NYT--Ebbers Mounts an 'I Never Knew' Defense

The New York Times > Business > Ebbers Mounts an 'I Never Knew' Defense:

In painting the picture of an earnest man aware of his limitations, the defense has tried to show that Mr. Ebbers relied on financial experts and was unaware when they started hiding billions of dollars in expenses to mask the company's deteriorating condition.

Mr. Ebbers is not the only fallen corporate titan who - after being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to run a multibillion-dollar company - has fallen back on the legal defense that he was in the dark and too unsophisticated to know what was happening.

Richard M. Scrushy, the former head of HealthSouth on trial on fraud charges in Birmingham, Ala., has adopted a similar defense. Kenneth L. Lay, the former chairman of Enron, is expected to use that defense when his trial begins next year.

And yet, at the same time but on another portion of the playing field, we are told repeatedly that the reason we all pay our CEO's 500 times what we pay ourselves is that's what it takes to get the best man for the job. So who's right here? The CEO's or their defenders? It is quite clear to anyone who has worked in the corporate structure that the best man for the job is most often overlooked, and even un-looked-for, and that the boob finally jury-rigged for the part is a many-level incompetent with just enough savvy and smarts to be sold to the troops with the usual rationalizations.

It's time for the call to end the ancient and outdated and inefficient hierarchical structure in which the priests at the top of the pyramid are paid as much as all the slaves in the bottom three-quarters of the pyramid, and given powers, breaks, shelters, perqs, and laurels so that they hardly need their paychecks. In a time when the bottom 3/4 was almost wholly ignorant of this, and the priests were the same executioners for the duration of the pyramid's time in the sun, this was a grotesque tragedy of a system, but now that the Masses have access to the Information (for now) and the Priests pass from Pyramid to Pyramid every 3 1/2 years after looting the treasury, it goes beyond travesty and becomes black comedy, with a chorus of bullet-headed, poor-white-boy slaves singing the praises of their Master and Model.

corporate structure