How do you know it's Xmas in North America? When all the news about layoffs and plant closings hits the airwaves; announcements made by grim-looking CEOs, feigning humanity as best they can as they speak their CorporateSpeak, which has all the tonal compassion of a grocery cart falling down a flight of concrete stairs.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - General Motors Corp. said Monday it would cut 30,000 hourly jobs and close or scale back operations at about a dozen U.S. and Canadian locations in a bid to save $7 billion a year and halt huge losses in its core North American auto operations.The son of a bitch behind this latest "just-in-time-for-Xmas" announcement is GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. In 2004, he earned $9,957,020 in total compensation including stock option grants from General Motors and has another $5,000,000 in unexercised stock options from previous years.
What is the Xmas message from Mr. Wagoner and his family to you and your family this holiday season? Now, I'm paraphrasing here: "Fuck off and dry up." Nice.
In between drinking eggnog and singing Xmas carrolls this holiday season -- and sending out your resume and applying for unemployment benefits -- you should acquaint yourself with what our corporate titans earn each year. It's interesting. These are the men -- all middleaged white men, to the last -- who run our economy (run it like suicide bombers run cars and planes into buildings), and yet their names and faces are entirely unknown to me.
There is a C.E.O. out there who earned $230.6 million in 2004. Do you know who he is? What company he does he head? Then you should consult Forbes Magazine's CEO Compensation Special Report. Print a copy to read while waiting your turn in the unemployment office. Share the cheer with others.
And there are some really jaunty, funny categories in the Forbes report, like the "Worst Performing/Highest Paid CEOs". Read this aloud in the unemployment office and be the life of the party.
The day the human race is finally able to "outsource" greed, I hope we shoe-horn it into a lead-lined titanium box and shoot it into the sun. I wouldn't trust such a mission to a computerized auto-pilot. No, we'd need some dedicated, stand-up, brave-to-the-bone people to man this mission.
I elect Rick Wagoner, and every other son of a bitch you'll read about on the pages linked to this posting. When it comes to a manned mission to the sun to rid our world of greed, these men have the "right stuff."
Other sons of bitches you should add to your Xmas card list.
Never forget: Corporate executives are necrophilic grave-robbing swine.
4 comments:
Interesting link Matt. Did you know the average CEO in the United States earns more than 400 times what the average worker makes? In Japan the difference is only 8 times more. Certainly their CEOs are getting paid less, but for fucks sake the inequality has gotten way out of hand. I would have though they'd have gotten bored of crushing people into homelessness and laughing by now, guess not.
When Fred Rogers (the man who played Mr. Rogers on TV) died a few years ago, NPR aired an interview they did with him. I forget the context of this quote, but I remember him saying that among the many things people want in life, one of the most fundamental is to be able to look at one another person and see a human being in there.
I look at these CEOs and corporate executives, and I don't see human beings in them. I see an ugliness and a pettiness and a fetid moat of greed around them that diminishes all humanity.
The worst part is that we let them be this way, and even encourage it by buying all the stupid shit they tell us is really cool and believing them when our TV tells us women won't like us if we don't have a plasma tv(etc...)
We can bring them down, just support Buy Nothing Day a lot more than once a year.
Almost every day for me, these days, is Buy Nothing Day. I sometimes feel like I'm going to be charged a fee just for looking out my goddamned windows.
I'm sure the next evolutionary step will be babies being born with money belts.
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