Criminal CEOs Skate Because They Make $9 Million a Year

Aviva Shen at Think Progress:

The average CEO salary broke records in 2011 at $9.6 million — and now, that record high has been topped by 2012 salaries, which averaged out to $9.7 million. Health care and media CEOs enjoyed the highest pay, while utility CEOs had the lowest at $7.5 million. Sixty percent of CEOs got a raise last year. 

Though CEO pay dropped slightly after the financial crisis, it quickly rebounded to reach new heights in 2010, 2011, and now 2012. Simultaneously, the pay gap between CEOs and workers has also broken records, as the average CEO in 2012 earned 354 times more than the average worker.

During the recession, some companies changed their compensation formulas to incorporate more stock as a way to tie executives’ salaries to the company’s performance. As the stock market enjoys all-time highs, CEO pay has also soared. Yet the stock market’s rally has not been felt by most middle and low income families, as the housing market recovers in fits and starts. As a result, income inequality has been exacerbated in the first two years of the recovery.

Skyrocketing executive salaries since deregulation in the 1980s helped the top 1 percent of Americans expand their share of income, even as worker pay has stagnated.

SNIP

Skewed executive compensation levels made some CEOs iconic villains after the financial crisis. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit got a $6.7 million pay-out after driving the bank to near ruin, while a Duke Energy CEO received $44 million for one day of work.

If only Congress saw them as villains. Instead, these are the assholes to whom Congress listens and for whose benefit Congress passes laws.

Full-time minimum wage gets you $15,000 a year.  That's 1/600th of average CEO pay. I dare anyone to explain to me how anyone can do anything 600 times harder or better than, say, what an elementary school janitor does.

The fact is, they can't. The gap between the lowest-paid workers and the highest-paid "workers" - and I use the word "workers" lightly to refer to people who gobble up millions for shifting paper around - is the class war crime at the heart of what is wrong with our nation.