#corporate integrity

[therealistjuggernaut]

Just a Note — Important — Building What Matters

The Realist Juggernaut is moving to an every-other-day publishing schedule starting today. This is not contraction. It is not burnout. It is

[assetintegrityengineering]

Applying Together in Order a Strong System for Handling Corporate Integrity

[rjzimmerman]

Recent cases of disturbing business practices underscore the need for good regulation, which is at stake in next year’s election.

If you follow Paul Krugman, you like him or you don’t. No middle ground. This is a good one by him about corporate integrity, in light of the VW scandal, and the need for more, not less, regulation.

Excerpt:

Item: The C.E.O. of Volkswagen has resigned after revelations that his company committed fraud on an epic scale, installing software on its diesel cars that detected when their emissions were being tested, and produced deceptively low results.

Item: The former president of a peanut company has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping tainted products that later killed nine people and sickened 700.

Item: Rights to a drug used to treat parasitic infections were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which specializes not in developing new drugs but in buying existing drugs and jacking up their prices. In this case, the price went from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior, not least so that ethical businesspeople aren’t at a disadvantage when competing with less scrupulous types. But we knew that, right?

Well, we used to know it, thanks to the muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era. But Ronald Reagan insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, and this has become dogma on the right.