Tag Archives: Corporate CEOs

Saturday Matinee: Mayhem

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By Brian Tallerico

Source: RogerEbert.com

Joe Lynch’s “Mayhem” feels like a timely film in a way it wouldn’t have a couple years ago. Whatever your political party may be, anger has been a palpable emotion in this country recently—it was anger that got Trump elected, and it’s anger that opposes his administration. But what do we do with that anger? How long can we keep it down before it overwhelms us? With his best film since “Wrong Turn 2,” Lynch channels that national anger into a stylish, smart, propulsive gore-fest set in a corporate America that takes no prisoners. But when did it?

Not only is “Mayhem” a brutal, visceral gut punch at a time of the year when we typically drown in awards bait, but it feels like a movie designed to tap into a vein of frustration and anger at a corrupt system. Hate your boss? Can’t control your road rage? Want to push your co-workers down a stairwell? Thinking mean things about the President and his cronies? “Mayhem” channels rage at an unfair society and the bullshit that trickles down from the Powers That Be into a paean to uncontrolled anger. Much more tonally consistent than the similar “The Belko Experiment,” “Mayhem” isn’t as much about id run rampant as it is two people finally loosed from moral and societal constraints in a way that allows them to enact bloody, vicious vengeance. There are times when the whole thing feels like an extended version of that scene from “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” or, worse, the movie that would be the favorite film of the lunatic followers of Tyler Durden in “Fight Club,” but this weird little genre exercise works way more often than it doesn’t, and actually has something to say in the process.

The premise of “Mayhem” is simple in a way that I think a lot of horror masters would admire. There’s an airborne disease, referred to as “Red Eye” for the single red-eye it gives those who suffer from it, that removes all societal and moral governance. So those infected with it don’t just get mad, they get bloody. And it happens to infect a firm (and not just any firm but the one that set the legal precedent for “Red-Eye Defense” by recently getting off a murderer who was infected with it at the time) filled with the kind of well-tailored monsters who barely control their impulse for cruelty anyway. These are the kind of people who gleefully step on the little man in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, and one of the most interesting aspects of “Mayhem” is the choice Lynch makes not to infect “average Joes” but people who seem to have practice unleashing their inner monsters. When John Towers (Steven Brand), the boss of this loathsome company, says to someone beneath him that “You must protect those above you,” it’s the kind of human shield mentality that CEOs and executives have been using for scapegoats for decades.

However, the protection in this case is literal, and the man that Towers needs it from is Derek Cho (Steven Yeun, going from fighting zombies on “The Walking Dead” to maniacal suits here), a rising star who is about to be fired on the day the infection hits the company. Rather than take his corporate execution the way so many do, he picks up a hammer and a nail gun and goes after the people above him, assisted by a client named Melanie Cross (Samara Weaving), who was in the office that day fighting an immoral foreclosure. Caroline Chikezie, Kerry Fox, and Dallas Roberts co-star as corporate monsters at Derek’s company, but the movie belongs to Yeun and Weaving, who both get exactly what Lynch is going for here. They are fearless and intense in ways that other performers would have missed. Yeun proves himself to be a more engaging leading man than I would have expected and Weaving has the energy of Margot Robbie—captivating and a little scary at the same time. They’re both really good, and it’s their commitment that keeps “Mayhem” humming.

“Mayhem” is at its best when it channels relatable stress into utter genre insanity. It’s like “Office Space” if Michael Bolton went on a murderous spree with a nail gun, playing on workplace stress instead of pure id, and it has a violent momentum that’s hard to deny, well-directed by Lynch (who might use a few too many quick cuts but also stages a brutal scene to Faith No More, so all is forgiven). It can be such a relentless experience that it surely won’t be for everyone, but it works best when considered as a film that’s essentially about people willing to kill, bribe and offer power to anyone to not only save their own skins but also excuse their own horrors. Whether you would levy such accusations at Trump or the candidate he beat a year ago, there’s something about watching a movie about unleashing repressed anger at injustice a year after Election Day 2016 that just feels right.

 

Watch the full film at Hoopla.

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

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These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Alec Anderson

Source: WSWS.org

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.

Why do corporate boards so overpay US CEOs?

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By Sam Pizzigati

Source: Nation of Change

Back in 1999, near the dizzying height of the dot-com boom, no executive in Corporate America personified the soaring pay packages of America’s CEOs more than Jack Welch, the chief exec at General Electric. Welch took home $75 million that year.

What explained the enormity of that compensation? Welch didn’t claim any genius on his part. He credited his success, instead, to the genius of the free market.

“Is my salary too high?” mused Welch. “Somebody else will have to decide that, but this is a competitive marketplace.”

Translation: “I deserve every penny. The market says so.”

Top U.S. corporate execs today, on average, are doing even better than top execs in Welch’s heyday. In 1999, notes a just-released new report from the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs at the nation’s 350 biggest corporations pocketed 248 times the pay of average workers in their industries. Top execs last year averaged 312 times more.

What explains this growing generosity to America’s top corporate chiefs? Today’s apologists for over-the-top CEO compensation, like Jack Welch a generation ago, point to the market.

One leading critic of these apologists, the Dutch management scientist Manfred Kets de Vries, neatly summed up this market world view earlier this year: Big CEO pay packages “reflect market demands for a CEO’s unique skills and contribution to the bottom line.” Mega-million executive paychecks “merely represent the market forces of supply and demand.”

Or, as the University of Chicago’s Steven Kaplan puts it, “The market for talent puts pressure on boards to reward their top people at competitive pay levels in order to both attract and retain them.”

In the world that CEO cheerleaders like Kaplan inhabit, impartial, unbiased markets determine executive compensation. Corporate boards simply play by market rules. They pay their execs what the market says their execs deserve. If they don’t, they risk losing their executive talent.

American corporate leaders take scarcity – of CEO talent – as a given. How else, in a market economy, to explain rapidly rising CEO pay? If quality CEOs abounded, executive compensation would not be soaring. But that compensation is soaring, so qualified CEOs obviously must be few and far between – and totally deserving of whatever many millions they receive. Simple market logic.

And simply wrong. American corporations today confront no scarcity of executive talent. The numbers of people qualified to run multi-billion-dollar companies have never, in reality, been more plentiful. These numbers have been growing steadily over recent decades, in part because America’s graduate schools of business have been graduating, year after year, thousands of rigorously trained executives.

America’s first graduate school for executives, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, currently boasts an alumni network over 10,000 strong. MBAs in the equally prestigious Harvard Business School alumni network total over 46,000. Add in the alumni from other widely acclaimed institutions and the available supply of executives trained at America’s top-notch business schools approaches several hundred thousand.

Just how many of these academically trained executives have the skills and experience really needed to run a Fortune 500 company? Let’s assume, conservatively, that only 1 percent of the alumni from the “best” business schools have enough skills and experience to run a big-time corporation.

That arithmetic would give Fortune 500 companies that go looking for a new CEO at least several thousand eminently qualified candidates. No supply shortage here.

Indeed, today’s business world is overflowing with eminently qualified CEO candidates, once you add in the grads from business schools abroad. INSEAD, perhaps the most prominent of these international schools, now has over 56,000 active alumni.

In the past, to be sure, American corporations seldom looked beyond the borders of the United States for executive talent. That tunnel vision made some sense. Executives inside the United States and executives outside worked in different business environments. Foreign executives could hardly be expected to succeed in an unfamiliar American marketplace, even if they did speak flawless English.

But today, in our celebrated “globalized” economy, that distinction between domestic and foreign executives no longer matters nearly as much. In dozens of foreign nations, in hundreds of foreign corporations, executives are competing in the same global marketplace as their American counterparts. They’re using the same technologies, studying the same market data, and strategizing toward the same business goals. Together, taken as a group, executives from elsewhere in the world constitute a huge new pool of talent for American corporations.

Pay consultants in the United States, for their part, do acknowledge the reality of this global marketplace for executive talent. In fact, they cite global competition as one important reason why executive pay in the United States is rising. American companies, the argument goes, now have to compete against foreign companies for executive talent, the argument goes. This competition is forcing up executive pay in the United States.

Really? What ever happened to market logic? If corporations all around the world paid their executives at comparable rates, market competition would certainly force up executive compensation worldwide. But corporations don’t all pay executives at comparable rates.

American executives take home far more compensation than their foreign counterparts, on average over triple the pay of execs in America’s peer nations. By classic market logic, any competition between highly paid American executives and equally qualified but more modestly paid international executives ought to end up lowering, not raising, the higher pay rates in the United States.

Why, after all, would an American corporation pay $50 million for an American CEO when a skilled international CEO could easily be had for one-fifth or even one-fiftieth that price?

We have here, in short, a situation that a deep, abiding faith in the “market” does not explain. In the executive talent marketplace, American corporations face plenty, not scarcity, yet the going rate for American executives keeps rising.

Has someone repealed the laws of supply and demand? How else could executive pay in the United States have ascended to such lofty levels?

Some analysts do have an alternate explanation to offer. Markets, they point out, still operate by supply and demand. But markets don’t set executive pay.

“CEOs who cheerlead for market forces wouldn’t think of having them actually applied to their own pay packages,” as commentator Matthew Miller has noted in the Los Angeles Times. “The reality is that CEO pay is set through a clubby, rigged system in which CEOs, their buddies on board compensation committees and a small cadre of lawyers and ‘compensation consultants’ are in cahoots to keep the millions coming.”

“CEO compensation,” agree Lawrence Michel and Jessica Schieder, the authors of the new Economic Policy Institute executive pay report, “appears to reflect not greater productivity of executives but the power of CEOs to extract concessions.”

If CEOs earned less, the pair add, we would see “no adverse impact on output or employment.” Instead, they go on, lower executive paychecks would mean higher rewards for corporate workers, since the huge paydays that go to CEOs today reflect “income that otherwise would have accrued to others.”

How could those “others,” the rest of us, best go about lowering CEO compensation? Michel and Schieder offer a variety of promising proposals, ranging from higher marginal income tax rates to higher corporate tax rates on companies with excessively wide CEO-to-worker compensation ratios.

And what might a reasonable CEO-to-worker pay ratio be? The new Economic Policy Institute research suggests one plausible goal. Back in 1965, Michel and Schieder calculate, America’s top execs only pulled down 20 times more pay than the nation’s average workers.