The Super "Connected" 1% CEO: The Incredible Tale of Billions of Dollars of Failure

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/155519/the_super_%22connected%22_1_ceo%3A_the_incredible_tale_of_billions_of_dollars_of_failure/

The Super "Connected" 1% CEO: The Incredible Tale of Billions of Dollars of Failure


Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground.

Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale. It’s the Dick Parsons Management Style. In each of the three companies Parsons was appointed to lead, they all failed spectacularly, and somehow Parsons and a handful of top executives always walked away from the yellow-tape crime scenes unscathed.

This past April, for his final act as Citigroup’s chairman, Dick Parsons made sure that Citi’s top executives were handsomely rewarded for their failures. He arranged a pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit amounting to $53 million despite the fact that Citi’s stock plummeted 44% last year, and has woefully underperformed other bank stocks even by their low standards. Citigroup, as you might recall, got the largest bailout of any banking institution, larger than BofA’s– $50 billion in direct funds, and over $300 billion more in “stopgap” federal guarantees on the worthless garbage in Citi’s “assets” portfolio. Those are just the most obvious bailouts Citi received—this doesn’t take into account the flood of free cash, the murky mortgage-backed securities buyback programs, the accounting rules changes that allowed banks like Citi to decide how much their assets “should be worth” as opposed to what they’re really worth on their beloved free-market, and so on…

So just as Dick Parsons stepped down as Citigroup chairman last month, shareholders finally rebelled, suing Parsons, CEO Pandit and a handful of executives for corporate plunder”.

Again, with Parsons, it’s the same story every time: Three executive jobs, three disasters, each worse than the previous one.

[Lasher]

1. Parsons seems like GOP presidential material

I wonder if he's a deserter.

[geckosfeet]

2. And the slow motion train wreck continues...

The Super "Connected" 1% CEO: The Incredible Tale of Billions of Dollars of Failure

Today, Parsons is gone from Citigroup, but he’s not gone from our lives: He’s just been appointed as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “education czar” for education reform in the state of New York. Sorry kids.

All of this begs the question: What makes whacky conspiracy theorists any worse or any more deluded than the "Meritocracy Theorists" who've been promoting a fairy-tale version of America since Reagan’s Revolution, a fairy-tale version in which talent, hard work and innovation are supposedly rewarded, and failure is punished? It’s time to admit it once and for all: Failure is the whole point. Failure makes looting easier and quicker. In that sense, Dick Parsons has been rewarded for a job well done.

The game is rigged, and Dick Parsons' rancid story gives some insight into how the rigging operates, and why failure is so valuable. What looks like failure to us, like losing our jobs and our future and our democracy—is success and riches to the One Percent who profit from this dystopian setup.

The Super "Connected" 1% CEO: The Incredible Tale of Billions of Dollars of Failure

edit for online punctuation

[xchrom]

3. oh fer fuck's sake. really?

?1316330080

[geckosfeet]

4. According to the piece that you posted - yes.

[xchrom]

5. i just zoned in on the Fail. that was gob stopping enough. nt

[chervilant]

6. Proof positive

that the corporatists intend to continue to erode public education until ONLY their progeny get a quality education, and the rest of us watch our progeny become factory fodder or service industry drones.

[sad sally]

9. The eroding continues...

Last week, the city of Philadelphia's school system announced that it expects to close 40 public schools next year, and 64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands of experienced, qualified teachers.

from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Quiet Drama in Philadelphia
Published on Sunday, May 20, 2012 by Common Dreams
by Ellen Brown

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/20-1

[tclambert]

7. So Mitt Romney has found his running mate?

Ha! I accidentally typed "ruining mate."

[Scuba]

8. He got a third chance...

... and will likely get yet another.