Last month, federal prosecutors charged cryptocurrency CEO phenom Sam Bankman-Fried with committing “one of the largest financial frauds in American history.” The 30-year-old billionaire, the Securities and Exchange Commission charges in a separate filing, has built a vast financial empire on a “house of cards.” The executive now trying to pick up those cards, the new CEO of Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency exchange FTX, says his predecessor simply engaged in “old-fashioned embezzlement” and didn’t even stop to worry about it. the “highly sophisticated” robbery of the legendary Enron executive. thieves a generation ago.
Just before Bankman-Fried’s brief appearance on America’s economic stage, the face of the nation’s fraud belonged to Elizabeth Holmes, the founding CEO of health technology company Theranos.
Holmes raised some $900 million from a “star-studded” list of investors ranging from media mogul Rupert Murdock to Henry Kissinger. In early 2021, a federal jury convicted her of various frauds in what the Washington Post called “the highest-profile test of whether Silicon Valley’s ‘fake it till you make it’ ethos could hold up to legal scrutiny.” The Hustles of our Bankman-Frieds and Elizabeth Holmes can certainly make for entertaining reading. But Freya Berry, a veteran corporate fraud investigator, finds her scams “aren’t as unusual as you might think,” and they’re not as entertaining either. With “higher rewards” and “higher penalties,” she notes, corporate wrongdoers “go to great lengths to hide” her nefarious ways, even “making death threats to whistleblowers.”
We need these whistleblowers. We must also understand that our culture of thieves is based on more than just outright stealing from our accused corporate fraudsters. Our most accomplished corporate thieves, in fact, never fear prosecution. They steal in broad daylight. They regularly steal the livelihood of the thousands and thousands of men and women who have worked very diligently, sometimes for many years, to make them fabulously wealthy.
We are now experiencing an intense stretch of this robbery. Tech’s top executives are now laying off workers at a frightening rate. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced plans to pass the pink note to about 10,000 workers. Amazon is cutting 18,000, Google parent Alphabet 12,000, IBM nearly 4,000. Overall, Forbes estimates, technology companies alone so far this month have boosted 56,000 employees.
What makes these layoffs ‘theft’? Simple greed. Investors on Wall Street “were expecting more growth,” explains Grid economics analyst Matthew Zeitlin, than Big Tech companies are “currently showing.” That sends Big Tech stock prices plunging, “ And every time stock prices fall, investors and executives get nervous, and workers often pay the price.
Meanwhile, the restless CEOs cutting all these positions continue to stuff dollars into their own personal pockets, at overall pay rates that rarely dare to dip below a quarter of a million dollars a week.
Last October, Microsoft revealed that CEO Satya Nadella’s annual compensation had risen 10.2 percent to just under $55 million. Nadella now earns more in one year than the typical Microsoft employee can earn in 289 years. In 2018, the typical Microsoft worker only had to work 154 years to earn what the company’s CEO earned in just one. Last December brought news that Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai has a new three-year ‘performance’ package that will net him $210 million.
Executives like these set a stealing tone for our entire society. Their vast fortunes not only make the rest of us feel poorer and poorer. They leave us increasingly vulnerable to scammers promising shortcuts to jackpots. And this pilfering from the most ‘respected’ CEOs of our corporate world provides the scammers among us rationalizations for their own scam behaviors. The corporate bigwigs play their games, they tell themselves, we play ours.
Excerpt: ‘How concentrated wealth and corporate power feed the greed of thieves’.
Courtesy: Commondreams.org
