I Am Shocked, Shocked, to Learn That CEO Pay Climbed During the Bush Recession

All of these CEOs and business leaders, most of whom are likely REpublicans, ought to be prostrating themselves and kissing the feet of the Democrats and president Obama.

More than two-thirds of the CEOs at 209 publicly traded companies based in Massachusetts received a bonus last fiscal year, even though many of those companies lost money that year or did worse than in the previous year, according to a Boston Globe analysis of pay data compiled by the paper and Capital IQ, a financial research firm owned by Standard & Poor’s. The figures are based on company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission through the end of July.

Oh, this is outrageous as all hell. You can bet your last centimo that those companies all shed workers and, where people weren't laid off, they were stuck with either pay cuts, hour cuts, increases in health insurance contributions, increases in insurance co-pays, or a combination thereof. But the fat cats at the top were laughing all of the way to the bank.

But that's not my central point.

Those CEOs should be kissing Obama's feet because, without the measures taken by the Democrats and, to be fair, the Bush Administration, this recession would, instead, have been a full-blown economic meltdown, complete with sovereign defaults. The outrage about the the destruction of the world's economy by a relative handful of banksters might have resulted in the form of societal upheaval that would have found a lot of them dangling from lamp-posts.

But that didn't happen and, in a really sad twist of ironic fate, the people whose jobs and benefits were saved by the bailouts, are outraged by the bailouts. Which is kind of like blaming a fireman because your hair got messed up when he pulled you out of burning building. There is a reason why the fat cats are pouring so much cash into the Tea party; they are doing it hoping that the people who are, so, so outraged will not notice who was really behind the economic catastrophe and who is continuing to profit from it: The rich Republicans.

That is why the GOP has not wavered from its goal of destroying government by giving away the Treasury to the rich. That is why, after the financial meltdown, not to mention BP's catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the Republicans have not wavered from their fairy-tale idea that the only thing wrong with business is government regulation.

Which, of course, is bullshit. It was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks that directly led to the near-collapse of the U.S. banking system.* It was the oil industry's co-option of the Minerals Management Service and the resultant attitude of MMS that the oil industry was their customer** that lead to the lack of competent adult supervision of the oil rigs int he Gulf of Mexico, a direct cause of the 2010 BP Oil Spill.***

The Republicans, other than a handful who only went along because President Bush and Vice President Cheney begged them to, did nothing at all to stave off a global economic collapse. That they have now managed to co-op the Tea party and may now benefit from their passive attempts to sabotage the economy speaks both to a bitter political irony and the ability of a segment of the American people to be fooled (and bought off) by the powerful who profited hugely from both the growth and the collapse of the economy.

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* Never forget that it was Senator Phil Gramm (R-UBS Bank), who rammed through the repeal of Glass-Steagall in the 1990s.
** The MMS forgot that they worked for the American people, not the petroleum industry.
*** This is not to absolve British Petroleum by any means. Their flagrant disregard of safety protocols over the years need not be repeated here.