Who filled the trough? Who set the table at the banquet of
greed? How has it been possible for corporate pigs to gorge
themselves on grossly inflated pay packages and heaping
helpings of stock options while the average American
struggles to make do with their
leftovers?
Provocative political commentator Arianna
Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of
CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who
have shown a brutal disregard for those in the office
cubicles and on the factory floors. As she puts it:
“The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like
some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.” Yet it has been,
allowing corporate crooks to bilk the public out of
trillions of dollars, magically making our pensions and
401(k)s disappear and walking away with astronomical payouts
and absurdly lavish perks-for-life.
The media have
put their fingers on pieces of the sordid puzzle, but Pigs
at the Trough presents the whole ugly picture of what’s
really going on for the first time—a blistering, wickedly
witty portrait of exactly how and why the worst and the
greediest are running American business and government into
the ground.
Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Adelphia’s John
Rigas, and the Three Horsemen of the Enron Apocalypse—Ken
Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow—are not just a few bad
apples. They are manifestations of a megatrend in corporate
leadership—the rise of a callous and avaricious mind-set
that is wildly out of whack with the core values of the
average American. WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, AOL,
Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and the other scandals are only the
tip of the tip of the corruption iceberg.
Making the
case that our public watchdogs have become little more than
obedient lapdogs, unwilling to bite the corporate hand that
feeds them, Arianna Huffington turns the spotlight on the
tough reforms we must demand from Washington. We need, she
argues, to go way beyond the lame Corporate Responsibility
Act if we are to stop the voracious corporate predators from
eating away at the very foundations of our
democracy.
Devastatingly funny and powerfully
indicting, Pigs at the Trough is a rousing call to arms and
a must-read for all those who are outraged by the scandalous
state of corporate America.
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