the kettle is black

It seems like everyone is chiming in on the various proposals surrounding the bailout and stimulus packages.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/05/fiorina.pay/index.html

Let me get this straight, Carly Fiorina, she who drove HP into the dirt and still walked away with $21 mil., dares to comment on the proposal limiting TARP CEO salaries to $500k. Who in the hell does she think she is???

"Our capitalist system works best when there is transparency and accountability." That goes without saying, but you and your Republibot friends like John McCain keep whining about how regulation hurts business. Without regulation, THERE IS NO TRANSPARENCY OR ACCOUNTABILITY!!! Do you honestly think that corporations can be expected to self-disclose executive wages voluntarily? Of course they can't. If that were the case, scumbags like Bernie Madoff wouldn't exist. And while we're on the subject, normally I'm staunchly anti-death penalty, but I would change my perspective if they could apply capital punishment to these white collared succubi. Besides that, given your and John McCain's past records, you have the economic know how of a shattered piggy bank.

"And it doesn't strengthen our economy when government decides how much each job is worth." Really? How about this? When you were at HP, you're annual base salary was $10mil./yr. If you were only getting paid $500,000/yr, that leaves $9.5 mil. At $40,000/yr, that $9.5 mil. could have saved over 200 jobs. That isn't a lot over the grand scheme of things, but when you consider how many executives there are in a company the size of HP, this type of action could have saved well over 1000 jobs.

Here's the bottom line - the free-market has created nothing but a cesspool of greed, overflowing with the muck created by lack of compassion for our fellow man. Granted, according to a report released today, the vast majority of CEOs in the companies propped up by TARP aid, don't make much more in base salaries than the $500k cap. However, their bonuses were in the several millions range. Answer me this Mrs. Fiorina, how does one get a bonus WHEN THEIR COMPANY IS GOING DOWN THE PROVERBIAL DRAIN?!?!?!?! Even the Trump thinks that salary caps are the right thing to do because as taxpayers supporting these companies, we have now become shareholders and have a stake in the company's success.

Further, I don't think that the salary caps should be limited to TARP companies. If Obama wanted to make real change, he'd apply this law to all executives. Let them make as much as they want (or the share holders are willing to give) in bonuses, but the bonuses can only be paid out under certain guidelines. The most obvious guideline would have to be that no bonuses get paid out unless the company is profitable. When I was a branch manager at Kinko's, I certainly didn't get bonuses unless my branch was profitable so why should this be any different?

There is a ridiculous disparity in this country between the haves and the have nots. If this isn't rectified (and soon), we're going to have a revolution on our hands (remember the Bolsheviks?). Unfortunately, whenever anyone talks like this, they are automatically labeled as a socialist or a communist. They falsely say that socialism encourages free-loading by those who don't WANT to work (as if these millionaire CEOs actually do any REAL work). All I'm saying is that this country needs to overgo a massive overhaul in many arenas if we expect to get out of this quicksand and it starts with the realization that trickle down economics was a failure on the grandest of scales.

Pleasant Dreams.