Disregard the lives of your workers. Violate government regs. Get Paid. Someone needs to rap about this because this is one of the most gangsta stories ever. Really.
Here’s the invisible hand doing what it does best:
As Don Blankenship prepares to give up control of Massey Energy after the nation’s worst mining disaster in four decades, angry shareholders who have been agitating for the coal executive’s ouster aren’t sure whether to celebrate or lament.
That’s because corporate filings are revealing the staggering cost of his departure — a golden parachute that will provide Blankenship with $2.7 million upon retirement, a free house for life, millions more in deferred compensation, and a “salary continuation retirement benefit” of $18,241-a-month that will continue for 10 years after his departure at the end of the year.
“The fact of the matter is, the company absolutely needs him to leave. You want to say, anything’s worth it because the company has no future with him,” said Per W. Olstad, a lawyer with CtW Investment Group, a shareholder group that has pushed for Blankenship to step down. “But it’s an egregious payout. It’s way beyond what he’s earned. Given how destructive his mismanagement has been, he simply does not deserve it.”
via Hullabaloo.
Olstad proclaims: “it’s way beyond what he’s earned”! Really? Who could have known?
How about: “There is no way we should have put all this in anyone’s compensation package. Even if Massey would have been the Angel of clean safe, preserve the mountaintops coal. He wouldn’t have been worth that money. The way we pay these executives has got to change.”
These shareholders didn’t think this golden parachute was a big deal when they approved it for Blankenship. It made sense to these clowns before Blankenship let conditions lapse so far that a bunch of their employees died on the job. People had to die for Olstad and the rest of Massey Energy’s shareholders to say: this is too much for him!
Imagine the worst coworker you ever worked with. Not C level executive, not VP, just coworker. Packed lunch stealin’, sexually harrassin’, discriminatin’, bickerin’, over sleepin’, dirty cube havin’, supply stealin’ co-worker.
Any job. Imagine how much more of jerk they would have been had they had a severance package built in that basically meant the minute you fired him, they got a “f*ck you money” balloon payment, a free MTV crib and a salary for 10 years.
A major problem with our economic system right now is how much we over pay the executives in our public companies. Shareholders are asleep at the wheel. No job over pays like being an executive for a public company in the U.S.. No job at all. Seriously. Blankenship is a boss. Hardcore rappers need to rap about doing Blankenship things. Seriously.