Why Don’t More Corporate Executives Commit Suicide?
The business news is abuzz with reports that the fatal car crash of
fracking executive Aubrey McClendon a day after he was indicted on federal
bid-rigging charges may have been intentional.
The high speed at which
McClendon’s SUV was apparently travelling at the time of the collision and the
absence of skid marks are generating speculation that he deliberately drove
into a bridge support.
If McClendon did indeed take his own life for reasons connected
to his indictment, it would not be the first case of scandal-induced corporate
suicide. In 2002, for instance, J. Clifford Baxter, former vice chairman of the
notorious energy company Enron, was reported to have shot himself in the
head, leaving a note saying “where there was once great pride now it’s gone.”
Yet in comparison to the high degree of corporate misconduct, executive
suicides are quite rare. Part of the reason is that so few executives are
prosecuted individually, as was McClendon, and thus are less likely to feel the
intense shame that usually prompts acts of self-destruction. And when those
prosecutions do occur, some executives remain defiant, depicting themselves of
victims of overzealous prosecutors.
A prime example of such defiance was former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who insisted he was targeted for political reasons despite the extensive evidence against him in a case stemming from the deaths of 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch disaster in 2010. Blankenship was convicted of conspiracy to violate federal mine safety laws but acquitted of lying to regulators.
It’s significant that McClendon’s possible suicide occurred
after he was indicted on the relatively abstract
charge of conspiring to rig bids for oil and natural gas leases in Oklahoma.
While the charges are serious, they do not directly involve harm to people and
the environment.
On the other hand, Chesapeake Energy, which McClendon co-founded
in 1989 and ran until 2013, has been involved in numerous cases involving
allegations of such harm in the course of fracking.
In the Violation Tracker my
colleagues and I at Good Jobs First created, we found more than 30 cases since 2010 in
which the company has paid more than $10 million in EPA fines and settlements.
Apparently, there was no shame in that.
Although it would be ghoulish to suggest that anyone commit
suicide, there is no shortage of other executives who should also at least be
feeling more intense shame for their actions.
A number of them are at companies
in the business of producing vehicles like the one in which McClendon was
driving at the time of his death. McClendon’s Chevrolet Tahoe is produced by
General Motors, which had to pay a fine of $900 million to resolve
criminal charges in connection with an ignition switch defect linked to more
than a dozen deaths.
Then there’s the case of Japan’s Takata, which is embroiled in a
controversy over the production of millions of defective airbags that in some
cases ruptured and sent shrapnel flying at drivers and passengers. Or else
Volkswagen, which has admitted wholesale cheating on auto emissions tests,
leading to untold additional amounts of air pollution.
There are plenty of additional past and present examples from
industries such as chemicals, mining, tobacco and asbestos. The answer is not
for more top executives to take their own lives, but for them to end their
reckless behavior to protect the lives of the rest of us.
