CEO's aren't the owners of the company. Stockholders are the owners.

No big news to me. When the owners of a company can't set compensation plans, the CEO takes a 'lion's share' of the wealth.

Link

In their filings with federal regulators, these companies also disclose details behind those pay plans – how much stock, stock options, “performance” shares and other esoteric holdings they’ve awarded to their top executives.

Let's see if there is a real world analogy to explain this. Nope. None. Only in the business world does the CEO get rich faster than the owners of a company.

Wait! Al Capone! Nope. Sorry. I thought I had a real world example of a CEO getting paid more than the owners of a free enterprise. Capone owned the mob. Or did he?

Bill Gates gives away his fortune

I got in trouble for this in college. MicroSoft has issued cash dividend to all stockholders. Bill got about $8,000,000,000. If global wage was $2 per day. a day's work was at least 12 hours and we had 6 billion people on the planet, assuming every 2 out of 3 people were able bodied, 4 billion people would have been employed for one day on Bill's windfall check. So what did the Billster do in his lifetime that was equal to 48 billion man hours of ditch digging?

Consider this: We could have built 10 Great Pyramids of Giza with that much manual labor.



But, there is a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which does some good deeds.

Melinda tells Bill how to give his money away. Including helping farmers access the internet via cell phones. This picture is copied from the Gates Foundation web site. Sort of highlighting the work being done primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.



Sort of like Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island told Thurston Howell III to tolerate the little people.



I'm sorry Mr. Gates. Your foundation must do a lot of good work. In my humble opinion, our country needs to look at the issues of wealth growth and concentration of power before we give everything away to just a couple of people.

Jobs for the homeless

Japan, the only country to ever endure nuclear bombings, built a few nuclear reactors. One right on the coast. On a fault line as all of Japan is an earthquake zone.

Tragic events damaged the reactor releasing a lot of radiation. Some radiation has reached the United States through ocean currents and sea life.

As Conservatives are always looking for the good news, let's spin the good news.

Jobs for the homeless!

This has been in the news before but Reuters and Yahoo news have a special report at this link.

Japan is using "people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong."

What's minimum wages for a glow in the dark job?

Hard to say exactly. "The cost of commuting, extra pay (such as working on holidays, at night, overtime, etc.) and temporary pays (bonus, tips, etc.) must be paid exclusively and cannot be used to calculate towards the minimum wage." The wage is between $8.40 to $10.90.

So, mimimum wage workers get paid for their commute, holidays, night shifts, overtime, and possibly bonuses.

Not bad for glowing in the dark.

Luckily, Japan has national healthcare available. And healthcare costs per capita are less than half of those in the USA.

"Patients are free to select physicians or facilities of their choice and cannot be denied coverage. Hospitals, by law, must be run as non-profit and be managed by physicians. For-profit corporations are not allowed to own or operate hospitals. Clinics must be owned and operated by physicians."

Wow!

We could use some alternatives to fossil fuels. Let's not build any nuclear plants on the San Adreas fault line.

We should immediately change our health care system to lower costs and put doctors back in charge.

That is the earth rattling change we need.