Why $500,000 a year is just NOT ENOUGH, y’all
Wall Street is freaked out at Obama’s suggestion that salaries of companies receiving exceptional assistance/bailouts cap their executives at $500,000 a year.
Note several exceptions: $500,000 cap on salary, not bonuses and all the other sneaky ways companies pass money to their executives (kids, can you say ‘private use of the corporate jet’, country club memberships, life insurance, cars and drivers?)
Note: $500,000 cap only applies to companies receiving ‘exceptional assistance’, as in tons and tons of money. Companies that receive tons of bailout money can still overpay their executives.
Note: this $500,000 cap is symbolic, which is why Execs are FREAKED OUT. They don’t want to take the blame for the downfall of capitalism. According to Robert Reich, these executives don’t think in terms of ‘bailout’, they think the middle class is just ‘inserting liquidity’ into a tight credit market.
But we haven’t had capitalism for a while, in my opinion. We’ve had oligarchy. We snub our noses at Russian oligarchs who have taken so many billions out of their country and spend it around the world on lavish lifestyles. Wait, doesn’t that sound like good old American billionaires like Henry Kravis and his many homes, his $51,369 salary PER HOUR?
Wall Street insists they need to pay salaries at higher annual rates than $500,000 to, WAIT FOR IT, attract and keep high quality executives.
SO, Wall Street, HOW IS THAT GOING FOR YOU, so far?
The US is in a depression, the whole world is having related economic heart attacks, and the brainiacs who caused this mess, the ones who earned millions of dollars a year siphoning profits out of corporations as they laid off thousands of employees and decimated towns and cities all across America, these brainiacs think they are such high quality bosses that they need to be paid more than $500,000.
These executives have raked in mega-millions but they, like the middle class Americans they mock, are living beyond their means and can’t suddenly take a drastic pay cut. How would they live without the household staff? Without the day and night nannies? Without the personal chef? What if their kids had to go to public school? Their wives are already cutting back on luxuries like unlimited charge accounts at Barney’s NY. How can they be expected to shop, with a limit?
These guys were fine taking all the profit, but they cannot be asked to sacrifice with the little people.
Exactly why are they still in their positions?
With US taxpayers as corporate owners (and why isn’t that still capitalism, just on a larger scale: instead of owning a share of a bank, you own a % of the bank), we should cut salaries and fire at will.
Because its not as if there is a UNION for executives, right?
While looking into GATT abuses it occurred to me that forensic accounting could be good fun. (That was shortly after we tumbled Allende’s democratically elected gov’t in Chile. I had been in uniform, interdicting Soviet assets. I was pretty much PO’d.)
Three decades later, the same thought arises. Not that there’s any more interest, but it comes up … cuz I’m dead stubborn. (Infantry instincts?)
Anecdotally: I heard an interview, quite lengthy and in-depth, with a young man who, a couple of years out of university, got into brokering ?what’s the term? collateralized debt derivatives.
He was making between $70K and $100K … per month.
Ok, his bubble only lasted 2 or 3 years.
Yaa, right.
Think his house is being foreclosed? Think he’s grasping at straws?
The psychopaths’ sychophants have been richly rewarded, and well.
Yuppies spent themselves into a hole.
It’s very like becoming a billionaire by flogging a crappy OS. (Bill Gates as benevolent … how freakin’ironic is that?!)