Tightening belts at $500,000

October 22nd, 2009 at 06:11pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Gee, I hope the seven CEOs can live on $500,000 a year, plus up to $25,000 in perks. Most people I know won’t see that kind of dough in 10 years, much less each year.

But that’s as far as the feds are willing to go with annual compensation for the  executives at the seven companies that got the biggest bite of the federal golden parachute. It’s a complicated deal announced formally today, and, yep there are a ton of loopholes, but, still….

These are the companies whose execs-with-no-souls snatched up every nickel they could steal from the rest of us, created a thousand and one crooked, crazy schemes and then played economic roulette until we all went off the cliff last fall.

I am totally and revengefully delighted at their consternation. Imagine having to cut back on things like jets and drivers, chefs and multi-million dollar vacation homes.  Crikey, they might have to recycle the plastic sandwich bags from lunch. I hope they get a taste of what unemployed Americans have been swallowing for a year now.

Here comes the but…. But, I am not so sure this “cut their pay” plan is much more than window dressing, and it could be a disaster. There’s every reason to believe that many of these soon-to-be-”poor” execs will just decamp for another company that doesn’t have salary caps.  That kind of exodus could be devastating to a company. And, there’s still the “small” matter of what’s going to happen to millions upon millions of cash bonuses promised to these guys.

Just as I started feeling  sorry for the poor execs and started sounding like a pro-big business shill,  wondering aloud who in the world would take one of those jobs for a miserly $500,000 plus $25,000 in perks, an executive-type friend stopped me in my tracks.

Said he: Well, I’d take one of those jobs in a heartbeat. I mean, he said, I couldn’t screw it up any worse than those guys did.

Hummmmm. Maybe I’ll dust off the resume.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized