Supplemental: Frank Bruni’s upset with college presidents’ pay!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2015

We’ll take it one step farther:
Frank Bruni is upset today with college presidents’ pay.

Last weekend, the thoughtful pundit was upset with the Clintons’ “greed” and with their troubling income.

We think Bruni should be concerned with college presidents’ pay. He makes some good points in his new column.

That said, we’re willing to take it one step farther. Since Bruni’s concerned about everyone else, we think the scribe should start to inquire about major journalists’ pay.

For example, how much does Frank Bruni get paid? How about Maureen Dowd?

People like Bruni are often upset about the money other folk make. At the same time, they tend to be secretive about the piles of cash which gets dished to the big runny cheeses in their own sacred field.

Especially on the TV machine, it’s hard to doubt the pernicious results of big corporate pay. We watch the declining quality of Rachel Maddow’s show and we wonder if a person like Maddow would ever decline as much as she has if it weren’t for the ill effects of massive corporate pay.

In our judgment, Maddow’s a special case. That said, all over our TV “news” divisions, wealthy purveyors are clutching their pearls, asking if Hillary Clinton can relate to “everyday people.”

We’re always struck by the efforts these people make to keep their own incomes secret. How are they able to relate? The question never comes up!

In large part, the clowns on TV are willing to clown because of their very large pay-days. In our view, Maddow has become an especially striking case.

Her self-adoration is dragging her down. She’s hardly the only one.

19 comments:

  1. From Quartz, May 20, 2015:

    JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s $20 million pay package will stay intact, despite the fact that nearly 40% of the mega bank’s shareholders voted Tuesday (May 19) not to approve the mighty bank chief’s compensation.
    Just 61% of shareholders voted in favor of the pay package, enough to approve it, but down from 78% last year. Also, more than a third of shareholders voted in favor of having an independent board chairman (rather than letting Dimon hold the board chair title along with CEO).
    The surge in disapproval followed strong recommendations against approving the pay from two prominent advisory firms, ISS and Glass Lewis, which advise big institutional investors on corporate governance issues. The issue was not so much the amount Dimon gets paid (unchanged at $20 million from last year), or the amount of turmoil the bank has gone through over the past year. Rather, the advisory firms object to the inconsistent measures that the bank’s board of directors use to decide how much cash and stock to pay its top executives.
    Voting down pay is a pretty rare for corporate shareholders. More than 90% of companies get the okay from at least 70% of shareholders, according to the consultancy Semler Brossy. And CEO pay is on the rise.
    The major pushback from institutional investors and other shareholders prompted the bank’s board of directors to at least give a vague nod to shareholders, indicating that they will consider making some changes, according to Bloomberg: “They generally did not question the actual level of compensation, but the structure of a component of compensation,” Lee Raymond, lead director and chairman of the compensation committee said at the meeting. “We acknowledge the importance of the question,” he said, adding that he would update investors on changes.

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  2. From Bloomberg News:

    Six of the world’s biggest banks will pay $5.8 billion and five of them agreed to plead guilty to charges tied to a currency-rigging probe as they seek to wind down almost half a decade of enforcement actions.
    Citicorp., JP MORGAN & CHASE, Barclays Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Plc agreed to plead guilty to felony charges of conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros, according to settlements announced by the Justice Department in Washington Wednesday. The main banking unit of UBS Group AG agreed to plead guilty to a wire-fraud charge related to interest-rate manipulation. The Swiss bank, the first to cooperate with antitrust investigators, was granted immunity in the currency probe.
    The four banks that agreed to plead guilty to currency charges are among the world’s biggest foreign-exchange traders. They were accused of colluding to influence benchmark rates by aligning positions and pushing transactions through at the same time. Traders who described themselves as members of “The Cartel” used online chat rooms to discuss their positions before the rates were set and suppress competition in the market, the Justice Department said.
    All of the banks that pleaded guilty said they received needed waivers from the Securities and Exchange Commission to continue managing mutual funds and raise capital quickly, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

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    Replies
    1. Right. It was "the banks" that committed the crime. No actual people were involved.

      Delete
  3. The AAUP just released its annual salary report. They examined whether faculty salary increases were driving tuition increases. Not surprisingly, they found that administrators salaries not faculty were related to tuition increases. Not only are salaries inflated but the number of administrators has increased dramatically. At my public university, the number of administrators increased by 220% in 15 years while faculty increased 5-10% over the same period.

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  4. Does Sparky imagine he's saying something about the impact of pay on media?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Somerby wonders if high pay is the cause of Maddow's decline.

    We know the theory fails when tested on him.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You of course mean the theory that if you are paid less, the quality of your work will improve. Isn't that the theory the plutocrats work out of?

      My theory for the "decline" of the quality of Maddow's show -- if there is one -- would also include that MSNBC spends, relatively speaking, next to nothing on it, and the same format of basically talking about the same things Chris Hayes just talked about and Lawrence O'Donnell will talk about again with the same limited roster of studio guests is getting pretty tired.

      Besides, it's baseball season and my team is pretty good.

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    2. I think these shows misunderstand their audience. They keep trying to provide entertainment when the only reason someone would watch such a show is a desire to find out more about politics and current events. There is better entertainment watching Judge Judy. Why watch Maddow for that? She is capable of providing serious commentary but to do that she would have to do research and invest mental effort that is now being diverted into being fun. That was obvious from her comments when she was interviewed by Jon Stewart.

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    3. Easiest thing to say that Maddow is only after "fun" and doesn't do research, especially on this blog. Just regurgitate the conventional wisdom of Bob''s tribe, and plenty will agree.

      Harder thing to say if you actually watched her show.

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    4. I am not aware of any big news items that "broke" on Maddow's show. Everything I have seen on her show has been regurgitated from other media or the web and presented in a "fun" and entertaining manner. I don't believe anyone would mistake Maddow for an "investigative reporter".

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    5. Maybe that is why they call it "The Rachel Maddow Show" instead of "Rachel Maddow Reports" or "MSNBC Investigates with Rachel Maddow." Or maybe not.

      Delete
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