Remember when Michael Jordan started playing baseball? How about the day pigs started flying?

I ran across something very similar. Apparently Tyco has joined the Ethisphere Council in teaching other companies about ethics. If that doesn't sound all kinds of wrong to you, allow me to ... remind ... you ... of ... the ... Tyco ... scandal.

Okay, maybe I am being a bit unfair. I mean this whole securities fraud thing was supposedly only conducted by one individual, former CEO Kozlowski - but what if he was just the fall guy for a group of people still in the company? How can we know for sure?

A problem of trust

Maybe I'm just bitter, but I flat out can't trust what any business says in a capitalistic environment. If they're for-profit, then making money and keeping a squeaky clean image is their bottom line.

It's for this reason I absolutely hate press releases. You can forget about getting anything close to the whole story. The worst part is, most media is based on just regurgitating these releases, with zero research involved.

Recently I received the first installment of a subscription to Strategy+Business magazine, which I'm about three seconds from canceling. It's just a bunch of companies touting what they have done recently for their clients under the guise of offering "practical ideas that bridge the gap between theory and practice in contemporary global business."

It's just a bunch of press releases - and you know what press releases do, right? They create hype, and hype creates profit by encouraging traders to buy the company's stock. In the case of Pre-Paid legal, their stock price went from $7 to $54 just because of press releases.

Whatever happened to accountability?

Whatever happened to actually delivering on promises? I mean, aren't we the consumers supposed to decide if a company flourishes or flounders?

Apparently not. It seems in a capitalistic business environment, the people with the money, control the money. They just tell us what to believe, and we're supposed to believe it, forgetting all past digressions, right?

Sorry, but I, for one, will not stand for it.