There will be no joy until all of north america's workers ,who's jobs aren't feasible to ship offshore, get crushed to, well, the lowest wage possible (we can get rid if the minimum wage if we want to) and then of course house prices collapse by 90 plus %. I can't wait for the good times to roll.............
Yikes! Twinkie maker execs gave themselves huge raises up to 300%, then went bankrupt
The looting of Hostess brands by its top executives is an object lesson in how CEO pay harms the 99 percent and kills the U.S. economy.
Dow Jones had the scoop yesterday: The troubled Twinkie maker's executives gave themselves big raises before seeking bankruptcy protection. Reports the news service;
Unsecured creditors suspect that Hostess Brands Inc. may have "manipulated" its executives' pay--sending its former chief executive's salary, in particular, skyrocketing- in the months leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, in an effort to dodge the Bankruptcy Code's compensation requirements, according to a redacted court filing reviewed by Dow Jones.
The official committee representing Hostess's unsecured creditors wants to launch a formal investigation in the bankruptcy case, hoping to dig deeper into the bakery company's senior executive compensation. The information the group has already gathered suggests "the possibility" that the company converted a chunk of its top executives' pay from performance-based bonuses to guaranteed salary, "at least in part to sidestep" rules designed to ensure that companies in bankruptcy aren't enticing their employees to stay on board with the promise of cash.
http://www.teamster....%E2%80%99-execs
As Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Ken Hall said,
The Dow Jones article suggests that management broke the law, looted the company and then told workers to suck it up and sacrifice.
If this is true, Hostess executives have violated their agreement with the Teamsters that all parties, including management, would share equally in concessions that would help keep this company alive.
It would be outrageous for the board of directors, which included secured lenders, to approve executive salary increases of up to 300 percent for a company that has filed for bankruptcy twice in four years.
more
http://www.teamster....-top-executives
CEOs are looting their corporations at the expense of innovation, trainng and employment, writes William Lazonick, the director of the UMass Center for Industrial Competitiveness.
CEOs have an incentive to inflate the price of their company's stock. They do it by buying back the company's own shares (called a stock buyback), which raises the share price. And as Lazonick points out, the practice of stock buybacks has gotten out of control:
In other words, they're destroying the US economy.
http://www.nakedcapi...99-percent.html
Hostess management would like you to believe the company is failing because union workers make too much money and enjoy benefits that are too rich. In another era it would be hard to believe that executives driving a company into bankruptcy would make such a brazen claim. Especially since former CEO Brian Driscoll's salaray rose from $750,000 to $2.55 million in the run-up to bankruptcy -- and other executives' pay rose by as much as 80 percent.
But this is the age of corporate greed. It is now the norm rather than the exception for CEOs to put their own greed ahead of the interests of the company they've been entrusted to run.
more
http://www.reuters.c...E80A0I120120111
