Will Congress Reform Wretched Executive Excess?

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:


Published on Sunday, February 4, 2007 by The Nation
Will Congress Reform Wretched Executive Excess?
by Morton Mintz

Excessive pay for top business executives--particularly for poor performers--has outraged millions of Americans and investors and now even Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who criticized the widening gap between rich and poor in his response to President Bush's State of the Union message.

Few people know, and Webb didn't say, that Congress has repeatedly stifled a bill to do something sensible about wretched executive excess: disallow business tax deductions for executive salaries in excess of twenty-five times the salary of the lowest-paid employee in the same organization.

The current furor was set off by Home Depot's disclosure on January 3 that it had fired chairman and CEO Robert Nardelli while easing his pain with a $210 million severance package built into his sign-on contract. It included $88 million in bonuses, retirement benefits and stocks.

In July Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell walked away with nearly $200 million. In 2005 ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond retired with an even more gargantuan bundle--$398 million.

"The average pay for chief executives rose to 369 times that of the average worker in 2005," Josh Fineman of Bloomberg News wrote on January 4. That was "up from 131 times in 1993 and 36 times in 1976, according to a study by Kevin Murphy, a finance professor at the University of Southern California." .....(more)

The complete article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0204-24.htm

[MikeNearMcChord]

1. I think there should be tax consequences for CEO pay

like maybe high penalties for companies that pay CEO's over 50 times the lowest wage. Also ban CEOs from picking the boards, require 50+1 vote goes to the non-management employees.