ABSTRACT
When the Mighty Sparrow1 ›rst penned the words of the calypso “Drunk and Disorderly,” little did he know it would take the island of Trinidad by storm, sweeping both the 1972 Carnival Road March and Calypso Monarch titles into his arms. The theme resonated with the West Indian diaspora, and it went on to become one of the greatest calypso songs of all time. In an economic environment still reeling from decades of unsustainable growth in personal debt, economic distress following the 2008 ›nancial crisis, persistently high unemployment, revelations of rock star style executive excess and massive levels of government spending, the key verse of that song, repeated over and over in its many classical, steel-pan, and soca2 incarnations, strikes a consonant chord in those concerned about the dismal state of corporate governance in the Western world:
Drunk and disorderly Always in custody Me friends and me family All man fed up with me, cause I Drunk and disorderly Every weekend I in the jail Drunk and disorderly, nobody to stand me bail
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, corporate wrongdoing dominated newsprint and evening news television programs. Right in the heart of American capitalism, before the eyes of a stunned world, emerged a band of drunken executive tossers, modern day robber barons who self-righteously debauched their ›rms, destroying investor value and in the process ruining the retirement dreams of their hardworking employees. Malfeasance and fraud were rampant in companies like WorldCom, which hid U.S. $3.8 billion in expenses; Enron, which hid U.S. $1 billion in debt; and Tyco, whose chief executive of›- cer (CEO) was indicted for evading U.S. $1 million in sales tax. So vulgar and villainous were the stories emerging out of corporate America in 2002 that the normally genteel Seattle Times observed with caustic exasperation3:
Wall Street’s 2002 will be remembered as a parade of catastrophe and disgrace. It will be hard to forget the image of executives of billion-dollar
companies led, handcuffed, to the courthouse steps. … Amid a stockmarket plunge and an eight-year high in U.S. unemployment, the avarice exposed in 2002 was astonishing. … As details emerged about Enron, WorldCom, and executives who got rich at the expense of employees and shareholders, stocks plunged, jobs were lost and retirement savings wiped out.
