Mark it on your calendar, anti-bailout activists and muckrakers: GE's annual meeting will be held in Orlando, FL on April 22nd. That meeting is everyone's chance to ask why it is that a company whose stock has gone down by three-fourths in the last year, and which would took hundreds of billions in subsidies and guarantees from the Feds, is still paying its top officers eight-figure salaries.
And oh by the way: Whatever happened to those $500,000 salary caps that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner said that they were imposing back in February?
GE needs p.r. help in the worst way. But happily for GE, it has an in-house propaganda arm, in the form of MSNBC, the semi-official "news" network of the Obama Administration and the Democratic National Committee.
No wonder Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and all the rest are singing such a pro-Obama song on MSNBC--MSNBC is not only the "cash cow" for the company, in terms of keeping the bailout money coming, but MSNBC's leftward bleatings are also needed to change the subject away from the absurd over-compensation of GE execs when they have put in a performance that rivals that of AIG in its money-losing badness.
And as for CNBC, well, they've been in the tank for the Obama administration all along--Obama AND the bailout. That's the new Wall Street mantra: We need the Democrats to be in charge, because we need a steady stream of bailout money. So yes, Jim Cramer has taken a whack at Obama, but Cramer also said that he voted for Obama. And as for Rick Santelli, he does seem to be an honest voice, so don't expect him to last too long as GE settles in on its suck-up-to-power media strategy.
As you can see below (you can click on each of these images to expand them and make them more legible) from GE's Proxy Statement, looking forward to its April 22 Annual Meeting, the top seven officers of the company, including Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, all "earned" more than $12 million in 2008, at a time when GE's stock price fell in half, from 36 in January 2008 to 37 at the end of December 2008. (All images in this post are screen grabs from the Proxy Statement.)
But of course, that's not all that these folks got. Let's not forget the additional stock bonuses. It's a little hard to read, but it shows that each of these worthies is getting another $1-3 million.
But wait! There's more! These GE-ers all seem to have access to companies cars and airplanes, too, for their own personal, taxable use:
Once again, all these are images are simply screen grabs from the Proxy Statement so have a look there, if you wish--or just click on the image and take a closer look.
And finally, last and not least, here's the "all other" compensation table:
There you have it, folks. One of the biggest and worst-run corporations--a company poisoned by the reckless lending of its GE Capital unit, just like so many banks and brokerages--is now planning on flouting the salary caps, and also to retain its incompetent management. This isn't just an issue for GE shareholders. It's an issue for taxpayers, because we are all on the hook this waste and abuse.
UPDATE: On the nightly newscasts tonight, ABC News pounded on the Obama Administration for not being on top of the AIG bonuses issue. But NBC was strangely silent about the administration's role. So no mention, on the MSNBC-driven Peacock Network, of Geithner being in the middle off all these bailouts, going back to the fall. Instead, NBC's Kevin Tibbles merely noted, in passing, during the course of a sidebar feature on AIG, Obama's supposed "outrage" at the bonuses.
But hats off to Jake Tapper for some tough questioning, and even better, some tough reporting.
