Corporate Naughtiness Revisited

I read this on dailykos this morning. Big surprise here - of course.

"The Rich Are Different by Devilstower

Thu Dec 27, 2007 at 01:54:10 PM PST

Michelle Leder at footnoted.org specializes in reading company reports and looking for those little special treats given to those folks who have their feet at the top of the corporate ladder.

So what has she found? Marketplace has some of Michelle's best finds for 2007.

How about the CEO at Qwest, whose daughter gets to use the corporate jet to travel to school? Puts that kid whose mother pulls up to jr. high in a Hummer in her place. Cost to the stockholders: about $600,000.

Personal travel was a theme in CEO perks this year. Just ask the CEO of I2. The company covered his commuting expenses so he could live in Maine while the company offices were in Dallas. Cost to the stockholders: $949,000 -- and by the way, the company was busy scrambling to avoid collapse. I'm sure the other employees got equally nice treatment."(rest of post here)

They were jacking it from Marketplace themselves. There is something devilishly wonderful about the self-righteous snarkiness that progressives, liberals, or whatever the preferred nomenclature is, express when these perennial stories pop up. Plus who doesn’t like to snark a little themselves?

I was at a funny little dinner party a few days ago with some friends of the family who all work in higher education. They were speaking about the move of some people on the sub-continent away from agriculture and toward manufacturing jobs. Their main thesis appeared to be that if the poor Indians could see the results of the move away from AG to factories ten years on, then they would stay in AG.

I love these people; I grew up with them. But please, give me a break. Do they wish that they themselves had stayed agrarian? I looked in all the packages and gift bags from the day and I only found one not made in China. Talk about hypocritical. I think I disappoint my family when I make comments to this effect, but isn’t it easy to sit in your heated house streaming internet Christmas radio, exchanging inexpensive gifts and even cheaper social commentary?

Progressives are just as complicit in this corporate world as anyone else. As long as cable television is cheap and consumer goods are cheap, we are all willing to grind brown and yellow people into the ground.