cross-posted from Progressive Junction
When the monkey rings the bell, it gets a pellet. It doesn't care how it got the pellet, it just enjoys the pellet.
Imagine you have a mental illness. Your illness convinces you that you are a John Galt or a Howard Roark, a Randian hero whose morality is so clear, whose proficiency is so divine that no amount of compensation could possibly be worthy of your effort. You have to be pleaded with, begged, and showered with gifts for merely doing your job. And despite the results of your work, whether you brought fame and success or shame and extinction to your company, you are entitled to riches for merely performing, and not necessarily for producing.
This disease exists, and it compels its bearer to deny their own or sometimes others' replaceablity. It compels them to believe, like Pavlovian monkeys, that the mere act of ringing the bell earns them the pellet, and we have been feeding them for decades.
It's time to shock the monkey.
The most recent (shock) treatment proposed by Senator McCaskill on Friday, and again by President Obama on Tuesday is to limit executive pay to executives whose companies are so desperate that they need government bailouts to survive. The virtues of this policy are obvious, and as much as it sickens me to see my tax dollars used to bailout corporations, I begrudgingly concede that it may need to be necessary for the future health of my country. However, this policy does not address the underlying issue: the growing gap between the ultra-rich and everybody else.
This trend is harrowing, and at some point it needs to be addressed. While every administration since Reagan has allowed for or sanctioned this trend, attempts at addressing it have recently come to pass in the form of the Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act. Though it never became law, it was introduced in 2006 and 2007, and suggested to Secretary Paulson in 2008 by one of my heroes, Barney Frank. He discussed the outcome of those attempts with Keith Olbermann on Monday:
BARNEY FRANK: In 2006, when the Democrats were still in the minority, I sponsored a bill which we called "say on pay" which said that you could not have these upper-end salaries for these top people with all these lavish perquisites, bonuses, golden parachutes, et cetera, unless you had the shareholders‘ vote on it. And, Keith, that was treated by my Republican colleagues as if it was the Russian revolution arriving on our shores. They wouldn‘t let the bill come up for a vote.
In 2007, we voted on that in the House. And one of the problems, I think, that led to the current situation is that I had a whole lot of people, editorial writers, "Wall Street Journal" crowd, the Republicans saying, "How dare you interfere with these institutions. You are going to jeopardize American capitalism. We are the best financial system in the world because we pay this money."
And I think that just gave the people in charge a sense of their own invulnerability because the Senate, in fear of a filibuster, killed it. And then, when we did the bill last September, several of us told Secretary Paulson that he had to put restrictions on compensation. He explicitly refused and said, "Well, if we do that, they won‘t participate."
The notion that the country's economic stability would be held hostage by executives who refuse to participate in a program that saves their company (and their salary) at tax payer's expense enrages me. Participation should not be optional, and with the proper legislation and enforcement, it won't be. Unfortunately, those monkeys do not realize that sometimes when you ring the bell, you break the fucking bell. YOU GET NO PELLET.
But those days are coming to a close. All the monkeys' crying and whining and screaming of "socialism" will not stop a progressive government from attempting to treat and/or cure the afflicted. TAKE YOUR MEDICINE BITCH.
Now we need to focus on creating new laws and setting new precedents, even for companies who are not receiving tax payer welfare. I like the concept of shareholders voting on executive compensation and I think we can get it done.
The disparity between executive pay and average worker pay is enormous. Even in 1960 it was 42:1, in contrast to today's Europe which is 25:1. Today in America, the average CEO makes over 400 times the average American. While shareholder votes may corral executive pay, they do nothing to maintain fair compensation for those at the bottom.
By making executives directly responsible to shareholders, we can put some limit on the excesses of the super rich self aggrandizement system.
Neither extreme of the compensation debate is acceptable. We cannot have a society that devalues human work to such an extent that the disparity between the top and bottom is a multiple of 400, nor can we have one where there is no disparity. An economic system that ties the highest and lowest classes of our society together ensures the advancement of both. Or else, we can keep this class war going on for a few more centuries.
I prefer to shock the monkey.