Corporation Watch

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day is the perfect metaphor for so much of what happens in the U.S. — including (or maybe especially) anything having to do with finance or corporate crime and corruption. Bill Murray plays a Pittsburgh weatherman who's forced to cover a saccharine annual event in rural Pennsylvania. The assignment is his idea of hell, and he tries desperately to get it over with as quickly as possible so he and his two-person crew can get out of town and back to the "big" city.

But the weather — and fate — intervene, and Murray's character is forced to re-live that same day over and over again until, after exhausting every duplicitous and underhanded strategy for exploiting the situation to his own advantage, he is finally able to restore the normal timeline only by abandoning his cynical and self-serving attempts to "game" a system he knows all too well (by dint of its repetition) and fundamentally altering his entire approach to life and his relationships with the people in it.

Well, anyone who's lived through one of the recent boom-bubble-corruption-crime-bust-bailout cycles that have gradually supplanted the actual economy in the U.S. must be hearing the strains of the 1965 Sonny and Cher hit I've Got You Babe*, because it should be clear to everyone by now that Wall Street is perfectly happy with the lucrative predicament it's in, and has no interest in fundamentally changing anything — and that the government's pathetic pantomime of financial reform doesn't even begin to approach the level of systemic change needed to break us out of yet another econo-temporal loop.

Daily Finance (and many other publications) reported Dec. 6 that the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by retailing behemoth Wal-Mart over whether 1.5 million of its female employees, who accuse the company of paying lower wages and denying promotions compared to their male counterparts, can sue as a single class.

As DF writer Abigail Field notes, "even if the women lose, they could in theory start over, seeking to sue as a different kind of class. Or each employee could [still] sue individually. However, given that nine years and many millions of dollars have been spent bringing the case this far, it's hard to see [them] starting from scratch."

Daily Finance reported Nov. 26 that the U.S. Justice Department has increased enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which prohibits American companies from bribing foreign officials. Quoting the FCPA blog, it noted that in 2004, "two individuals were charged under the FCPA, and criminal fines collected that year were around $11 million. In 2009 and 2010, over 50 individuals have been charged, 35 await trial, and nearly $2 billion in fines have been collected."

Perhaps one way the government could reduce the national budget deficit would be to actually enforce the laws against corporate malfeasance, and in addition to sending corporate executives to prison — a punishment (and simultaneous deterrent to further crime) that is sorely lacking — collect large (not slap-on-the-wrist, cost-of-doing-business) fines that would eat into shareholders' take and make corporate crime a money-losing venture.