What makes CEOs so Special

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US...  Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."

Thom Hartmann asks the question: what makes the CEOs of large trans-national corporations so special that it's necessary to pay them hundreds of millions and billions of dollars?

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Of course this is not the first time the Oligarchs have taken control of the United States.

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results.  An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos.  And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.

By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society.  And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.

But we have seen very little of this from the Obama administration.  Yes he has occasionally talked the talk but up until now there has been no evidence of walking the walk.  The real problem may be the Supreme Court.  The Roberts court is stacked with pro-oligarchy judges.

In his latest book, The New Golden Age, economist Ravi Batra is critical of the current oligarchy but sees signs that we may be on the verge of a new revolution. 

Note:

The above is an excerpt from Thom Hartmann's New book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.