CEO pay out of control

Do you ever get the feeling that we have returned to the Gilded Era? It seems that everyday there is another story of a crappy CEO getting a huge compensation package. I experienced this first hand going through a merger at a former employer. The new CEO took over a profitable, albeit conservative company and all of the sudden gets a huge compensation package. He then took the company public and proceeded to spend 3 times the company's annual income in one year to increase its market share only to see profits and market share decrease. The company then fired the CFO and hired a new "merger" minded CFO. They sold the company to another troubled company and laid off most of the employees (I was not one of them, luckily).

The problem was that even though the company was not well run, all of the executives received huge retention raises. When the merger occurred the top executives received all of their stock options and two years severance pay. The worst was the CFO who received somewhere around a million stock options for 6 months of work.

The point of all of this is that we have reached a point where executive pay is loony. I don't think it portends well for our society when most people have very little job security and have mostly stagnant wages and CEOs get huge packages not linked to performance. I don't think that most people would object to pay for performance. I think it is time to give stockholders greater control over compensation and eliminate the ability of CEOs to appoint members of corporate boards.

The bigger issue relates to how we protect the middle class and stop the flow of wealth to the top 1% who now control 40% of US wealth. I wish I could find a trend for that number...