Senate OKs $81B for Iraq, Afghanistan

Senate OKs $81B for Iraq, Afghanistan

From the article:

The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved $81 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a spending bill that would push the total cost of combat and reconstruction past $300 billion.

With approximately 100 million households in America, it means that every household has paid $3,000 for the war in Iraq.

Hail to the Robber Baron?

Hail to the Robber Baron?

From the article:

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich. Last year, due to Bush’s tax cuts, over 80 of America’s most profitable 200 corporations did not pay even a penny of their federal and state income taxes. Meanwhile, to pay for his additional tax cuts for the very rich, Bush is drastically cutting back several social services, such as federal lunch programs for poor children.

Business education has also produced former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and other MBAs behind the malfeasances of Tyco, HealthSouth, Haliburton, AIG, and WorldCom. Many executives of corporate America who hold MBAs have also been engaged in the unethical acts of raiding their corporate treasuries at the expense of employees and stockholders. Emulating President Bush’s hubris, a multitude of CEOs in corporate America give themselves obscenely large bonuses that have little to do with their performance. In 1980, the CEOs of Fortune 500 large corporations received, on average, 70 times larger annual compensations than their average employees. Under the Bush Administration, comparable CEOs have come to give themselves 600 to 1,000 times larger annual compensations than their rank-and-file employees whose pay has stagnated. To pay for such self-dealt compensations, corporate aristocrats layoff their workers, cut ordinary employees’ health benefits, and outsource jobs abroad. Under the Bush Administration, over five million Americans have lost their health benefits, and the U.S. has lost over 2.7 million quality manufacturing jobs. President Bush and his rapacious “captains of piracy” of corporate America are destroying America’s democracy built up since Roosevelt’s New Deal era.

The definition of the concentration of wealth. Instead of spreading out to everyone, the wealth increasingly concentrates in the hands of the few.

The concentration of wealth at Mirant

Mirant Shareholder Rights Group Enraged by Excessive Executive Compensation Practices

From the article:

The Mirant Shareholder Rights Group today expressed its outrage at the excessive compensation of Mirant Corporation's management team, in spite of their track record of failures.

The Mirant Shareholder Rights Group believes this is a flagrant abuse of the bankruptcy process, and that Mirant Corporation has clearly demonstrated that it is not interested in any level of accountability to its shareholders. While the Company has lost billions of dollars and is now under Chapter 11 protection, its top executives have, and continue to be, rewarded handsomely.

For 2004, Mirant's Chief Executive Officer, Marce Fuller, received $842,000 in base salary as well a more than 100% bonus, bringing her total compensation to nearly $1.7 million. Despite remaining in bankruptcy in 2005, Ms. Fuller again will receive approximately $1.7 million in compensation. Additionally, if Ms. Fuller resigns or reaches a mutual agreement with Mirant to terminate her employment, she will receive a lump sum payment of $3.4 million in cash upon separation.

Other executives have seen exceptional increases in their compensation and bonuses as well. Curtis A. Morgan, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, more than doubled his base salary from 2003 to 2004 from $156,822 to $427,350 and more than quadrupled his bonus, which went from $124,000 to $543,483. Similarly, Douglas L. Miller, Senior Vice President & General Counsel received nearly five times his 2003 bonus of $62,708 in 2004, the sum of which was $298,313.

"Since when did bankruptcy mean enriching creditors and management?" asked Rick Doutel, a Mirant shareholder. "What is going on at Mirant and in this bankruptcy process is astounding. From excessive management compensation and attempts to suppress court filings from public scrutiny, to obvious efforts to hide value and enrich creditors, we believe the Mirant bankruptcy will one day serve as a case study in corporate greed."