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

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

List Price: $22.00
Your Price: $14.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An eye opener for EVERY American!
Review: Regardless of where your political partisanship falls, this book should be a wake up call regarding the rampant corporate corruption in America. Arianna Huffington has written a clear and factual recounting of the various corporate scandals and corporate crooks that run some of America's largest corporations. In this time of recession, layoffs and a sputtering economy, there are still corporate crooks out there lining their pockets as the economy falters. Our recent political administrations have let this go on unchecked (despite all the claims to the contrary by the current Bush administration...it's all lip service). As Arianna says in this book, once you have finished reading it, you will want to "join forces to storm the control room on the S.S. America and shut off the autopilot".

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Her book is as unclear as her speech
Review: The author presents ideas that are outdated and imposible to implement into society. She is obviously an idealogue who is incapable of relating reality to government. She provides simple solutions to difficult problems. It just doesn't connect and her kame logic permeates this book. I would give a lower rating one star but there is no choice.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Clear proof of corruption in business and gov't
Review: The prosecutors trying the corporate crooks should follow this book for their pitch to the juries. This books gives the best clear explanation of how extreme corporte greed along with political corruption has damaged our country worse than its enemies could. Everyone should read it and then vote angry!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Oink!
Review: The really sad thing about this book is that, although we might be entertained, and it sure feels good if nothing else to verbally abuse the bad boys of corporate America, it is all so morosely ineffectual and after the fact. How many of the CEOs that columnist (and currently independent candidate for governor of California) Arianna Huffington lambasts here will actually do any jail time? How many will pay fines that are more than a fraction of the benefits they have already received, benefits they have reinvested, benefits that are drawing dividends, interest and influence? How many will even find their lavish lifestyles amended in the slightest?

The answer my friend is probably zero.

And so it goes (wrote Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Slaughterhouse Five, but that's another story). In the long run whether corporate executives will continue to find the means to rip off their shareholders is of little moment. Let's say each visible pig managed to steal one way or the other an average of $40-million from his corporation; and let's say there are one thousand such swine. How much does that cost us? Forty million times a thousand is $40-billion big ones, or as Evertt Dirksen used to say, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. Notice, by the way, that in small companies or in a business that you may happen to own, there is absolutely no chance that you could get away with ripping off...yourself!

Furthermore, remember that these oinkers have to spend that money on conspicuous consumption of some kind, a house on Long Island, an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht berth at Martha's Vineyard, Picassos and Rembrandts, a mistress, Chateau Petrus and Cuban cigars. So some of it trickles down, and for most of us poor souls in the unemployment line (God, we're hardly alive! relatively speaking) it really doesn't matter much.

What does matter is how corporations are able to gain unnatural influence over our elected officials and thereby rip off the government, the environment, pollute the water and the air, drive smaller businessmen out of business, purchase public lands at garage sale prices, economically ensnare millions of workers (and then dump them when the time is ripe), and guess what, nobody can be held responsible!

I wish Ms Huffington had focused on these more substantial crimes of corporate America and on the way the system works to shield them and their execs from any real accountability. I did enjoy her numerous flights of nasty rhetoric and the befuddling array of facts and figures she presents (I assume they are mostly right), and I have a lot of sympathy for those who got their pension funds shortchanged while the CEOs golden-parachuted on gossamer wings to the French Riviera or Barbados or a ranch in Texas. I even feel some sympathy for the poor slob who bought Enron at ninety bucks and change or WorldCom at sixty-four fifty (see p. 41). And it is true she has a table on page 115 entitled "Buying Congress" which lists the top five senators and top five congressmen in terms of campaign contributions from the accounting industry, 1989-2001. The salient thing to notice, however, is that there are exactly five democrats and five republicans on the list. What does that tell us about how things are going to go in the future? With both political parties feeding heartily at the trough is there any chance that any of what Huffington rails against will change?

The answer my friend is the null set. Until the laws of the land are changed so that corporations AND their executives are held responsible for their actions, business will continue as usual. The rich will grow obscenely more rich, and someone, somewhere, who doesn't deserve, it will get ripped off once again.

And so it goes.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: when big business controls government
Review: The scandals and outrages brilliantly described in this book prove beyond a reasonable doubt that big government is controlled, lock, stock and barrel, by big business, perhaps more so now than at any other time in American history. But because the mainstream media is controlled by big business as well, most Americans don't realize what is going on, or don't seem to care.

Is there any hope for a better future? Sure. Join Public Citizen, Common Cause, Global Exchange, the Center for Public Integrity, working assets radio, United for a Fair Economy or Citizen Works, to name a few or write your favorite media encouraging them to shine the light on this cesspool of corruption.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Arianna _is_ the pig at the trough
Review: The theme of this book is that businessmen are parasites who do not earn their money. This theme is evil and false, and evades every key issue.

Who is it that built this country? The homeless? Welfare recipients? Bureaucrats? Environmentalists? Factory workers? Even scientists? No. The Soviet Union did and does have all those groups. The one group they didn't and don't have is businessmen. That is why socialism didn't and doesn't work. It is the conceptual, mental ability of businessmen that is required for an industrial civilization. Society cannot survive with only scientists, factory workers, and bureaucrats. The average American - whom she claims to defend -owes his standard of living to Big Business, not his own work. The rate of wages one could get in the Soviet Union is what physical labor guided by bureaucrats alone could provide. The wages of the American worker rest on the unmatched mental ability of American businessman.

But the need for and the rights of businessmen have never been acknowledged. They have been called exploiters for no other reason than that they do mental, rather than physical, work. Their right to their profits has never been defended. They have been called morally evil ("materialistic money grubbers") for the exact moral virtue that is keeping us all alive - an intense, rational focus on life here, now, on this earth. We have never paid them the one thing that we owe them most: a moral sanction.

Of course, she would claim that she is only after fraud and abuse. But that is not true, she condemn businessmen as such. Why else would she include Jack Welch in her attack? The only thing Welch was even accused of was earning a large salary and daring to enjoy it. She rejects the moral premise of unequal pay for unequal work, and attacks businessmen for the lavish lifestyle which they have earned.

We should regard whatever dishonest businessmen who are involved in these scandals the same way as we would regard a black man who raped a white woman in the lily white south of the 1920's. It is true that a rapist should be punished. But the white-hooded lynch mob gleefully dispensing that punishment is much, much, much worse than the rapist.

Actually, the author is worse than even that. The old south lynch mobs were merely racists; they hated people for their skin pigmentation, which is a meaningless physiological detail. She hates people for their _virtues_: ambition, industry, rationality and success.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I HEART PIGS AND HISTORY
Review: this book really helped me understand the fine art of Pigs and theyre greed. I love pigs but they need to understand what this book says. I recomend this book to any pig out there that needs guidance and that would learn from this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Perfect title....
Review: This is a perfect title for a book about unbridled greed in America. Yes, a lot of what corporate CEOs do is legal. So, what should we do about it as a society? Change the laws! Do these people even have a conscious?!?! Arianna makes a wonderful case for people standing up to say "This is MY country and I am not taking this anymore."

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Dead on Target!
Review: This is a very insightful,imaginative, thought=provoking look at how American society is being corrupted and held captive by selfish and greedy corporate executives and politicians. Huffington aims and hits her target on nearly every page.What adds credibility to this account is that Huffington is very familiar with the types she writes about, being the ex-wife of a multi-millionaire former politician. This is an excellent book, very well-written as well as being vastly entertaining

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Pigs At The Trough
Review: This is Ms. Stassinopoulus/Huffington's latest bid for attention, and I find it difficult to take her seriously as a writer or a politician. She changes her positions on an awful lot of issues depending on what seems to serve her own purposes - I get no sense that she is behind much of anything she says or writes.


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