Why is it that our corporate CEOs even those with lousy track records

[KlatooBNikto]

feel entitled to salaries, bonuses, perks and stock options that the best executives of Japanese Corporations do not even think about? For example, the CEO of GM, a company that produces the least liked cars in the market gets more than twenty times the compensation of the CEO of Honda one of the most admired and innovative corporations around.

[shaolinmonkey]

1. to piggyback, why is that when they fail, they get fired with multi-

million dollar buyouts? It's infuriating. Oh, but let's cut off those "wellfare queens". What complete and utter bullshit.

[leftofthedial]

2. capitalism in the US is more advanced

than in Japan

they haven't achieved the maximum greed potential yet.

[Solon]

3. Yet their technology is much more advanced...

Honda, as mentioned above, built the first working humanoid robot for crying out loud. Ours robots can barely navigate a single room on wheels.

[Jose Diablo]

4. Well, Laura seems pretty advanced for a robot n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

6. So, what does advanced technology have to do with capitalism?

If there were a connection, we'd all be driving little, highly efficient cars powered by H2 fuel cells, getting our home power from solar panels & wind turbines, running farms off fuel cells powered by the methane the farms produce from manure, etc.

Capitalism is one of the major obstacles to the development of technology. They're not gonna move us off oil until it's all sucked up, then on to nookyoolar energy because guess-who owns the Uranium deposits, etc.

[leftofthedial]

8. capitalism is THE major obstacle

to freedom

[atre]

11. it's cultural, not evolutionary

nm

[leftofthedial]

12. so there's no greed in Japan?

no avarice?

their culture is more social and "team" oriented and promotes the group over the individual

but they still have competition, ealousy and greed

their culture may slow the adoption of some characteristics of the economic system we gave them, but capitalism definitely does evolve and it evolves for the worse

[JHB]

5. Because the boards are made up of the same type of shameless greedheads.

And usually they have enough shareholder proxy votes to control the whole process.

[smirkymonkey]

7. Because they are all big, fat, bloodsucking pigs at the trough.

That's why.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. Because we now have a hereditary corporate executive class

whose only education has been in business school. They are totally focused on money and have no other values.

The days when CEOs were either founders or people who had worked their way up the ranks within the same company are gone. Now Myron Moneybags, son of a corporate bigwig, starts as an MBA in finance, takes a position at corporate headquarters, makes it to CEO, stays a few years, maximizes dividends to shareholders by any means necessary, and on the basis of that "success" is hired to be CEO at another corporation. Or else he runs a company into the ground, is fired with a "golden parachute," and is hired as CEO at another company, meanwhile acting as a board member for his college roommate's company. Or something like that.

They no more understand or sympathize with the lives of ordinary working people than the feudal lords understood or sympathized with the lives of their serfs.

[gpandas]

10. the hirers and firers and ceos are the same people.

[camero]

13. They have a law in Japan

The CEOs there can only make so much more than the average worker. Plus the Japanese culture tends to lean towards modesty and honor even among the upper classes.