Cynthia Cooper was a true corporate whistleblower. She became famous, not by choice, but because of the WorldCom financial statement fraud valued at $11 billion. She was the Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom, a position that was not easily obtained. She almost single-handedly created the internal audit department at WorldCom, and her book Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower details the struggle to get management to take internal audit seriously.

Things started going wrong at WorldCom very early. The company went on an acquisition spree, and the merging of many small companies, managers, and accounting systems was a disaster waiting to happen. Cynthia says that WorldCom was much better at acquiring companies than integrating them, and that is clear.

From an accounting perspective, it was next to impossible to create a properly controlled system. There were too many small systems being pieced together, and it was easy for numbers and authorizations to get lost in the shuffle. This struggle is well-documented by Cynthia, who no doubt painstakingly researched the various acquisitions in order to give such a complete history.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

Mike Gableman – Loophole Louie Butler was knocked off the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday. He can take his love of criminals and legal loopholes somewhere else. This is the first time in 40 years that a justice running for re-election has lost. But it was the perfect time…. swinging the votes back toward the right. Lefty groups like the Greater Wisconsin Committee and Wisconsin Education Association Council (teachers’ union) supported Butler.

Milele Coggs – Coggs defeated jailbird alderman Michael McGee (fond of referring to himself as “The Alderman”). The city of Milwaukee can now stop paying him his $70k salary plus auto allowance while he’s locked up for his crimes. Sadly, Coggs appeared completely clueless last night on television. It’s likely that she won largely on the name recognition of her family. I fear she has no idea what she’s going to do for her district, but at least ousting McGee was a step in the right direction.

The taxpayers don’t need to give money that increases the reserves of Planned Parenthood, and we certainly don’t need to financially support baby killers.

Proof that Planned Parenthood doesn’t need tax money, from the American Life League: