Executive Pay Not "Contrary to the Public Interest", Just "Ill Advised".

The long awaited report about executive pay has been published and the bankers are quite happy.  Wall Street can "exhale" now, the Wall Street Journal writes.  The executive pay revue was required as part of the stimulus package and was written by Kenneth Feinberg, known as the "Pay Czar".  Feinberg is moving on to a new job administrating the $20 billion fund that BP has set up to clean up the gulf.  If it's anything like the FEMA money for cleaning up after Katrina, there'll be some thieving going on. Contractors and all sorts of wasters rush in to feed at the public trough. I was in New Orleans after Katrina and it was reported that some clean up crews were picking up fridges and stuff in one part of town and dumping them in another and repeating the process.  Thirty years of garbage was dumped on the streets in New Orleans in four days.

The banks expressed "relief that the report wasn't tougher on them" the Wall Street Journal reports.  Feinberg declared that banks paid out what he calls, "ill advised" executive compensation "But I do not believe it is fair to declare that the payments were contrary to the public interest" he adds.  Consequently, as the billions paid to these folks must be in the public interest if as he finds that they weren't contrary to the public interest, Feinberg's report doesn't suggest the money be paid back.  These thieves are deathly afraid of any infringement on their right to plunder.  Feinberg's report suggests that banks give their "compensation committees" the right to change executive pay during a "crisis".  This would only be voluntary but the banks don't even like that. Returning compensation or changing compensation after contracts are signed  could present "legal issues" the banksters claim. 

The bosses have no problem ripping up Union contracts though.  Private companies like GM have used the courts to renege on pension obligations and municipalities are now doing the same.  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, AC Transit has imposed a concessionary contract on its drivers. The economy is in crisis so we have to tighten our belts.  We tighten our belts and they get billions in hand outs. As an earlier blog pointed out, the fine recently imposed on Goldman Sachs is a joke.

Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official who was forced to resign this week but has subsequently received an apology from the Obama Administration, spoke of what she has learned in life, Working with the white farmer whose farm she saved  she said that it "made me see . . . that it's really about those who have versus those who don't." and that "they could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic."

These are  powerful words and very threatening to the folks whose report Feinberg ensured would keep their ill gotten gains  There will be great pressure to co-opt Ms Sherrod and have her drop such inflammatory language.  More than any other industrialized country, there is nothing worse a US politician or public figure can do than engage in "class warfare".  You can't have class warfare in a country where there are no classes can you?   That means even talking about classes at all and certainly using terms like "them and us" (unless you're talking about race or men and women) or the rich versus the poor, is taboo. And, most importantly, racism has to be kept on the radar.  They can't be as openly racist as they want to, the civil rights movement put a stop to that as was explained in earlier blogs. But overcoming racial, gender and other obstacles to working class unity while at the same time talking of there being us and them and those that have and those that don't is a powerful and dangerous combination; we outnumber them, don't we.

Despite the set backs working people have faced over the past 50 years, that the bosses have had to publicly discuss executive pay and make public statements as Obama has attacking bankers, points to a powerful mood of anger that exists in US society and the potential for this anger to become widespread and part of a united movement.  The bosses see it.  It would be a mistake for us to miss it.