题目内容
The views of the writer and Spitzer on American corporate governance are
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Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
It has been a wretched few weeks for America's celebrity bosses. AIG's Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has been dramatically ousted from the firm through which he dominated global insurance for decades. At Morgan Stanley a mutiny is forcing Philip Purcell, a boss used to getting his own way, into an increasingly desperate campaign to save his skin. At Boeing, Harry Stonecipher was called out of retirement to lead the scandal-hit firm and raise ethical standards, only to commit a lapse of his own, being sacked (it seems) for sending e-mails to a lover who was also an employee. Curly Fiorina was the most powerful woman in corporate America until a few weeks ago, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) sacked her for poor performance. The fate of Bernie Ebbers is much grimmer. The once high-profile boss of World-Com could well spend the rest of his life behind bars following his conviction last month on fraud charges.
In different ways, each of these examples appears to point to the same, welcome conclusion: that the imbalance in corporate power of the late 1990s, when many bosses were allowed to behave like absolute monarchs, has been corrected. Alas, appearances can be deceptive. While each of these recent tales of chief-executive woe is a sign of progress, none provides much evidence that the crisis in American corporate governance is yet over. In fact, each of these cases is an example of failed, not successful, governance.
At the very least, the boards of both Morgan Stanley and HP were far too slow to ad dress their bosses' inadequacies. The record of the Boeing board in picking chiefs prone to ethical lapses is too long to be dismissed as mere bad luck. The fall of Messrs Green berg and Ebbers, meanwhile, highlights the growing role of government—and, in particular, of criminal prosecutors—in holding bosses to account: a development that is, at best, a mixed blessing. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in haste following the Enron and WorldCom scandals, is imposing heavy costs on American companies; whether these are exceeded by any benefits is the subject of fierce debate and many not be known for years.
Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney-general, is the leading advocate and practitioner of an energetic "law enforcement" approach. He may be right that the recent burst of punitive actions has been good for the economy, even if (as is surely the case) some of his own decisions have been open to question. Where he is undoubtedly right is in arguing that corporate America has done a lamentable job of governing itself. As he says in an article in the Wall Street Journal this week: "The honour code among CEOS didn't work. Board oversight didn't work. Self-regulation was a complete failure." AIG's board, for example, did nothing about Mr. Greenberg's use of murky accounting, or the conflicts posed by his use of offshore vehicles, or his constant bullying of his critics—let alone the firm's alleged participation in bid-rigging—until Mr. Spitzer threatened a criminal prosecution that might have destroyed the firm.
The phrase "save his skin"(Paragraph 1) denotes
In so doing, the FCC seemed to have taken its first, big step towards imposing traditional telecoms rules on the internet—a contentious move given the fears that this will strangle what many still regard as an infant industry, especially if regulators elsewhere follow suit. But are the new rules really so bad？
The new rules uphold a subset of telecoms policy, social objectives, which is much less burdensome than the FCC'S hugely unpopular economic regulation. Many providers of internet telephony—strictly, Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP)—have for years sought the technical ability to provide an emergency service, knowing that such a feature would be essential were internet telephony ever to become a truly credible alternative to the traditional phone service. Incumbent operators that manage the emergency-service sys tem have not always made it easy for the upstarts to interconnect, which costs a provider almost $10m a year for nationwide service. The FCC has signaled that incumbent operators had better now act fairly.
Moreover, the new rules apply only to certain firms, are easy to implement, and pro vide flexibility for future technical improvements. Only firms that offer VOIP via the public telephone network will have to provide 911, and to use it their customers will have to register their addresses. Only when internet technology is developed to allow the network to tell where a phone is connected to it will other VOIP operators be required to introduce this facility. Significantly, services based mainly on software, such as voice-enabled instant-messenger programs or online video games, which do not try to resemble regular phone service, are exempt.
All in all then, the new policy is unlikely to do much to slow a business now growing rapidly worldwide. In America, VOIP is on track to exceed $1 billion in revenue this year, with over 3m users. Many ordinary phone firms now use the technology to connect calls, helping VOIP to account for a growing slice of international phone traffic.
Having found an elegant way to impose 911 rules on VOIP, the FCC's next challenge will be to secure wire-tapping capability for law-enforcement surveillance. This is an issue that similarly has been quietly debated for years. It may take another set of tragedies before it is mandated in a quick, unanimous vote by the regulators.
We can learn from the text that FCC's mandate
The term "grub"(Paragraph 4) most probably means
受伤6～8h内的战地伤口
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