This from the
WaPo:
High-profile meltdowns aside, it still pays to be the boss.
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Carly Fiorina, recently muscled out of her job over lackluster performance, walked away with an exit package worth $42 million. Boeing Co.'s Harry C. Stonecipher, pushed out over an affair with a female employee, nonetheless is eligible for retirement benefits of about $600,000 per year. Franklin D. Raines bowed out under heavy pressure in December following accounting problems at Fannie Mae. But the firm says he is now owed $114,393 per month in pension benefits.
You wonder why these economic Brahmins are not so worried about the future of Social Security...
Well it just keeps getting better, if you have your hand in the till:
"Even though the escalation of pay has often been justified as necessary, when you look at the details, that is not the case, because much of the pay is not all that sensitive to performance," said Harvard Law School professor Lucian A. Bebchuk, author of the new book "Pay Without Performance."
"Our view is that pay is much less connected to performance than investors commonly recognize," he said.
Among the biggest pay winners in 2004 was Morgan Stanley chief executive Philip J. Purcell, who pulled down $22.5 million, including $13.8 million in restricted shares. Some Morgan Stanley shareholders have criticized Purcell's pay because, while the firm's earnings grew 18 percent in its fiscal 2004, the company's stock price dropped about 6 percent.
At Coca-Cola Co., chief executive E. Neville Isdell made about $11 million in cash, stock and bonus in 2004 and was awarded 450,000 stock options. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola shareholders watched the stock price fall from around $50 at the beginning of the year to just over $41 at year's end.
Overall, a study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting LLC found that bonuses at 100 big companies rose 46.4 percent in 2004, to a median of $1.14 million. The gains follow a decade of soaring executive compensation, a rise that has not been slowed by heavy criticism from some shareholder groups and institutional investors.
Between 1993 and 2002, total compensation paid by all public companies to their top five executives was $260 billion, according to a study by Bebchuk and Cornell University professor Yaniv Grinstein.
From 1993 to 1997, executive pay amounted to 6 percent of total corporate profit, the study said. That number increased to 10 percent of aggregate corporate profit from 1998 to 2002. At companies whose shares are part of the Standard and Poor's 500-stock index, average chief executive pay rose from $3.7 million in 1993 to $10.3 million in 2002, a hike of 178 percent, the study said.
Instead of a growing middle class, we have a giant ponzi scheme where the top of the pyramid sucks the wealth from the rest of the society by hook or crook. We look more and more like a caricature of a Third World country. The economic system is not working for us, we are working for it, and that has got to change.