Merill Lynched

Stanley O’Neill, CEO and bank veteran left investment giant Merill Lynch after the company posted a quarterly loss that Wall Street has never seen before. O’Neill is not the first and most probably not the last martyr of the wide-ranging hedge fund house-cleanings these days. Heads are falling left and right at Citigroup, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, just to name five of the big-shots on the US stock market. With the housing mess still unresolved, an ever so severe credit crunch, soaring oil prices and the full blown crisis of the subprime market, it’s tough to be a CEO these days.
…Especially if you have to tow home a moneybag worth $161 million as a "compensation package." Pocket change compared to, say Yahoo shotgun Terry Semel’s $230 million paycheck. Big is beautiful in America and people are used to big numbers here… but many raised eyebrows on today’s news. Think about it: the company suffers a $8.4 billion historical loss and the guy gets paid a fortune. Something is seriously wrong with this country. Am I the only one who’s jiggered about the fact that an average chief exec in the corporate world takes home 364 times more cash than the average Joe?
Two weeks ago the IRS (i.e. the US APEH) reported that more than 21% of the nation’s total income went to the top 1% and the income gap grew to its widest since the 1920’s. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer each and every day in America, and despite occasional media frenzy and harsh outcries from Democratic rallies, nothing, literally nothing has been done to reverse the tendency of growing income disparity.
Bush’s notorious tax cuts made the wealthiest American families the undisputed winners of his reforms and when it comes to corporate salaries, as a true non-interventionist Republican, he elegantly delegates the problem to shareholders, saying it is business’s business: the government has not much to do with boardroom paychecks.
Let’s face it, he’s not the one chewing on sour grapes and Wealth is not a new phenomenon in America. Think about Ford, Carnegie, or the Rockefellers - icons of the American dream, the dream that is fuelled by extreme success-orientedness, accumulation of material goods and appreciation of hard work. The word "equality" in the Constitution was never supposed to mean equality of income – Bronx kids and Harlem-dwellers know this just as well as the Founding Fathers did.
In America, the fact that the rich get ultra rich is perceived as an axiom of market capitalism, and apparently, enough shoulders are shrugged on Capitol Hill for the news of the day to become a non issue in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile Robin Hood bides his time.