Hilary B. Rosen is president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group for the sound recording industry. Rosen boasts a seven figure salary, has a hip Lesbian partner and child, and is frequently covered in every conceivable media outlet. Naturally, she is a hard-core liberal, beloved by the ACLU, and is a founding board member of Rock the Vote.

With her PC credentials well-established, let's take a look at what she has accomplished for her industry in the past several months. Keep in mind that the record business has seen better days.

RIAA's long and expensive battle with Napster has succeeded in spawning superior technologies such as Gnutella, and has popularized file-trading websites like BearShare, which works better than Napster ever did. Moreover, while Rosen was shouting from the rooftops about all the illegal websites and FTP sites she was shutting down, she knew well that she could do absolutely nothing about the alt.binary newsgroups, which contain hundreds of thousands of mp3 files.

And, the battle against mp3.com, a company that was never anything more than a clever dot-com name able to garner foolish investment capital, may look good to the uninformed, but is the equivalent of this year's Super Bowl champion defeating your local high school's squad. The words "So What" or even "Duh" spring to mind.

The best thing Rosen could have done, of course, would have been to convince her members to set up their own websites, offering downloads at a reasonable price, say $0.50 per song. Remember, this industry is forever crying about the costs of manufacturing, production, and promotion. How many millions of dollars in profits could be generated from such an official website? What better way is there to exploit her precious intellectual property than to sell it in a pure electronic format and gain instant credit card revenue? What could have been a colossal business will instead go down in history as the missed Internet opportunity of all time.

I guess that's why she gets the big bucks.

We turn now to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Her solution to her company's troubles is to merge with even worse off Compaq. Not surprisingly, the only positive voice came from Gateway's CEO Ted Waitt. He's delighted because the proposed deal will keep both rivals preoccupied for the next six months, and integration issues could plague the combined company for several years.

But, forget Waitt. Exactly what synergy can exist between these two over large institutions? Maybe she consulted chapter two of the CEO playbook, that describes a profit making scheme of consolidation and trimming the fat. Great idea, Carly, but perhaps you should try it within HP first. With all her talk about e-business and e-commerce, she might look at how awful HP's own e-commerce set-up is, not that their call-in facility is anything to write home about.

Yeah, I know. The best man for the job is a woman. Tell me that if a guy had proposed this dreck he wouldn't have been laughed off the podium--or worse.

I must admit, though, that while I can appreciate the entertainment value in the antics of Rosen and Fiorina, the outpouring of sympathy toward mass murderer Andrea Yates is much harder to take. Indeed, the title of this piece now seems a whole lot more sinister than it did a few minutes ago.

For those so inclined, dust off that Chaplet of Divine Mercy. For everyone else, get ready for a huge collective Karmic debt to become due and payable.

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