GM's chief Whitacre to get $9M cash and stock combo

I think I just discovered another dream job . GM, if you are looking for some more consultants, I am on the phone !

 

I'll work for 20 hours a month for half of that. I'll do real work too, design parts, clean bathrooms, whatever they need. :madgrin:

 

Silly dogfriend! You don't get paid the big bucks for working. You get the big bucks for being a sleazy scumball who knows the right people and can pull the right strings. Offering to actually work proves you are not the person they want.

The secretaries do the actual work, and they get $20 an hour. (The ones who work for the big bosses, that is.)

 

What makes me mad about this whole thing is the following phrase:

"GM also said in Friday's SEC filing that Henderson will sign on as a consultant to the automaker for $59,090 a month plus expenses, for 20 hours of work per month through 2010. "

What? Is Fritz hurting so much for cash he needs GM to pony up for his 20 hour a week lunch break at Jack in The Box? Or can he not afford the gas money to get to work?

I'm guessing we'd all be shocked to find out how much he is putting on his expense account. It's those type of subtle loop holes that make GM's and Ex-GM's of companies look like slime balls.

Given the money he has made, and the money he IS making for 20 hours "work" does he really need an expense account? Or is it just the continued attitude that someone else should pay for him? The exact attitude that poisoned GM.

Hey Fritz...buy your own lunch and carpool....

 

Yes, I know. Yet another reason I have lost all faith in humanity.

Actually, the best gig(s) are to become a board member or director for a Fortune 500 company. The usual compensation is about $500k or more and you only need to show up a few times a year. If you read the bio of any of the board members, they usually sit on two or more boards, so they are doubling or tripling that for just a few more days a year.

Plus, they usually have nice catered lunches while they contemplate executive compensation packages and poison pill amendments.

 

I don't think I ever had any faith in humanity. Maybe that's why none of this surprises me. When I was 5, I observed how cruel kids are to each other. I saw how adults lie to kids (I knew there was no Santa Claus because we didn't have a chimney!) so I knew they were no better. And I knew it was unfair for some people to be poor while others were rich, so I knew society as a whole was all wrong.

This whole "people are basically good" thing is just silly. People are animals (that's not a bad thing; it just is) and as such they look out for themselves. They are not "evil" and they are not "good." They just try to survive and procreate, and that means trying to get as much for themselves as they can. The obscene wealth of the ruling class is just natural instincts gone berserk. But to have "faith" in humanity is like having "faith" in a chipmunk.

 

That's being awfully harsh on chipmunks, isn't it? :madgrin:

 

Not at all. People are neither better nor worse than chipmunks. We and they act as our instincts drive us. We have more-developed brains which allow us to overcome obstacles a chipmunk could not, and invent such concepts as god and aberrant behavior, and rationalizations for killing people we don't like. But we are still just animals that try to survive and procreate, just like them. People are neither good nor evil because there is no such thing as good and evil. Those are human inventions to justify pursuing our own desires. The Chipmunk does not need justifications, but it still pursues its desires, just as we do.

 

I've sat on a board of directors before, but sadly my compensation was quite up to those levels.

Tom

 

Fixed that for you. It's interesting to see the network of individuals and who's on what board. It's a surprisingly small pool (especially in technology companies).

 

These ridiculous levels of compensation are at the root of many of the country's problems. Just today on yahoo

"Wall Street gathered more than $20B in bonuses in 2009 as recession plagued US"



Problem is a fat pocket has become the goal of the upper level management as opposed to doing a good job and being properly compensated. Compensation has become the primary goal at the cost of ethics and moral behavior.

I can remember as an engineer 30 years ago you worked hard and strove to do a good job and if you got a very good performance review and were lucky and the company did well that year you might get a 5% raise maybe if real lucky you got an extra 1% above the average raise everyone else got.

These ridiculous bonuses when performance is in the tank and companies are failing are just plain immoral.

 

These days if you're REALLY good, you get to train your replacement.

 

Capitalism is based on the profit motive. The ruling philosophy (which I disagree with, but it is the capitalist guiding principle) is that if people are free to accumulate as much money as they possibly can, production will be more efficient and everyone will benefit.

Note that "the profit motive" is roughly equivalent to "the love of money," which the apostle Paul declared to be the root of all evil. Not just some evil, but all evil. This makes capitalism and Pauline Christianity mutually exclusive. If you are a capitalist, you are not a Christian, by definition. This is one of the few points on which Paul and Jesus are in agreement, since Jesus always told people to give away all their money to the poor. Calvinists believe that wealth is a sign that god favors you, but there is no basis for this in the New Testament.

However, that said, the people who run companies set their own compensation, as high as they can get away with, and if they ruin the company in so doing, it demonstrates a flaw in the capitalist guiding principle, but as long as BOTH major political parties hold firmly to that principle, it ain't gonna change.

As a socialist, I believe that there should be ceilings on compensation, with reasonable incentives to work harder and be more productive, but those incentives should have reasonable limits. Of course, there also needs to be a living minimum wage and one-payer health care, both of which would mitigate the effects on the poor of the irresponsibility of the wealthy. Also free education at all levels, and rewards for people who work and go to school at the same time, since an educated populace is more productive, less inclined to crime, and everyone benefits.

 

One of my former coworkers (while working at a different company) got to train two workers from the Philippines so that his job could be sent over there.

My last 4 days at work were spent gathering documentation of the products that we built and coaching a process engineer from Malaysia so that they could take over production after they shut down our facility.