Obama

Limiting robber barons' pay may be easier said than done.

The WSWS, naturally, thinks it is just a token gesture:

Moreover, even the size of the so-called pay “limit”—$500,000—is startling. That a salary of a half million dollars—more than 10 times the median annual pay of an American worker—could be presented as punitive action testifies to the avarice of the ruling elite.

But in fact the rules allow executives to make far more. The Treasury Department guidelines include an exception that permits executives to be paid in stock options beyond the $500,000 limit, so long as they keep the stock until their firms have paid the government back for loans taken.

Once again, the full significance of this stricture will become clear only when Geithner presents the details of the new bailout. If, as is widely anticipated, the plan will feature the creation of a "bad bank" where financial institutions could sell their toxic assets at an inflated price, it would have the immediate effect of rapidly increasing the banks' stock prices—and with them the pay packages of the CEOs.

As Max Holmes, a finance professor at New York University and chief investment officer of an asset management firm, told the New York Times, "[T]he stock prices of the good banks are likely to soar, as they will be the four best capitalized and cleanest banks in the world."

Additionally, Obama and Geithner declared there would be new restrictions on "golden parachute" severance pay packages for executives, and new rules pertaining to corporate jets, office remodeling and corporate parties and vacations. These largely symbolic measures are plainly aimed to mollify public anger.

Notwithstanding the toothless character of the proposed limits, Wall Street has raised a hue and cry about the intervention of the government into the prerogative of "private enterprise." The financial elite are ready to take trillions from the government, but they bray against even the symbolic appearance of public jurisdiction over their empires.