserve to be publicly brought down and decimated when there is illegal activity, I have some questions. How many innocent people need to be laid off to pay the legal defense fund? Who benefits when a company is shut down? It's not the little people since many of them were put out of work. I'm amazed when people root for the demise of a corporation. Don't these same people work for a living? Don't these same people complain about jobs going overseas?
Don't mistake my words. Illegal actions should be punished. But if an executive at Nortel is to blame, then blame him. Don't shift it to Nortel. Don't blame Enron. Blame the executives. Enron was composed of more than just the decision makers. Every single corporation is made up of people. Just because there are executives and employees out there who had an ethical bypass, doesn't mean they speak for everybody in the corporation. Nortel is a cool company with a lot of excellent technology. It employs regular people who like to come to work. In the end, these people will become victims of overzealous prosecutors and the anti-corporate rhetoric that accompanies every corporate scandal.
Maybe it's time we examine where these executives are going to school and what their backgrounds are. That may shift the blame from corporations to universities and colleges where postmodern business theories are pushed and traditional values are archaic.
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