TABLE OF CONTENTS A 16-month-old child dies from drinking bacteria-laden apple juice after a company ignores advice concerning the product's safety. A slaughterhouse is found dumping waste, chicken blood, and entrails into one of Mississippi's main water systems. A children's safety seat manufacturer fails to reveal to the public dangerous defects in its car seats, cribs, and strollers that kill two babies and injure more than 300 others. Enron collapses, costing employees millions of dollars in pension losses. Merrill Lynch agrees to pay $100 million in fines for touting stocks that its own analysts expected to lose money. Hundreds of listed companies are forced to restate their profits, caught red-handed in financial manipulation and deception.
Why do these things continue to happen? Just when economists, politicians, and business leaders were declaring the final triumph of free-market capitalism over central planning or government intervention in markets just when the doctrine of corporate voluntary compliance was beginning to make headway against overregulation it seems as if all the concerns and accusations levied by pressure groups against companies are justified.
Maybe it is because we were beginning to believe the constant upbeat advertising, the incessant almost orwellian re-branding, the slogans, the music, the pictures of happy children, pristine lakes, and dedicated employees...
