In the study, to be released Tuesday, about a third of the people who said they made more than $500,000 annually contend that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”
Just as bad: “Nearly one in five respondents feel financial service professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment.”
.. Its results appear even more noteworthy today for the sheer number of individuals who continue to say the ethics of the industry remain unchanged since the crisis (a third said that, by the way).
.. Nearly one-third of those asked “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”
.. On virtually every question, those in Britain seem to indicate that ethics problems could be even more widespread there. “Respondents from the U.K. are either more willing to commit a crime they could get away with — or are more frank about it,” the report’s authors write.
.. Many of those asked said they worried “their employer would likely retaliate if they reported wrongdoing in the workplace.”
And quite a few said that they had signed, or been asked to sign, a confidentiality agreement that would prohibit them from reporting illegal or unethical behavior to the authorities.
.. Better commenters than I will tell you that corporations feel no shame
AT&T Policy Blog: Thoughts on Net Neutrality and Partisanship
Does anyone really think Washington needs yet another partisan fight? Particularly a fight around the Internet, one of the greatest engines of economic growth, investment, and innovation in history? At AT&T, we’ve supported open Internet principles since they were first enunciated, and we continue to abide by them strictly, and voluntarily, even today. We supported, and testified in favor of, Chairman Genachowski’s 2010 net neutrality regulations. And we thought the approach being taken by Chairman Wheeler in exploring a Section 706 regulatory framework was reasonable, and legally sustainable, as well. We have never argued there should be no regulation in this area, simply that there should be smart regulation.
.. Instead of a clear set of rules moving forward, with a broad set of agreement behind them, we once again face the uncertainty of litigation, and the very real potential of having to start over – again – in the future.
If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It
Lynn Stout has pointed out, that corporations provide a mechanism for society to make long-term, intergenerational investments that are not linked to government or a specific family.
It is not an overstatement to say that corporate separateness has been one of the legal innovations most important to the development of national wealth.
The professors argued that this separateness meant that the Greens should not be able to attach their own religious beliefs to the corporation. The reason the Greens had chosen to form a corporation was to be able to operate the business without running the risk of losing their personal assets if the corporation went belly up. They wanted separateness.
They should not then be able to stand in the shoes of the corporation for purposes of religion.
.. Corporate personhood is thus not only a mechanism for the creation of wealth (by encouraging investment), it is also a mechanism for enforcing accountability (by providing a deep pocket to sue).
.. In fact, in 2011, AT&T asked that information about its finances be excluded from Freedom of Information Act requests, because the statute has an exception for “personal privacy.” The Court unanimously rejected this claim—and Chief Justice John Roberts ridiculed it in his opinion. That exception, he wrote, “does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”
.. And while money is not itself speech it is sometimes essential to make speech audible above the din.
.. Nevertheless, there are myriad reasons why a commitment to free speech rights—even corporate free speech rights—should not bar reasonable limits on independent campaign expenditures from both corporations and the super rich. It is not hyperbole to say that without such limits, our democracy is at risk.
.. The current Court is so enamored with a simplistic, libertarian theory of free speech doctrine that it is blind to those risks.
.. The Supreme Court is applying twisted ideas of free speech and due process to wall corporations off from accountability.
.. An article in the Harvard Business Review (that socialist rag!) declared in 2012, “There’s a growing body of evidence … that the companies that are most successful at maximizing shareholder value over time are those that aim toward goals other than maximizing shareholder value. Employees and customers often know more about and have more of a long-term commitment to a company than shareholders do.”
.. In a number of European countries, for example, companies have “codetermined” board structures that require representation of both shareholders and employees. Even with these management structures, corporations continue their focus on building wealth—that is the core purpose of the corporate form—but not for a narrow sliver of their investors only. And it works. Germany, where codetermination is strongest, is the economic powerhouse of Europe. A former CEO of the German company Siemens argued that codetermination is a “comparative advantage” for Germany; the senior managing director of the U.S. investment firm Blackstone Group had said that codetermination was one of the factors that allowed Germany to avoid the worst of the financial crisis.
.. These reforms make corporations more like persons, not less. Human beings routinely balance a multitude of interests—I am, for example, a parent, a spouse, a teacher, a writer. Only the rare oddball—Donald Trump, maybe?—behaves as if accumulating money is the paramount and unitary good.
.. The best way to constrain corporations is to require them to sign on to a more robust social contract and to govern themselves more pluralistically—mechanisms designed to mimic the traits of human personhood within the corporate form.
.. The richest 5 percent of Americans own more than two-thirds of all stock assets. The bottom 40 percent—125 million working-class people—essentially own nothing in terms of stock.
.. I believe that, in this moment, there is an opening to question the very framework of how we view corporations and their social obligations
Europe Takes Aim at Deals Created to Escape Taxes
The laws in Netherlands shield a variety of profits from taxation, making it attractive for big multinational companies like Starbucks, Google and IBM to set up offices. Even rock stars like the Rolling Stones and U2 have taken advantage of Dutch tax shelters.
The same goes for Luxembourg, Bermuda, Ireland and the British Caribbean countries like the Cayman Islands. Along with the Netherlands, those places rank among the top destinations for foreign direct investment from the United States, according to a review of data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis that shows how entrenched tax avoidance strategies have become.
.. In some ways, authorities are performing a futile task: As officials move to close certain loopholes, others are likely to pop up in their place.