AUSTIN, Texas -- Here's another to add to our growing list of needed corporate reforms. When some poor company -- caught in endless coils of red tape, strangled by mean government bureaucrats, its last gasp of entrepreneurial energy driven out by nasty investigators -- is finally forced to pay for some slightly overzealous bit of capitalist behavior, what is that poor company to do? Write the fine off on its taxes, of course.

Yes, incredible as it sounds, when corporations are fined for breaking the law, they can deduct the fine from their tax bill. This puts the rest of us taxpayers in the unhappy position of subsidizing corporate misbehavior.

This revolting situation is now being "looked at" by the Senate finance committee Chair Max Baucus. Kudos to The Wall Street Journal for bringing this one to the public's attention. Is this a perfect example of how corrupted our political system has become by corporate special interests, or what? This policy should not be tossed aside lightly. It needs to be thrown aside with great force.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Nothing like a lot of distracting saber-rattling to get you to take your eyes off the shell with the pea under it. Kind of like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, impending war does tend to concentrate the mind wonderfully. But the remaining balance, if any, in your 401(k) is an attention-grabber as well, so while the administration tries to make up its mind whether it agrees with itself on the best way to handle Saddam Hussein, I recommend a swift glance back at the corporate reform agenda.

President Bush went around the country this summer essentially saying, "Done that, it's all over," on corporate reform. His adoption of Sen. Paul Sarbanes' Accounting Reform and Investment Protection Act, which he staunchly opposed until two weeks before it passed by a unanimous vote, is his most unusual claim to parenthood since he announced in mid-debate he was the father of the Texas patients' bill of rights. In that case, he had first vetoed the bill of rights and then refused to sign it after it passed by a veto-proof majority.

A year on, amid the elegies for the dead and the ceremonies of remembrance, there are the impertinent questions: Is there really a war on terror; and if one is indeed being waged, how's it going?

The Taliban are out of power, and Afghan peasants are free to grow opium poppies again. The military budget is up. The bluster war on Iraq is at full volume. On the home front, the war on the Bill of Rights is at full tilt, though getting less popular with each day as judges thunder their indignation at the unconstitutional dictates of Attorney General John Ashcroft, a man not high in public esteem.

On this latter point we can turn to Merle Haggard, the bard of blue collar America, the man who saluted the American flag more than a generation ago in songs such as "The Fighting Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee." Haggard addressed a concert crowd in Kansas City, Mo., a few days ago in the following terms: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand ... (pause) ... right in the mouth!" He went on to say, 'the way things are going, I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out."

AUSTIN -- A new wrinkle in the annals of corporate scandal -- Salomon Smith Barney, the stock brokerage/investment banking firm, allocated almost a million shares of hot IPO (initial public offerings) shares in 21 different companies to Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, and that is just the tip of the Everest, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Salomon also gave IPO shares to about two dozen other top telecom executives.

According to the Journal, "the linking of investment-banking business to IPO allocations has been a controversial, yet pervasive, practice on Wall Street." The New York Times, not one to leap to a conclusion, reported, "At issue is whether Salomon handed out such allocations to ensure that companies like WorldCom continued to give the firm investment banking business." Surely not! No connection whatever. Motivated only by charity, these brokers.

Come on, get real. If this were a third-world country with CEO's getting IPO's in exchange for investment banking business, no one would have any trouble identifying it as a kickback.

George W. Bush, fresh off a brush-clearing operation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, snubbed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, Africa, for a trip to Oregon, where he vowed to fight future forest fires by taking a chainsaw to the nation's forests and the environmental laws that protect them.

In the name of fire prevention, Bush wants to OK the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next 10 years. He wants it done quickly and without any interference from pesky statutes such as the Endangered Species Act. Bush called his plan "the Healthy Forests Initiative." But it's nothing more than a giveaway to big timber that comes at a high price to the taxpayer and forest ecosystems.

Bush's stump speech was a brazen bit of political opportunism, rivaled, perhaps, only by his call to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling as a way to help heal the nation after the attacks of September 11. That plan sputtered around for a while, but didn't go anywhere in the end. But count on it: This one will.