Does this Czar answer to Lenin and Marx?

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 13, 2009 under Executive compensation, Politics, Reporting on pay | Read the First Comment

The Screwed Seven must submit their pay plans to the horribly nicknamed Pay Czar by Friday.  The reports about this have fairly captured his situation:

Many believe Feinberg will be squeezed between public fury over outsized bonuses on one side and what is best for companies trying to compete and retain talent in a marketplace that demands million-dollar salaries on the other.

If Feinberg rules that big compensation packages are mostly fair, lawmakers may assail him as the tool of corporate interests. If he tries to strike down salaries, boards and shareholders may blame him for chasing away the rainmakers.

The implication, here, is that our lawmakers consider corporate interests expendable.  In the context of taxpayers’ interests in these particular corporations, this would make Congress a lousy fiduciary, but we already knew that.

Once again, this Congress has placed itself to the left of the administration:

“I don’t think the American people begrudge that people make big salaries, as long as they’re not jeopardizing the goodwill of the public in doing so,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.

Contrast that with this concern from Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank:

[TARP recipients could] “enrich their executives while deferring repayment of the federal financial assistance that helped them avoid financial catastrophe.”

As if preventing their “enrichment” will help anyone avoid financial catastrophe.

The fact that Feinberg is doing this job for free is not reassuring.  On the other hand, I know they could not have paid me enough to do it.  I get rather claustrophobic in the crevices of shifting boulders.