Why Corporate American is rotten to the core

A typical US corporation raises its funding by selling a worthless shell to the public through IB. Those banks that died in the last four weeks because they oversold mortgage-backed securities (The word "security" itself is an irony, because there is really nothing secure about those and other "securities").

Since IPO, the management team struggles to make up the "numbers" to show to "the Street". They make up the numbers by investing most the cash flow into marketing (aka advertising) so that people will buy things they don't need; by openning sweatshop all over the world, by privatizing natural resource that belongs to the planet.

What does "the management team" made up of? First there are board of directors (including chairman, president, CEO, big investors, outside directors). They represents the ultramate power. They can oust a CEO with enough votes. Under CEO, there is CFO, COO, CTO/CIO.
CFO is in charge of cooking the book, therefore are paid the most. He controls the budget, therefore has the most direct power. CTO/CIO is only considered a cost for plumbing "the computers".
In some public company, the president, the chairman of BOD, the largest shareholder, the CEO are the same person. Such company is very easy to be ruled as a totalitrian regime.
In other cases, where the CEO is a "professional" excutive, but not a big shareholder. The CEO will focus even more on short-term profit, which is directly linked to his bonus. By the time he screws up the company too much he will leave with a huge pension and severance package.

Examples are:
 
Henry Paulson (Goldman Sachs $600 million)
Robert Nardelli (Home Depot $225 million)
Michael Ovitz (Disney $140 million)
Stephen Hilbert (Conseco $72 million)
Carly Fiorina (HP $42 million)
Gary Forsee (Sprint $40-million-plus)
Charles Prince (Citigroup, $40 million)
Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide, $100 million)
Kerry Killinger (WaMu $20 million)
Martin Sullivan (AIG $47 million)
Stan O'Neal (Merrill Lynch $160 million in stock).

If we do a simple math (which the CFOs loves to do), the severance packages listed above already amounts to $1.486 billion, and that's a very incompletely list.

When the same trend spreads to Europe: Gerard Le Fur (Sanofi Aventis
$9.51 million), we had to laugh at the large
scale of anger among the French public, because that's really just a fraction of Gerard's US counterparts are getting.

If there were a Capitalist Manifesto, those names should be the underwriters.
 
After reading all this, will you still be surprised that we are in a recession? Will you still doubt about Henry Paulson's determination to bail-out the banks including Goldman Sachs with $700 billion of taxpayer money?