First of all, you wouldn’t have the money to have all that. That’s the purpose of struggling to get the raise or the loan. Second, you aren’t dumb. You know that excesses like those described will have a negative effect on the people from which you want to get the loan or the raise.
It seems, however, that the captains of the auto industry don’t understand what you and we call good sense. Just a week ago, the CEOs of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler went to Washington, D.C. with tin cups in hand begging Congress to bail them out of their miserable problems with a loan of $25 billion. Sort of a bridge loan that could carry them through the rest of this year and into next. Okay. It is obvious to all that they need the help. But why in heck did each one of the CEOs fly to D.C. in their own private jet? Talk about ostentatious. Talk about being just plain dumb. Of course, the members of Congress were not impressed in the least.
But wait, there’s more. The mainstream press has not been reporting it, but it is being reported from some sources that leading executives over at Chrysler are getting a bonus totaling about $30 million. It seems that these bonuses were some how included in their contracts when Chrysler made the break from Daimler as a retention payment to keep them on. The idea behind this was to assure that anyone who may buy Chrysler would be committed to keep the execs. Come on! Give me a break! Chrysler is burning money, laying workers off, paring down its network of dealerships, cutting back production, cutting models and asking for billions of dollars in bailout money from the federal government and they have the gall to allow 50 execs to divide up $30 million among themselves. It is simply unbelievable!