just a few brief business questions
posted 2004.07.18
Is personal responsibility truly that much more important than responsible corporate governance? Is your responsibility to your own dollars and cents more important than the responsibility to thousands of employees and investors?
Martha Stewart: Pundits had been crowing for months that she would go to jail, and they were right.
Kenneth Lay: Pundits are already speculating that he'll get off. And they'll probably be right, too.
I suppose it's obvious from the statements above, but I can't help but feel there are degrees of wrongness here, and the scales are not seemingly tipping in the way one would expect.
But maybe that's just me.
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Personal responsibility is a committment between two or more people, and cannot be shared with innanimate objects. A janitor is responsible to the people that own and work in a building to clean it, not the building itself. You could say we have a responsibility to the earth to not destroy it, but that really only matters because other living things count on that system for survivial - so the responsibility is still between things that are alive.
People have a resoponsibility to themselves, and those that rely on them, to ensure that they have enough dollars and cents to support themselves and not place undue strain on others for support. Reasonable wealth beyond that still carries a tacit responsibility to be used for the greater good; through activities like purchasing, investment and philanthropy.
Beyond that, amassing wealth is a pointless attempt to feed personal greed. It does not satisfy, because you will always want more. That's the vicious spiral Martha and Ken Lay got themselves into. They twisted a personal responsibility that they had both reasonably fulfilled years ago into something sinister, at the expense of their responsibility to employees and investors.
I figure Martha got time because she's famous and will serve as a warning to others, while Ken Lay is too connected to powerful people to sit in a cell. I hope history proves me wrong on the latter.
Amen!
I completely agree with you.
Granted I'm not a Martha fan in the leats bit, but if I were in her spot and I found out that I was standing in line to lose a chunk of my change, you better bet I'd take it out. I think at most she should have paid a hefty fine and perhaps community service. Jail time? Oh heck no. I've known drug dealers selling in schools that got less time than she did and they were back out at the school selling drugs a day after they got out!
Kenneth Lay, on the other hand, needs a long long long time in jail and not in one of those resort prisons. This man needs to pay for the amount of lives he helped destroyed.
Our justice system is definitely sending the wrong message to the corporate world here.