What's with the larger than Normal High Level Resignations, lately?

NEW:  BBC General Director George Entwistle resigns over elitist child sex ring allegations

CIA director David Petraeus resigns in wake of extramarital affair:
[link to www.thestar.com] 

Hillary Clinton stepping down:
[link to theweek.com] 

Eric Holder (Attorney General):
[link to washington.cbslocal.com] 

Frank Stronach steps down from Magna board chairmanship:
[link to www.theglobeandmail.com] 

Roger Ortiz’ resignation official, Cameron Co. searches for replace…
[link to www.valleycentral.com] 

Lockheed Martin’s incoming CEO resigns; replacement named:
[link to www.latimes.com] 

PetroShale Announces Resignation of Director:
[link to www.stockhouse.com] 

And at least 6 high level resignations in Canada alone.

The Corporate Mad Dogs of Citizens United

Wednesday, October 31, 2012 by Creators.com

by Jim Hightower

 

As feared, our people's democratic authority has been dogged nearly to death by the hounds of money in this election go 'round, thanks to the Supreme Court's reckless decree in the now-infamous Citizens United case. 

That rank political power play by five black-robed judicial partisans unleashed the Big Dogs of corporate money to bite democracy right in the butt this year, poisoning our elections with the venom of unlimited special-interest cash. But there's also been another, little-reported consequence of the malevolent Citizens United decision: It has unleashed mad-dog corporate bosses to tell employees how to vote.

Prior to that 2010 Court ruling, top executives were barred by federal law from using corporate funds to instruct, induce, intimidate or otherwise push workers to support particular candidates. No more, thanks to the five Supremes. Having been given a legal pass, bosses have openly and aggressively conscripted employees to be political troopers for corporate-backed candidates.

For example, CEO David Siegel of Westgate Resorts, a major peddler of time-share schemes, warned his 7,000-strong workforce against voting for Obama. To do so, he wrote in a letter to each of them, would "threaten your job." Obama, Siegel declared, planned to raise taxes on multimillionaires like him, which would give him "no choice but to reduce the size of this company."

Likewise, Dave Robertson, president of the Koch brothers' industrial empire, notified 30,000 workers that they would suffer assorted "ills" if they helped re-elect Obama. In case that message was too subtle, Robertson helpfully included a slate-card of Koch-approved candidates for them to take into the polling booth.

Of course, corporate chieftains say they're not making threats — just suggestions. As Boss Siegel disingenuously put it: "There's no way I can pressure anybody. I'm not in the voting booth with them."

But, of course, he can see (or be told by watchful managers) if any employee dares to sport an Obama campaign button, bumper sticker or lawn sign. And he can find out if any rebellious worker has gone to a Democratic Party event, volunteered in the wrong campaign or made a donation to Obama (now there's a chilling irony — under Citizens United, Siegel can secretly shovel a million bucks or more straight out of the corporate treasury into an anti-Obama campaign group, but a regular person's $200 donation has to be disclosed for all to see, including the boss).

So, sure, this is America, where we're all equal as citizens — you, me and the Fortune 500. And don't forget that you're perfectly free to defy the guy who can fire you for whatever reason he makes up — or for no reason at all. Good luck with that.

For a rich example of unbridled boss power in today's political process, harken back to August, when Mitt Romney appeared on a stage with a group of Ohio coal miners arrayed behind him. "I tell ya," the clueless candidate cheerfully exclaimed, "you've got a great boss."

That would be Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, who'd previously held a $1.7 million fundraiser for Romney. But if Mitt had just turned around and seen the scowls on the soot-smeared faces of the Murray miners, he would've had a clue that they didn't quite share his enthusiasm for their "great boss."

One reason for their grumpiness is that they hadn't volunteered to be there, but had been directed by Bossman Bob to attend. Also, Bob was docking them a day's pay for "taking the day off" to serve as stage props for Mitt's campaign. In effect, they were compelled to donate to the Republican. That'll make you grouchy.

As uncovered in an investigative report by The New Republic, such involuntary support is routinely demanded from the salaried employees of Murray Energy. They get hit up again and again for donations to Romney and such other designated candidates as Sens. Rand Paul, Scott Brown, Jim DeMint, and David Vitter.

Murray himself sends dunning letters to employees' homes, specifying to each one how much to give and instructing them to send their checks directly to corporate headquarters. Staffers there maintain a list of those who did as told — and those who didn't. "If you don't contribute, your job's at stake," one employee bluntly explained. "There's a lot of coercion," he adds, "They will give you a call if you're not giving."

Indeed, Murray deploys his lieutenants to squeeze the laggards — as the boss put it in one letter to them last year: "Please see that our salaried employees 'step up,' for their own sakes." And, in another letter this March, he pointedly named names: "I do not recall ever seeing the attached list of employees ... at one of our fundraisers."

After Romney's "great boss" statement, he added that Murray "runs a great operation here."

Yeah — a political shakedown operation by the 2012, court-sanctioned, corporate version of political bossism. If you needed another reason to support a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, there it is.

Democrats In Bed With Corporations

Still think the Democrats are better than the Republicans? They are exactly the same: corrupt corporatists.--jef

No accident Americans underestimate inequality--The rich prefer it that way

We’ve been brainwashed

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

This article was adapted from the new book The Price of Inequality.

 

How, in a democracy supposedly based on one person one vote, could the 1 percent could have been so victorious in shaping policies in its interests? It is part of a process of disempowerment, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement that produces low voter turnout, a system in which electoral success requires heavy investments, and in which those with money have made political investments that have reaped large rewards — often greater than the returns they have reaped on their other investments.

There is another way for moneyed interests to get what they want out of government: convince the 99 percent that they have shared interests. This strategy requires an impressive sleight of hand; in many respects the interests of the 1 percent and the 99 percent differ markedly.

The fact that the 1 percent has so successfully shaped public perception testifies to the malleability of beliefs. When others engage in it, we call it “brainwashing” and “propaganda.” We look askance at these attempts to shape public views, because they are often seen as unbalanced and manipulative, without realizing that there is something akin going on in democracies, too. What is different today is that we have far greater understanding of how to shape perceptions and beliefs — thanks to the advances in research in the social sciences.

It is clear that many, if not most, Americans possess a limited understanding of the nature of the inequality in our society: They believe that there is less inequality than there is, they underestimate its adverse economic effects, they underestimate the ability of government to do anything about it, and they overestimate the costs of taking action. They even fail to understand what the government is doing — many who value highly government programs like Medicare don’t realize that they are in the public sector.

In a recent study respondents on average thought that the top fifth of the population had just short of 60 percent of the wealth, when in truth that group holds approximately 85 percent of the wealth. (Interestingly, respondents described an ideal wealth distribution as one in which the top 20 percent hold just over 30 percent of the wealth. Americans recognize that some inequality is inevitable, and perhaps even desirable if one is to provide incentives; but the level of inequality in American society is well beyond that level.)

Not only do Americans misperceive the level of inequality; they underestimate the changes that have been going on. Only 42 percent of Americans believe that inequality has increased in the past ten years, when in fact the increase has been tectonic. Misperceptions are evident, too, in views about social mobility. Several studies have confirmed that perceptions of social mobility are overly optimistic.

Americans are not alone in their misperceptions of the degree of inequality. Looking across countries, it appears that there is an inverse correlation between trends in inequality and perceptions of inequality and fairness. One suggested explanation is that when inequality is as large as it is in the United States, it becomes less noticeable—perhaps because people with different incomes and wealth don’t even mix.

These mistaken beliefs, whatever their origins, are having an important effect on politics and economic policy.

Perceptions have always shaped reality, and understanding how beliefs evolve has been a central focus of intellectual history. Much as those in power might like to shape beliefs, and much as they do shape beliefs, they do not have full control: ideas have a life of their own, and changes in the world—in our economy and technology—impact ideas (just as ideas have an enormous effect in shaping our economy). What is different today is that the 1 percent now has more knowledge about how to shape preferences and beliefs in ways that enable the wealthy to better advance their cause, and more tools and more resources to do so.

Beliefs and perceptions, whether they are grounded in reality or not, affect behavior. If people see the “Marlboro man” as the type of person they aspire to be, they may choose that cigarette over others. If individuals overestimate some risk, they may take excessive precautions.

But important as perceptions and beliefs are in shaping individual behavior, they are even more important in shaping collective behavior, including political decisions affecting economics.

Economists have long recognized the influence of ideas in shaping policies. As Keynes famously put it,

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Social sciences like economics differ from the hard sciences in that beliefs affect reality: beliefs about how atoms behave don’t affect how atoms actually behave, but beliefs about how the economic system functions affect how it actually functions. George Soros, the great financier, has referred to this phenomenon as reflexivity, and his understanding of it may have contributed to his success.

Keynes, who was famous not just as a great economist but also as a great investor, described markets as a beauty contest where the winner is the one who assessed correctly what the other judges would judge to be the most beautiful.

Markets can sometimes create their own reality. If there is widespread belief that markets are efficient and that government regulations only interfere with efficiency, then it is more likely that government will strip away regulations, and this will affect how markets actually behave. In the most recent crisis what followed from deregulation was far from efficient, but even here a battle of interpretation rages. Members of the Right tried to blame the seeming market failures on government; in their mind the government effort to push people with low incomes into homeownership was the source of the problem. Widespread as this belief has become in conservative circles, virtually all serious attempts to evaluate the evidence have concluded that there is little merit in this view. But the little merit that it had was enough to convince those who believed that markets could do no evil and governments could do no good that their views were valid, another example of “confirmatory bias.”

If individuals believe that they are being treated unfairly by their employer, they are more likely to shirk on the job. If individuals from some minority are paid lower wages than other equally qualified individuals, they will and should feel that they are being treated unfairly—but the lower productivity that results can, and likely will, lead employers to pay lower wages. There can be a “discriminatory equilibrium.”

Even perceptions of race, caste, and gender identities can have significant effects on productivity. In a brilliant set of experiments in India, low- and high-caste children were asked to solve puzzles, with monetary rewards for success. When they were asked to do so anonymously, there was no caste difference in performance. But when the low caste and high caste were in a mixed group where the low-caste individuals were known to be low caste (they knew it, and they knew that others knew it), low-caste performance was much lower than that of the high caste. The experiment highlighted the importance of social perceptions: low-caste individuals somehow absorbed into their own reality the belief that lower-caste individuals were inferior—but only so in the presence of those who held that belief.

Fairness, like beauty, is at least partly in the eyes of the beholder, and those at the top want to be sure that the inequality in the United States today is framed in ways that make it seem fair, or at least acceptable. If it is perceived to be unfair, not only may that hurt productivity in the workplace but it might lead to legislation that would attempt to temper it.

In the battle over public policy, whatever the realpolitik of special interests, public discourse focuses on efficiency and fairness. In my years in government, I never heard an industry supplicant looking for a subsidy ask for it simply because it would enrich his coffers. Instead, the supplicants expressed their requests in the language of fairness—and the benefits that would be conferred on others (more jobs, high tax payments).

The same goes for the policies that have shaped the growing inequality in the United States—both those that have contributed to the inequality in market incomes and those that have weakened the role of government in bringing down the level of inequality. The battle about “framing” first centers on how we see the level of inequality—how large is it, what are its causes, how can it be justified?
Corporate CEOs, especially those in the financial sector, have thus tried to persuade others (and themselves) that high pay can be justified as a result of an individual’s larger contribution to society, and that it is necessary to motivate him to continue making those contributions. That is why it is called incentive pay. But the crisis showed to everyone what economic research had long revealed—the argument was a sham. What was called incentive pay was anything but that: pay was high when performance was high, but pay was still high when performance was low. Only the name changed. When performance was low, the name changed to “retention pay.”

If the problems of those at the bottom are mainly of their own making and if those collecting welfare checks were really living high on the rest of society (as the “welfare deadbeats” and “welfare queen” campaign in the 1980s and 1990s suggested), then there is little compunction in not providing assistance to them. If those at the top receive high incomes because they have contributed so much to our society—in fact, their pay is but a fraction of their social contribution—then their pay seems justified, especially if their contributions were the result of hard work rather than just luck. Other ideas (the importance of incentives and incentive pay) suggest that there would be a high price to reducing inequality. Still others (trickle-down economics) suggest that high inequality is not really that bad, since all are better off than they would be in a world without such a high level of inequality.

On the other side of this battle are countering beliefs: fundamental beliefs in the value of equality, and analyses such as those presented in earlier chapters that find that the high level of inequality in the United States today increases instability, reduces productivity, and undermines democracy, and that much of it arises in ways that are unrelated to social contributions, that it comes, rather, from the ability to exercise market power—the ability to exploit consumers through monopoly power or to exploit poor and uneducated borrowers through practices that, if not illegal, ought to be.

The intellectual battle is often fought over particular policies, such as whether taxes should be raised on capital gains. But behind these disputes lies this bigger battle over perceptions and over big ideas—like the role of the market, the state, and civil society. This is not just a philosophical debate but a battle over shaping perceptions about the competencies of these different institutions. Those who don’t want the state to stop the rent seeking from which they benefit so much, and don’t want it to engage in redistribution or to increase economic opportunity and mobility, emphasize the state’s failings. (Remarkably, this is true even when they are in office and could and should do something to correct any problem of which they are aware.) They emphasize that the state interferes with the workings of the markets. At the same time that they exaggerate the failures of government, they exaggerate the strengths of markets. Most importantly for our purposes, they strive to make sure that these perceptions become part of the common perspective, that money spent by private individuals (presumably, even on gambling) is better spent than money entrusted to the government, and that any government attempts to correct market failures—such as the proclivity of firms to pollute excessively—cause more harm than good.

This big battle is crucial for understanding the evolution of inequality in America. The success of the Right in this battle during the past thirty years has shaped our government. We haven’t achieved the minimalist state that libertarians advocate. What we’ve achieved is a state too constrained to provide the public goods—investments in infrastructure, technology, and education—that would make for a vibrant economy and too weak to engage in the redistribution that is needed to create a fair society. But we have a state that is still large enough and distorted enough that it can provide a bounty of gifts to the wealthy. The advocates of a small state in the financial sector were happy that the government had the money to rescue them in 2008—and bailouts have in fact been part of capitalism for centuries.

These political battles, in turn, rest on broader ideas about human rights, human nature, and the meaning of democracy and equality. Debates and perspectives on these issues have taken a different course in the United States in recent years than in much of the rest of the world, especially in other advanced industrial countries. Two controversies—the death penalty (which is anathema in Europe) and the right to access to medicine (which in most countries is taken as a basic human right)—are emblematic of these differences. It may be difficult to ascertain the role the greater economic and social divides in our society has played in creating these differences in beliefs; but what is clear is that if American values and perceptions are seen to be out of line with those in the rest of the world, our global influence will be diminished.

A Christmas Message From America's Rich

Friday, December 23, 2011 by Rolling Stone

by Matt Taibbi 

 

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

"The very rich on today’s Wall Street," writes Taibbi, "Are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government." 

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays.

Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.  
 
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.

A Generation of CEOs Who Don't Know How to Raise Wages

Monday 24 October 2011

by: Dean Baker, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Those who follow the rants from our business leaders and their allies in politics and the media have been struck by a disquieting cry in recent months. We have been repeatedly told that, even though we have more than 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, businesses are unable to find qualified workers. 

For example, last week New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman took us to Illinois, where Doug Oberhelman, the CEO of Caterpillar, one of the largest companies in the country, complained that he could not find qualified hourly workers for his manufacturing facilities. Oberhelman went on to complain that he also could not find engineering service technicians, or and even welders.

 

Friedman also recounted a conversation with Chicago's new mayor, former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. According to Friedman, Emanuel complained about "staring right into the whites of the eyes of the skills shortage." Friedman recounts a story from Emanuel about two young CEOs in the health care software business who claimed that they have 50 job openings today, but can't find the people.

There are many other accounts like the ones in Friedman's column, of businesses who find their growth prospects stunted by their inability to hire good workers. Two parts to this story should bother people.

First, in spite of all the complaints in the media about businesses not being able to find good workers, this problem doesn't seem to show up in the data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the overall ratio of job openings to existing jobs is just 2.3 percent. This is down by almost a third from its pre-recession level.

Mr. Oberhelman's experience at Caterpillar doesn't seem to be common among his peers; the job opening rate in manufacturing is just 2 percent. Even in professional and business services, the category that would likely include the workers that the software execs wanted, the job opening rate is just 3.5 percent, down by more than 25 percent from pre-recession levels.

As a group, employers also don't seem to see inadequate worker skills as a problem when asked in surveys.  The National Federation of Independent Businesses has been asking its members about the biggest problems they face for more than a quarter century. In the most recent survey, only 6 percent listed labor quality as one of their top problems. This is up from the 3 percent at the trough of the downturn, but down sharply from the 24 percent peak reached more than a decade ago.

While the experience of CEOs cited by Friedman might appear to be atypical since it is not reflected in the data, there is another aspect to the problem that is even more disconcerting.

These CEOs apparently do not know how a business is supposed to respond to the inability to find qualified workers.

According to standard economics, when businesses can't fill job openings, they are supposed to offer higher wages. If these businesses offered higher wages, then they could lure away workers from their competitors. They may also be able to attract workers from other states, or even other countries. Certainly there are workers somewhere in the world who have the skills that are needed to work at Caterpillar or at software firms run by Mr. Emanuel's friends. If these CEOs raised wages high enough, then these workers would be willing to work for their companies.

However, for some reason, they have not chosen to raise wages to the market clearing level, and, therefore, can't get the workers they want. Apparently, these CEOs do not know how to raise wages.

This inability to raise to wages is also reflected in the data. There is no major occupation group that has seen substantial increases in real wages over the last decade. Even college graduates as a group (excluding those with a postgraduate degree) have not seen an increase in real wages over the last decade. This indicates either that there is no problem of skills shortages, or that companies are increasingly being run by CEOs who do not know how to increase wages.

Since it would be rude to imply that CEOs are not being honest when they complain about the lack of skilled workers, we should assume that they don't know how to raise wages. This is a problem that could be easily remedied. The government could offer short courses to CEOs and other top executives that would teach them how to raise wages and why this would be beneficial to their firms.

These raise-waging instruction sessions should not be very expensive; even the thickest CEO could probably learn how to raise workers' wages in a day or two. Most state and local governments could afford the cost, which should be easily repaid in stronger growth when employers learn how to address their skills shortage.

Companies should not have to forego expansion and workers should not have to be unemployed just because CEOs don't how to raise wages. The skills shortage problem can be fixed.

The 10 Greediest People of the Year

They came, they saw, they took it all. Welcome to the world where thieves have no honor, and those who hone their talents hammering the rest of us are lavishly rewarded.
By Sam Pizzigati, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on December 20, 2010

Hard times can be good times -- for the aggressively avaricious. Where others see pain, they see opportunity. In desperation, they delight. The grimmer the economic outlook, the more ghastly their grabbing.

And who grabbed the most outrageously in 2010? We offer below our annual take on America's ten greediest of the year.

10/ Nick Saban: A coach's fabulous crimson ride

America’s college football coaches seem to have made an end run around the Great Recession. In 2006, only 10 of the about 120 big-time college football coaches took home at least $2 million a year. The 2010 total: 38.

The king of them all: the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban, with a 2010 takehome at $6,087,349, six times the college football coaching average. Only five coaches in all of professional sports will this year make more than Saban.

Forbes has labeled Saban the “most powerful coach in sports,” and his many perks -- everything from two cars to a contract clause that lets him exit Alabama at any time without taking a financial penalty -- amply confirm that assessment.

Financial penalties, meanwhile, are abounding throughout the rest of Alabama's public sector. Budget cuts have forced some colleges in the state to up tuition as much as 23 percent. The state’s overall education budget dropped 9.5 percent in 2010, and local school boards now see no way to “avoid major layoffs.”

Saban, for his part, has been blasting the “greed” of sports agents who sneak college athletes cash in hopes of cashing out big themselves when the athletes turn pro. In August, Saban called these agents no better “than a pimp.”

A pimp, responded one national sports writer, displays a “willingness to physically exploit young people” the pimp claims “to protect” and, “above all, a love of money.” That definition, continued Fox Sports analyst Mark Kriegel, just might fit Nick Saban, Alabama’s most “highly paid state employee.”

9/ Howard Schultz: How to brew a bigger fortune

A decade ago, after running coffee giant Starbucks for 13 years, Howard Schultz stepped down as CEO to take life a bit easier as the company’s “chief global strategist.” Early in 2008, with Starbucks struggling mightily in the marketplace, Schultz took back his CEO slot.

The struggles continued. Massive layoffs would soon slash the chain's workforce by 19 percent. Schultz would feel the pain. He started trumpeting “the shared sacrifice I want to make” -- and pledged to take almost no personal salary.

But CEOs, wink, wink, only get a small fraction of their total pay from straight salary. The Starbucks corporate board, behind the sacrificing scenes, was actually turbocharging the Schultz pay package with a mammoth grant of stock options, delivered at just the moment Starbucks shares were hovering at a rock-bottom low.

Starbucks valued those options, at the time of their granting, at $12.4 million. By May 2010, after a Wall Street mini-boom, the value of the shares had soared to $46.8 million. More good news for Schultz: He scored another $26 million last year exercising options he had been granted way back in 1998 and 1999.

And what about Starbucks shareholders? Those who bought their shares in 2007, right before the Great Recession, still have no gain to show for their investment.

8/ Daniel Akerson: Competing at a mythic level

The chief executive of General Motors since this past September, Daniel Akerson, earlier this month gave his first “high-profile speech” as the automaker’s CEO. The prime takeaway from his address? The feds, said Akerson, need to ease up on the bailout pay limits still in effect for his fellow top GM executives.

”We have to be competitive,” Akerson told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. “We have to be able to attract good people.”

Getting “good people” to fill jobs below GM’s executive level, on the other hand, apparently doesn’t matter all that much. GM salaried employees, Akerson has decided, will not see any increases this coming year in their base salaries. New assembly line workers at GM, for their part, are now making only $14 an hour, half the rate they would have been making before GM’s meltdown.

Akerson is currently making $1.7 million in cash annually, on top of $5.3 million in stock for the next three years. Before GM’s meltdown, the automaker’s CEO, Rick Wagoner, was raking in a much more “competitive” $10.2 million.

“Competitive” might not actually be the right word here. In the year Wagoner all by himself was collecting $10.2 million, Toyota’s top 32 execs -- a group that included CEO Katsuaki Watanabe -- were together pulling in only $19.9 million.

7/ Don Blankenship: Dirty business as usual

Outside the nation’s coal fields, few Americans knew Don Blankenship, the CEO at Massey Energy, before last April. But that all changed after an explosion that month left 29 Massey miners dead. Reporters would soon grill Blankenship about the mine’s long history of safety violations, over 500 in 2009 alone.

“Violations,” the Massey chief coldheartedly retorted, “are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”

Almost as normal as windfall paychecks for Don Blankenship. The Massey CEO took home nearly $34 million in 2005, about quadruple the industry standard. Over the last three years, he has waltzed away from his office with another $38.2 million. But the real waltzing is only now beginning.

The 60-year-old Blankenship is retiring at the end of this year with a pension valued at $5.7 million, another $12 million in severance, still another $27.2 million in deferred pay, title to a company-owned house, and a two-year consulting agreement that pays $5,000 a month for no more than 32 hours work.

Blankenship may even exit, once all this year's stats have come in, with a 2010 “performance” bonus that factors in safety.

How can a coal company CEO with 29 dead miners get a safety bonus? Massey’s flagship safety standard, “Non-Fatal Days Lost,” merely multiplies “the number of employee work-related accidents times 200,000 hours, divided by the total employee hours worked.” Death doesn’t factor in.

6/ David Cote: King of America's corporate political cash

Coal can kill. Uranium, too. Workers who handle uranium, notes labor journalist Mike Elk, “suffer rates of cancer 10 times higher than the general public.”

That’s one big reason why the union local that represents workers at a Honeywell uranium facility in Illinois this past June rejected a management proposal to eliminate retiree medical care and boost -- to $8,500 a year -- the out-of-pocket health care costs active workers have to pay.

A disappointed Honeywell, one of the nation’s top defense contractors, promptly locked the Illinois uranium workers out. Those workers, ever since then, have been trying to meet face to face with Honeywell CEO David Cote.

The week after Thanksgiving, the locked-out workers even traveled to Washington, D.C., where Cote, a member of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, was discussing with his fellow commissioners a variety of proposals to slash federal spending.

Cote, who took home $13.2 million last year and $28.7 million the year before, has been spending big himself -- on political contributions. Under his direction, Honeywell has emerged as the nation’s top corporate political giver.

Cote’s agenda? Making sure the budget-cutters in Washington keep hands off defense contracts. As one alternative, press reports indicate, he’s pushing a freeze on the pay that goes to America’s servicemen and women.

5/ David Tepper: This hedge needs clipping

Nobody made more money last year than America’s top hedge fund managers, and no hedge fund manager made more than David Tepper. This 53-year-old former junk bond trader at Goldman Sachs hit a $4 billion jackpot essentially betting, in the middle of the global financial meltdown, that Uncle Sam wouldn't let Wall Street's biggest banks go under.

Tepper is currently doing his best to single-handedly reboot America’s still depressed residential real estate market. In June, he spent $43.5 million to pick up a summer home in the Hamptons that used to belong to former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine. The 6.5-acre beachfront spread sports six bedrooms, a tennis court, and a heated pool -- and rented last summer for $900,000.

The $43.5 million Tepper shelled out ended up the highest price paid this year for a Hamptons home. The total also amounted to about half the record $88 million the hedge fund industry raised for the homeless this past May at the 2010 Robin Hood Foundation dinner, Wall Street's single biggest annual charity gala.

One official at the foundation dubbed that $88 million an act of “extraordinary generosity.” Others might define “extraordinary” a bit differently. David Tepper and the rest of the hedge fund industry’s top 25 last year together pocketed $25.3 billion. They averaged, each and every business day, over $100 million.

4/ Lloyd Blankfein: Getting the most from our tax dollars

Lloyd Blankfein, the chief exec at Wall Street’s biggest bank, has had a stunning century. Since 2000, Bloomberg News calculates, Blankfein has earned a whopping $125 million in cash bonuses and enough additional stock awards to leave him with a personal stash of Goldman shares worth over $300 million.

And the goodies keep coming. This January, Blankfein will pick up another $24.3 million in stock, as a delayed payout from previous years. He’ll also pick up millions more in soon-to-be-announced bonuses for 2010.

News of these bonuses, Wall Street analyst Jeanne Branthover predicts, will leave the public “outraged” and Wall Streeters “excited” -- that “there’s still a reason to be working so hard.”

How hard is Lloyd Blankfein working? He simply never misses an opportunity, however small, to make a buck off taxpayers. This year’s prime example: the fees that Goldman Sachs has fixed on Build America Bonds, the federal program that's helping states and localities raise money for construction job projects.

Local governments, in tough times, often have to cut back on such projects because they can't afford to pay the interest on new bond offerings. With Build America Bonds, the federal government is paying 35 percent of this interest.

Investment banks charge municipalities fees to bring their bonds to investors. Goldman’s fees typically range up to 0.625 percent of each bond issue. But Goldman has been charging, on Build America Bonds, up to 0.875 percent. Why so much? Goldman, Blankfein told Congress, had to “educate the market.”

3/ Mark Hurd: Unfurling a platinum parachute

The truly greedy don’t just grab -- at the expense of those they overpower. And the truly greedy don’t just feel entitled to grab all they can get. The truly greedy feel invincible while they’re grabbing away, just like former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

Hurd gained the HP reins in 2005. He proceeded to pocket $134.2 million, through 2009, mainly be wheeling and dealing his way through dozens of mergers that killed nearly 40,000 jobs.

HP’s board cheered Hurd on, every step of the way, until this past August when news surfaced that the married CEO had wined and dined a former erotic actress, handed her a huge and undeserved marketing contract, and then fudged HP's books to cover up his indiscretions.

That arrogance would cost Hurd his job, but not much else. Hurd left HP with a severance package that may total $40 million and almost immediately landed a comfy new gig as president of business software giant Oracle. His new contract will bring Hurd, in his first Oracle year, as much as $11 million -- and a boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who just happens to be his buddy.

2/ Larry Ellison: How dare we call him ruthless

Mark Hurd has shown himself to be a whiz at the merge-and-purge corporate CEO two-step. But the master of that merger two-step -- snatch a rival’s customers, then fire its workers -- has always been Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, the third-richest man in America.

Oracle has bought out 66 companies over the years, and Ellison, the Wall Street Journal estimates, has collected $1.84 billion in compensation just the last ten years alone. But Oracle's chief started this past year out vowing to change his ways.

In January, after consummating a $7.4 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems, Ellison had “We’re Hiring” buttons handed out at the news conference to announce the deal -- and then royally denounced a news report that Oracle would be axing half of Sun’s 27,600 workers.

“Those who wrote this should be ashamed of themselves,” Ellison ranted. “The truth is, we are going to hire about 2,000 new people to beef up the Sun businesses -- about twice as many as we will let go.”

The truth turned out to be anything but. Five months later, with no fanfare, an Oracle filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that the company was taking a huge severance write-off for personnel reductions. As many as 8,600 jobs, one analyst calculated, would be history.

1/ Andrew Clark: Education really does pay

Just a few years ago, at the height of America’s subprime frenzy, bankers and mortgage lenders were making mega millions hoodwinking vulnerable old people into refinancing their homes at unconscionably high interest rates.

Today, in an economy still reeling from that fraud, a new high-growth industry -- the for-profit higher ed sector -- is hoodwinking vulnerable young people into taking on taxpayer-financed student loans they can’t possibly repay.

And now this industry, facing federal regulations that aim to rein in its deceit, is waging a massive media campaign based on the phony premise that Washington wants to make it “harder to get the education” students “need to succeed.”

No one is personally profiting more from this for-profit higher ed industry chutzpah than the CEO of the San Diego-based Bridgepoint Education, an enterprise that specializes, of late, in going after returning military veterans. That CEO, Andrew Clark, last year took home $20.5 million.

For-profit colleges didn’t pay any particular attention to military vets until 2008. But Congress that year gave veteran tuition benefits a significant hike, and the for-profits rushed to gobble up the newly available tuition dollars. Bridgepoint's military enrollment soared to 9,200 in 2009, up from just 329 three years earlier.

Overall, the New York Times recently reported, Andrew Clark’s Bridgepoint last year spent more on marketing and promotion than on educating its students.

For-profit colleges have hit upon an enormously lucrative business model: Promise vets -- and other potential students -- anything to get them to enroll, even if that means signing them up for courses of little real value or classes, the Times notes, they would be “all but certain” to fail. If students do fail or drop out, no prob. The for-profits get to keep the tuition, courtesy of America’s taxpayers.

Plenty of America's power suits, to be sure, are making more money than Andrew Clark. But none are grabbing with any more gusto.

Executive Excess

by Jim Hightower - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 by Creators Syndicate

Look out, they're angry. Foaming-at-the-mouth angry. And they're lashing out, saying they won't take it anymore. As one of their leaders angrily cried, "It's a war." Indeed — they're on the move to take their country back.

Forget the tea party rowdies, this is the champagne party! More precisely, it's the Dom Perignon-$1,000-a-bottle-champagne-party, propelled by — get this — billionaire's rage.

Yes, some of the richest, most pampered people on the planet — people who literally wallow in luxury every day, with never a concern about losing a job, a home or health care, or getting their kids into college — these people are wailing in self-pity. They are Wall Street hedge-fund operators, which essentially means they are high-flying financial flimflammers. What has stoked them into an elitist fury is a Barack Obama proposal to close off a ridiculous tax loophole that has let them pay only 15 percent of their lavish income in taxes, rather than the 35 percent rate that us commoners pay.

One of the richest of the ragers, Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, sees Obama's proposal as an outrageous intrusion into the suites of the elite, comparing it to "when Hitler invaded Poland." This over-the-top-tantrum comes from a multibillionaire — a guy who spent $3 million in 2007 just to throw himself a birthday party! Come on, Steve, you're filthy rich. Stop hyperventilating, and pay your taxes!

Pathetically, the real root of this sad Hedge Fund Rebellion is a feeling by these powerful, super-privileged megalomaniacs that they are being picked on. One even whined that asking hedge-funders to pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else amounts to the "persecution of the minority."

Good grief, man, get a grip! Next thing you know, these doofuses will hire Glenn Beck to host a weepy telethon to "Save the Billionaires Tax Loophole."

But it's not enough that the wealthy elite want to exempt their excessive, ill-gotten income from any fair contribution to the public good — they also want to slash our incomes.

Many of America's top-paid CEOs are the very ones who're ruthlessly axing America's middle-class jobs, and they are reaping gains from our pains.

A new survey finds that corporate chieftains who inflict economic pain on the company's workers receive more financial gain for themselves. The Institute for Policy Studies examined the layoff-payoff records of America's 500 largest corporations during the past couple of years. IPS researchers report that the 50 CEOs who fired the most rank-and-file employees averaged 42 percent higher pay than their peers, averaging an extra $3.5 million each.

One of the champions in this contest of convoluted corporate compensation was Mark Hurd. As chief executive of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, Hurd dumped 6,400 workers in 2009 — a year in which he pocketed a paycheck of $24.2 million. Earlier this year, Hurd was forced to resign from HP after an internal investigation found that he falsified some expense reports. No need to weep for Mark, though — he was comfortably compensated for this bad turn of fortune, receiving a severance package reportedly worth $40 million.

Being bad, you see, can be awfully good for a CEO's bottom line. For example, IPS documented one category of badness-to-goodness that is especially infuriating. Five of the 50 leading pink-slip-issuers last year were also bailout barons. Among them was Kenneth Chenault, honcho of American Express, which got $3.4 billion from us taxpayers in 2008 to save it from financial ruin. In gratitude, Chenault subsequently offed 4,000 employees, then helped himself to a paycheck of nearly $17 million, including a $5 million cash bonus.

To see the full IPS report, titled "Executive Excess 2010," and to help stop the excess, go to www.ips-dc.org.

Executives at health insurance giants cash in as firms plan fee hikes

(I apologize in advance for any offense, but is there a bigger class of cocksuckers than insurance and bank executives? During the worst economy since the depression, these dicks are going to hike the rates AGAIN after doing it last year and the year before!!! And this time, they are raising rates 40%! Fuck them! Off with their heads! First against the wall when the shit goes down.--jef)

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Execs @ Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth, WellPoint and Aetna received nearly $200 million in compensation in 2009, according to a report, while companies sought rate increases as high as 39%.
By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times
August 11, 2010 | Reporting from Washington

The top executives at the nation's five largest for-profit health insurance companies pulled in nearly $200 million in compensation last year — while their businesses prepared to hit ratepayers with double-digit premium increases, according to a new analysis conducted by healthcare activists.

The leaders of Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint Inc. each in effect received raises in 2009, the report concluded, based on an analysis of company reports filed with the Security and Exchange Commission.

H. Edward Hanway, former chief executive of Philadelphia-based Cigna, topped the list of high-paid executives, thanks to a retirement package worth $110.9 million. Cigna paid Hanway and his successor, David Cordani, a total of $136.3 million last year.

Only one executive in the list actually saw his paycheck shrink last year: Ron Williams, the CEO of Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna Inc., earned nearly $18.2 million in total compensation, down from $24.4 million in 2008.

"Most families are struggling to hang on. Employers are struggling to stay in business. And these guys were giving themselves huge raises," said Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, a coalition of advocacy groups that prepared the report.

A spokeswoman for WellPoint said executives' compensation reflects their effort to improve care and hit corporate goals. Representatives of the other four insurers either declined to comment Tuesday on the report or did not respond to questions.

The executive packages were calculated by adding base salaries, bonuses, stock awards and other compensation reported on company financial statements. It did not include the value of exercised stock options.

Last year was highly profitable for most of the country's big publicly traded insurers. In the first two quarters of this year, profits for many insurers have continued to soar more than 20%.

Aetna's net income jumped more than 40% in the second quarter of 2010 compared with a year earlier. Indianapolis-based WellPoint recorded a 51% increase in its profit in the first quarter compared with the same period in 2009.

At the same time, the companies have sought major premium hikes. In Rhode Island, UnitedHealth of Minnetonka, Minn., this spring sought increases of up to 15.5%. In Utah, some customers of Humana of Louisville, Ky., reported increases of 29%.

In California, WellPoint subsidiary Anthem Blue Cross planned increases as high as 39% earlier this year. (The company later scaled them back, acknowledging errors in its rate-setting).

Industry officials have said the rate hikes are necessary because of rising medical costs, but insurance companies have faced added scrutiny as executive pay grows. After UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley cashed in nearly $99 million worth of stock options last year, a group of shareholders launched a bid to expand shareholder input on executive pay.

"It creates a culture of over-compensation," said Lance E. Lindblom, president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which led the ultimately unsuccessful effort to increase oversight at UnitedHealth. "That takes eyes off the ball of performance."

White House warns BP on possible CEO change

Monday July 26, 2010

The White House warned BP on Monday that any decision to replace under-fire CEO Tony Hayward would not change its obligation to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and compensate victims.

"The CEO of BP ... if he makes the decision for him to leave -- that is one thing," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

"What is clear is BP cannot and should not and will not leave the Gulf without meeting its responsibility to plug the well, to clean up the damage that has been caused, and compensate those that have been damaged."

Earlier, British media reported that Hayward was expected to quit imminently with a payoff of up to 18.5 million dollars despite being lambasted over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.