No substitute for a conscience

It's always struck me how corporate and Wall Street miscreants try to buy respectability, using their ill-gotten gains to contribute to political and religious causes.

Randolph K. Pace, operator of the notorious Rooney Pace penny stock firm of the 1990s, gave large sums to Jewish charities in New York City. Bob Brennan of First Jersey Securities also tried to buy his way to respectability, before he was caught and hauled off to jail. More recently, Richard Altomare, the loudmouth ex-boss of Universal Express, was appointed to three committees by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after a federal judge found his company to be rife with fraud.

So I was not surprised to read that Patrick Byrne, the wacked-out CEO of the Overstock.com corporate train wreck, has been busily trying to buy respectability. The Salt Lake City Tribune reported yesterday that Byrne has been a major bankroller of an effort to force a school voucher program down the throats of the parents of Utah:

A pivotal local contributor to the voucher effort is Utah entrepreneur Patrick Byrne. The founder and head of Overstock.com has pumped $290,000 into the "yes" effort. Byrne has single-handedly financed a Republican legislators' PAC, Informed Voter Project, with a $200,000 donation.

What Byrne does with his ancestral wealth -- Overstock is, of course, bleeding cash -- is his business. But it makes you wonder: Why is a confirmed, fortysomething, childless bachelor, a product of private schools all his life, meddling in a public education system that he has never experienced and knows nothing about--and cares about even less?

I can understand Byrne throwing money away on his nutty "naked shorting" obsession. It was recently reported that Byrne took $120,000 of Overstock's scarce cash and flushed it down the toilet by throwing it at a lobbyist to push his goofy stock market conspiracies.

No surprise here. This is a co-opted regulatory system that swims on a river of corporate cash -- some of it hard-earned, some of it stolen, and some of it, as in the case of Byrne, obtained by selection of the right parents.

But what's with this school voucher thing? After all, it's not as if Byrne has ever shown any interest in kids learning. You don't see him donating his vast ancestral wealth to actual schools or kids or anything meaningful. Since his own education was private schools paid for by his millionaire daddy, GEICO founder John Byrne, it is not surprising that he would push a program that would undermine the educational system for ordinary working people.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.