Not Enough Bullets

Yep, here's another example morality, or lack thereof, of the American "Entrepreneur with someone else's Money," usually abbreviated to MBA, class. While executives were running companies, like UAL, LTV, WestPoint Stevens, Polaroid, Reliance Insurance, and Pillowtex into the ground, they were taking hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries:

UAL Corp., US Airways Group Inc. and eight other companies paid executives $350 million in the five years before the U.S. was forced to take over their under-funded employee pension plans, a government report said.

One airline company missed $979 million in required pension contributions while its top three executives took $55.5 million in compensation, and another paid four executives $120.4 million amid two bankruptcies, a Government Accountability Office report today found. Data including dates of the pension terminations, stock awards and pay levels show the unnamed companies were UAL, the parent of United Airlines, and US Airways.

Benefits to retirees were cut in some cases by as much as two-thirds, as executives got salary increases, stock awards, retention bonuses and other pay, the GAO said in a report that studied pension takeovers from 2002 through 2005. Representative George Miller of California is considering legislation that will freeze executive compensation if a company’s rank-and-file pension plan becomes significantly under-funded.

The problem here is that the Federal Pension Guarantee Corporation (FPGC) had to take over their pensions, at what will eventually be a cost of billions to the taxpayers, in addition to cutting pensions of ordinary guys who played by the rules and did their jobs to the best of their abilities.

Here's an idea: If the FPGC has to take over a pension, they get to claw back anything that senior executives got over the pay of the President of the US for the preceding 10 years.

Then maybe, just maybe, these guys won't use the pension funds to juice the numbers for this year's bonuses.