So H-P follows ENRON into the corporate lack of ethics Hall of Fame

One of the interesting things about corporate and government life may not be that people have become less ethical, but that there is less sense of shame about it. How can Patricia Dunn, the Chairman of the Board of H-P, use people who pose as individual Directors to get their phone records? It seems that much as companies such as ENRON, Peregrine Systems, and many others saw nothing wrong with what they did, so too companies feel OK about options backdating, or channel stuffing, or null trades. Elected representatives see nothing wrong with voting for measures which will enable them to profit from, for example, the sale of land. Perhaps people have always been out for themselves, but the constraints on dishonorable behavior have grown less.