Today's Reactions
- Don't you wonder how any working person in America is getting any work done? There are so many polls going on to show how low W's "approval rating" has sunk (down to 32% and dropping) that one imagines everyone spending all their time on the phone answering pollster's questions. (Love this title: "God's Foreign Policy Approved by 32 Percent")
- Pam Spaulding called Elizabeth Dole "Sugar Lips Dole" and I had a good laugh.
- I'm very much enjoying the pieces written by Dr. Peter Rost at The Huffington Post; today I read "Winners and Losers in the Medicare Drug Lottery".
- For a day or two, there's been interesting talk of state legislatures taking the initiative, according to "obscure" parliamentary rules written by Jefferson, with resolutions of impeachment (in Vermont and Illinois, at least).
- In a few years' time: with all the authors who will undoubtedly be busy writing exposés about the currrent administration's mendacity, will anyone be available to write the book about the manufactured "gasoline crisis"?
- Speaking of the oil industry, I'm wondering whether the reaction to Lee Raymond's "compensation" while at Exxon-Mobile, not to mention his retirement package, will lead to any effective outrage over the disparity between CEO "compensation" and that of their average worker.
- Misty related a very amusing, Seuss-like poem about sex toys, in honor of South Carolina. The concept that using a sex toy is "adultery" is pretty odd, but who can be surprised?
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on Wednesday, 26 April 2006 at 00.10
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Effective outrage over the disparity in compensation is too diffuse to do any good. It's like grousing about the weather.
Notwithstanding Exxon-Mobile's obscene profits and dandy stock price, I defy anyone to make an objective case Raymond actually did work for the corporation commensurate with all those hundreds of millions of dollars he's got and will get.
One thing to keep in mind is that the guy was dealing in a standard commodity at one of the world's leading oil companies going in. He didn't have to invent or reinvent any wheels.
Ever-increasing demand for the product was and is automatic. Furthermore, Exxon is in about as little danger from competition as a major corporation can be.
Lastly, are we to believe there weren't thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of equally capable executives who would've jumped at the chance to run Exxon, even at, say, one-third Raymond's take?
I can't come up with any logical, believable evidence the marketplace for executives bid up Raymond's rewards to those levels.
Same goes for ex-GE poobah, Jack Welch.
Is there some kind of corruption at work? Are trustees or maybe their kin getting payoffs of some kind? It wouldn't surprise me.
Even if it's just a case of free and easy stupidity on the part of Exxon's trustees, there ought to be a limit.
I submit that when you have someone with $100 million or more in assets and making tens of millions a year, tax away everything over, say, $5 million a year. I don't think the few people making that kind of money can appreciate the difference of making $5 million plus an extra dollar. I don't think they feel any pain at simply not getting money above such a large sum, either.