While thousands of Americans lost their jobs this past year and millions more took pay cuts, some in the form of forced unpaid days off, Glen Tellock got a 141% pay raise.
Total compensation gifted to Tellock, the 40-something president, CEO and chairman of the crane and food services equipment manufacturer/supplier Manitowoc Company, is now a cool $4.9 million, according to a little item on the March 26, 2011, Milwaukee (WI) Journal Sentinel's business page.
http://www.jsonline.com/business/118652089.html
A similar news tidbit surfaced just one day earlier about another flush corporate exec, the CEO of M&I bank in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin, you know, that "broke" state whose new (R) governor and (R)-dominated legislature are fixing with a "budget repair" still-bill or law (depending on which constitutional lawyers suit you) that eviscerates (i.e. the blood-and-guts part of dressing a deer) just about every service that benefits Wisconsin residents, i.e. babies, children, students, poverty-level folks, library users, the not-so-well-off oldsters, oh the list is long, but it includes nary an "I-got-mine-screw-you" grubber, like the paltry few who are benefiting from the $143 million no-strings attached business tax breaks said (R) governor and (R)-dominated legislature gifted to them just a couple of weeks before popping the cork on their "budget-repair" bill.
The $18 million lavished on M&I CEO Mark Furlong was just one of the "golden parachutes" totaling $70 million that have been slopped on M&I execs. Golden parachutes because M&I got sold, which pulled the ripcord on those 'chutes.
In a hand-washing re-enactment that would have done Pontius Pilate proud, M&I buyer Canadian-based Bank of Montreal eschewed any responsibility.
“It’s not our affair,” BOM President and CEO Bill Downe is quoted as saying.
http://www.milwaukeenewsbuzz.com/?p=532394
How so? The reason is that 24k parachutes are part of the contract when execs are hired. What they'll get if and (much more likely) when they leave is determined before they ever set foot in their corner office or executive suite. Lucrative serverences are among the carrots along with obscenely high salaries, stock options and other "incentives" that are dangled in front of prospective execs in order to attract the "best and brightest."
The "best and brightest." I'm sure you've heard that expression before.
It's that red herring that gets dragged out whenever anyone dares criticize or question gaggingly high CEO compensation, particularly when most other Americans (you know, those who are not among the richest 1% among us) are "sharing the pain."
So, um, Mr. Tellock is among the "best and brightest," an absolute wunderkind who at the tender age of 47 or thereabouts is Chairman, President and CEO of a multibillion-dollar, multinational corporation, so much so that he deserves a 141% raise in an economy struggling to recover from the worse recession in 75 years in which 9% of its workforce -- or wannabe workforce -- nationally is unemployed.
You think so?
Buried down in the part of the Journal Sentinel news item that few readers would have gotten to is this: "In 2010, Manitowoc Co. narrowed its loss to $74.4 million, or 55 cents a share, from $704 million, or $5.41, in 2009."
'Scuse me, but wouldn't that be a losing performance?. And wouldn't a losing performance be more likely to result getting fired than rewarded with a nearly 50% raise?
But 24k parachutes guarantee easy street for life, no matter how incompetent the exec or how badly he takes down a company. Take former Chrysler Chairman and CEO and before that, before he wrecked it, Home Depot Chairman and CEO Bob Nardelli for instance. When Home Depot's board realized how close Nardelli was to killing that company and showed him the door, he waltzed away with $210,000 million -- that's right, nearly a quarter of a BILLION smackeroos -- thanks to the severance-pay provision in his pre-nup contract.
How he got a job doing anything getting fired from Home Deport that is a true mystery to me, much less be taken on as fearless leader of another corporation. But Chrylser did just that. Guess that helps explain the near demise of that company.
CNBC has named Nardelli one of the "Worst American CEOs of All Time" but he's still filthy rich -- unless he has managed screw up his personal business as abysmally as he did the corporations he headed.
So, could it be that the mega bucks that are thrown at corporate execs to ensure that companies get the "best and brightest" is just a crock? Might that be just a ruse so us regular folks don't catch on to the good ol' clubbers' incestuous game of sitting on each others' boards of directors and voting each other increasingly astronomical compensation packages?
Do you suppose it's possible that if you were to take a close look at all of those emperors, you would see that except for their trappings there really isn't anything a bit special about them?
Rather than the best and brightest, they are really just some of the privileged in this land of great and increasing inequality. You know, the ones with filthy rich daddies, those born or invited into the club or who were dealt hands with the "right" cards and whose real talents lay with just being able to swim with sharks and are slippery enough to keep from being eaten alive.
Does that mean that the whole idea of the "best and brightest" is a crock? I don't think so. I think this country is filled with the best and brightest. But rather than living and operating in ivory towers, they are living and walking amongst us. A lot of them are teaching our kids in public school classrooms.
Rather than being lured with big pay and other incentives, though, they are being denigrated, disrespected and rewarded with shrinking compensation because, we are told, everyone has to "share the pain."
Now saying that everyone must share the pain
is a crock unless and until "everyone" includes the highly compensated corner-office, executive-suite club.
I am truly conservative about who should be called the "best and the brightest" and paying people what they are
really worth. And I'm even more conservative about demonizing those who really are the best and brightest, but instead in these topsy-turvey, inside-out times are treated like they're just selfish, greedy, lazy louts.
Here's a short video of one of them.
https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150099422543827&comments
