Wall Street watchers say that none of this conduct is particularly unusual. "
The financial industry is " built on the dream of making money for nothing,
of arbitrage, of perpetual motion machines, of converting intellect
into cash without the annoying interventions of hard work and risk,"
writes Mark Levine of Bloomberg. "Magical sure-fire ways to make money
tend to be, you know, bad, for the people providing the sure-fire money.
Regulators keep making them illegal. But the regulations are
complicated, so people keep reinventing the same magical ways to make
money."
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CorpWatch: Non-profit investigative research and journalism to expose
corporate malfeasance and to advocate for multinational corporate
accountability and transparency. We work to foster global justice,
independent media activism and democratic control over corporations.
We seek to expose multinational corporations that profit from war,
fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses, and to provide
critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective
democracy.
Our guiding vision is to promote human, environmental, social and worker rights at the
local, national and global levels by making corporate practices more
transparent and holding corporations accountable for their actions.
As
independent investigative researchers and journalists, we provide critical information
to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy.
We believe the actions, decisions, and policies undertaken and
pursued by private corporations have very real impact on public life à ‚¬"
from individuals to communities around the world. Yet few mechanisms
currently exist to hold them accountable for those actions. As a result,
it falls to the public sphere to protect the public interest.
In many cases, corporate power and influence eclipses even the democratic
political
process itself as they exert disproportional influence on public policy
they deem detrimental to their narrow self-interests. In less developed
nations, they usurp authority altogether, often purchasing government
complicity for unfair practices at the expense of economic,
environmental, human, labor and social rights.
Yet despite the
very public impact of their actions and decisions, corporations remain
bound to be accountable solely to their own private financial
considerations and the interests of their shareholders. They have little
incentive, nor requirement, for public transparency regarding their
decisions and practices, let alone concrete accountability for their
ultimate impact.
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