A former AT&T CEO rats out his former comrades in income inequality humbuggery, and The Gadfly thinks it is pretty fucking cool:
You can blame the stagnant economy on a "handful of women and men" who run the country's largest companies. And that's according to a man who used to be one of those people.
Executive pay has gotten so out of hand, former AT&T Broadband CEO Leo Hindery told HuffPost Live on Thursday, that it has caused a "structural breakdown of the meritocracy of our nation."
Hindery pointed out that, even as CEO pay has skyrocketed in recent decades, it has not "trickled down" to workers, who must increasingly borrow money to finance their spending. That dynamic helped set the stage for the most recent recession and helps explain today's sluggish recovery.
Fortune 500 CEOs now make more than 200 times what their average workers make, according to Bloomberg data. That ratio has increased by 1,000 percent since 1950. As CEO pay has exploded, worker pay has stagnated: Workers have not had a real cost-of-living increase since the 1960s, Hindery argued.
And these CEOs are not exactly earning their exorbitant pay, said Hindery.
"It's a fraud," the former executive said. "It's born out of cronyism."http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/leo-hindery-ceo-pay_n_4784162.html
When Hindery states that CEO's exorbitant pay is a "fraud " and "born out of cronyism," what he is referring to is the fact that there appears to be some type of holy covenant between most of these large, multi-national corporations wherein they just simply trade-off CEO's with each other every few years and as they do - the compensation packages and payouts for these guys just keep spiraling upwards. Translation - these CEO people are integral players in the plutocrat's clique and regardless of how successful they are in running their companies, they are the plutocrat's elite boys and therefore they are going to stick with them no matter what.
Meanwhile -- one of the HuffPo commenters had this devastating critique about the whole sordid mess and it's so spot on deadly, albeit not in an eloquent sense, that The Gadfly feels it is worth re-printing in it's entirety:
Have you ever been in a store that seemed to be run on a skeleton crew, can't find anyone to ask a question, long lines at the cash register? Not to mention the value of experienced, helpful, motivated staff, rather than minimum wage kids. Have you been put on hold, while a recording said "we are experiencing an unusually high level of call volume".
Bullshit. If it were truthful, that recording would say:
"We are experiencing an unusually high level of executive compensation and consequently are not hiring enough people to run the business properly".
There are thousands of businesses across America that need more sales people, customer service reps, technical people, clerks, etc. but instead of hiring enough people to staff the counters and floors, the execs are choosing to pad their own pockets and raise their own pay, give themselves perks and bonuses, and run the companies on a skeleton crew.
"Downsizing" was the euphemism fat cat execs used to fire people, make the poor slobs left work two jobs for the price of one, and stick the money in their own pockets.
If all the executives were sick for the day, the business would still go on. If the sales floor staff didn't show up, it's all over.
For every $1,000,000 some yacht owning private plane flying CEO chooses to enrich himself with, he could have hired 30 people at $33,000 per.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/jaydancingbear/leo-hindery-ceo-pay_n_4784162_307181537.html?
Bada-Bing!! Bada-Boom!! If that isn't the fucking hard core truth of the matter, The Gadfly is a suck-egg mule.
There is one way (of many) to put and end to and turn around this situation dear readers, and we all know what it is because Senator Elizabeth Warren has told us what it is. The ball is in our, We The People's, court.
----TFG
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