Almost everyone has heard the sordid tales of the stunningly avaricious executives of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. As the SEC deadline for reporting company “earnings restatements” approaches, more companies will probably be forced to admit their accounting innaccuracies (read: cooking of their books). In this light, the Fortune Magazine report on “The Greedy Bunch,” a list of the most greedy corporate executives and how much money they have made at the expense of their shareholders, is particularly interesting. The article and its associated stories goes into a good amount of detail on these unconscionable actions, but this passage in particular incites my wrath:

The not-so-secret dirty secret of the crash is that even as investors were losing 70%, 90%, even in some cases all of their holdings, top officials of many of the companies that have crashed the hardest were getting immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy. They got rich because they were able to take advantage of the bubble to cash in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock--stock that was usually handed to them via risk-free options--at vastly inflated prices. When the bubble burst, their shareholders were left holding the bag.

I just can’t fathom how these executives can live with themselves knowing that they have profited at the expense of thousands of people’s lives. W’s Accounting Industry Reform Act is too little too late and is hypocrisy in the highest degree, but that’s another rant I won’t get into right now. For this legislation to be at all effective it has to have actual consequences, not a slaps on the wrist that don’t do a damn thing to help compensate the employees and shareholders whose stocks have been decimated.