Most Executives Would Be Fired for Confessing Criminality
Even Donald Trump couldn’t say “You’re fired!” enough, fast enough, if turned loose on government.
A front page report in USA Today on March 15 provided a brief, incomplete catalog of the cost-cutting and cost control measures that many states, buried in budget deficits and new, onrushing costs shoveled onto them by Obamacare, are hurriedly implementing.
Sadly, the governors and legislators are only grudgingly, reluctantly slashing all this wasteful duplication, gross over-staffing and bureaucratic boondoggling. They do it now because they’ve been backed against the edge of a cliff. The epic waste of taxpayers’ money is finally being reined in long, long after it could and should have.
In short, these elected officials have too long been derelict of duty. They deserve no praise for these overdue actions – they deserve to be fired. Unceremoniously booted to the curb.
In truth, these sudden economizers have confessed to crimes against those they represent spanning years. Technically, it is called violation of fiduciary responsibility.
Fiduciary responsibility means managing money with which one is entrusted in a reasonable, prudent manner. Attorneys, accountants, bankers, brokers put in charge of money in trust who violate their fiduciary duties can be put in prison. Corporate leaders have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and can be sued or even criminally prosecuted for violating it. There are famous CEOs, who were once glorified on business magazine covers, parked in prison right this minute for this very crime. If we can’t watch all these politicians take perp walks to justice, we can at least fire them. We must. At every opportunity.
The question for voters to ask, and that media should relentlessly demand answers to (but very rarely does) is: if you can find these savings now, why have you permitted all this slop and waste month after month, year after year until now? Why have you engaged in such criminality for so long?
And it’s the question that every journalist at every opportunity should have been asking President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and the rest of their gang this past week:
“If you insist on advancing this preposterous proposition that you can pay for Obamacare in substantial part by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and waste from Medicare – thus slashing its costs without curbing quality or quantity of care (no rationing, no death panels) – then you must know where that fraud and waste is. So why are you engaging in criminal activity day by day by day, by continuing to administer this waste and fraud? Why are you sitting atop a criminal conspiracy and doing nothing to end it? How dare you ask – no, demand – more control of more of health care, when you confess to being complicit in billions of waste and theft from the hunk of it you already control? How dare you attack and vilify insurance companies for taking of money out of health care, when the insurance company you now run (Medicare) is, by your own confession, rife with waste and fraud? Fraud! Unchecked fraud. How dare you?”
Hardly any media figure demands these criminals try and defend themselves. Instead, most are complicit in the furthering of the waste, fraud and now, new deception of this outrageous socialized medicine and tax scheme. What passed on Sunday is nothing less than crime enlarged and expanded.
Dan Kennedy is a serial entrepreneur, adviser to business owners, sought-after speaker and author of 13 books. More information about Dan can be found at www.NoBSBooks.com, and a free collection of his business resources including newsletters and webinars at www.DanKennedy.com.<?xml:namespace prefix = u1 />