Non-National Corporations

The amount of criminal fraud which becomes institutionalized never ceases to amaze me. To fully understand how much it takes to amaze me you would have to understand what it is to be a citizen in Illinois where the statewide pass-time is sending politicians (in particular governors and anyone associated with the Mayor of Chicago office) to prison. I firmly believe we hold the international patent on fraud and corruption, only leasing it to wanna-be criminal countries like Nigeria.

I have long said you cannot teach or instill ethics into an MBA. They attend a specialized college curriculum to have morals, ethics, and dignity purged from their beings. While labor parties and backers were outraged at the recent attempt by one corporation to get stimulus dollars even-though they have been leading the charge off-shore and are now down to fewer than 30% U.S. Citizens as employees, I considered it just another day at the office. This is the mentality which has been rampant in the industry since the Gartner Group was paid to market “Right Sizing” and never faced criminal charges over the labor shortage when Y2K hit. Had all of those programmers been working on Y2K issues when Gartner was telling the industry to fire them, the entire Y2K debacle would have been dealt with for less than 1/10 ^th the cost, yet no criminal charges were ever filed against Gartner or the executives who cashed huge bonus checks/stock options from all the money they “saved” by “right sizing”.

We, as a country, can fix this, but it has to come from a grass roots effort. You will not get politicians cashing lobbyist checks to vote for it. Basically the SEC needs to be able to declare an enforce Non-National Corporation status. Any company with a U.S. Citizen employment rate of less than 51% would be classified as a Non-National Corporation. The stock symbols would get a special letter added to them, much like we add the Q for companies about to be de-listed. Further, the SEC must reach out and force both the S&P 500 and the DOW to not include Non-National Corporations in their compositions.

The only way to solve this problem is to hit the MBAs where they live, stock options and bonus checks. By forcing them out of the S&P and the DOW, we will force a liquidation of their shares. A lot of mutual funds track those indices as well as some exchange traded funds that hold shares of them. Forcing the dump from all of these will cut their share price 20-40% nearly over night. Next you have the “moral agenda” mutual funds which may not yet be aware of just how few American citizens these companies employ. They will also be dumping shares. Finally, the addition of the letter will force mom & dad to pay attention to the issues. Many times they purchase stocks on a “tip from a friend” or based upon a “chart” without every knowing what the company is really doing.

Probably the largest piece of this fraud is the very real likelihood that these companies are counting the output of non-nationals and foreign operations when the government is calculating the GDP. The secondary effect is that ALL output from these newly declared Non-National Corporations must be removed from the GDP calculation. We need a real picture when it comes to the state of the country, not continued fraud. The GDP needs to measure American citizen output, not Indian/Brazillian/Korean/Chinese/etc. output. What will really be interesting to see is if Toyota ends up getting classified as a National corporation when these new rules go into affect. They already build more vehicles in this country than Ford. It may very well turn out that 51% or more of their employees are U.S. Citizens.