CEO Salaries vs Value and Competence

A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a bizarre discussion about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2023 salary “cut” (from $83 million in stock awards, $12 million in incentives and $3 million in salary to $49 million in total compensation for 2023). I argued that it would be impossible for one person to be worth anything near Cook’s 2023 income, let alone the insane compensation he received in 2022. A couple of “CEOs” (“Chief Extortion Officers”) argued that Cook should be compensated based on Apple’s performance (Since “Cook took over as CEO in 2011, Apple stock has returned 1,212% versus 290% for the S&P 500”). One self-described CEO wrote, “When you look at how much his salary is compared to the worth of the company, he's being paid a small % of the worth of the company he's leading and his guidance and decisions are what drives the company and shares.”  Hilarious.  Anyone stupid enough to believe a CEO has ANYTHING at all to do with a company's performance deserves to be beaten to death with a handful of wadded-up preferred stock.  

Cook has been compensated with well over a billion dollars since 2011. I would argue that, mostly, the company’s performance represents how repressed the engineers and designers had been under Jobs’ deranged “leadership” and general megalomania. As for stock value, Apple stock is valued at 10X it’s 2011 price which is impressive but not anything close to exceptional for tech companies during that period. I’ve known and “worked with” (in quotes, because none of the CEOs I know ever did a moment of productive work) a solid dozen CEOs from $20-50M/year to $500,000,000/year corporations and I have yet to see any of them do anything that would positively effect the company’s bottom line.

I am entertained by the idea a CEO’s compensation should be based on the company’s performance or value. It’s pretty obvious that the flotsam and jetsam that bobs to the top in the sewers of corporate politics never make that argument when their companies’ stock tanks. This is just more of the Harvard MBA “pull credit up and push blame down” tactic. If there were a financial connection between CEO performance and income, there would be a bunch of ex-CEOs littering the nation’s homeless camps.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lines in a Silicon Valley Startup tells a different kind of story about the kind of halfwit who floats to the top of corporate toilet bowls. Assuming you don’t believe that Elizabeth Holmes exerted some kind of magical witchcraft on the susceptible minds of executives from Safeway, Walgreens, the US Army’s General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, Carlos Slim Helú, Larry Ellison and several dozen tech-venture capitalists, a passel of idle rich wannabes, and way too many technical employees who should have known better, it’s pretty obvious that most rich people got that way through luck. Holmes only “qualification” as a biotech entrepreneur was her physical attractiveness and some pretty shaky presentation skills.

50 years ago, I was a young, gullible electronics tech who fell for the promises of an employer who eventually ripped me off for several tens of thousands of dollars. For a couple of years I worked closely with this character, following him to trade shows, county and state fairs, and on-site watching him con all sorts of customers (all rich farmers and ranchers) into equipment they didn’t need and would never figure out how to use. Often, at the fairs, my boss would wander around the other vendor booths and he’d buy the dumbest shit. In the end, I realized that (like most salespeople) he believed his own bullshit and when he heard the same lines from someone else he’d fall for it every time. His main “skill” was being in the right place at the right time with a big pile of cash his father had handed him in hopes that he’d find his idle way in the world.

As I read Bad Blood, I saw my small town boss over and over again. Except now he was wearing handmade Italian suits, driving overpriced Eurotrash cars, and taking meetings where he’d hear presentations from other rich people who didn’t know what they were talking about.  But that wasn’t a problem for him because he never knew what he was talking about, either. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed out of the hands of these rich farmboys (and girls) into the hands of a couple of con artists pretending to be sophisticated biotech engineers. Worse, they weren’t even doing a good job of pretending to be engineers or biologists.

George Santos is another example of how easily the so-called “sophisticated” crowd can be fooled. It wasn’t just the usual bimbo Republicans who fell for that bumbling con artist. The so-called, self-styled sophisticates of New York’s Long Island were easily duped by a dude who couldn’t sell watches in a Midwestern shopping mall. So if you are intelligent enough to realize that you were conned by Ronnie Reagan, G.W. Bush & Co, or Maralardo, don’t feel bad. You’re in the “good” company of the nation’s oldest, richest, and most educated “talent.”

An un-surprising postscript about the Theranos scam is that neither Holmes or her chubby Indian co-conspirator, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, have spent a day in jail, as yet. Supposedly, Holmes will surrender to prison authorities sometime in April for an 11 year sentence. In the meantime, she’s puking out her 2nd baby and living the high life at her $135 million Silicon Valley estate. She supposedly married William "Billy" Evans, an idle rich heir to the Evans Hotel Group, and they’ve spawned two pups. She used her 2nd spawning to put off her trip to prison after she and Evans failed to pull off a one-way trip to Mexico before sentencing.

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

Conservative Consistency

For most of my life I’ve been baffled and annoyed by what I believed was a conservative distain for consistency. Republican responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have cleared up a lifetime of confusion. The Vietnam War was the first place I witnessed, up close, the odd inconsistency my parents’ demonstrated with their professed “pro-life” positions and completely uncritical view of our government’s invasion of a 3rd world country that posed no threat to the United States. Since the 60’s, I’ve watched conservatives form up behind US invasions of Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. We’ve mindlessly and pointlessly bombed cities and civilian populations all over the world, with and mostly without, the support of a few other nations. There was a lot of talk both in the US and the rest of the world that G.W. Bush and his cronies might be prosecuted for war crimes under the conventions established in Geneva and Hague Conventions and such US law as the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws. But Republican and conservative voters and talking heads ignored all of that criminal behavior under the guise of “patriotism.”

Today, most of the country appears to be somewhat upset that Putin has decided to overturn a neighbor’s democratically elected government under the pretense of defending a minority Russian population in that country. The argument ought to be familiar. Eisenhower justified dipping into the Vietnam conflict after extracting the country from another unpopular war in Korea by claiming “the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following… now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people. The possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.” “Free” meaning corporate (US corporations, at the time) control of resources, people, and property. As a justification based on the US retreat in Korea, Kennedy said, “Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” Johnson said, ““I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” The military mental-midget, General Curtis LeMay, was one of the first to threaten to “bomb them back to the stone ages” and almost no one even winced at that viciousness. And Nixon followed that with the words of an international war criminal, "I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point." —National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger All of that to justify spending as much as the nation has invested in infrastructure in the last forty years.

When the US decided to mindlessly dive into the Vietnam War, based on a phony excuse provided by the CIA and the , there were warnings that this was a classic over-reaching-empire miscalculation, “I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”—Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR) Even a Republican voiced as rational a policy as was possible when he advised Johnson to “Declare the United States the winner and begin de-escalation.”—Senator George Aiken (R-VT) And South Dakota’s Senator, George McGovern stated the obvious, “We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it. I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.”

Conservatives were, predictably, all-in on the Vietnam War and regularly labelled as “traitors and cowards” antiwar protestors, war opposition candidates, draft evaders (including those who went to prison for their beliefs), and anyone who didn’t fall in line behind the military effort and propaganda. Likewise, during the propaganda build-up for invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest, conservatives were immediately all-in on war. [That is, likely, a big part, or all, of their opposition to what they call “revisionist history,” which is nothing more than an honest look back at the country’s history without the propaganda filters.]

The same characters have followed the “love it or leave it” script for every US foreign invasion from Korea to wherever-the-hell our military, CIA, and NSA are screwing around today. If there is a war or an opportunity to squash democracy anywhere on the planet including the US, they want to be in on it and if there is money to be made doing that, all the better. And there is always money to be made creating misery and destruction.

Today, all of this kind of talk is rampant in Russia’s media both in Russia and Russia’s spokes-characters in the US. “I’ll stand on the side of Russia right now,” Joe Oltmann. Fox News, Tucker Carlson is a regular contributor to the state-owned Russian media as are more than a few other Fox and NewsMax squawking heads. The Q-Nuts and, of course, Putin’s pet, Donny Trump (I and II), and more than a Republican politicians regular Russian cheerleaders. As usual, follow the money. And that propaganda has been at least as effective in Russia as it has been in the US. "58% of Russian people approve of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while 23% oppose it, according to a poll taken by independent survey research organizations last week. That result is flipped for young people aged 18–24. In that group, 39% oppose the operation, and 29% are for it." I’m not sure “flipped” is the right word, with 29% of the younger group all in on the Russian invasion, but those numbers are pretty typical of the propaganda effect in the US’s history, too. Older people are more gullible and since they are unlikely to be asked to make any real sacrifices in war they are more likely to buck the party line.

  

Awful, Better, Best, and Perfect

An acquaintance recently sent me an ad for a President Obama memorial Xmas ornament. I was tempted. He was sarcastic, calling Obama “Uncle Thomas” and “Onkle Tom” followed by a list of Obama’s real and perceived imperfections. He’s an old, middle class, white guy who probably doesn’t know any actual black Americans but he’s convinced that Obama was a tool of the power elites and “that’s how I perceived him, as did and do many in the black community. I knew well before he was elected that he had to be a tool of those who truly govern the country.” I don’t know about the “many in the black community,” but about 10% of that so-called community voted for Trump; mostly proving you can fool some of the people all of the time. I’m tempted to buy one of those  ornaments just to piss off the nutjobs on the far left and right. Anything that irritates those two herds of nutjobs and morons is worth owning and a bargain at $22.

I only wish the world was that clear and simple? My experience tells me that nothing is as simple as it looks from thousands of miles away or even across the street.

I admit that I was and am impressed with Barak Obama’s performances as President of the United States. That is saying something, because I’m mostly unimpressed-to-disgusted by the presidents I’ve observed in my lifetime. Starting with Truman, who was president when I was born and left office when I was five years old, through Bush II there haven’t been many bright moments in American executive branch politics.

While he didn’t stay in office long enough to accomplish as much as he might have, Jimmy Carter was probably the 2nd best president in my lifetime. He was too much of a micro-manager, a typical fault of self-made business men, he had a vision for the United States that would have positioned the country far more soundly than the mess made by his successor, Reagan. We’d have moved into the metric system, evolved away from oil and carbon-pollution energy sources, and our education system wouldn’t fallen to 3rd world status. But Carter lost to a candidate every bit as goofy and unqualified as Trump before anything resembling Fox News existed; when he had the Fairness Doctrine to balance the media foolishness. Today, Carter wouldn’t have a chance even as a Democrat. He’d be too easy a target. All I really know about Kennedy comes from history books. I was 15 when he was murdered, but there was no politics in my life at the time. I do know that many of the adults I knew in Kansas were not unhappy he was killed. So much for the good old days when we were “one country, united.”

Otherwise, the presidents who have mismanaged the country in my lifetime have all been awful or less-awful.

Out of Patience

[Interestingly, after 25 years of telling essentially the same story, some wingnut snowflake "flagged" this rant as violating some Blogger nebulous "community standard."  I'm supposed to magically know what offended the fascist snowflake, but I am clueless. I this this might be the motivation I need to move my last blog from Google to Wordpress.]

When I was a kid, in the 50’s, Eisenhower was President and Nixon was Vice-President (heavy on the “vice”). For a brief moment, John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, when I was twelve and assassinated when I was fifteen. A marginal Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, followed that until he was chased from office (by actual Democrats) over his expansion of the Vietnam War. Nixon and his band of merry assholes and war criminals followed. After six and a half years and even more expansion of the war, Republicans stuck the country with Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller after Nixon and his VP, Spiro Agnew, were chased from office for corruption and various crimes against the nation. Ford was the 1974 version of Paul Ryan, with about the same lack of patriotism, with the same collection of corrupt corporate and 1% owners, and the same disdain for justice and honor that has been typical of Republicans for my whole lifetime.

For an incredibly brief 4 years, a competent businessman, experienced engineer, a reasonable politician, and decent person, Jimmy Carter, was president. Carter made the politically fatal mistake of attempting to explain the situation Americans had placed themselves in with those years of  expansionist war, Republican, and near-Republican misnamangement (Remember the “malaise speech?”). Reminiscent of the more recent words of Bernie Sanders, Carter told us, "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." He called American lack of faith in the country’s future, “a crisis of confidence.” The truth may set you free, but in Carter’s case it cost him the 1980 election to a Republican con man and a collection of right wing crooks and traitors who haven’t yet left the stage. Carter was right, though, the post-Reagan USA became one “defined by . . . what one owns.”

So, with our heads in the sand or up our asses we elected Ronald Reagan, followed by George Bush Sr., and the country drove itself off a cliff of international debt and some kind of weird celebration of anti-intellectualism and greed that resulted in a habitual deficit spending and a vicious love of imperialism and militarism. Twelve years of regressive, corrupt, and incompetent Hollywood executive and mediocracy—inspired congressional idiocy followed. Somehow, brainless and lazy Americans decided to convey political sainthood on Reagan instead of admitting that they’d been conned and the country had been robbed by the B-movie actor and failed California politician.

Bill Clinton could have been a Democrat, but he chose to be an “Eisenhower Republican” and he only moderated the government’s incompetence during his eight years in office. Even Republicans don’t like Republicans pretending to be Democrats and the last four years of Clinton’s administration was taken up with “did he or didn’t he” bullshit about Clinton’s blowjobs. Republicans tried to conjure up real impeachable crimes, but being Republicans their success was limited by their lack of competence and their own massive corruption issues. Clinton might have been an easy target if Republicans still had an intellectual base, but by 1992 every intelligent Republican had left the building and their space was filled by the uneducated, racist, tools of the Koch brothers we suffer today.

Then eight years of G.W. Bush and a bunch of Reagan and Nixon cronies finally led us to the Great Recession. Obviously, the Party of Borrow and Spend borrowed and spent to the tune of increasing the deficit every year while the 1%, the conservative media talking heads, and the Marching Morons pretended that was a rational alternative to Democratic “tax and spend” policies that at least attempt to pay for their policies. 2008 through 2010 were budget years where the federal government attempted to spend its way out of what looked like the Second Great Depression. I guess it sort of worked, but prosecuting the financial criminals, recovering their booty to repay the trillions they cost the country and world, and taxing the 1% would have worked far better. Barak Obama was more of a Democrat than the Clintons, but not enough more to convince the Marching Morons that democracy is better than idiocy or mediocrity.

Trump, of course, will be the worst of Reagan and the Bush’s combined. He had no skill as a “businessman” and his mental instability has led to a collection of right wing idiots in the executive branch who are guaranteed to make life miserable for working people. The best we can hope for now is that Republicans and the inbred 1% will be stupid enough to crash the country and the resulting chaos will break up the oversized and overarmed US military and not cause the insane religious right, who now dominate US politics, to fire off their own perverted version of Armageddon. Today, the world’s most pressing problem is surviving the end of the empire known as the United States of America.

So, I went through the Vietnam War years, watching my friends die, be mentally or physically disabled, and being alienated from my family and community because I wouldn’t “get onboard” with an immoral war. Again, I was on the opposite side of the majority during Reagan and Bush I’s reign of world terror and imperialism and again with Bush II. After spending most of my 69 years suffering with the incompetence of Republicans and the stupidity of Republican voters, I’m tired of it. I have no more energy or motivation to put up with 4 or 8 years of a pack of Trump morons than I have with chemotherapy and a long “fight” with cancer. In fact, the moral character of my country feels disgustingly like a cancer infection/infestation.

#130 Looking for King George (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I've heard at least a zillion explanations for why executives are worth the humongous salaries they're paid for doing the mediocre work they usually avoid.  Not a one of those justifications makes a lick of sense. 

The dumbest is the comparison between professional athletes and executive salaries.  The story goes that if an uneducated street kid who happens to be able to run fast, throw a ball hard, jump high, and/or coordinate his hand and eye at a superhuman level is worth X-million-dollars a year, it should be obvious that the CEO of a Misfortune 500 Company deserves even more money for whatever the hell he does.  Sort of an if X=Y, then Z=$6,000,000 kind of logic. 

First, we have some standard of comparison for the athlete, even if it's totally irrational because some dumbass CEO is the fool who decides what the athlete is "worth."  At least the athlete has to be able to do his job well enough to produce points or prevent them from being produced before some silly executive will assign a value to that job.  Second, it's indirectly possible to pretend that there is a marginally direct link between an athlete's performance and the dollars spectators will spend to witness that performance.

No such logic exists for executive salaries.  An exec can completely suck at his job, providing no leadership, no technical skills, no Big Picture insight, and no useful reason for his or her existence and that exec can still drain big bucks from the corporate till.  Any half-competent corporate researcher can find examples of thousands of execs who have mismanaged their company into oblivion and walked away with a magnificent golden parachute.  Sometimes those parachutes can be directly attributed to the company's death and that doesn't seem to phase anyone. 

No, I think the reason American companies pay such ridiculous salaries for non-performing execs is because we're looking for King George. A paltry 1% of the original citizens of the United States participated in the American Revolution.  The overwhelming majority were perfectly happy with taxation without representation and a class system that stifled England into 3rd world status in the next 200 years.  A disgusting number of the elite who participated in the creation of the Constitution wanted a government similar to the one the country had just defeated, many of them urged George Washington to become King George Washington.  Today, most Americans are doing everything they can to return to the social structure and economic system that killed crushed the life out of Jolly Ole' England. 

We're happily and stupidly electing an inherited political system, setting ourselves up for years of inbred Bush family-screw-ups.  We've created a class system of upper crust, Ivy League morons who float to the top of almost every corporate institution, in spite of inability and lack of imagination and infected by the age-old ruling-class-total-absence-of-ethical-standards. 

Humans are an incredibly simple-minded animal, at the core.  We're desperately hoping that there is more to life than . . . life.  We want "meaning" to be applied to this painful and degrading existence, but we don't want to work for that significance.  We want someone to impart it upon us.  Since gods are notoriously absent during times of trial and turbulence, we hope that the gods will speak to "special people": the inherited ruling class.  As stupid as that theory is, it's as old as human society.  If you can find a single example of a king being anything but a drain on his culture or a queen being anything but a useless figurehead sucking the lifeblood away from the folks who do actual work, I'll be astounded.  But I won't be convinced that your one example establishes anything but an incredible example of dumb luck in a single moment in time. 

The best companies are more democratic than autocratic.  The most successful companies in modern history have a structure that is dramatically more flat that pyramidal, decision and salary-wise.  Not that anyone cares.  We're more interested in being comfortable than in being productive.  Apparently, most of us are more comfortable when we're being ruled by a royal class whose inheritance is decreed by non-existent gods.  P.T. Barnum must have been thinking of this trait when he said "there is a sucker born every minute."  The only thing wrong with this sentiment, in 2005, is that suckers are born at a much faster rate. 

February 2005