BY POLLY MANN
You won’t find the word in a dictionary as I just coined it. Its roots are BA which stands for “banks” and SUG which stands for “sugar.” You might say it stands for sugary or sweet bankers and that would, in a sense, be true for these particular Wells Fargo bankers who, knowingly, created two million bogus accounts in order to show non-existent assets, and Wells Fargo—well, well, Wells Fargo got caught with its sticky, sweet fingers in the jam pot and was fined $185 million.
Now, getting down to the sugar part of the equation or rather the Sugar Association—one of the Harvard researchers connected with the organization became the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture. There, years ago, he set the stage for the federal government’s dietary guidelines and influenced research and scientific literature which helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets, shifting the blame solely to fats. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as the main reason for the current obesity epidemic.
So, here are two major industries caught in a web of corruption. It can’t be that banks and sugar in themselves are prone to corruption. There’s just too much of the sticky stuff in the entire corporate world in general. Maybe the government could issue Certificates of Conscientious Corporations to the “good guy” corporations worth a few million dollars plus dinner with America’s Chief Corporate Head—the President of the United States.
There already is a roster of “B Corps,” that is, companies with a conscience who are graded on how they treat employees, investors, etc. There are over 400 certified B corporations in 60 different industries. (We don’t know what kinds of rewards they get, though, other than the satisfaction of their high standing.) However, there are no “B Corps” that are publicly traded companies.
