Este tipo de "lobbying" es lo que ha obstaculizado la estadidad para Puerto Rico desde hace casi un siglo. Y es porque bajo la estadidad, las CFC's no pueden hacer muchas cosas que les benefician, pero que no han servido bien a los puertorriqueños y obstaculizan la estadidad.
Para educar a nuestro pueblo, es vital el revelar estos traqueteos y que la gente comprendan la magnitud de estas influencia en nuestras vidas y nuestro futuro.
Debemos saber si Wal-Mart u otras compañias, siguen el patrón de "bribery" de Wall Mart en Mexico, pero en Puerto Rico. mj
Have America's commercial giants lost their ethical compass?
Published: Sunday, April 29, 2012,
By John Farmer Jr.
THE STAR LEDGER
Although Bernie Madoff has come to personify the ethically (and legally) challenged businessman, every day seems to bring news of other financial scandals, on an even larger scale, involving different kinds of "persons": corporate persons.
So we read, for instance, that Bank of America has agreed to pay $11.8 billion to settle charges related to mortgage servicing abuses, such as fabricating affidavits of title; Intel has agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle antitrust charges that it retaliated against computer manufacturers who refused to put the Intel inside; Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to settle claims that it sold subprime mortgage instruments that it had designed to fail.
It also turns out that they are quite adept politically, these constitutionally recognized "persons" who (thanks to the current majority on the U.S. Supreme Court) can spend virtually unlimited amounts of money influencing the political process. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., it was disclosed last week, has been lobbying to change the federal law prohibiting bribery of foreign officials, a law that it is alleged to have violated in Mexico.
Wal-Mart denies lobbying, though it belongs to groups that do. (?)
What groups? Are these groups lobbying anyone in Puerto Rico? and for what? MJ
The problem clearly runs deeper than a rogue financial adviser or two; it extends beyond Wall Street, and even Main Street USA, to some of the most powerful corporations in the world. It involves thousands of "real" people acting under the corporate umbrella.
What are we to make of this spate of corporate scandals? Are ethical and legal lapses to be treated simply as a cost of doing business? Is it "okay" for a corporation such as Goldman Sachs to sell an investment to consumers that it knows will fail, so long as it is willing to pay the price it will cost to settle the resulting lawsuit?
On a more fundamental level, what accounts for the recurrence of these kinds of scandals?
Let’s start with the obvious, and most encouraging, point. We are reading about these scandals because they are being policed. Although some would argue that the penalties should be more severe, unethical and illegal behavior is being exposed and publicized. A combination of federal and state law enforcement agencies, including the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, and aggrieved consumers has become aggressive in pursuing claims against corporate miscreants.
By prosecuting the Bernie Madoffs, the Kenneth Lays (Enron’s former CEO) and Jeffrey Skillings (Enron’s CFO), and the Dennis Kozlowskis (Tyco’s former CEO), the government has reinforced the need for ethical leadership by corporate executives.
On the other hand, however, it is clear that aggressive prosecution has failed to deter corporate misconduct, which reached such heights in the subprime mortgage scandal that the world economy teetered on the brink of ruin. The only way to save the economy, ironic as it seems, was to infuse the offending institutions with hundreds of billions of tax dollars, thus, in effect, rewarding corporations for their recklessness. They promptly paid billions of dollars in "retention" bonuses to their executives.
DESPERATE MEASURES
It is all too easy to account for the persistence of unethical conduct as the product of pure greed, and there’s no question that greed has been on prominent display. In my view, however, greed can be deterred; desperation cannot. Greed is likely to be the tragic flaw of the relative few; the failing of the past decade was a failure not just of the purely greedy few, but of an entire culture, a culture of institutionalized desperation.
Philosopher Michael Sandel hints at the deep roots of the problem in his new book, "What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets." Our culture, Sandel argues, has been pervaded by a "market" sensibility, in which virtually everything is for sale: "To a remarkable degree, the last few decades have witnessed the remaking of social relations in the image of market relations." This transformation has missed, in Sandel’s view, "the corrosive effect of money" in dehumanizing relationships. It has instilled a sense of unfocused desperation.
We are bombarded by marketing, what our Supreme Court has protected as "commercial speech;" even our television shows are disrupted by advertisements that occupy half of the screen. We are driven to discount the truth of almost everything we hear, because we know that people are just trying to sell us something.
DANGEROUS GOALS
At the heart of this "market" culture, in my view, and driving the sense of desperation is the fact that the corporations and other businesses that comprise our economy are pledged to a concept of economic growth that is unsustainable.
This is the notion that growth must be measured in compound terms, in which each succeeding year’s earnings become the baseline for the next year’s expectations. If your earnings remain the same for the next year, even if they represent a profit of the same magnitude, your "growth," which is all that matters, will be considered zero. It is easy to see how the demand to earn more and more will increase almost exponentially under such expectations, and with it the sense of desperation as the growth targets become more difficult to reach.
Over time, as the growth targets amount to billions and even trillions of dollars, the temptation to resort to artifice, or gimmick, or outright fraud becomes overwhelming.
In my view, this desperate attempt to chase unsustainable growth expectations, as much as greed, accounts for the proliferation of ever more clever and artificial and even fraudulent investment gimmicks — from leasing automobiles to bundling subprime mortgages — over the past several decades. It is no surprise, then, that most of the stock market surges in my adult lifetime have been bubbles born of fraud or exaggeration and have collapsed.
If I am right, law enforcement cannot address and government cannot fix this problem. Only a frank discussion of business leaders can drive a new consensus on corporate values: how to value growth in business in a way that doesn’t undermine our other, more human, values.
John Farmer Jr. is the dean of Rutgers School of Law-Newark.
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