There is much attention focused right now - understandably so - on the preposterously obscene volumes of riches that are thrown in the direction of those catastrophically incompetent executives of crumbling mega corporations. What amazes me more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that these pathologically unscrupulous rich pigs are being payed, is the surprise with which average folk react to these revelations of excessive executive pay. People react as though it is some kind of surprising contradiction or irony, that stands out starkly as out of place: that it is unexpected that these executives should get such high karat golden parachutes, even as the collapsing firms that they once ran suck hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money into them - as if they were the financial equivalent of black holes.
I would argue that, in actual fact, it is more of an unsurprising causal connection than a surprising contradiction. We hear defences of the insane executive pay that corporations lavish upon their top executives. Were it not for this flexiblity in paying top dollars, we are told, the top corporations would lose out in their competition in the marketplace for top CEO material. They would not be able to secure the best and the brightest, for the most important responsibility in a company, we are told.
Well, it sure seems like they've managed to enlist the best and the brightest. I would argue that "the best and the brightest" is really a euphemism for "the shrewdest and the sleaziest". As it turns out, corporations and their shareholders - with their insatiable greed - are willing to pay the highest price for those willing to stoop the lowest. Whatever it takes. Whoever's moral inhibitions are sufficiently muted as to be able to exploit the most vulnerable and leave the most damage in their wake for others to clean up, without so much as the slightest twitching of their shriveled conscience - those are the people that the biggest financial stakeholders want.
They specifically want the people who would be willing to turn a blind eye to accounting and business practices that are likely to result in a wholesale fleecing of taxpayers when their all-promise-and-no-deliver corporations fall flat on their faces. It is the ones who have carefully cauterized their compassion, who have developed the kind of detachment that would allow even the very Holocaust to be rationalized away as "in the shareholders' best interests". Yes, these are the people that corporations have sought and installed in the top positions.
Because corporations are alien entities within our society that take on a life of their own, and they act not in the interests of the society within which they operate, but in the interests of feeding their own growth and survival. They tolerate the humans that make up their corporate body, to the extent that those humans have utility to them, and then they toss them out to the cold when those humans become inconvenient. The corporation takes humans and poisons them. It first turns the humans against all the other creatures on Earth, and the humans are willing to go along with it, because they don't feel the pain of the habitat loss and the hardship that is imposed upon the other creatures of Earth. And then, the corporation turns the humans against other classes of humans, and the humans are willing to go along with it, because they are detached and don't feel the pain and the hardship of the humans that are turned into feedstock to build the corporation's riches.
And it is "the best and the brightest" that rise to top rank in these pyramids of exploitation. And when the pyramid fractures apart and crumbles to the ground, those perched at the top fall safely to Earth with their gilded parachutes, while those down below are crushed under the rubble of the shattered juggernaut.
Americans query CEO pay scales as crisis deepens