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July 6, 2011
The Fall of The Empire: Cui Bono?
By Arlene Goldbard
Rome fell, the history teacher told us, because those in power pursued personal wealth and privilege at the expense of collective well-being.
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Last Sunday I read a piece on executive pay in the business section of the New York Times. Ever since, I have been wondering how to write about it.
Here are some of the images I did not want to include: bad apples spoiling a whole barrel; pirates (and other types of marauding bandits); weeds spoiling the garden. Why? Because while nothing could be more apt to symbolize the downside of corporate domination of our economy and polity than than the obscene excesses of executive pay practices, they are not aberrations, but the inevitable products of a complex system. To redeploy a phrase beloved of judges on TV crime shows (where it refers to something quite different, evidence obtained illegally), they are "the fruit of the poisonous tree."
Most of the images still circling my mind are from the Ancient History 101 version of the fall of Rome: Rome fell, the history teacher told us, because those in power pursued personal wealth and privilege at the expense of collective well-being. Such explanations were illustrated with lurid depictions of toga-clad degenerates cramming whole roast birds and huge bunches of grapes into their gaping mouths.
Nowadays they are garbed in gray flannel and power ties, but the facts are equally shocking.
While ordinary working people (and the unemployed) were being exhorted to "share the pain" by accepting pay cuts, job losses, and limits on unemployment benefits, executives' slice of the roast goose got bigger:
Let's begin with the view from 30,000 feet. Total executive pay increased by 13.9 percent in 2010 among the 483 companies where data was available for the analysis. The total pay for those companies' 2,591 named executives, before taxes, was $14.3 billion.
That's some pile of pay, right? But Mr. Ciesielski puts it into perspective by noting that the total is almost equal to the gross domestic product of Tajikistan, which has a population of more than 7 million.
But it's not the sheer dollars so much as the fact that the standard rationales for such expenditures no longer provide even as much cover as the flimsiest toga for the self-regarding indifference that drives so much of the corporate sector. The executive pay study shows clearly that top-level salaries and bonuses swelled even at the expense of shareholders, of research and development, and of market capitalization. Consider a few facts:
It's hard to skip over the fat-cat bad-apple imagery and give such information its full import, because--in a culture that generally ignores class while focusing on individuals--we tend to think in terms of specific cases rather than a whole system. But it's really a mistake to allow the facts of executive pay to pull us toward a personalized moral critique of the executives who stockpile wealth at the expense of shareholders, or R&D, or general economic well-being. Focusing on this as individual aberrations misses the most important questions:
To find out more about people who are spreading information and taking action, here are a few links:
At the risk of sounding ridiculous (to paraphrase Che), the antidote to our trance of indifference is a passion for truth. In ancient Rome, Cicero popularized a question he attributed Lucius Cassius, whom he said the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge: L. Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat 'cui bono' fuisset. ""he was in the habit of asking, time and again, 'cui bono?'-- 'To whose benefit?'" A simple question we mostly seem to have forgotten: if we can't move ourselves to ask it now, when?
I really wanted to link to a video of Tommy's Castro's "No One Left to Lie to But Myself," but I couldn't find one, so here's a bit of the lyrics:
The truth hurts but I know I can't deny it
Can't sell nothin' when there's no one left to buy it
I made this bed and I guess I got to lie in it tonight
But deep down inside I know it's just as well
Cause now there's no one left to lie to even if it tried to
Got no one left to lie to but myself
No there's one left to lie to but myself
On the off chance the universe is pushing me toward an optimistic ending, I'll go instead with his version of "My Time After Awhile": "It's your time now, baby/But it's gonna be my time after awhile." May it be so.