My Other Job
Posted on October 23, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I’ve been speaking out a lot on overpaid executives this week and commenting on the pay cuts imposed by the Obama adminstration’s on the top executives of seven of the bailout companies. I appeared on Bloomberg, the Nightly Business Report, and the NBC Nightly News, and in the New York Times. The Oregonian was nice enough to quote me as a leading expert in its editorial. And I am in the midst of a debate with University of Chicago professor Steve Kaplan on whether executives are fairly paid. I’m arguing that they are overpaid. If you agree, you can vote on my side.
Now, back to the movies!
Unless they are as willing to accept responsibility for foolish choices, greedy missteps, or simply cataclysmic management, these yahoos and economic vermin do NOT – N*O*T – deserve any large sums as salary or bonuses. They should be treated exactly as their employees would be if they screwed up on the same scale. After all, they are the front people for the whole company, corporation, or business and are only as good as the employees who work on their behalf. If the business fails it is because they had missed a cue, tripped over their own wallets, or were asleep in the bored (
I had no idea you were involved in this issue until you were profiled in “The New Yorker” (to which I have subscribed for years) a few weeks ago. I have always respected you as a critic but now I respect you even more as an advocate for fairness.
Thank you very much, Dennis! People who know me from one of my jobs are often surprised to find out about the other, but I love them both! Your kind words mean the world to me.
I’m glad to see your views are getting so much exposure, Nell. It’s interesting. I’ve been attending the Noir City D.C. film festival at the AFI Silver Theatre. Yesterday, I saw the film “Gun Crazy” for the first time.
I was thinking how much the folks on Wall Street often seem to resemble the main characters in that film (and in other Noir films that feature doomed lovers that embark on a life of crime because of the excitement).
One of the speakers described film noir as “deterministic” and full of a sense of doom, while my sense as I have watched many of these films is that the characters’ fates are determined by their own bad choices. It seems to me that many on Wall Street and in investment firms are caught up in the “high” of what they are doing much like the “gun-crazed” lovers were, and pretend to themselves (and us) that they just can’t help it.