Greed is God

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi takes down Wall Street yet again with an entertaining and easy-to-understand explanation of what when wrong.

A shorter version: a group of borderline sociopaths exploited weak regulations to ensure that the playing field is so tilted that your average mom-and-pop investor never stood a chance.

And when they ran out of innocent victims this pack of jackals began to eat each other last fall, with the unintended consequence of consuming all our pension plans.

Well duh...

What I can quite believe is that this guy was naive enough to actually believe any of that horseshit about Warren Buffet.

It just proves, once again, that the French have it right. Or more specifically, Honor de Balzac had it right...

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime."

Could someone please explain to me, slowly and in short words, exactly how these bailouts are anything but corporate welfare?

And since that's clearly what it seems to be... if companies get to run for the safety of the welfare state, shouldn't we all have that option.

Business to Planet: Survival First, We'll Go Green Later

We are so screwed. Today's Business Incubator on the Globe and Mail website considers the question of how important the environment should be to your business. Considering this is being taped and put on the web for anyone to see, you have to assume this group of business owners and consultants are putting their best face forward. And as it turns out, the consensus Canada's business people want the world to see is that the public doesn't really care about the environment so why should they? Moreover, as we're in a recession, business people have to worry about their own survival before concerning themselves about anything as abstract as the planet's.

In other words, if you and I, as consumers, don't stop buying over-packaged, toxic products shipped from the four corners of the globe (because we have sooooo many options), companies won't stop making them. In fact, they'll make more.

Sounds like yet more evidence that the only way to get anything accomplished for the environment is through strong federal legislation. But, hey, that's just me.

Ethics 101

Received word the other day that a new website has been launched in Montreal to promote ethical business practices in areas like the environment, labour relations and sustainability. It relies on case studies drawn from around the world. So far, 75 or so have been compiled. The goal is to add more as other examples of businesses behaving in an ethical manner are uncovered--assuming such entities actually exist (ethipedia)