Last Month, federal prosecutors indicted the crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for committing “one of the largest financial frauds in American history.” The 30-year-old billionaire had created an infinite monetary empire with a “house of cards.” This was made possible by a separate submission to the Securities Exchange Commission enabling them to include expenses.
Before Bankman-Fried’s brief look in the fraud spotlight, the nation was focused on the financial misdeeds of Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of the Wellbeing Technology Firm Theranos. Holmes raised some $900 million from a “star-studded” list of investors, which included media mogul Rupert Murdock and Henry Kissinger. In early 2021, a federal jury found her guilty of various frauds in what was called “the highest-profile test of whether Silicon Valley’s ‘fake it till you make it’ ethos could hold up to legal scrutiny.”
Freya Berry, a fraud investigator for many years, John finds the scams “aren’t as unusual as you might think.” They’re both entertaining, but with “higher rewards” and “higher penalties,” company wrongdoers go to great lengths to hide their nefarious ways, even “making death threats to whistleblowers.”
It’s not just about stealing from the accused fraudsters in companies. The majority of company thieves who are successful do not face prosecution. In broad daylight, they steal the livelihoods of thousands to thousands of people who have worked hard, usually for a few decades, to become extraordinarily rich.
We are actually witnessing an intense period of theft. High-ranking executives from tech companies are cutting employees for a steep fee. Earlier this month, Microsoft made 10,000 employees aware of the plans to change to pink, Amazon is cutting 18,000, Google parent Alphabet is chopping near 4,000, and IBM is close to 12,000. According to estimates from Forbes, this month’s tech firms have increased the number of employees by 56,000.
Are these layoffs theft? Simple greed. Investors on Wall Street “were expecting more growth,” explains Grid Economic analyst Matthew Zeitlin, which Big Tech firms are “currently showing.” That sends Big Tech stock prices plunging, and employees often pay the difference.
Meanwhile, the stressed CEOs cutting all these positions continue to stuff dollars into their own pockets, at general pay rates that rarely dare to dip below a quarter of a million dollars every week. Last October, it was revealed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s annual compensation was just under $55 million, but had increased 10.2 percent. He earns more in a single year than the average Microsoft employee can make in 289 years. In 2018, it was estimated that the average Microsoft employee would have to work for 154 years to earn the same amount of money as the CEO.
Just last December, it was announced that Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai had been offered a new performance package worth $210 million over three years. Such examples set an alarming tone for the whole society. Not only do large fortunes make us feel poorer and less fortunate, but they also help to improve our quality of life. They make us more and more vulnerable to scammers claiming shortcuts to big wins. And the scammers in the world use this theft to justify their own ripoffs. The bigwigs in companies play their games, telling themselves that we play ours.
Excerpt: ‘How the illness of wealth is fed by concentrated power and corporate greed.”
Courtesy: Commondreams.org
