Corporate Malfeasance Quotes

… the blindness and greed of the so-called captains of industry.

Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.

Not all psychopaths are in prison - some are in the boardroom.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

During the Enron debacle, it was workers who took the pounding, not bankers. Not only did Enron employees lose their jobs, many lost their retirement savings. That's because they were at the bottom of the investing food chain.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

Some American companies operate in the gray area between legitimacy and outright fraud … where the accounting is being perverted.

Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America

I would fill the penitentiaries and jails of the United States so full of Trust magnates that their arms and legs would stick out the windows.

New Yorkers have been fortunate to have Andrew Cuomo as our Attorney General - protecting working New Yorkers against the banks, insurance companies and big corporations.

Business people get many undeserved prizes - golden parachutes and bonuses even when companies fail. I don't think people should get rewarded for screwing up.

When people rob banks, they go to prison. When bankers rob people, they get a bonus

The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

We can no more condone the wastefulness of self-serving company executives than we can the sacrifice of the lives of our citizens in a senseless war.

I don't want corporate America to think they can continue their duplicitous double-dealing.

It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.

Yes! We finally captured Martha Stewart. You know, with all the massive and almost completely unpunished fraud perpetrated on the public by companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco we finally got the ring leader. Maybe now we can lower the nation's terror alert to periwinkle.

The oil companies are gouging the American citizenry aggressively, relentlessly, and without any sense of conscience whatsoever.

I think the presumption is, for some reason, anybody who comes from the business or the corporate world is corrupt.

The malfeasance and misjudgments by our corporate, financial and government leaders, declining ethical standards, and the failure of our new agency society reflect a failure of capitalism.

Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats.

At the height of the Enron mania, the company's market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.