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

by Arianna Huffington

Who filled the trough? Who set the table at the banquet of greed? How has it been possible for corporate pigs to gorge themselves on grossly inflated pay packages and heaping helpings of stock options while the average American struggles to make do with their leftovers?

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in the office cubicles and on the factory floors. As she puts

“The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.” Yet it has been, allowing corporate crooks to bilk the public out of trillions of dollars, magically making our pensions and 401(k)s disappear and walking away with astronomical payouts and absurdly lavish perks-for-life.

The media have put their fingers on pieces of the sordid puzzle, but Pigs at the Trough presents the whole ugly picture of what’s really going on for the first time—a blistering, wickedly witty portrait of exactly how and why the worst and the greediest are running American business and government into the ground.

Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Adelphia’s John Rigas, and the Three Horsemen of the Enron Apocalypse—Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow—are not just a few bad apples. They are manifestations of a megatrend in corporate leadership—the rise of a callous and avaricious mind-set that is wildly out of whack with the core values of the average American. WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, AOL, Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and the other scandals are only the tip of the tip of the corruption iceberg.

Making the case that our public watchdogs have become little more than obedient lapdogs, unwilling to bite the corporate hand that feeds them, Arianna Huffington turns the spotlight on the tough reforms we must demand from Washington. We need, she argues, to go way beyond the lame Corporate Responsibility Act if we are to stop the voracious corporate predators from eating away at the very foundations of our democracy.

Devastatingly funny and powerfully indicting, Pigs at the Trough is a rousing call to arms and a must-read for all those who are outraged by the scandalous state of corporate America.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Business, History, Sociology, Classics

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2003

About the author

Arianna Huffington is the chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of fourteen books.

In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

She has been named to Time Magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

She serves on several boards, including HuffPost’s partners in Spain, the newspaper EL PAÍS and its parent company PRISA; Onex; The Center for Public Integrity; and The Committee to Protect Journalists.

Her 14th book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder was published by Crown in March 2014 and debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Reviews

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this book written to make a point? You bet! Call it propaganda, I don't care. Now that this is clear, let's move on. Truth is where you you find it, and she looks even more like a Prophet since this last corporate meltdown in 2007/2008. Actually, you don't need to be a Prophet, you just need to understand human behavior, and not be easily suckered in by rhetoric. If you want proof that she is telling the truth, consider this. She lists a thousand examples of exploitation, and or criminal behavior. Then she backs that up with a thousand specific actions by those in question. If she was not protected by the truth, don't you think that some of those bad boys and bad girls would have sued her right into the poorhouse?
She is right about other things too. If we don't get money out of elections, and write strict regulations, we are fools to expect anything different in the future. I would like to add that constitutional term limits would also help clean out the corruption in our government.
I am sick to death of our government existing solely to perpetuate this scam of the rich. Political pressure is just like pneumatic pressure in the physical world. If it is not released in a controlled manner, then eventually all hell breaks loose. Read your history!

[Ben · Rating 1 out of 5]

An important topic that deserves a good book. Unfortunately, this is not a good book. The writing is poor, and the organization is non-existent. Information is thrown in randomly - without any logical order, so it's impossible to remember and impossible to find later. The authors tone is sarcastic and mocking through the whole book, with more space given to jokes and mocking metaphors than to relevant facts about a serious problem. I was disappointed.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly I am in the wrong business.

As a non-boardroom employee people tend to take a dim view of my personal enrichment at the expense of the company, investors, and the public in general.

This book is easy to read but hard to believe, as Huffington documents the warm-ups and practice rounds that lead to our current economic woes.

Is worse yet to come?

[Madi Badger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually enjoyed this book more than I thought, it made me laugh a few times

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington is a book that points out a major economical issue in the United states. Throughout this novel the author shows countless examples of overlooked economic flaw. Her target being big corporate business owners and how they influence politics to keep themselves reaping all of the benefits. With great use of real world statistics she shows how unfair things have been to try and open the eyes of people who are not getting as much out of life because of extreme greed by the most powerful people, some who claim to be helping.

I enjoyed the fact that this novel was written to prove in depth how greedy corporate America can actually be with undeniable evidence stated page by page. Along with good intentions it had a lot of snide sarcastic jokes I actually found quite amusing and very intelligently put but no lack of insult.

This novel was quite hard to get through because it jumped back and forth a lot and was pretty hard to keep up with. It seemed to digress to much and after a while it was like reading the same thing over and over again it just rambled about very identical situations that were impossible to remember the difference between unless I kept going back and refreshing myself and scanning for tiny differences.

In the end this was a pretty terrible book. Unless that's something you are crazed about it is terribly hard to get through. I felt like the book just kept starting over and it never got exciting or interesting after reading about a ton of very similar incidents all talked about and made fun of in the same way.

[Chilly SavageMelon · Rating 2 out of 5]

caveat: this style of book is well outside of my "comfort zone" or normal reading material and thus I find it a challenge, in a way, to review, but-

While I am certainly gung ho on a corporate watchdog mentality, I couldn't relate to Huffington's detailing of some of the presumably empirical data of what this crooked CEO paid for their 2nd beach house etc., for the same reason I don't watch E television. Ultimately, I just don't give a fuck and look cynically at those entire worlds. In theory, I am glad someone is out there grinding such axes, and to be fair, in the end proposing solutions about steps the Fed might take to oversee shennanigans.
But I found the jokey little quizzes throughout to be pithy at best, overall stupid. While I don't take serious issue with anything stated here, I couldn't get swept up in the "liberal bandwagon". To say "let's just decide to bring back more of the mom and pop style" sums it up for me, but I recognize this as altruism.
One hilarious turn of events, five years after it's publication is the recent depantsing, literally, of "hero" Elliot Spitzer, who is lauded again and again here.
All of this having been said, I did learn something, and have no real regrets I went out on this particular limb.

The American Big $ Game is still fixed and the little guy gets screwed, go figure...

[Brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I share some of Huffington's social and political opinions her snarky asides and exertions to drill a lame joke home (sometimes dedicating a short paragraph to making fun of someone) really grow tiresome quickly. She knows her business but is better off in explaining economics and corporate malfeasance to retards like me than she is trying to entertain anyone.

[Kim Cano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this as a gift for my step-dad a while back since he likes these sorts of books, and he suggested I read it. Even though it was depressing I really liked it. Now when I hear friends tell me they haven't gotten a raise in years, they're being switched from full-time to part-time and their benefits are being cut, I'll know it's so some asshat can have a $6,000 gold shower curtain!

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is full of great information but the writing isn't very good and it's very slow reading.

[Alysha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't understand this woman. I wish she would stop writing. She's not good at it.

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Corporate scandals age faster than yogurt, yet “Pigs at the Trough” has proved stubbornly resistant to obsolescence. First published in the early 2000s, Arianna Huffington’s book arrived as Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and their kind were still smoking craters on the financial landscape, and as the phrase “restatement of earnings” was just beginning its career as a genteel synonym for fraud. Reading it now, in its updated form with the 2009 preface and afterword, feels less like opening a time capsule than like discovering an early season of a long-running series – the pilot for the “too big to fail” era.

The central metaphor is not subtle and is not meant to be. America, in Huffington’s telling, has allowed a small, self-dealing elite to turn the economy into a feeding trough. The title is not a throwaway insult but a framing device. Who gets to eat, who fills the trough, who quietly picks up the tab when the animals have wandered off – these are the questions the book returns to, chapter after chapter, with a mix of satire, data, and prosecutorial fury.

Huffington opens with the mythology of the 1990s boom – the “new economy” rhetoric, the promises of democratized capital, the assurances that the stock market would transform ordinary workers into small shareholders in a grand, shared prosperity. Into that mythology she drops the likes of John Rigas of Adelphia, a small-town success story who turned a local cable investment into a multibillion-dollar empire while prompting customers to pay for his private golf course, pro hockey team, and family indulgences via innocuous line items on their cable bills. The rate hike notice arrives in the mail; the explanation invokes “rising operational expenses.” In Huffington’s hands, the euphemism is peeled back to reveal the golf greens.

This is one of the book’s strengths: its ability to connect the abstract and the intimate. It is one thing to talk about billions in “improperly capitalized expenses.” It is quite another to point out that those capitalizations are the reason a nurse in Buffalo or a teacher in Fresno is paying a little more each month for cable, or why a pension fund quietly withers. “Pigs at the Trough” is full of such translational moments, converting the high dialect of corporate accounting into recognizable household costs.

Structurally, the book proceeds in concentric circles. The early chapters, especially “Pigs on Parade: Power, Perks, and Impunity,” form a sort of rogues’ gallery of early-2000s corporate chieftains. Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, with his infamous shower curtain and Sardinian bacchanals; Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron, with their baroque special-purpose entities and energy-trading shell games; Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, turning losses into profits with the stroke of an accounting pen. These men appear not as isolated monsters, but as a familiar type: the visionary CEO as minor deity, celebrated on magazine covers and business shows, surrounded by boards and bankers who discover their doubts only when the subpoenas arrive.

Huffington is at her most entertaining – and most merciless – when she lingers on the details. The private jets, the executive washrooms, the phantom years of pension credit that transform a short tenure into a lifetime annuity. Her metaphors are gaudy on purpose. She does not merely describe a system of misaligned incentives; she arraigns it. There is a constant refrain: what would happen if an ordinary worker tried any of this? If a line employee pocketed company property, manipulated expenses, or falsified time sheets? The answer is obvious – termination, prosecution, disgrace. At the top, the answers are more creative: golden parachutes, consulting contracts, the occasional strategic sabbatical.

But the book’s ambitions are wider than a catalog of outrageous perks. The next ring outward, captured in sections like “The Bloodless Coup: The Corporate Takeover of Our Democracy,” follows the money down K Street and into Congress. Here the trough imagery broadens: it is not just CEOs feeding, but lobbyists, lawyers, and legislators, all benefiting from what Huffington describes as a quiet, incremental takeover of the machinery of government. Campaign contributions become “down payments on preferential public policy.” Lobbyists are the travel agents of legalized corruption, booking tickets between the boardroom and the hearing room.

She is particularly sharp on the choreography of legislative nonresponse. The metaphors pile up – the captain explaining that the ship is on autopilot while politicians spin the wheel for the cameras; the “not enough oxygen in the room” excuse when corporate reform must compete with homeland security for floor time. She is good at naming the little dodges that turn outrage into inertia: calls to “go slow and get it right,” endless jurisdictional hand-offs, the insistence that reforms are “overreaction” when markets swoon and “too late” when they recover. In a few brisk, angry pages, you get a tutorial in how a bipartisan consensus can smother even modest attempts to rein in the more exuberant forms of looting.

If the CEOs and the lobbyists are the obvious trenchermen, the later chapters are devoted to what she labels “the enablers” – the people and institutions that were supposedly on guard. Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, Wall Street analysts paid like celebrities, the business press with its “Dow 36,000” fantasies, the accountants who turned “restatement of earnings” into a kind of inside joke, the corporate boards that nod through compensation packages while meeting a few times a year between other commitments. In these sections the tone shifts slightly; the satire remains, but there is a hint of betrayal. These were not meant to be pigs; they were meant to be shepherds.

Huffington is not the first to point out that the separation between commercial and investment banking, created by the Glass–Steagall Act and dismantled in the 1990s, helped erect a firewall against certain conflicts of interest. Nor is she alone in observing that, once the firewall fell, analysts became creatures of the deals their firms wanted to win, and auditors became consultants with little incentive to question the hands that fed them. What she adds is a kind of moral x-ray: a sense of how quickly the vocabulary of prudence can be repurposed as cover. A “one-time charge,” a “special purpose entity,” a “temporary liquidity problem” – these phrases wander through the pages like stage directions in a farce.

The book culminates, in its original edition, with a section on “The Binge and the Reckoning,” written as the early scandals crested and legislative responses like the Sarbanes–Oxley Act were still being debated, stalled, or watered down. Here Huffington is strenuously anti-reassuring. The standard Washington narrative at the time – that America had indulged in a little too much speculative champagne and now had to suffer an inevitable hangover – strikes her as a dangerous understatement. She prefers the language of addiction and intervention. A hangover suggests one bad night. A binge suggests a pattern.

From the vantage point of those years, some of her warnings sound almost restrained. She argues that the reforms being floated were largely cosmetic, designed to satisfy public anger without altering the basic relationship between corporate donors and their political beneficiaries. She is skeptical that Sarbanes–Oxley, as negotiated, would prevent the next wave of scandals. She is right. When the preface and afterword written in 2009 pick up the story in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the argument snaps into a longer arc. The earlier cases begin to look less like a climax than like a rehearsal.

This updated material is one of the book’s more compelling features. It allows the author to revisit her earlier metaphors in light of a crisis that dwarfed Enron and WorldCom in both scope and consequence. The pigs are still at the trough, she suggests, but the trough is now filled directly from the public treasury. John Thain’s $1.2 million office renovation at Merrill Lynch, AIG’s spa retreats after its bailout, banks quietly increasing their lobbying budgets using bailout funds – these later examples give the book a grim, almost inevitable coda. Whatever lessons were meant to be learned, the culture of executive entitlement appears to have heard only that the backstop is deeper than previously assumed.

Yet the book is not without its limitations, and a fair assessment has to dwell on those as well. The first is temporal. A work that is laser-focused on the scandals of 2001–2002, supplemented by a 2009 update, cannot capture the mutations of corporate power in the decade and a half since. The rise of platform monopolies, the gig economy, and new forms of data-driven extraction all sit outside its frame. To that extent, “Pigs at the Trough” now reads as an anatomy of a particular phase in the long life of neoliberal capitalism rather than as a comprehensive guide to its current forms.

Second, the tone – which is part of its appeal – can shade into hectoring. Huffington’s anger is righteous, and often infectious, but the prose is pitched at a high, sustained register. Chapter after chapter ends with variations on the theme that the game is rigged, the fix is in, and only a “critical mass” of outraged citizens can reclaim democracy. There is not much patience for the possibility that some actors may be mistaken rather than malicious, misguided rather than venal. In a media environment saturated with outrage, what once felt bracing can sometimes now feel like one more blast of indignation in a very crowded airspace.

Third, the solutions on offer – campaign finance reform, tighter regulation, corporate governance reforms, a redefinition of “morality” that places economic justice alongside private behavior – are sketched more than specified. The prescriptions are directionally clear but light on institutional detail. Readers looking for a blueprint will find more sermon than schematic. The book’s power is diagnostic rather than programmatic; it tells you vividly what went wrong, less so exactly how to fix it.

There is also the matter of partisanship. Although the book takes swipes at figures in both major parties, its sensibility is unmistakably aligned with a certain strand of left-liberal populism. For readers who share that sensibility, this is a feature. For those who do not, the argument may sometimes feel less like a cross-examination than like a closing argument to an already sympathetic jury. In its best passages, the book transcends this by showing how bipartisan the corporate takeover of policy has been – how deregulation and deference to markets have been shared projects. In its weaker ones, it lapses into the familiar grooves of talk-show polemic.

Still, these caveats coexist with substantial achievements. “Pigs at the Trough” remains a remarkably readable primer on the mechanics of corporate misbehavior and political capture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It excels at turning footnotes into headlines – pulling obscure accounting rules, pension-plan tricks, and lobbying maneuvers into the light. It has the virtue of naming names, citing numbers, and reminding readers that every abstract policy choice has a very concrete beneficiary.

Perhaps most importantly, it insists – sometimes a little too insistently, but not incorrectly – that what is at stake is not just the tidiness of the markets but the meaning of democracy and morality. Is it more “immoral” to air a risqué music video or to systematically cheat workers out of overtime pay? To carry an adult magazine at a checkout line or to use tax shelters to starve public schools? In a culture that spends endless energy policing the former while politely debating the latter, Huffington’s moral accounting feels like a necessary provocation.

Taken as a whole, then, the book is neither the last word on corporate greed nor an artifact to be shelved alongside “Dow 36,000” as a relic of a bygone moment. It is something more interesting: a furious, often funny, occasionally overcaffeinated dispatch from an early front in a war that has continued to spread. For all of its excesses, it helps explain how an economy can produce record profits at the top while insecurity deepens at the bottom, and how a political system that prides itself on checks and balances can repeatedly fail to apply them where money is thickest.

On that basis – balancing its vivid clarity and continued relevance against its dated examples, one-sidedness, and sometimes bludgeoning tone – I would give it a 78 out of 100.

[D Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but a necessary one. I'm glad I read this book because I feel more knowledgeable about how we as a country ended up in this financial crisis that we are now in today. The author keeps her story interesting by making a lot of smart remarks while at the same time having tons of facts that I'm amazed that she was privy of knowing. From immoral CEOs to untrustworthy & questionable lawmakers, this book gets down and dirty when exposing them all. It's so depressing to find out in detail just how morally corrupt the people we depend on the most for our countries financial well being. They are pure capitalistic, self-serving, unprincipled, greedy pigs! Two things that I liked most about this book was 1) the way it explained how the financial analyst, investment bankers, and the worth-nothing companies (including it's CEOs, board members, and accountants) contributed to the countless loss of retirement funds without giving it a second thought. It was just business as usual with these companies. 2) This book also lists organizations that people can actively get involved in or just get info from in order to empower themselves. After all, if you do not take a stand to say “Enough!”, then it's really your loss.

[Donitello · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Huffington clearly seeks to take no prisoners in her expose of corporate/legislative malfeasance: She names names, she gives dates, she states exact amounts of money. (Eg.: "If you paid $1 in taxes last year, you paid more than Dow Chemical.") In a truly bipartisan castigation of government corruption, she squeals (pun not intended) on Republicans and Democrats alike, making a strong case that the "military/industrial complex" that President Eisenhower warned about has become a military/industrial/legislative complex--with the legislators holding paying jobs in both the military AND the industrial groups they're supposed to regulate.

If you believe that capitalism is inherently benevolent, and that the profit motive never conflicts with the Bill of Rights, then you probably won't like this book. If, however, you have unsettling suspicions that many of our nation's political actions over the past 3 decades seem to have been motivated solely to create profits for the few, well, this book may provide information that is useful to you. Your call.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of topic Ariana Huffington can really sink her teeth into, and she does so with gusto and relish. She is a very engaging writer, and since this book came out at the height of the Enron scandal, it really uses Kenneth Lay as a springboard to pounce on a variety of CEOs, CPAs, and lots of other people with jobs described by their initials. Huffington knows how to rant and holler - and there is nothing better in my view than a good rant - but she backs her indignation with facts and figures and interesting hitherto-unknown fun items. She occasionally falls off the edge of the trampoline, but she bounces back up to provide the reader with more than enough information for a rant of his or her own.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a grasp of analogy rivaling Matt Taibbi's, and a depth and scope to her research (including, one would have to guess, first-hand contacts) matched by none, Arianna Huffington draws for you outsized diagrams of power and influence, sort-of like those Mercator projections we all learned about in 6th grade, but of the Real World. Her wit makes the bitter pill go down easier, but, sad to say, the situation seemed to be delineated thus: " Although the ties that bind corporate directors and CEOs are informal, subtle, and difficult to quantify, they're powerful enough to foster a collegial spirit in the boardroom that frowns upon criticism or any genuine attempt to exercise real oversight." Sheesh!

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful account of capitalist greed and the politics that drives us there. Huffington does an excellent job of detailing many of the failings of some of the major corporate collapses of late, from the infamous Enron, to WorldCom and down to the lesser mentioned Adelphia. She educates the reader on the specifics of each collapse along with the nasty details of the insiders of each of the companies and their failings to work in the interest of the shareholders. She, goes on to detail Washington's action and inaction that led to and later swept the problems under the proverbial rug.

A good read for anyone interested in corporate greed and corporate regulatory politics in America.

[Jackie Harrison-jewell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been on this kick, reading books about the housing crisis, tax evasion amongst the wealthy, and just general skullduggery. It's been pretty depressing. I think that Ms. Huffington's tone as she talks about the ultra rich taking advantage of their wealth and access to power and government support is satisfying in some ways. She doesn't hesitate to call out these folks for what they are, but it's also a bit too glib for me. I suppose what else did I expect, given the title of the book. Still, informative read and an excellent resource in a list of watchdog organizations aiming for tax and corporate reform.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Arianna Huffington is a well-known liberal, this book is extremely balanced from a political perspective. It covers corporate CEOs, lobbyists, boards of directors, politicians, Wall Street analysts/auditors, and others who feed these greedy pigs. This book should be required reading for all Americans.

Disclaimer: I was in the middle of reading this when it was announced that The Huffington Post would be sold to AOL for $315M. It did put a damper on the sincerity of her writing this book, but I still think it is incredibly important to read.

[Dollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were times reading this book when I just got so disgusted with the behavior of all the corporate “fat cats” that I just had to put this book down for a while. It took me about 5 months to get through. It was all about how lobbyists influence our politicians and laws and how our government so far has been absolutely ineffective in controlling the big corporations in America, so they are allowed to get away with all sorts of shady dealings, such as off-shore tax evasion accounts. It’s disgusting. A good book to read, but very discouraging for the average joe.

[J. Indi Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was enthusiastic about this book from the first page to the last owing, if for no other reason to its witty, yet serious assignations against the excesses of the "obscenely rich", I would say, "pornographically rich" less than 1 percent of the population of this "fat land" America. Namely, those who have sacked up their booty in a number of surprisingly devious ways which the author enumerates. Despite the insistence of the "Right" on the pervasiveness of the quote, unquote, "Liberal, left wing media" I seldom see anything falling below envious idolization and near worship of the lifestyles of the "Rich and Famous" as portrayed on the media outlets (let us admit) ALL of which are owned by them.

Upon perusing the bleak picture Ms. Huffington paints, and all this portends about the true nature of a portion of this world's fellow humans, the reader can only shake his/her head in utter disillusionment in the hope for any remaining particles of optimism he/she may have been sheltering, regarding the depths of unethicality, immorality, indecency, even inhumanity beyond which anyone other than the most depraved serial killer could possibly descend.

Far from that! Far far from that!

It seems that a relatively large proportion of Human animals, (among the small few who have found themselves in the position of heading a corporation) quite happily, one might even say rapaciously availed themselves of all super-rewarded Super-Theoretical-Accountant devised recondite methods, and means by which they glutted themselves, and over-stuffed their personal treasuries. Feeding frenzies which drained the corpses of the Corp.ses, even at the expenses, even up to the deaths by blood loss of (for example) the pensions and retirement schemes of thousands of employees of those self-same corporations.

Lay off several thousand, even tens of thousands of employees by surprise, and at the final hour, perhaps even on Christmas Eve, to add a touch of Dickensian flair?

Instruct the Public Relations, and Art departments to design attractive, confidence inspiring promotional material to keep employees buying company stocks and shares until the very penultimate moment of life of a corporation, by flatly denying all public leaks hinting at the terminal diagnosis, and absolutely imminent death of operations, and naturally the impending worthlessness of afore mentioned stocks and shares?

Offer severance packages of apparent high dollar value of these doomed company shares as an alternate to apparently lower yielding pension plans to more senior employees. Voluntarily relinquishment of pension legally unlocking Millions $$'s for immediate plundering by "in the wise" CEO's?

Move enormous manufacturing complexes out of the towns and regions dependant on them for generations, to other lower wage expectant countries. Turning said areas into dead cities virtually overnight to save on wage costs for companies already realizing profit margins in the billions?

SURE! Why not? Everyone is doing it!

Join the exclusive, elite, party!!! It's all happening 25,000 feet (7.62 km) above ground. Onboard the fleets of privately owned luxury jets in the rarefied air exclusive to the un-perturbed, un-guilt ridden, (un-prosecuted!), One Percent.

It's all laid out in Ms. Huffington's little book, and all in glorious black and white!

What good does knowing it do? In a time when the self-proclaimed "Billionaire" sitting in the office of the Presidency has placed a cotre of other millionaires and billionaires in every head position of every overseeing agency from Health and Welfare, to my personal favorite expression of dark perversity, the appointment of a former head of Exxon to the agency tasked with policing corporate and industrial pollution of our nation's land and water, the now almost paradoxical Environmental Protection Agency.

I liked this well researched and fact-checked little volume. And though I believe giving the facts to the 'People' is a task of high honor, I do not wonder overly hard how many of it's readers will be the people who might actually change this 'sad song' into 'Pollyanna's' "Glad song" since I believe, the body-wide infection of compassionlessness and greed has gone SO septic and is so deeply corrupted that it may be, only those who are in the very positions of gaining by it are the ones who must turn away from it. Perhaps not... Perhaps there are still some "grass-roots" teeth left in the foul smelling mouth of this model of wide spread, systemic corruption we call "our country". Perhaps after all Democracy is not dead and all but buried... And perhaps, the traffic lights will all turn blue tomorrow, and the wind cries Mary...

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oink!

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.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Narendran Thangarajan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstly, this book is from 2003 and seems to be written in response to the string of high-profile corporate fraud from ~2002 which included Enron and WorldCom. The book is well researched, and shows the various ways big corporations can play the government, financial analysts, accountants and their own board of directors to drive their greedy agenda and deceive investors large and small. If you are curious to know what high-profile corporate scandals look like then this is the book for you. Personally, after seeing scandals like Madoff and Lehman Brothers in US and Satyam scandal in India I got curious on what kind of circumstances make these conspirators resort to such scandals and hence made me find and read this book. The answer from this book was simple - greed aka more money.

The one-star drop is because of the lack of coherence in the book. The writing felt repetitive at times. Otherwise, an excellent book for those interested in corporate greed.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The problems with corporate greed are still with us and the book feels both dated and timely in 2018, dated because Bush is long gone, but timely because nothing makes these examples of corporate greed any less relevant today than they were then. The 8 years of Obama did nothing, really, to set things right and the pigs are still at the trough. Perhaps if more people had read this book, American would not have been gullible enough to turn to business people for answers to our national problems.

[J. Cunis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required Reading

As we are about to see the pigs engage in yet another round of greed and corruption which may even dwarf those illustrated in this fine work, this book should be required reading for all high school seniors. Of course an educated populous has always been counter productive to satisfying the gluttony of the pigs and thus education has been carefully sanitized and unfunded.

[Madara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could use some planning. Too much information dumped together and a lot of 'sensational journalism meets dramatic outrage' for my taste but then again I like an academic tone. The information is good and paints a picture of corporate greed in America. Just wish they had take a fine brush and not slathered it on.

[Mr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Astounding information. Exhaustively researched. A quick read and good primer for deeper reading into any of the corporate atrocities covered. However, written like a 1980s soap opera, with all the clichés and melodrama one could possibly stomach. “And the Daytime Emmy for best Junior High Research Project goes to…Pigs at the Trough!”

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

When political elections are won by whoever gets the most campaign funds….there will always be opportunities to buy candidates…Jimmy Carter will probably be last president to not accept campaign funds from PAC’s or individuals.

[Chris Winwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit of a struggle to read to be brutally honest. Adding a great amount of detail to what many people already know deep down.

[Danielle Cozzola · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but the organization (well, lack of it) really bothered me and made it difficult for me to read.

[Sorina · Rating 3 out of 5]

To read. Interesting examples. Disappointing tone and lack of evidence.
A subject that deserves more.