Severance Pay(off) - The Golden Parachute

Keeping with my tradition of posting commentaries that still need editing...

ABC News just ran a story this evening on Stephen Crawford, ex-co-president of Morgan Stanley. He quit just 3 months after being named co-president and was rewarded with a $32 million severance package. This amounts to slightly more than $300,000 per day. Many people are aghast at these mega-severance packages from Fortune 500 companies that seem to try to out-do each other year after year. News agencies report them over and over and it's as if the shareholders of these companies have their heads up their collective asses. There is zero accountability. They are being fucked again and again and again by these corporate thieves and they just scratch their heads and never bother asking any questions, like WHY are these people getting these sums of money. Often these corporate executives are being fired or quitting due to poor performance, so why should they be getting this much money? How on earth can it be that all these companies, whose sole responsibility is supposedly to make as much money as possible for shareholders, be allowing people to walk away with millions for doing nothing -- literally taking money out of the pockets of shareholders?

The answer is so simple, and yet you will find very few people on TV or in the financial news willing to say it. But first you must accept the simple fact that everyone involved in these transactions is a CROOK. These companies are run by super-ultra-mega-rich people who conspire on a regular basis to manipulate markets and profit off severe swings on stock prices. This is the way Wall Street works now. This is sort of how things have always worked, but it's now been turned into a totally blatant science. No matter how poorly their companies perform, the executives at these companies all get filthy rich. Often they tell lies about how their companies will perform, jack up the stock price, then sell out before it crashes (Enron). Or they overestimate earnings and then miss the estimate to kill a stock price so they can buy it up cheap. They use their positions in investment banks to extort huge numbers of shares from companies during IPOs and then pass them off to their friends who dump them for enormous profits (free money anyone?). They steal investors money and they steal taxpayers money. Hell, half of them run the government, stealing directly from taxpayers (eg: Halliburton), the other half run all the major corporations. These days they can even do both at the same time, just ask Dick Cheney.

So what does this have to do with severance pay? The reason people get huge sums of money they don't deserve when they leave a company is simple. Think of it. If you were leaving a company that had been involved in illegal activities and you knew everyone there who had been involved because you were hired by and worked with them -- if you worked in a situation like that, would you leave quietly, or would want some extra money to keep your mouth shut? Exactly. When you see these CEOs getting $32 million for 3 months of shitty work, it's like an announcement that someone was a witness to some seriously illegal shit. So imagine you're on the board of Enron. You're sitting there around your giant boardroom table discussing how you just jacked California for another half-billion and Ken Lay suddenly stands up and announces that he's tired of living a lie and raping his shareholders and he just can't take it anymore. He reaches into his briefcase and before he can even pull out his signed resignation, checkbooks are literally flying through the air like salmon swimming upstream. People in $15,000 suits are literally falling over each other to make sure Kenny-boy knows just how much his criminal fellowship means to them. They're gonna give him enough money to sedate any conscience Kenny-boy might ever develop. They might even give him $32 million for doing nothing at all.