The unmitigated gall of Vice President Dick Cheney.

At least his boss, the president, appears to be a little bit embarrassed by his past business experience of taking investors for a ride with Harken Energy and Texas taxpayers for suckers with the Texas Rangers baseball stadium shenanigans.

But not our vice president. He's not only not even ashamed of presiding over the Halliburton Corp. while it was cooking the books on its earnings, he wants to keep the world safe for more rape and pillage of the unsuspecting by other greedy corporate moguls.

Cheney has the audacity to complain about Congress' attempts to enact some meaningful reforms that just might protect innocent investors in the future from the likes of Enron and WorldCom.

The vice president has been grumbling that even if Congress can't find a way to make it impossible to lose money in the stock market, it will try.

The guy's a real comedian.

No, Dick Cheney, responsible members of Congress aren't trying to find a way to make it impossible to lose money in the stock market. They're trying to make it impossible for people like you to suck unconscionable amounts of money from your corporations while leaving the working people and widows who thought they could trust you hanging out to dry.

Cheney, as we now know, walked away from Halliburton with a $34 million retirement package, not a bad take for a few years on a cushy, made-to-order job. Most Americans would be happy to retire with one hundredth of that amount after devoting an entire working lifetime to an employer.

The vice president's cavalier attitude is indicative of what is so wrong with too much of corporate America. There's an attitude that nothing is above the corporation - not even the law.

Employees are treated like pawns. Profits short of expectations? Fire a few thousand.

Executives are pampered like royalty. Need another vacation home? Invent another accounting gimmick to hide costs and produce an extra few million for big shot bonuses.

The government agencies that are supposed to keep an eye on shenanigans are kept at bay. Some bureaucrat getting too nosy? Buy another politician or two.

One of the great ironies of history is that while the late Franklin D. Roosevelt was reviled by big business because of his insistence that corporations needed strong government regulation, FDR's programs actually saved capitalism from itself during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Unfortunately, instead of a Roosevelt, we've got Bush and Cheney for this crisis.

And that doesn't bode well.

Copyright 2002 The Capital Times

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