Corporate Billionaires: From Greed to Sleaze

Gosh, I miss the old days of CEO greed, when the pay gap between Boss Hog and everyday employees was merely gross.

Today, the guiding ethic for top executive enrichment is to have no ethics. Grab as much as you can as fast as you can, everyone else be damned. And never mind that as chief, you did absolutely nothing to “earn” that exorbitant stash of cash.

How exorbitant? Corporations try to hide the actual numbers, but under an insider accounting measure called “compensation actually paid” reveals the obscene truth. Last year, America’s 10 highest paid CEOs averaged more than a billion dollars each in pay. One person, one year, one billion.

And the Number One highest-paid corporate honcho last year, Alex Karp, made off with nearly $7 billion! That’s $560 million a month in personal pay. With the exceptions of Jesus and Dolly Parton, no one is worth anywhere near that!

And what does Alex do? He’s the CEO of Palantir, a high-tech outfit now working for Donald Trump to collect and computerize all of your and my personal data, creating government dossiers so federal agents can monitor us. Sleazy, but in today’s Corporate America, that’s a path to untold riches.

Still, for the insanely rich, too much is not enough. So, they, their lobbyists, and Republican congress critters are now furiously pushing for what Trump calls a “Big Beautiful Bill.” It would cut Medicaid, food stamps, and other basic human needs for America’s lowest-paid working families. Why? To give a billion-dollars more in annual tax cuts to hucksters like Karp… and Trump himself. This is worse than kleptocracy – it’s sleazocracry.

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