Steve Jobs apologized today for the whole stock option Aquagate thing. Apple also announced the resignation of Fred Anderson, former CFO. So I guess heads rolled. Just not Steve's.

Once Apple has to revise its previous earnings, we'll have a very different picture of things.

The Apple con is being busted on the financial end... now all that remains for the MacLash to come, is to bust it on the crappy-casual-use/user-interface end.

Fire the con artists in the marketing and interface design departments, like you fired the former CFO, and we may start making some real progress toward winning back the soul of the Mac.

Brother thalo are you sniffing glue or getting to close to the tonar cartridges?

Almost all major companies are going thru what Apple is due to a change in the law in 2002. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act reaches back into a companies records to around 1997. That is why the years being adjusted are from ~1997 to 2002. From what I can tell the change seems to have come as a result of Enron and it's accounting practices starting in the same year 1997.

Apple and other companies needed to adjust their historical records against this new legislation in 2002 that effected the years back to ~97. Those companies who had not complied properly received a letter from the SEC saying they would be removed from their respected exchange listing if they did not get on the bandwagon.

How is it that Apple was singled out from all the other companies in the same boat was something brought about not from luck.

I know other companies are going through this, brother Rico. But unfortunately that doesn't make lying right.

And when you're Apple... a corporation supposedly more socially aware and responsible than other corporations, with an image you jealously guard and maintain, you'd think it wouldn't be in your best interests with something you later will have to apologize to the stockholders for. I don't care if everyone else is doing it or not.

Seriously thalo lying?

The law changed that affected accounting standards stretching back into the past. Apple along with many other companies did not properly adjust their financial statements not because they were lying about something. The rules changed after the fact.

Jobs as CEO was going to have to make a statement for one reason Apple was put in the spotlight.

Lying. Backdating is lying. Recording stock option grants to a date before the grants are approved is lying. It's clear as a friggin' bell, playing with option grants dates, when you're talking about stock options awarded to executives in the company, means you're trying to do one thing: unfairly increase their value. Resulting in a bigger payoff for the insider.

One of the monstrous grants in question? Went right to fucking Steve himself. Now he's doing the dance, in a desperate attempt to prove that he never exercised the option and never profited off of it. Great, fine. But he COULD have. And then this would be a totally different story. He'd be busted. Right now, for Jobs to get into legal trouble, it will have to be proven that he knowingly and willingly CREATED or authorized the backdates at EITHER Pixar or Apple. If the Pixar ones look shady, it'll just make the Apple ones look worse.

Right now all the results are an internal investigation... which means the foxes are checking to see if the henhouse is secure. That tells me they don't intend to prosecute, but they've got 121 CEOs scurrying around trying to pull their hands out of the cookie jars. It's a warning shot... clean up your act. I say good.

Oh please stick to design work.

The law changed after the fact. Like after the options were already issued and dated. The Feds changed how the rules applied. Apple accounting did not properly apply the new rules to old options. They made a mistake like many other companies which were also asked to make the adjustments they to did not understand the new rules.

You do realize Jobs is CEO? So you are shocked that one of the monstrous grants was going to Steve? That's how corporations work these days. The CEO's are paid in huge option grants.

In the end who wins out. The accountants. What a racket. Keep tax law confusing to make it look like only they understand. Lobby congress to keep changing year after year. Even have congress change it so they have to go back to re audit books stretching back 5 years into the past. Essentially getting paid all over again.

Now there is a scandal of swindlers.

Brother Rico, I love ya, but you must've been working too much with OS X, and it's making you soft in the head.

You get no argument from me with "that's how corporations work"... but it's not like corporate practices have ever been lily white and free from corruption.

If it was such a "law changed after the fact" scenario... Then Steve wouldn't be apologizing. I wouldn't. I'd be waving my fists in the air: "hey! Hey! Hey! The law changed after the fact! This is friggin' BS!" Um, but that's not what we're hearing. We're hearing mea culpas. We're seeing ashamed, sheepish CEOs. Come on, they knew what they were doing was really pushing it. If not shady, it was damn close. These aren't little white lies... this ain't oh, boys will be boys. This is lying about stock options to potentially reap huge profits.

Did you ever see the documentary "The Corporation"? Even though it uses the likes of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to act as social conscience when examining how corporations operate... it's a film worth seeing. It articulates the potential benefits and past disasters of corporate culture. It pokes its nose into some of the black hearts of the corporate con-jobs that I'm often on about here.

And remember, I ain't a commie. I just think there's a way to be a capitalist, and make profits, without being a friggin' lying grifter.

Dear Brother thalo

Jobs is apologizing because the media put Apple in the spotlight. They singled out Apple from over a hundred companies going thru the same process making them the poster child.

If there were any real journalist in the world the real story behind what you see as Apple/Jobs the swindlers really all falls back on Enron. I would not doubt if a journalist were to scratch at the surface they would find that what is happening to Apple is due to congress to be able to convict Enron executives of wrong doing they changed the laws to make it possible. The focus of Enron was all on the excutives and their options. What appears to have taken place to make the options Enron excutives received during the years 1997-2001 as illegal they simply wrote up new laws to make it so.

Naturally from the start the real debacle that caused Enron was never even covered.

quote:

Did you ever see the documentary "The Corporation"?

Thalo, I did view "The Corporation." I thought it was very clever. One main point in the film was accepting the premise that corporations are persons and then ask what sort of persons they are.

Of course corporations are not persons. They are things. However, by judicial edict corporations are considered legal persons (non-living persons) and they claim the rights and privileges of personhood under various constitutional amendments including free speech and especially (rather repugnantly in my view) the rights under the 14th Amendment that were meant to prevent the southern states from enacting laws that would restrict the rights of former slaves after the Civil War.

But sure, okay, if one wants to claim a tree stump or a corporation is a person what sort of person is it? In the case of tree stumps that would be a rather sedentary person. Not so in the case of corporations. They engage in all sorts of behaviors. What the film "The Corporation" does is accept the judicial edict that corporations are persons and then examine their behaviors. In the film Dr. Robert Hare, a consultant to the FBI on psychopaths, says corporations exhibit as a matter of normal everyday behavior all the hallmarks of people that are considered psychopaths by the FBI guidelines. Corporations have no capacity to experience guilt, they are inherently deceitful with repeated lying and conning of others for profit, and on it goes through the other key hallmarks that make up the psychopathic personality.

What's worse is that these behaviors are not choices. They are mandated by law and are the key structural elements of the corporate system. Having flesh and blood psychopaths loose in society is bad enough, but corporations have powers far beyond any individual. They are enormously powerful and influential.

The film simply applies the same sort of common sense judgement to these persons that anyone would apply to any person they happen to meet. What it finds is that these "persons" are not the sort of people anyone in their right mind would want to spend any time with or bring home to meet the family. If you did come across a flesh and blood person exhibiting the behaviors of these non-living persons it would probably creep you out to the point where you would give a call to law enforcement. You certainly wouldn't think there was anything admirable about them.

That's one of the things I thought was clever in the film. If corporations are indeed persons then it's perfectly appropriate to subject them to the same sort of ordinary judgement we apply to any person. If they aren't persons and are exempt from such judgement what the hell are they doing possessing the legal rights of personhood?

quote:

If corporations are indeed persons then it's perfectly appropriate to subject them to the same sort of ordinary judgement we apply to any person. If they aren't persons and are exempt from such judgement what the hell are they doing possessing the legal rights of personhood?

Yes, and what's the friggin' legal system doing creating this frankenstein's monster of legal personhood for corporations, when it won't find legal rights for entities that probably have a stronger claim to potential personhood, like unborn fetuses. (I'm not a rabid anti-abortion advocate, just curious). Furthermore, where corporations can choose to end their "lives" or merge or dissolve... human beings who are desperately ill can't choose to be peacefully and painlessly put down with lethal injection. Something we do quite legally for animals, and murderers in the name of humanity. Corporations can fuse and ally and share assets with another corporate "person" of their own type, and yet real persons who are homosexuals can't make a legal and binding marriage arrangement in many states.

I think it's fine to do some of these legal and intellectual gymnastics, if what you really end up with is a clearer idea of the rights of human beings. It seems to me that life shouldn't be more fair for the constructs. It should be either equally fair, or less fair by virtue of the fact that they are not flesh and blood. If we're giving them more rights, what we're doing, sometimes subtly sometimes overtly, is giving the people that run them more rights, power by association.

The questions I still want addressed are, are corporations protected under the first amendment? I kinda think they should be. And yet the only ones who exercise this are in the media field. Other corporate "persons" seem to think that they really need to keep their mouths shut to make money, and spend an awful lot of time never taking a stand or expressing an opinion about anything, except in disclaimer form.

Can a corporation protect itself under the second amendment? Keep and bear arms? I don't see why not. That's the right of every single one of us. I can certainly see why some people wouldn't want that for sociopathic persons, but unless they have been convicted of "domestic abuse"... (which I could imagine a totally new definition for, in relation to corporate personhood)... they should have the right.

With a slippery slope this big, it's a wonder nobody has really sat down and noticed how easy it is to grease.

Now it's caught forgin':

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061228/ap_on_hi_te/apple_stock_options

Seriously, Apple lying, Stock option issues, Marketing bullshit... They can do all that and more IF they finally deliver a decent configurable UI, UI-Fonts Pref-Panel and a decent kernel.

Now they're caught monopolizin'