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kinda have to agree, I don't see as many of those up in arms when some Corrupt CORPORATE CEO, or some phony BS ARTIST Wall Street Guru is caught stealing multi millions,, tho,, its as if thats OK, and acceptable, because their in the Corporate structure, but if your a worker, rather blue collar or white collar down the lower rung of the ladder, your nothing, and are portrayed as another Ant at the company picnic and aren't deserving of anything or being able to better yourself.
Why is it alright for these Corrupt Corporate CEO's to get outrageously over the top pay packages and Glorious Benefit Packages and Hefty Bonuses beyond ridlicious,, and all kinds of lavish other Ridlicious Perks, but its NOT alright if the workers want a few dollars more or a better percentage of their health ins. paid for.
How many times have we been seeing thru out the years - 1 Corporate scandal after another, or Wall Street scandal , not just the Banking industry, but ENRON, TYCO , WORLD COM, HOME DEPOT, K-MART etc,, and the CEO's were paid outrageous salaries & bonuses,
yet they ran the company into the ground and along with it - the companies stock and the shareholders had to hold a meeting to oust the no good SOB,,,,,
** ""What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."
- Gore Vidal
"The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money," said literary critic Mary Colum during lunch with Ernest Hemingway in 1936. In truth, more money is hardly the only difference. No newsflash there. But what should be making headlines is the fact that the gap between what's going on upstairs in boardrooms, executive suites, and private planes and what's going on downstairs in office cubicles and on factory floors has become an abyss.
Upstairs: Former Kmart CEO Charles Conaway received nearly $23 million in compensation during his two-year tenure.
Downstairs: When Kmart filed for bankruptcy in 2002, 283 stores were closed and 22,000 employees lost their jobs. None of them received any severance pay whatsoever.
Upstairs: Former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski made nearly $467 million in salary, bonuses and stock during his four-year tenure.
Downstairs: Shareholders lost a massive $92 billion when Tyco's market value plunged.
Upstairs: The CEOs of 23 large companies under investigation by the SEC and other agencies earned 70% more than the average CEO, banking a collective $1.4 billion between 1999 and 2001.
Downstairs: Since January 2001 the market value of these 23 companies nosedived by over $500 billion, or roughly 73%, and they have laid off over 160,000 employees.
Upstairs: In the year before Enron collapsed, about 100 executives and energy traders collected more than $300 million in cash payments from the company. More than $100 million went to former CEO Kenneth Lay.
Downstairs: After filing for bankruptcy, Enron lost $68 billion in market value, 5,000 employees lost their jobs, and Enron workers lost $800 million from their pension funds.
Upstairs: Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott, Jr. received more than $17 million in total compensation in 2001.
Downstairs: Wal-Mart employees in 30 states are suing the company alleging that managers forced employees to punch out after an eight-hour work day, and then continue working for no pay. This is a clear violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which says employees who work more than 40 hours a week must be paid time and a half for their overtime.
Upstairs "Penthouse A": Citigroup provided Enron with $8.5 billion in loans disguised as commodity trades. The deals allowed Enron to artificially inflate cash flow and hide debt, which deceptively boosted share price and ultimately led to the company's collapse.
Upstairs "Penthouse B": Citigroup offered hot initial public offering shares to WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers and other telecom titans in exchange for their investment banking business. Ebbers is alleged to have made nearly $11 million on IPO shares sold to him by Citigroup.
Downstairs: Citigroup agreed to pay $215 million in fines to the FTC to settle allegations of "predatory lending," loosely defined as mortgage lending that preys on customers, especially ones with bad credit, through abusive practices like deceptive marketing and inflated fees on unnecessary refinancings.
Upstairs: More than a million U.S. corporations and individuals have registered as citizens of Bermuda to avoid taxes, a practice okayed by the IRS. Although the exact number is unknown, the IRS estimates that "tax motivated expatriation" drains at least $70 billion a year from the U.S. Treasury.
Downstairs: If you were poor enough to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit in 2001, your chance of being audited was one in 47. If you made more than $100,000 a year, your chance of being audited was one in 208.
Upstairs: The richest 20% of Americans earn almost 50% of the nation's income.
Downstairs: The poorest 20% of Americans earn 5.2%.
Upstairs: The top 1% of stock owners hold 47.7% of all stocks by value.
Downstairs: The bottom 80% of stock owners own just 4.1% of total stock holdings.
Upstairs: In 2000, the average CEO earned more in one day than the average worker earned all year.
Downstairs: In 2000, 25% of workers earned less than poverty-level wages.
Upstairs: Between 1990 and 2000, average CEO pay rose 571%.
Downstairs: Between 1990 and 2000, average worker pay rose 37%. For more information about the disturbing disparity in wealth and privilege between the top 1% and the bottom 80%, open up the business section of your newspaper. Or turn on Court TV.
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" In August of 2002 I received a politely phrased notice from my cable company, Adelphia, addressed to "Dear Valued Customer" announcing that my monthly cable fee would be increasing. The letter explained that, "like other businesses, Adelphia constantly faces increases in operational expenses such as wages, specialized training for our employees, utilities, fuel, insurance, equipment...." Missing from the missive? any mention of another operational expense that no one at Adelphia seemed to happy to discuss. During the unfortunate latter days of his reign, former CEO John Rigas had borrowed $3.1 billion from the company and spread the money around like seed on a sun-scorched lawn. His own lawn, of course. he spent $13 million to build a golf course in his backyard, $150 million to buy the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, $65 million to fund a venture capital group run by his son-in-law, thousands to maintain his three private jets, and $700,000 for a country-club membership. It's a wonder my bill's not going up a million dollars a month. I just hope Adelphia's subscribers aren't also paying for his bail.
In the super-heated nineties we were told repeatedly that the "democratization of capital" and unparalleled increases in productivity would level the playing field and produce unprecedented gains in everyone's standard of living. Well, far from closing the vast gap between the haves and the have-nots, the lunatic excesses and the frenzy of fraud perpetrated by our high-flying corporate chieftains have left America's 401(k)s and pension plans in ruins and more than 8 million people out of work. Meanwhile, despite the much vaunted Corporate Responsibility Act and the highly publicized round up of a few of the most heinous offenders, the awful truth is that the corporate tricksters have pillaged the U.S. economy and gotten away with it. They're still living in their gargantuan houses, still feasting on their wildly inflated salaries, and engorging themselves on staggering sums of stock options, while the rest of America tries to figure out how to rebuild for retirement. or send a kid to college on a worthless stock portfolio.
Ask yourself, Which America do you live in?
Do you live in a $90 million mansion in Bel-Air like Global Crossing founder and chairman Gary Winnick, financed by the cleverly timed sale of more than $730 million worth of stock in the now bankrupt telecom giant? Or do you have a house like Stephen Hilbert's in Carmel, Indiana, with a personal basketball court that's a full-sized replica of Indiana University's Assembly Hall? (Hilbert -- an avid Hoosiers fan as you may have guessed -- built the house during his disastrous tenure as CEO of Conseco, an insurance company whose stock dropped off the S&P 500 in the summer of 2002.)
Maybe you prefer to kick back, like former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, on beautiful Nantucket? Sea Rose Farm, Kozlowski's $5 million island spread, features magnificent ocean views, massive fireplaces, a resident chef, a four-bedroom guesthouse, and two seaside cottages -- the cutely named "Sequin" and "Edward Cary" -- each valued at an additional $2 to $3 million.
Or maybe you don't even bother with a house. Maybe you live on a yacht like Sakura, the 192-foot, five-deck, $10 million floating mansion owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Or the aptly named Aquasition, which you took off the hands of former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers after the company he led hid more than $7 billion in losses and scuttled its stock. Or maybe these are just too small-time for you. If that's the case, try out Kozlowski's $25 million, 130-foot historic sloop Endeavour, which costs the Tyco tycoon $700,000 a year to maintain.
Or are you one of those corporate titans who has so many million-dollar residences scattered around the globe that you have trouble settling down? Perhaps you'd rather shuttle between homes on your corporate jet. Or is even that too restrictive? When General Electric's retired CEO Jack Welch got fed up with his fleet of cramped corporate jets, he did what any self-respecting capitalist idol would do. He went out and bought a couple of much larger Boeing 737-700s. His allergy to baggage claim is said to be so extreme that even in retirement GE kept a plane at the ready for his impulsive wanderings. Only after the arrangement was made public in his divorce filings did Welch agree to pay $2 million a year to reimburse GE for the jet and a few other perks.
How do you make the most of a long weekend? Instead of planning a backyard barbecue, do you take off for an afternoon at a beach halfway around the world, say in Fiji or Bora Bora, courtesy of your generous shareholders? Or do you line up a golf date with the president of the United States?
Why not jet off to a sunny spot closer to home like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands? CEOs like Joe Forehand of Accenture and Herbert Henkel of Ingersoll-Rand can go there and still claim they're on the job because their companies are technically headquartered in these centers of high finance with warm tropical breezes and no taxes.
How about a little extra spending money? Are you crafty enough to line up the special kind of financing that netted Bernie Ebbers $408 million in loans? Hey, why bother with a nosy bank when you can just write yourself a check for a few hundred million from your very own corporate kitty, at no or extremely low interest? And if you can't pay it back, maybe your company will let you slide for a few months or years or even forgive the whole thing like E*Trade did with CEO Christos Cotsakos' $15 million loan? After all, you're the boss.
And what would happen if, God forbid, you caught a few bad breaks and were forced out of your job? Are you confident that even if you really messed up and not only lost all the company's money but also lost thousands of other people their jobs, you'd still walk away with millions of dollars in bonuses and options and an extremely generous annual pension payment?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you live in a very special suburb of America: "CEO-ville." It's a cushy, exclusive enclave that has broken away from the rest of the Republic, where the motto is "Land of the free, home of the off-shore tax shelter." The currency is emblazoned with the inscription, "In God and crooked accountants we trust," and the Declaration of Independence includes the phrase: "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are stock options, golden parachutes, and the reckless pursuit of limitless wealth."
In all likelihood, though, you're living in the other America, the one 99.9999% of the country has to make do with. The one in which a record-breaking 1.5 million filed for bankruptcy between March 2001 and March 2002. The one in which investors have lost nearly $9 trillion since March 2000 and retirement assets lost 11% of their value -- $630 billion -- over roughly the same period.
How did this divisive and anti-democratic tale of two Americas come to pass? How did the impossibly rich upper crust get impossibly crustier? How did we allow the haves to have so insanely much while the rest of America got stuck with the bill? What did our fearless corporate leaders do to deserve such excessive pay and perks, and severance packages, as they laid off hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans, and magically made trillions of dollars in pension plans and small investor shareholdings disappear?
It's not just that corporate America corrupted the watchdogs that were supposed to be guarding the public interest by feeding them under the table. While it is true that federal regulators, overseers, accountants, and the corporate boards were only too happy to lick the hands that fed them, corporate corruption will not just be chased away by a better-trained pack of Dobermans.
Most of us live our lives according to a set of generally accepted rules. Some are actual laws, which we may or may not be happy with -- who likes paying taxes? -- but which we follow anyway. Others are moral conventions governed by our sense of decency. We relinquish our seat to an elderly woman on a crowded bus. We hand back the extra money when a cashier gives us too much change. We don't gamble away our kids' allowance in the office football pool. And although we're ambitious, we don't cheat people just to speed up our own rise to the top.
A small group of Americans isn't happy with this arrangement. Not content to conduct themselves according to a code of fair play that allows more than ample opportunity for hard-working, talented, or just plain lucky people to prosper -- even to become very rich -- they've created their own set of rules that defy logic, violate basic decency, corrupt commerce, and laugh in the face of the laws and regulations established to protect the rest of us. These are the standards that comprise the Code of the Crooked CEO. It's a code of dishonor that rewards unprecedented avarice with gargantuan wealth and ensures a lifestyle of appalling excess -- where "keeping up with the Gateses" means that having too much is never enough.
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