VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
Traveling as I still do,unwisely,to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, I detect a development in the universe of anti-Americanism, which one gets used to (and bored of!). There is a decline in admiration for one of the icons of the American success story,free enterprise capitalism.
I make it my business to extol to foreign audiences the virtues of the U.S. corporate sector, which with all its faults, continues to be the engine of world prosperity and the source of a pretty large share of innovation, productivity and, at its best (vide Bill Gates!), social responsibility and global beneficence.
Yet what is the image of the U.S. that much of corporate America projects to the world today?
Martha Stewart was cheered deliriously,yep, deliriously,when she returned from prison to her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Corp.
Bernie Ebbers, former chief of WorldCom, which cheated its investors and customers of tens of billions, said at his trial that he wasn’t to blame “Because I almost never looked at the books and didn’t really understand accountancy.” How come the directors of Global Crossing, among them some of the nation’s top businessmen and bankers, allowed this guy to run what once was a Fortune 100 company?
Boeing fired its chairman, making it three in a row.
First, Phil Condit was forced to resign for “ethical lapses” and using an extra room he had built at one of the company’s executive flats for romantic trysts.
Next, Michael Sears, CFO, jailed for conspiring with Darlene Druyen, a Pentagon procurement executive, who corruptly handed multibillion dollar contracts to Boeing in return for a $250,000 retirement job as head of its missiles division.
And now, Harry C. Stonecipher, brought out of retirement to repair the damage, who last week was shown the door because to quote a Boeing spokesman, “if details were to get out about his affairs, the company’s reputation would be harmed!”
I’m sorry about Stonecipher. When Condit, at the height of his powers, was my guest at Orange County’s World Affairs Council, I got to know Stonecipher a bit and found him modest where Condit was boastful, humorous where Condit was pompous. Stonecipher also was gifted with a vision that his predecessor lacked for his great company’s future in space.
I also feel badly about Boeing and the guys who work for it in Long Beach.
The 747 surely is the best airliner ever built. The same goes for the C-17, the huge heavy lift and short takeoff transporter that Boeing took over from McDonnell Douglas, which, in times gone by, I tried,and failed,to persuade Britain’s Royal Air force to buy.
Yet ever since Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, it has been in trouble. And most of its troubles arise from its unsavory relations with government.
I’ve never forgotten how our No. 1 aerospace company whooped up false rumors about the dangers of supersonic flight that persuaded New York state to delay the Anglo-French Concorde out of the U.S. market for the four to five crucial years that Boeing needed to launch its wide bodied jets.
I’m also doubtful about some of the tactics being used by both sides, but especially Boeing, in the contest of the Airbus 390 and Boeing’s 7E7 Dreamliner.
Boeing and its top executives, like the leaders of all mammoth firms, are facing one of the oldest and wisest warnings of corporate wisdom,”The bigger you are the harder you fall.”
Which is why it is so crucial that those who rise to the top and exercise the all-too-often untrammeled power of corporate chief executives,whose revenues may be larger and whose global influence is greater than all but the 20 top nations,must be held, and be seen to be held, to the highest standards of personal honesty and accountability.
Shouldn’t those who are exposed as crooks and frauds also exhibit at least a few signs of shame?
On which note, I return to the international scene where most American companies are models of propriety compared with their opposite numbers in Japan’s keiretsu, South Korea’s chaebols and many of the conglomerates that dominate the lists of corporate chicanery in the Arab world and Europe.
The difference, however, is this: U.S. spokesmen, from the president to ambassadors to chambers of commerce, make a habit of lecturing other people about the virtues of the American “system”,when the reality in the field is that there’s less and less to choose between their crooks and ours!
* * *
I just returned from the same kind of trip to Khartoum as I made in 2003 to meet Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. I helicoptered around the Blue Nile provinces of Sudan with its president, Omar Hassan Bashir, named last month by Parade magazine as the “world’s worst dictator,” beating out North Korea’s Kim Jong II. (Gadaffi placed sixth.)
Following my lecture to Khartoum’s only global affairs nongovernmental group, I met the minister of industry, who boasted of Sudan’s “130 million cows and enough pretty girls to milk them.” The minister of energy showed me the locations of foreign companies drilling for oil (most Chinese).
The main subject of my talks with President Bashir at his home was Darfur, where the U.N. estimates 70,000 have died and half a million have been made homeless by genocidal tribal fighting. My estimate of Bashir,who helped mop up a glass of cranberry juice I spilled on the lambs wool presidential sofa,is that he is more despot than democrat. But he’s now committed to peace and having his people vote on it.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, former member of the House of Commons and undersecretary of state in the U.K. He will speak on Sudan at a World Affairs Council dinner April 19 at the Center Club. Call (949) 253-5751.
