"It’s greed to top all" by Brian McGrory | Globe Columnist, April 13, 2012
At some point in the future, maybe 50 years from now, maybe a century, historians will look back at this era as the time when America basically lost its collective mind.
Like Germany under Hitler?
The latest example is Ted Kelly, the recently retired chief executive officer of Boston’s Liberty Mutual insurance company. Ask any official or business person across the state, and they’ll sing Kelly’s praises: good guy, insanely smart, devoted to the common cause, all of that manifest in the fact that Liberty Mutual grew at breakneck speed under his leadership and gave millions of dollars away.
Also see: Mass. Democrats' Cash Cow
State Handing Out Tax Loot to Liberty
At least you know whose pocket it was going into as your social services are slashed.
There’s something else, though, that came out this week. Ted Kelly had an annual compensation package of $50 million for the last four years. Yes, there’s a zero after the 5. That’s just shy of a million dollars a week, $192,000 per working day, $24,000 an hour. To run an insurance company....
Related: Liberty Mutual’s $50m CEO pay stands out
Insurer’s ex-CEO reveals 2011 pay
Every Liberty Mutual policyholder, all those regular people making ends meet at kitchen tables, have paid for Kelly to take $200 million out of the company, their company, over the last four years. Every Massachusetts taxpayer is footing part of his salary, given that the state granted Kelly’s company a $46.5 million tax break for a new headquarters in Boston. The whole thing is grotesque....
Corporate profits set a post World War II record last year, but worker pay fell 2 percent.
Just thought that was important.
Chieftains are swimming in millions while unemployment is historically high. We’re in an era of princes and paupers, mansions and minions, with income inequality here rivaling developing countries like Uganda and Cameroon and tax policies that favor the uber-rich.
Time for a revolution!
Fifty million a year for an insurance executive? The corporate world thinks this is business as usual, the way things are supposed to be. It’s really nothing short of obscene, more evidence of an unparalleled age of greed.
--more--"
