Executive Pay Caps

Obama's mentioning the caps may be show, if one believes the WSWS, but what it does illustrate is just how perverted our economic system is when tiny numbers of the financial elite bitch and moan about $500,000 a year being a pittance.

Perhaps a half mil doesn't go as far as it used to, but it is still a huge amount of money. Most people could live for YEARS on this allegedly modest amount of money.

But things are so twisted in this society, Wall Street types and executives are bitching about the cap, which is more than adequate to live on in any part of the United States:

But on Wall Street, $500,000 is considered a pittance. The New York Times reports that executives felt cheated by taking home “only” $18 billion in collective bonuses in 2009. “I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” an investment banker with Citigroup told the Times.


The Financial Times reported on Wall Street’s opposition to the largely token measures. “Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a ‘brain drain’ from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye,” it wrote. “Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money.”


“‘The cap is a lousy idea,’ complained one top Wall Street executive. ‘If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?’”


Andrew Ward, a University of Georgia professor and specialist on corporate boards and management, told the Financial Times that executives could respond to Obama’s measure by calling his bluff—refusing to allow their firms to accept a bailout that would in any way limit their personal enrichment. “One of the potentially unintended consequences is that executives might try and hold off asking for government assistance until it is too late,” Ward said.


Media and academic figures who have tried to argue that the massive pay packages of the Wall Street executives are somehow legitimate, or even rational, succeed only in revealing the rot that characterizes intellectual life in the US. Their central argument—that the same CEOs who have driven their companies and the economy as whole into the ground are worthy of remuneration in the tens of millions—is so absurd it is almost an embarrassment to answer.

It's completely fucked up, and remember, it is working people who are being screwed out of their earnings in order for these crooks to live like kings (and the vast majority of these crooks are male).

Yeah, there has been class warfare in this country, and it has been waged exclusively by this new aristocracy and their handmaidens in the media. What will it take for the American people to finally wake up and realize they have been held economic hostage by a group of gangsters?