The Wall Street Occupation

Hey, we just had a PERFECT example of what is wrong with executives at big companies: Apotheker at HP.

Before he was fired he had already taken home most of his $1.2 million annual salary, a $4 million signing bonus and an additional $4.6 million awarded for relocation assistance and to offset payments that he forfeited from his previous employer, SAP (SAP).

Apotheker will receive $7.2 million in severance, which will be paid out over the next 18 months. He'll also receive a bonus of $2.4 million for his 11 months of service.

Also, HP will pay Apotheker up to $300,000 for any losses or fees on the sale of his California home, and will immediately vest 156,000 shares of stock valued at $3.6 million on the day Apotheker got the boot.

Holy crap! *I* would have gladly driven HP into the ground for half that approx. $24 million.

It's definitely painful to see, but you have to see it for more than just 'he got $24 million to drive HP into the ground in less than a year." Not saying I completely agree with it, I don't, but:

1) He was there less than a year, he made some decisions that were ultimately unpopular, but he wasn't there long enough to do most of the damage HP has suffered.
2) They hired him away from SAP. Most of that $4.6MM was paying for his deferred comp that he forfeited when he left. Regardless of what he did or did not do at HP, it would be pretty unfair to deny him that given that he could have just road it out at SAP and collected it. HP made him a promise to get him and they honored it.
3) HP is a multi-billion dollar company. $24MM isn't proportionally outrageous to the amount of revenue they generate. (Hard to talk profit given the current state of things).
4) What's the alternative? The price to get a top CEO is high. Yes, they could offer someone $100,000 and lots of good feelings, but who would take the job? To pay that much for a CEO is still no guarantee that it will work out, but to pay them $100k (or similar) is pretty much a guarantee of getting someone that is not qualified.

I'm not saying that executive compensation doesn't need reforms, it does, but there really aren't any good answers that I've seen. Stock options were supposed to be the big cure to executives that didn't have their compensation aligned with performance. Well that failed as it led to massive accounting scandals plus given that fundamentals haven't driven the stock market for about 15 years, it wasn't very well correlated to performance anyway.

The next time I see an executive compensation plan that truly aligns the compensation of a CEO to the long term performance of the company will be a first.
 
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I'm not saying that executive compensation doesn't need reforms, it does, but there really aren't any good answers that I've seen. Stock options were supposed to be the big cure to executives that didn't have their compensation aligned with performance. Well that failed as it led to massive accounting scandals plus given that fundamentals haven't driven the stock market for about 15 years, it wasn't very well correlated to performance anyway.
Even as a jackbooted puppet of my corporate masters, I must say this is an excellent summation of the situation.
 
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Stock compensation (or at least bonuses) could work if they were done right. Vest them after 5 or 10 years for instance.

But a $7.2 million dollar severance package after working there 11 months (I suspect it would have been for working there 1 second)? $2.4 million **BONUS**? A bonus is for doing something good or if the company does well not for managing to get fired.

Whoever is on the executive compensation committee of the board should be sacked. Oh, wait, those are executives from other companies.
 
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I love to see all debates that include Americans to degenerate into money talk .

Point is this, the rich are more useless than Pope's testicles or an ashtray on a bike, we don't need them while they need us. For as long as the capital rules over labor this world will suck , protests like this are only the beggining.
 
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Ah, ignorance must be bliss!! What a totally ridiculous point of view; even Marx (Karl not Groucho) didn't go that far. Believe me, you NEED the rich FAR more than they need you. Go get an education, grow up, whatever, cause even a primary school knowledge of economics shows how in error you are!!

PS:- I'm not rich.
 
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Ignorance?
Your post is laughable , all the rich do is remove wealth from the circulation , bury it under mountains or buy useless trophies .All you need is to find the fine line between motivation of the worker and fair distribution of wealth .

*Personal inslults like "go get an education" without any explanation simply show who you are.

No intention to disrupt you from talking all the money BS, please go on i am having lots of laughs.
 
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Stock compensation (or at least bonuses) could work if they were done right. Vest them after 5 or 10 years for instance.

But they already do that. Most stock options only vest after 5 years. Now sometimes you get a certain amount automatically vested if you are fired without cause.

But a $7.2 million dollar severance package after working there 11 months (I suspect it would have been for working there 1 second)? $2.4 million **BONUS**? A bonus is for doing something good or if the company does well not for managing to get fired.

I agree it sounds excessive, but HP has been in a bad state for years. How are you going to attract someone that can fix it without giving them some guarantees? Especially if they are guaranteed a similar amount at their current job?

Whoever is on the executive compensation committee of the board should be sacked. Oh, wait, those are executives from other companies.

And who would you put on it? And what were their options exactly? Again, who would take the job for $100k and a bunch of promises down the line IF things get turned around?
 
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For as long as the capital rules over labor this world will suck , protests like this are only the beggining.

That's pretty funny. The organizers of this farce declared they'd have over 20,000 people 'occupying wall street' for weeks. Well, they started with 500. They got to about a thousand over the weekend. We get a hundred times more than that for gay pride rallies and St. Patrick's Day celebrations.

And I hope the rest of the world decide to wage war on the rich. It will drive capital back to the US and re-solidify the US status as the dominant economic player of the world. So bring it.

Ignorance?
Your post is laughable , all the rich do is remove wealth from the circulation , bury it under mountains or buy useless trophies .All you need is to find the fine line between motivation of the worker and fair distribution of wealth .

*Personal inslults like "go get an education" without any explanation simply show who you are.

No intention to disrupt you from talking all the money BS, please go on i am having lots of laughs.

This is a very ignorant position. In my line of work, we do a lot of capital raising for corporations. Who do we raise that capital from? The wealthy and big pension funds, that's probably 95% of where the money comes from to fund companies that provide jobs for world.

I would like to fund these supposed mountains or 'useless trophies' though if they exist. Sure there is some splurging by the wealthy, but for every Paris Hilton, you have dozens of others that put their capital to work in the economy.
 
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Stole this from another board I post on. These are the people running this show. It's both hilarious and sad at the same time:

The more I read #OccupyWallStreet bloggers, the more I think they genuinely don't know what they are doing, they are just incredibly frustrated and seeking an outlet. When they finally coalesce around a set of demands, its going to be fascinating to see if they are realistic or not. I'm blocking out a whole afternoon next week to spend at this thing . . . I can't wait. From the multitude of articles I've read, it wouldn't surprising at all if they can't get over their "self governing" system. We are talking about a group that held a "working group" of 100 people that spent the day arguing over the proper use of gender pronouns before coming to the agreement that gender was merely a societal construct, and deciding everyone should be called "it" until that person told the other how "it" would like to be addressed, he/she/etc ( no, I'm really not making that up ). Some hilarious snippets:

On Wednesday night I attended my first General Assembly. Seeing 300 people using consensus method was powerful. Knowing that a lot of people there had never been part of a consensus process and were learning about it for the first time was powerful.
....
We ended up at Ground Zero and I felt the deep sense of sadness that that place now gives me: sadness over how, what is now in essence, just a construction site changed the world so much for the worse. A deep sense of sadness for all the tourists taking pictures around this construction site that is now a testament to capitalism, imperialism, torture, oppression
....
I felt something pulling me back to that space. It was that it felt like a space of possibility, a space of radical imagination. And it was energizing to feel like such a space existed. And so I started telling my friends to go down there and check it out. I started telling people that it was a pretty awesome thing, that just having a space to have these conversations mattered,
....
I went to the anti-patriarchy meeting because even though I was impressed by the General Assembly and its process I also noticed that it was mostly white men who were in charge of the committees and making announcements and that I had only seen one women of color get up in front of everyone and talk.
....
Women talked about not feeling comfortable in the drum circle because of men dancing up on them and how to change this, about how to feel safe sleeping out in the open with a lot of men that they didn’t know, about not-assuming gender pronouns and asking people which pronouns they would prefer.
....
And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened.
...
The line was changed, they listened, we sat down and re-wrote it and it has been published with our re-write. And when we walked away, I felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed a movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see

What was this mystical "line" in their Declaration you ask? Changing this:
being one race, the human race,
to this!
As one people, united
Oh, and several dozen protestors dressed like zombies today so that the financial workers could
"see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions," according to OWS spokesman Patrick Bruner.

In addition, they scored a major 'victory' by getting the Transit Workers Union to issue a letter of support. Nothing like combating the corruption and waste of Wall Street .......

With the corruption and waste of an East Coast union!

Great moves guys. At least it is getting colder and most of these people will be heading back to their parent's homes soon.
 
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And who would you put on it? And what were their options exactly? Again, who would take the job for $100k and a bunch of promises down the line IF things get turned around?

Apparently Meg Whitman.

Meg Whitman, as the new CEO and president of the Hewlett-Packard Co., will be getting $1 in base salary, a target annual bonus of $2.4 million for HP's 2012 fiscal year, and an option to buy 1.9 million shares of the company's stock at $23.59 (price when she joined) apiece under certain conditions.
 
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Apparently Meg Whitman.

Meg Whitman, as the new CEO and president of the Hewlett-Packard Co., will be getting $1 in base salary, a target annual bonus of $2.4 million for HP's 2012 fiscal year, and an option to buy 1.9 million shares of the company's stock at $23.59 (price when she joined) apiece under certain conditions.

Not exactly. She was already on their BoD and had a very large stake in HP. She already has a large vested interest in seeing the company succeed. How do you get someone that doesn't already have that?

Plus, she could easily get vested in the options earlier if the Board wants to and her bonus could get paid regardless. There's no great solution.
 
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Last I heard the figure for protestors was 5000 in liberty squere and 750 were arrested by the police?
Capturelotsofpeopleatoccupywallstreet.JPG

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/20...et-protests-wave-union-support-arrives-73461/

Post: #21 RE: Where are you? Occupy Wall Street – September 30, 2011 Update: Reports are the protestors have now shut down NYPD headquarters. Yesterday 4 unions announced their support for the Occupy Wall Street protests, including the massive 200,000 TWU, The Teamster’s Union, SEIU and the IWW. The a collective group with one million members announced their support.

Even media mogul Russell Simmons told MSNBC he would be joining the movement vowing to bring hundreds of thousands of people. Now, NYPD police scanners are estimating a crowd up to 5,000 are occupying liberty square in a scene that is now starting to look more like Egypt’s Tahrir square.
 
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Do you remember the 60's? I do!! (On a good day that is) :)
 
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How so?

Übereil

The over dramaticism of changing a line in their 'declaration'.
The zombie crap, which just makes people laugh not actually listen to their arguments.
The fact that they really have no coherent demands (which is probably the number one thing outside of size that separates them from the Arab Spring protests).
The referring to people as 'it' until they let you know which pronoun they prefer because gender is a 'social construct'?

I didn't copy even all of the retarded quotes. Here's another one for you:

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly operates under a revolutionary “progressive stack.” A normal “stack” means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been in place since the beginning, it is necessary, and it is important.

“Step up, step back” was a common phrase of the first week, encouraging white men to acknowledge the privilege they have lived in their entire lives and to step back from continually speaking. This progressive stack has been inspiring and mind-boggling in its effectiveness. Manissa McCleave Maharawal writes on Racialicious regarding her block. In fact, the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street would not have been released if not for the blocking power of a different document a week prior by the Speakeasy caucus (for non-male identified and traditionally marginalized people):


If these people really want their protest to attract more than just the fringe and the bored, they need to cut that bullshit out and make a list of specific (and realistic) demands.
 
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Last I heard the figure for protestors was 5000 in liberty squere and 750 were arrested by the police?
Capturelotsofpeopleatoccupywallstreet.JPG

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/20...et-protests-wave-union-support-arrives-73461/

That was over the weekend. Lot of people came out just to see the show from what I could tell. Definitely come back down as people are going back to work.

The support of those unions is interesting. I'm not familiar with SEIU and the IWW, but TWU and the Teamsters are notoriously corrupt and morally bankrupt. They certainly can bring out the numbers (it won't be anywhere near the 1MM members they have, but maybe a few thousand extra here and there), but that 'help' comes at a price. You can bet that in the end, the union bosses will take over, benefit themselves quite a bit, maybe get a few scraps for their members, and declare victory.

The only OccupyWallStreeters that are happy about this alliance are the naive.

It's what I warned of. If things don't improve quickly, we will see protests as great (or greater) than those of the sixties.

Doubt it. We have a lot farther to go before that kind of social unrest occurs. The sad fact is that Americans are lazy and while we all like to complain about politics, bank bailouts, and the rich not paying taxes, most people still have reasonably comfortable lives. Until that changes, there won't be more than just fringe movements.
 
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And I hope the rest of the world decide to wage war on the rich. It will drive capital back to the US and re-solidify the US status as the dominant economic player of the world. So bring it.
Not on capital bn but on excessive profits. Remember "privatizing profits and nationalizing losses" bit?
 
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