The Hightower Report

---

USING TERRI SCHIAVO

Even if you're a hardcore Republican, even if you're so enraptured by George W. that you get goose bumps at the mere mention of his name – is there no level of political sleaze being resorted to by the GOP leadership that will make even you gag?

Take the Terri Schiavo case. For years, the issue of whether her feeding tube should be removed has bounced from six different Florida courts to Gov. Jeb Bush's office to the Florida legislature up to the state supreme court – now all the way to the White House and congress, who have stuck their noses into this state matter and autocratically shifted jurisdiction over it to federal courts.

"This is about defending a life," George W.'s press flack declared piously. Well, for Republican political operatives, it's actually been about politics, for she has represented a golden opportunity to curry favor with the Christian right-wing, which seized upon Terri's case as a rallying point for their opposition to the right-to-die-with-dignity movement. As her case was being rushed to Washington, the GOP Senate leadership circulated a secret, one-page memo to its members, gleefully noting that their power grab over the case would pay big dividends with the party's core supporters.

Unfortunately for them, the memo was leaked to the media, and their crass opportunism was revealed. Distributed right out of the offices of the party's Senate leaders, the memo says, "The pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," adding, "[t]his is a great political issue." The memo even gets specific – not on the matter of morality, but on politics, noting that the political by-play around Terri's case could damage next year's re-election chances for Florida's Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

No matter how you feel about the terrible plight of Terri Schiavo, there's another moral issue at play here – and that's the deep immorality of Washington politicians who're so willing to use her in such a gross grab for partisan gain.

---

FLIMFLAMMING CEOs WALK FREE

There's a word for people who take money from others under false pretenses. The word is: criminal.

But this word does not apply to corporate CEOs, even if they are guilty of the kind of flimflam that would send common hucksters to prison. Instead of bilking people in Ponzi schemes, some CEOs fleece investors by claiming to have achieved enormous profits in the previous year, when the company actually made much less or even suffered a loss. These executives cook the books to make the corporation's performance (and theirs) look far better than it is, thus artificially jacking up the company's stock price and duping investors into putting more money into the scam. The executives, who get rewarded based on meeting profit goals, walk away with millions.

Take William Wise, honcho of El Paso Corporation. In 2001, this energy giant reported a $93 million profit. Wise cashed in with a $3.4 million bonus plus $6 million in other incentive pay, on top of his $1.3 million regular salary. Two years later – oopsie-doopsie – El Paso admitted that instead of making a $93-million profit that year, it actually had lost $447 million.

This got Wise booted from his job, but what about that $10 million or so he looted from stockholders by falsely claiming to have made a profit? Not only has he avoided any prosecution, but he has not paid back a dime of his ill-gotten gain – nor has the corporation even asked for repayment.

Wise is not alone in profiting, rather than being prosecuted, from this kind of high-class hucksterism. Time Warner, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Xerox, and Qwest are among the corporations that paid fat bonuses in the past couple of years to CEOs based on false claims of profits. They let the CEOs walk, they say, because they don't want more bad publicity, or because they fear it'll be too costly to sue the CEOs for repayment.

Who says crime doesn't pay? It can pay very nicely ... if the crime is in the suites.