CEO class okay with lying and cheating

In case you were wondering how our corporate overlords make all that money, this would be a clue:

In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.

Would appear that Mitt Romney is okay with lying and cheating to get ahead too:

But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.

I suspect the numbers are really much higher. But the CEO class use their ill-gotten gains to purchase the politicians who then dutifully rig the legal and regulatory system in their favor. None of the big players go to jail and they still get multi-million dollar bonuses. Which is why I suppose so many were willing to admit it happens. Talk about perverse incentives.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]