Obama's Missed Opportunity

President Obama is truly missing an opportunity to do some long term good. Today he appointed Kenneth Feinberg as a “compensation czar” at the Treasury department to oversee the pay of top executive at companies that have received federal bailout money. He should have gone much further. The compensation of upper management at all corporations needs to be regulated. The coupling between compensation and reason has been severed. There is no moral or economic justification for anyone who manages others to be paid hundreds of times more than the people he or she manages. All the talk thrown around in conservative circles about the need to design exorbitant pay packages to retain top people is absolute garbage. It completely reinforces the social inequity that has become ingrained in the consciousness of corporate America. As I pointed out in my previous post, the concept of shared sacrifice has disappeared from the vast majority of American minds.
Only when the culture of greed is purged and the dollar becomes an instrument for social improvement instead of an end in itself will we start on the long road toward recovering our self respect and repairing our wounded economy.