The Hightower Report

DEAD EXECUTIVES

Corporate CEOs are the golden ones of our economy. They are paid gold mines during their privileged tenures. And if they get the boot or if their companies fail, they have multimillion-dollar golden parachutes to soften their falls. But what happens if they die at the corporate helm?

Not to worry, for they have taken care of No. 1 even in death by arranging ludicrously lavish payouts known as "golden coffins." XTO Energy, for example, is bound contractually to pay its CEO a "bonus" of $111 million if he croaks. Isn't this dangerous, since it makes him worth more dead than alive to his heirs? Curiously, this deceased chief would also draw a $158,000 payment that XTO lists as a "car allowance." Hey, where does this stiff think he's going?

More curious is a special benefit that the Shaw Group would pay to its top honcho. He is to get $17 million for agreeing not to join a competing firm after he dies. But even that is not the most preposterous posthumous payout. Nabors Industries is on the line to fork over a $263 million "severance" payment if its chieftain kicks the bucket. Death is, I suppose, the ultimate severance from a job, but a quarter-billion dollars is a pretty pricey send-off – indeed, it's more than the entire profit that the corporation made in the first quarter of this year.

It's not like these guys have been scrimping along and need a little help to buy a burial plot. The CEO of Nabors, for instance, has hauled in $500 million in pay since he took the job. Come on, couldn't he have bought a life-insurance policy rather than soaking shareholders?

Corporate apologists say that such postmortem paydays are necessary as retainment incentives to keep CEOs from leaving. But who wants to retain a dead executive – and who wants a corporate leader so self-absorbed that he'd demand such a rip-off?

LAWMAKERS CASH IN AS LOBBYISTS

Old Congress critters never die; they just flitter away to K Street.

Take Dennis Hastert. Actually, he's already taken. The longtime Republican lawmaker retired last November, but rather than return to Illinois, he has alighted just a few blocks from the Capitol at the blue-chip lobbying firm of Dickstein Shapiro. The firm lured Hastert with more than half a million bucks in annual pay, designating him "strategic counselor" on the legislative needs of its corporate clientele.

Dickstein Shapiro brags that it lobbies for more than 100 of the Fortune 500 corporations – a lineup that includes tobacco giants, drug companies, the nuclear industry, mercenaries like Triple Canopy, and such brand names as AT&T and Time Warner. Hastert will feel right at home in this crowd, for he was always a faithful legislative errand runner for corporate America. Indeed, corporate interests essentially ran the place when Hastert was speaker of the House, with the likes of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff given a free hand to cut corrupt deals. While Hastert no longer has the muscle to ram through a corporation's agenda, he certainly has his old buddy network and insider knowledge to get favors done – this time for personal gain.

Hastert is hardly the only Capitol Hill alum to cash in on his public trust. In recent years, more than 200 former members have made the lucrative metamorphosis from lawmaker to lobbyist, and Congress' feeble ethics rules even let members openly shop for lobbying jobs while they're supposed to be doing their legislative work. This is a revolving-door system that special interests are happy to exploit – last year, they paid nearly $3 billion to hire Washington influence peddlers. That's $17 million for every day Congress was in session.

And Congress critters wonder why their public approval rating is a humiliating 11%.