Hold the CEOs Up for Scrutiny... But Leave Our Celebrities Alone!
by John Reit (April 12, 2006)

I might sound a bit conceited with this statement, but to any other person an article about a new SEC rule might have seemed trivial. To me, it was a significant statement about the current American values; and I don't mean a positive statement.

In their never ending campaign to create class warfare, the mainstream media, hypocritical wealthy Democrat politicians, Hollywood limousine liberals, and the left in general have regularly expressed a hatred toward corporate CEOs for their "bloated" salaries, benefits, and pensions. There's no rational reason, according to these socialists, for a man to earn in one week what the average worker earns in one year.

To liberal America's pleasure, any publicly held company is required by law to publish salaries and perks of their executives. But under a new Securities and Exchange Commission regulation companies would be forced to disclose compensation details of as many as three non-executive employees whose pay and benefits exceed any of its top five executives. This means any entertainment, media, and production company, as well as any professional sports team, might have to make the salaries of their top performers or athletes public.

Ironically, executives of these companies are challenging the rule. DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. honcho Jeffery Katzenberg stated the case for opposition in a letter to the SEC, saying the regulation would:

Apparently, Katzenberg (a notorious liberal) sees nothing wrong with throwing the public scrutiny spotlight on the likes of Terry Semel of Yahoo!, William McGuire of UnitedHealth Group, Howard Solomon of Forest Labs, and so on. Their privacy is not nearly as important as Denzel Washington of Remember the Titans, Tim Robbins of Mystic River, Brad Pitt of Oceans 12, or Tom Cruise of The Last Samurai.

Let's do a little comparison. Semel, McGuire, and Solomon are all older rich white men whose only crime was going to school, working hard, and becoming successful in corporate America. That doesn't fly with liberals who spend a great deal of their time building and nurturing a public hatred of men such as these. They did not become successful the "right" way. They didn't have to suffer like celebrities. They never even knew what it's like to suffer.

People like Washington, Robbins, Pitt, and Cruise - now these are people who represent the American dream. They had to overcome real obstacles like being beautiful all their lives, spending hours in the make-up chair, having their pictures taken everywhere they go, and trying to keep the illegal status of their cleaning people and landscape artists a secret. I mean, people like Semel, McGuire, and Solomon can only imagine the pure Hell these people have gone through.

Luckily, these victims have finally found justice by earning $20 million per film. And they really earn it. I can't even fathom what it must be like to pretend as a career. These brave souls have to pretend to be an astronaut one month, a criminal the next month, and a renegade cop the month after that. And what do they do when they're not pretending? Hang out in a trailer like common white trash munching on prime rib and M&Ms (brown ones taken out before hand, of course) while watching their big screen television and getting a massage (whether it be the legal or illegal kind). The horror… the horror.

Sarcasm aside, this is what our country has come to - a society that values the work of actors more than the brilliant men and women who run the most powerful companies in the world. We place on a pedestal these self-indulgent, self-righteous multi-millionaire celebrities who, for the most part, spend their time trying to improve their lavish lifestyles while simultaneously criticizing the greed of corporate America. Meanwhile, CEOs are making vital decisions every single day that affect the lives of tens of thousands of people. Every move a CEO makes will determine the futures of those who work for them - whether it's their Director of Marketing, or their warehouse employee who prepares a product for shipment. They are decisions that would make most of us shake at the knees if we had to make them.

Yet these people take on this responsibility every single day.

Do they get over compensated for it? Well, consider this. Probably the most famous CEO of recent history is Jack Welch. Welch took over GE in 1981, when the company was estimated to be worth $14 billion. By the time Welch retired in 2001, GE was worth over $500 billion. Let's assume that Jack was compensated one percent of the growth for which he was responsible. That's a little under $5 billion. Is that too much? Think of the jobs that Welch created during his tenure. Besides, if you had a company and could hire someone that could increase its value by 3500 percent in 20 years, what would that person be worth to you?

I'm not saying that the product celebrities create doesn't have value. And I'm not suggesting that they are overpaid. They keep us entertained and certainly, they keep film crews working. They also keep movie theatre workers employed and t-shirt companies in business. So their work does have value. But in the grand scheme of our economy, it's the names that don't appear on the marquis that make our country what it is. These people who provide the income for the common man to easily afford a night of entertainment at the local cinema.

It's a sad statement about our society if we can hold these great men and women, who keep the rest of us working, under a public microscope, but shudder at the notion that the highest paid celebrities might have to tell the public what they earn in a year.