Nowadays speaking ill of the American CEO is a surefire way to be branded a far left loon. Hell, failing to worship the ground they walk on will get you branded a commie sympathizer. But maybe it's about time someone other than just the commies spoke up against the moral bankruptcy of today's corporate culture.
Yeah, sure, I know the whole "a corporation's only responsibility is to its stockholders' portfolios" is a trendy slogan in the world of laissez-faire dreamers these days... but for the love of God... Why do we encourage these people? And why do we hold them to another standard than we hold anyone else that works in our economy? Not a higher one definitely. We expect selfishness on their part. We expect the company to bend backward for them. We expect them to be fragile and we're supposed to cry for them. I say $%@# 'em! Let 'em compete with the CEOs in Japan and India for their jobs.
I'm not saying their jobs are easy... but neither is the job of an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a sewer worker, or just about any working stiff that must spend a great deal of free time worrying about the security of their job.
But capitalism is about supply and demand... Right? HaHaHa! Tell that to the guys who have parachute offers of more money than any other worker makes in a lifetime. Tell that to the guys who can decide they don't want to live near the office... so the company will pay enough to cover a a few full-time skilled employees in order to jet them to and from home. Tell that to the guys who really don't have to worry if their going to eat tiomorrow regardless of how crappy a job they do.
Ah, but excuse me. They never do a bad job. If they create jobs... They're heroes. If they downsize, they're heroes. And then we also have to feel bad for them for having to make that decision. Sniffle sniffle. Actually I feel bad for the low-to-mid management who actually have to make the specific decisions AND have to face up to the people they let go... with more than just a computer-signed memo.
This is not the morality of my dad's first employer. The CEO of that day was a person who could feel failure! A need to downsize was FAILURE... not another reason to give yourself a raise. It was the kind of thing you apologized for and worked your @$$ off to fix, not something you spun around into a great business decision and a reason for giving yourself more. And the same is true in other parts of the world where CEOs have moral standards and actually give a %$## about something other than their own pocketbooks... and they have a lower going rate.
So outsource these $#%@s! That's how the market works for everyone else. Everyone else can be called a failure simply because their job is no longer deemed necessary. Anyone else is replaced for the audacity of demanding special perks. Everyone else lives in fear for work. And as rough as a CEOs job must be... how hard can any job really be where short of crime, you cannot fail... and even if you do you're set for life! No one else can even expect raises that do more than keep up with inflation... and they can expect cuts in benefits.
In short, these people are another class. The market treats them as an exception to the rule.
While you people worry about communists taking over, elitists are carving themselves a big slice of the market and breaking the rules.

But do I blame them specifically? No. I blame the ethic of the day. This is what we expect of them. This is what we call morality for a CEO with no responsibility except to stockholders.
It's especially the stockholders that are most guilty... but to an extent our entire society. Blame what you want for America's moral decline... but I'll hint you in that this is more than a tad more dangerous to human decency than gay marriage.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Woke up on the wrong side of the cubicle this morning?

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

What can be said of CEO's can also be said of professional athletes, movie stars and pop stars. They all make so much money in so short a period of time that, unless they spend at a ridiculous rate, they can comfortably retire even if their careers come to an abrupt end. But that is supply and demand. The masses are stupid enough to place that high a demand on these people, so frankly, just as with tax money and the swine we've got in Washington, the people get what they pay for. Government and big business are as good as the people; that is the problem. Human nature isn't going to change, so this sort of problem is here to stay.

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)

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Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left. - F.A. Hayek

Where have all the Conservatives Gone?

There is always hope, as long as one can think.

None other than Warren Buffet has criticized the compensation packages that are being paid to many US corporate CEO's.

Buffett and Munger both were scathing on the subject of executive compensation and the process of how pay is set at major corporations:

"The typical large company has a compensation committee," said Buffett. "They don't look for Dobermans on that committee, they look for chihuahuas."

He paused amid laughter, then added: "Chihuahuas that have been sedated."

Munger interjected: "I would rather throw a viper down my shirtfront than hire a compensation consultant."

The method of determining pay is explicitly flawed on NOT competitive in most US publicly held companies. You are correct to point out the problem and any "free marketer" is wrong to defend the current system. For it is no more representative of a free market than no-bid contractors being granted to any given rent-seeker is. Worse yet, when believers in capitalism and individual freedom defend such distortions they merely destroy the ideological credibility, in utilitarian terms, of LF capitalism and liberalism. Creating a political environment that is fertile for more explicitly totalitarian alternatives.


EXACTLY!
This day is coming too. International comparisons show that there is no relation between pay and performance in executive compensation. As globalization continues I would expect either foreign executive pay to increase or for American executive to decrease. Most likely some of both will occur till equilibrium is reached. Unfortunately, various gov't interventions in policy will distort a true equilibrium pay being reached but something less "fleecing" should certainly result in the American case.

Once investors, particularly institutional ones, begin flexing their muscles things will change the evidence that pay is not based on mgmt performance in America, is quite frankly overwhelming.

http://www.thecorporatelibrary.com/

Yes.

Comparisons aside....and at the risk of sounding like a communist groping to excuse operational reality..........

....I would argue that current executive compensation structure and methodology, including "golden parachutes", are not capitalism. They are certainly not based on S & D.

Correct. And that market is called the political market. Something that is an anathema to the true economic liberal.

Well personally, I try to rail against all the above.

So do I. These pseudo-capitalists and access capitalists, exemplified perfectly by our president, have no understanding of the ethical foundations behind market economics. First off, economic liberalism was the impetus for the development of the political liberalism we find more universally appealing. We should probably never have fully decoupled the political economy into separate areas of academic study in the west since the two are quite frankly intrinsically linked. Secondly, the end game of economic liberalism is in fact a tale of equity. This is the dirty little secret that economic fascists like GWBush just don't get. At the end of the day totally free competition would result in the complete return of the consumer surplus to the consumer, or in short, a more equitable distribution of wealth than is obtained in the political marketplace.

Regards.

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"I have been made victorious through terror" ~ the profit mohammed (Bukhari 4:52:220)

The truth hurts, but not as bad as a being beheaded.

Force is right. My husband and I went to see the new "Rocky" the other day and spent $36.00. Price of tickets to get in keep going up and then when you get in there, you get soaked for the cost of the popcorn and drinks. It's outrageous.

Now, we might say that Sylvester Stallone deserves to make what he makes and so does the rest of the workers and investors in the movie industry. Or we might say he doesn't. We might say they are all greedy and getting way more than they deserve for a few months----or sometimes weeks----worth of work. OR, we could just decide the price is more than we want to pay and stay home and rent old Rocky's and wait for the new one to come out on video, which would be cheaper.

But what I don't understand is why liberals pick solely on CEO's and corporations and leave their liberal Hollywood base alone. You also don't seem to mind what Union bosses make. Can some of the libs explain that to me?

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

I recall JavaBlack calling American unions "corrupt". Because of the immigration matter, on which I am decidedly pro-immigrant, I have perhaps an even lower opinion of unions than most conservatives do. At any rate, as an ex-socialist, I recall that my view of corporations was that they distorted our values towards selfishness and greed. I now recognize that I confused the cause and the effect. Many (and probably most) people are selfish and greedy, so the corporations they buy stock in have the same "values". Back when I was a socialist (albeit an atypical, religious one) I ranted more about Hollywood's immorality than I do now. My former social ultraconservatism came from the same confusion of a cause and an effect. The messed up people in Hollywood are reflections of societal immorality and shallowness. The masses worship Mammon and Gommorah, so they get exactly what they deserve from the elites they build up.

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)

As long as you understand that to me, on fiscal matters, you seem quite liberal much of the time.

I believe that one should maximize his value in the workplace, and make as much as he can. But in doing so, if you think in the short term ONLY, you may be jeopardizing the longer term. My company realizes that unless I get some sort of bonus every year, I might leave. And I realize that if I try to hold them up for an excessive amount, they might pay it this year, but then try to find someone to replace me next year.

But once you become a CEO (and/or Chairman), at many companies, you are able to have a (heavy) hand in designing your own compensation package. And at very few public companies is the CEO the "owner". He is actually just an employee. I'm hardly a liberal, but I think that what bothers many people is not so much the amount that some CEO's get paid (or really, pay themselves), but also the methods they use to extract money from the shareholders. The defined purpose of a corporation is to enhance shareholder value, not to make the CEO a member of the ultra wealthy. And if the CEO and Chairman are engaged in things like loading the BoD's with cronies and secretly backdating option grants, that is cheating the system. At my former company, the VP was fired for a "strategic" $100 million error. But he wasn't really "fired"... he was allowed to resign and then received $750,000 to go away quietly. That bothered many of us. The President, who brought this clown in, did it to protect himself, and allowed his buddy to get paid a fortune to go away. He was also fired about a year later - much too late then. I doubt the average shareholder had any awareness of this trickery. But they got socked for $100 million in diminished value none the less.

As for athletes and actors, the demand is there, the money is there... take it. You willingly paid $36 to see a movie. Whose fault is that? A movie ticket would be considered to be an item with very elastic demand. If people decrease their demand for $36 tickets, the prices will likely come down. I don't have much use for unions, so I don't know how much their leadership gets paid. Many of them seem to be fairly crooked (sorta like politicians), so I'm guessing there is some trickery there as well.

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"Tweeter was a Boyscout before she went to Vietnam and found out the hard way... nobody gives a d@mn."

I agree about the big payouts for apparent failure. Just the other day I read where J.C.Penney brought a woman CEO on-board and after 6 months they wanted her gone. They paid her $10 million dollars to leave. That was the agreed upon package. That seems ridiculous to me. And like you say---you take the best deal you can get. That would be the case for YOU as well IF someone thought you were worth $10 million to them. I'm sure it was the "agreed upon" terms when she was hired. You "buy out" someone's contract----just like in sports and entertainment. You won't see Democrat John Edwards mentioning the entertainment field when he speaks of "two Americas." Nope----he'll be referring to Wal-Mart and other large corporations only. What the liberal base makes in dollars doesn't bother him.

So, that's my gripe: why is it Dems and libs only go after corporations when it happens with their liberal base as well? It's hypocritical on their part.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Actually, Hollywood is run by corporations- and big ones. However, corporate executives are ultimately paid by consumers and shareholders, so the responsibility to control their salaries rests solely on those people.

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)