Follow the conflicting headlines. If you can.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 14:10 Don’t you just love it when newspaper headlines seem to be completely at odds with each other? You have to wonder if anybody was really paying attention, or gave a rat’s ass.
In this mornings Reno Gazette-Journal, on the Business page, there was this:
Benefits perk up CEO pay packages. The article talks about the importance of giving CEO’s plenty of perks to sweeten their miserly pay packages. Things like use of the corporate jet, thousands of dollars for ‘financial planning’ (where to put those billions), the costs for home security at the various estates and mansions.
According to the article, corporate compensation advisors are queasy talking about CEO perks right now, but gee … “It’s not like directors haven’t thought about getting rid of perks. They’re still a sticking point for a lot of executives. They feel it’s part of their compensation package. And it’s a stature thing”. Ain’t that grand?
Below this article, the headline says:
Product-safety database under multiple attacks. You have to actually read past the lead paragraph to get it, but apparently the sweeping product-safety law’s Consumer Product Safety Commission’s new complaint database isn’t roundly loved by all. Why, you ask? “Businesses say it’s overly burdensome.” More burdensome, say, than handing out all those tough CEO perks. But probably not as burdensome as the price of sweet red bell peppers. I was in Winco yesterday, and a ‘working class’ couple were trying to decide if they could afford to buy two peppers - for about 89 cents apiece. The man said, “You know, that’s almost two dollars there. Do you need them?”
Yes, she probably didn’t actually need those sweet peppers. Not any more than the $1.5 million Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got for home security, or the $526,391 Black & Decker CEO, Nolan Archibald, got for personal travel on the corporate jet, or the $391, 107 Occidental Petroleum’s Ray Irani received for ‘financial planning’ on top of $76.1 million in compensation.
To end this little rant, I want to mention a ‘fer instance’ on why we might need a consumer complaint advocacy.
In February, Public Citizen got a hot tip about what was and was not being said at the annual webinar of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). It seems some attendees had some ethics and a conscience, and reported that one of the ASPS presidents advised members to avoid using the words ‘cancer’, ‘tumor’, ‘malignancy’ when talking about a type of cancer found in women with implants. He said it would be less frightening to use the word ‘condition’ … especially when talking to the media as well.
Golly gee. You wouldn’t want to frighten the little ladies, now would you? And if you can get rid of the teeth in an consumer advocacy/regulatory agency, then you can kill the messenger too.
Ain’t that grand?
-maven
