In California, the big scandal concerns a small city, City of Bell, paying its city officials around up to a half million dollars. This column notes that while we it is appropriate to express shock and outrage, what about CEO pay, which "has been galloping out of control for so long that it has achieved the status of a cliche."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20101003,0,7721537.column
Maybe it's unfair to pick on the longtime chairman and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, since at $31 million last year, he places only fourth on Forbes' latest list of America's highest-paid executives.
If one is looking for overpaid CEOs, as ranked by their compensation relative to shareholder return, General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt, Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg and many others might deserve to stand ahead of Irani in the queue for the orange jumpsuit. (Those rankings come from Forbes too.)
But to some degree they're all emblematic of the No. 1 scandal of American business — executive pay that bears scant relationship to what these people are worth.
The CEO pay curve has been galloping out of control for so long that it has achieved the status of a cliche. In 1965 the average U.S. CEO earned 24 times the pay of the average worker. Four decades later the ratio was 411 to 1..
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