Reply #13: Real estate argument seriously sucks. [View All]

RE people work on a standard commission in a HIGHLY competitive market which is being undercut by discount commission sellers.

CEOs. Nice argument. Explain how it works to pay $20 million to a CEO who has crashed the stock and had to fire thousands of employees? How many could have been retained if the idiot was paid less?

A celebrity fool once said "You can never be too thin or too rich." Well, famine in Ethiopia shows you can be too thin. AIDS wasting proves you can be too thin. Howard Hughes, who died with uncut fingernails in filth, was an example of being too rich. If his income had been normal, someone who cared would have gotten him help. Dick Cheney and his friends are too rich. They only associate with each other and feed on each other's fantasies of world domination. Nobody contradicts them because they are so rich they can buy anything, even someone to kill you for annoying them. And now look what they've done. Thousands dead, millions to come? To dominate Middle East oil, Cheney and Bushco will have to drench the desert in blood.

They are too rich. What is there left to buy but elections and souls?

The oddest thing is their passion for security. All the money on earth, and yet still not safe? Who will they kill for their guilty safety? Take their wealth. It has only made them cruel and paranoid.

A CEO paid 500 to 3000 times what salaried employees are paid may be pardoned for thinking himself superior, of more value. That is crap.
It doesn't take special skills to falsify a healthy bottom line by eliminating salaries and benefits to thousands. Or to claim profit when the margin is made by polluting water, earth, and air. To pay $20,000,000 to a CEO and still have a profitable organization, something has to go: American employees, environmental safety protections---all savings from the relaxed environmental and work rules have or will end up in CEO pockets.

The argument that executives can go elsewhere and be paid better may be vaguely but not really true in a bubble market, but NOW? An unemployed exec can go where, exactly? There is no current justification for the outrageous salaries except corruption and cronyism. The corruption created and then bankrupted the bubble. if we continue to believe the idiocy of free market philosophy we are doomed. A true free market does correct itself. But only by death. If too many people die, starving or poisoned or maimed, the market will adjust. To Bushco, that is completely acceptable. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. Actually, the jungle doesn't operate that way. Jungle species have many cooperative behaviors to save their weakest members. This is the behavior of insects. Are we really nothing better than cockroaches?

But our CEO/Cheney class believes itself to be a true nobility. Kings in a society too foolish to recognize real royalty. But kings had a concept of responsibility. Kings whose kingdoms were struck with plague were killed to pacify the angry gods. There was no golden parachute. CEOs who are rewarded for trashing a company have no incentive to feel responsibility to anyone but themselves.

But your question was about being awarded for achievement. It is simply brainwashing to believe ONLY THIS CEO could bring this company around. And it is insanity to reward ONLY the CEO. A smart company, and there are a number, rewards all the employees up and down the line. First the employees, then the shareholders, THEN something to the CEO. But not so much he thinks he's worth more than god. Or his arrogance will reach out and destroy all. As corporation after corporation is discovering. Enron, anyone?