Quote:
Originally posted by theking
Three or four dozen? Name me a dozen? No I am not thick enough to believe the ones that have been caught are the only ones doing "this shit". How many more are about to go down? I am not a soothsayer, but I suspect that at some point there will be more.
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Fine, here's ones I can think of off the top of my head. You are welcome to check my numbers in places where I say "about" or "more than" because that means I couldn't remember the precise numbers.
Waste Management, INC. Until Enron, the largest public collapse. Many dollars down the tube, lives ruined, etc. (This one is a few years old, the rest are in the last 1-2 years.)
Enron - we all know what happened here. Paper transactions, billions in debt shuffled off the books to their own subsidiaries, bribery, etc. Much bullshit, many dollars lost, pension plans gone (PUBLIC ones, as well, I might ass since many states own stock for their workers).
Haliburton - passed something over $100,000,000 in bogus costs on to customers.
Xerox - in the last five years or so has completely invented over $1.5 billion in earnings.
The Baptist Fund - wiped out the savings of over 10,000 people by falsifying records and cooking the books. Somethinig on the order of $700,000,000 gone into thin air. The Largest ever collapse of a non-profit instituion. Left thousands of people absolutely destitute.
WorldCom - cooked the books to the tune of around $4,000,000,000 dollars and gave under-the-table off-the-books loans to their founder.
Adelphia - over $3.1 billion in illegal load actvity to the Rigas Family along with artificially inflating earnings and hiding debt. Some of these guys are on their way to jail.
Arthur Anderson - auditors for Enron, WorldCom, The Baptist Foundation AND Waste Management (probably others, too, but those are the ones I remember).
Merck - in the last few years has booked over $12 billion in non-existent revenue. They just made it up. They never collected it, but it went on their books.
Not quite a dozen, but not bad for just reading the papers in the last few months. EVERY one of these companies has cost people money in their stocks, pension plans, salaries and have hurt the economy through loss of jobs, decline in value, etc. Every single one of these companies got away with it for a long time because the laws are geared for the corporations and not the people. If the laws were not so unduly friendly to the corporations, Arthur Anderson wouldn't have been able to fuck everyone so hard for so long, Enron would not have gotten away with the same shit Waste Management did and there would be 10,000 Baptists with enough money to live instead of having to lean on family or collect welfare (more damage to the economy).
So, unless you're paying attention, don't waste your time calling me out.
SpaceAce