Free Republic

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, under questioning from voters in recent days, has switched positions on a 2007 executive order he issued mandating the vaccination of all young girls before they enter sixth grade to ward off cervical cancer. Mr. Perry's order that Texas school girls receive the vaccine, Gardasil, made by Merck & Co., was overturned by the state legislature and never got off the ground. But it still has roiled conservatives and Christian groups for years. After long defending the decision, Mr. Perry has apologized repeatedly for the order since launching his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. As...

Indictment: Broadcom co-founder had narcotics warehouse, hired prostitutes, drugged associates SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- Federal prosecutors may have charged Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III in one of the largest stock-option backdating cases in U.S. history, but it was allegations that the billionaire drugged his business cohorts, hired prostitutes and maintained a drug warehouse that grabbed headlines. A pair of indictments unsealed Thursday charge the 48-year-old with conspiracy and securities fraud in an alleged scheme to backdate stock options that ultimately forced Broadcom to write down $2.2 billion in profits last year. But prosecutors also detailed a litany of...

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Government star witness Andrew Fastow repeatedly admitted during cross-examination on Thursday he was a liar and a cheat as the defense tried to refute his testimony that former Enron Corp. chief executives Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay covered up their company's crumbling finances. He said he had no written documents to back up his allegations against his former bosses, but said they were part of a broad conspiracy among Enron executives to mislead investors while enriching themselves. "I was suggesting the senior management at Enron, not only Mr. Skilling, engaged in a pattern of actions that painted...

WASHINGTON, April 27 - The federal government had a hard time three years ago obtaining a conviction of Arthur Andersen for having shredded its Enron documents as the energy company, its major client, was imploding. A jury in Houston took 10 days and declared itself deadlocked before convicting the accounting firm of a single criminal count of witness tampering. But the challenge the government faced then looked easy compared with the one confronting it in the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning as the justices heard Arthur Andersen's appeal. The justices were so clearly sympathetic to Andersen, with Justice Antonin Scalia...

Despite a friend's comment that I am the most high-strung person she has ever known, I like to think of myself as fairly laid back.      Granted, everything is relative.      Current public sentiment, however, has me boiling over.      While perusing message boards on the web recently, I have been amazed at the current uproar against "corporate greed."      While comments range from specific complaints to absurd accusations, the common theme seems to be this: "corporations are only out to make a profit."      What truly angers me about this concept is that "profit" is seen as a negative...

Senator Hillary Clinton, who has attacked President Bush in the corporate corruption scandals, has at least one close connection with people who are in deep trouble because of the alleged corporate funny money games they've been playing while pumping cash into her campaign coffers. Sam Waskal, the recently indicted CEO of ImClone, for example, gave the New York Democrat $27,000 which she refuses to return. Waksal, indicted for insider trading, bank fraud and obstruction of justice, has been one of Hillary's financial angels - she's been the number one recipient of his generosity, according to the New York Post's ace...

During the business segment at ten to the hour on NPR’s Monring Edition, they had a story that revealed that the Clinton SEC virtually stopped regulating the IPO market until late 1999. The private sector NASDAQ did not enforce their rules any better because both organizations saw a steady decline in IPO fraud, kickback and other white-collar crime enforcement since 1990 despite the skyrocketing number of IPOs during the Dot.com era. These two organizations were completey blind (or purposely blinded) to the behavior going on Wall Street at the time, the public is just now learning about some of the...

Subject: REMAINING U.S. CEOs MAKE A BREAK FOR IT Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border San Antonio, Texas (Rooters) -- Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense. "They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters."...

The entire WorldCom debacle once again brings up the fractious question of whether sometimes the invisible hand of the markets should be assisted by the very visible back of the hand of responsible government regulation. For many doctrinaire libertarians and free market advocates, the answer would be a big, definitive NO. However, having dealt first hand with the sociopaths and thieves who are attracted to today's modern corporate "free market" economy, the Iconoclast knows that the recent WorldCom abuses are yet just another example of why government must sometimes intervene in modern commerce to protect the interests of the individual...