Disposable Everything

It’s becoming more obvious to me the extent of the world’s insanity. Flipping through the channels, I’m inundated with advertisements for products that not only do I not need, but also I can’t understand how anyone could justify needing, let alone buying. In particular I’m most annoyed at the home cleaning products, whose rate of unceasing development is a cause for amazement. How can so much development money be focused on making the task of keeping a house clean any easier than it already is?

Look at the recent rash of new paper-towel-plus-cleaner products, like Procter & Gamble‘s Swiffer and SC Johnson‘s Pledge Grab-It, that take the concept of paper towels to a whole new level. Now not only can you clean, you can disinfect like you’ve never disinfected before! And when you’re done you can just throw them away, environmental consequences be damned!

There’s such an obsessive-compulsive desperation to the pitches for these products that I half expect to see a commercial in the future that goes something like this:

Pan to shot of Brendon crouched in the corner of his bathroom, scrubbing his body with Scrubboâ„¢-brand personal body cleaning towels while rocking gently back and forth.

Brendon (mumbling): Still not clean, must get clean…

As if diapers weren’t bad enough for filling our landfills, now we’ve got Helen Homemaker nuking every bacterium that dares to step into her household, only to throw away the toxic results and create even more garbage. With the super-duper cleansing power of these new products it’s no wonder bacteria are becoming more resistant when we’re throwing every disinfectant at them at every opportunity.

These aren’t the only environmentally irresponsible products coming from these companies. There’s also the new rash of facial cleansing cloths, and disposable containers competing for our global garbage can. What ever happened to reducing our waste output?

What’s more disturbing is the amount of technology and funding thrown at solving problems that don’t exist, while real problems remain unsolved. Christ, I’ve got toothpaste and laundry detergent that gets my teeth and clothes so white they’re positively luminescent, and we still haven’t got an electric car! Part of me wonders if somewhere in the world researchers wring their hands and wish aloud, “If only we could get some of the Colgate or Sunlight funding, then we’d have this cancer thing licked!”

Don’t get me wrong, I like things clean and orderly. But after a while it seems to be counterproductive to clean things when you’re creating more garbage than you’re cleaning up. There’s a point of diminishing returns when you’re expending so many resources on keeping things clean instead of doing worthwhile work. Could it be that we’re turning into a race of people who need to wash our hands so often and so thoroughly that we never actually accomplish anything useful?

Professional Accountability?

I found it more than a little ironic to watch today’s news and see George W. Bush signing corporate responsibility legislation. Could it be that the defender of the free market has realized that corporations, existing only to exact profit, ultimately succumb to their own greed when left to their own devices? While it is hardly surprising that fatcats at the top of the corporate food chain effectively absconded with their investor’s money and employee’s retirement nest egg, what does surprise me is how little was said by the accounting firms, or individual accountants within those firms. What ever happened to professional accountability?

Professions, by their definition, are designed to be self-regulating bodies created by an act of legislation to work in the public interest in a specific area of expertise. This legislation restricts the practice in the field of expertise to those individuals licensed by the professional body, and provides the framework for the basic operation of the professional body. For example, in British Columbia the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists is responsible for regulating the practices of engineering and geoscience, as specified in the province’s Engineers and Geoscientists Act (APEG-BC). Practice in either field is restricted under force of law to those licensed by APEG-BC. Members of the Association are also required to abide by the Code of Ethics, which define basic ethical rules by which the Association’s membership must abide. The Association is also responsible for disciplining those guilty of professional misconduct.

Professional bodies for accountants, such as the Chartered General Accountants or the American Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants, surely have similar rules of discipline. Where was that keenly honed sense of ethics and responsibility to the public interest when Enron execs were shifting money around to make the books look good? Did the little angel on their left shoulder just take that year off?

Of course, in some people’s minds it’s easy to dismiss the obligation to the public interest in matters of accounting, isn’t it? After all, it’s not like a building falls down, a plane falls out of the sky, or a nuclear power plant implodes. Nobody ever died due to an accounting error that I know of, and I’m willing to bet that the tally of spreadsheet-mishap-related fatalities is destined to stay eternally low.

We shouldn’t care about professional misconduct in accounting because nobody dies, is that it? I don’t think so.

To truly remedy this situation, the appropriate professional bodies in the United States should throw the book at those professionals responsible for perpetrating these crimes. Strip them of their professional designations, fine them the maximum amount, and make it widely known that this type of behaviour is unacceptable. While the masterminds behind the corporate shell game may be able to plead the fifth, no such right exists for professionals before their professional body’s discipline committees. If we can’t get the real crooks, then we should make like Elliot Nest and go after the accountants.