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It fits in perfectly with the tenor of this year so far. AOL Time
Warner Inc., that mega-corporation that does a lousy job of
everything, is having to take a $54-billion "accounting charge."
Translation: "You know how much we said we were worth, back when
AOL and Time Warner merged? Well, we were just joshin'."
Fifty-four billion dollars.
Hey, it's just a little red pencil mark in the annual report. It
would be funny, if not for the fact that investors once were asked to
believe the company was worth it.
(My second favorite news of the week about AOL Time Warner was that
the company ordered all its employees to use AOL's e-mail out of
brand-name loyalty. But the service was so unreliable that the
company had to reverse the order.)
This is a year for paying the piper for the short-cuts of the past --
corporate America, the Catholic Church, even some of our famous
authors and intellectuals.
You put your name on something, you're responsible for it. What a concept.
Tuesday there was a great column in the New York Times by a guy named
James O'Toole, talking about all those folks wearing T-shirts that
say, "I am Arthur Andersen."
The column said: They lived off the name brand. They made their money
off the name brand. They took credit for it, were proud of it, as
long as times were good.
But their company, unchecked by any ethic or internal policing,
helped Enron to shove its debt into hiding places while Andersen got
fatter off Enron fees. Andersen did this and little people continued
to be fooled into using their life's savings to buy Enron stock, even
while Enron executives dumped their own stock like the rats they were.
That was Arthur Andersen. And I am not saying the other big
accounting firms are angels, either -- just lucky.
To say, "No, it was a few bad apples," is to say that an
organization as a whole can never be held responsible. As O'Toole
wrote, it is "tantamount to admitting that the signature of the
firm that appears in corporate annual reports is worthless."
Accountability.
Enron had a hand in writing President Bush's energy policy. You know
it, I know it, and the vice president sure as heck knows it. That is
why the White House fights to keep it hidden, and the president tries
to claim that Kenny baby was a distant stranger. The fact that we are
united behind the president in his leadership against terrorism does
not mean we have to ignore Enron's hand in the cookie jar back home.
This week, the news came out that UBS PaineWebber fired one of its
guys who tried to warn investors about Enron. They fired him, and
then they sent out a memo to the investors saying the guy was wrong,
and to buy more.
Thank you, PaineWebber.
The purpose of checks and balances in our society, as amazing a
concept as this might seem, is to check and balance.
Acquiring a position of trust implies that you should be trustworthy.
In business, that means this: Not making up fake revenues and assets
and hiding your debts to try to con people into pumping up the stock
price. (Why, oh why, do we have a system that rewards executives for
exactly that?)
In accounting, it means you account. In advising investors, it means
be independent.
In a church, any church, it means that upon learning one of your own
might have committed one of the worst crimes possible, involving a
child, that your first instinct not be to try to cover it up with
money and reassignments, as in Boston and elsewhere.
In the world of letters, it means this: If you take somebody else's
words and ideas, whether it be a specific fact, or an arrangement of
the language, a cadence of thought, a sequence -- if you take it from
another source and represent it as your own, and have people pay you
money for it, then you have stolen.
It is possible, I suppose, that there is a hierarchy of guilt, that
truly deliberate theft is a worse crime than mere sloppiness, but
what does it say about us if sloppiness is acceptable? It should not
be acceptable, ever.
This is a year for bills to come due. Good.
-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com. |
