This is a story that cannot be retold enough and updated enough because it highlights, as much as any trend, how nothing has changed. The people suffer--while CEO pay continues to go up. The robbery continues unabated.
Let's start with the hospital sector. In New York, and I would suspect everywhere else around the country (stories please), hospital case is being cut back wherever public dollars are being spent--but hospital CEOs are doing just fine, as we learn from an article entitled "Immune to Cuts: Lofty Salaries at Hospitals":
At Bronx-Lebanon, a hospital that exists only by the grace and taxed fortunes of the people of New York State, the chief executive was paid $4.8 million in 2007 and $3.6 million in 2008, records show. At NewYork-Presbyterian, a hospital system that receives nearly half a billion dollars annually in public money, the chief executive was paid $9.8 million in 2007 and $2.8 million in 2008.
In an urgent search to cut the state’s health care costs and lift revenue, a task force came up with a plan to increase the cost of a hospital stay by $5 and to limit housekeeping services for the disabled in their homes.
One area of plump costs, however, remained undisturbed: executive suites where salaries and compensation run into the millions of dollars, even at the most financially struggling hospitals.
And...
Ms. Glick’s district includes Greenwich Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan closed last year in a blizzard of problems. “I had a hospital that existed for 160 years, and there were many issues with it,” she said. “It also had some level of poor management in its final year.”
The top 10 executives took home about $6 million that year. They may have gone out of business, but they didn’t go cheap.
There is no cry from our governor--a "Democrat"--to cap CEO pay. Nope--but he is raring to go when it comes to cutting back the services for regular people because, well, we have no money (of course, this is a phony crisis--especially if he had the balls to tax his rich campaign contributors...which he doesn't and won't).
And it isn't just health care. Let's go back to our favorite group of miscreants who managed to crash an entire economy. Courtesy of the Financial Times (I'm going to come back to this article in another post in the next day or two):
More than two years after the depths of the financial crisis, banks are grappling with profound regulatory changes to the levels of capital they must hold as a buffer against systemic shocks; restrictions on the markets in which they are permitted to function; and questions about which business lines will remain sufficiently profitable to operate.
But the model of paying extraordinarily high sums remains largely intact. This is in spite of public and political outrage at a practice blamed by some for exacerbating the crisis; but also in spite of the sector’s declining profitability in the past year.
And...
Indeed, since the crisis, the gap has widened dramatically. Pay per employee at Goldman Sachs, UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley – five of the world’s biggest investment banks – averaged $403,000 in 2010, according to research by Evolution Securities. That is about 10 times the average US and UK income of $40,000 – in theory a far higher premium than should be necessary to attract people to work in the sector, economists say.
Meaning, the only justification for high pay for the incompetent greedy folks who destroyed millions of jobs is...well...greed. It has very little to do with any real competition in the marketplace that would put a price on "skilled" people.
Greed marches on. People get screwed. Nothing has changed.
Updated by Tasini at Wed Mar 16, 2011 at 05:55 PM EDT
Have To run...will check in later...