Back in late November we discussed what we thought was the last in a too-long series of Republican legal actions to enable Big Business to steal more money with less effort and publicity.

In what may be one of the Republican Party’s last sloppy wet kisses to Big Business and Wall Street for a while, an “independent” committee formed by Treasury Secretary Henry M Paulson Jr has recommended the US adopt new rules to allow the Republicans’ big campaign donors to steal as much money as they possibly can.

Ah, the sins of overconfidence and post-election triumphalism! How silly to expect them to go quietly into the arena of public respectability.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a move announced late on the last business day before Christmas, reversed a decision it had made in July and adopted a rule that would allow many companies to report significantly lower total compensation for top executives.

The change in the way grants of stock options are to be explained to investors is a victory for corporations that had opposed the rule when it was issued in July, and a defeat for institutional investors that had backed the S.E.C.’s original rule.

It looks like The People Who Own America do have a sense of shame, or at least an aversion to having a public spotlight on their excessive greed. When Lee Raymond retired from ExxonMobil his retirement package totted up to well over $400 million:

Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.

Wall Street seems to have done very well in 2006, what with all the home mortgage foreclosures, which comes from predatory sub-prime lending practices, assorted stock flummery, and the failure of the Bu$h economy to float the boats of even the middle class:

Wall Street is awarding itself tens of billions in bonuses this winter. The fantastic amounts of money being handed out to investment bankers, securities traders and the like is symptomatic of the vast social divide that blights every aspect of American life.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs is leading the pack. The firm reported an increase in quarterly earnings of 93 percent and will distribute some $16.5 billion in bonuses to dozens of its bankers and traders. The top “rainmakers,” as they are called, will each take home as much as $20 to $25 million just in bonuses, “while traders who booked big profits will take home a chunk of those profits, up to $50 million apiece,” according to a December 13 article in the New York Times. The report cited the comment of one New York-based investment firm, “Anyone at the bonus line at Goldman Sachs died and went to bonus heaven. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

And that sort of public gloating over public engorgement is just unacceptable. Why allow the proles to learn about the vast gap?

As the NY Times story noted:

“It was a holiday present to corporate America,” Ann Yerger, the executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, said yesterday. “It will certainly make the numbers look smaller in 2007 than they would otherwise have looked.”

Christopher Cox, the commission chairman, said yesterday that he viewed the decision as “a relative technicality” that improved the rule. When the rule was adopted in July, Mr. Cox said it was aimed at providing information that would allow shareholders to “make better decisions about the appropriate amount to pay the men and women entrusted with running their companies.”

In announcing the new rule on Friday, he said “the new disclosure requirements will be easier for companies to prepare and for investors to understand.”

…

The new rule changes the way grants of stock options will be measured in that summary table.

Under the old rule, if a company awarded an options grant valued at $15 million to an executive this year, the full amount of $15 million would show up in the summary compensation table.

Under the new rule, which takes effect immediately, the amount reflected in the table would be much smaller, with the remaining part of the $15 million included in later years, as the executive qualifies to exercise the options.

This is obviously a good change, aimed at preserving the basic health of the stock market. A cynical man might think that under these new rules there would be a far less visible record if company executives decided to dump their stock holdings before bad news.