Grade This! - April 18, 2006

The latest news wrap-up: Neil Young’s busy week and Time’s lazy Sunday.

By Brian Beutler
Tuesday April 18, 2006
 

They Can Only Afford Three Hawaiian Islands This Year

What’s really neat about leading the business world is that you don’t have to change anything at all to be showered with rewards. Last year, after a very modest rise in overall production indices (like, say, GDP), CEO wages went up 16 percent. The year before that it was 41 percent. Compounded, that’s something like 63 percent over two years. If salaries for executives at public companies were indexed to productivity, their raises would have been paltry—even lower than the increase in worker wages. Shockingly, business leaders have opted out of a fair approach to compensation, choosing instead to give themselves the sort of raises that, in percentage terms, might be enough to lift minimum wage earners above the poverty line if applied to poor people. Also surprisingly, outsourcing executive positions to parts of the world where the going rate for VPs and CEOs is thousands of percents less than in this country remains a non-existent option for companies that are (they assure us) trying hard to remain competitive in the global economy.

Increasing minimum wage: A+
Indexing minimum wage to inflation: A-
Indexing CEO salary to, oh, say, Viagra sales: F

Apparently, Exemplary Performance Means You Never Soiled Yourself at a Board Meeting

The above phenomenon seems to spiral even farther out of control if your company was responsible for the most ecologically damaging oil spill in history, plus is a candidate for MVP on global warming. Keep that in mind, business students: Work for companies that have a bad rep (preferably one that destroys the environment or enslaves third world children), turn their profitability around, and you could get a half-billion dollar retirement package. You should probably know that, if Forbes is to be believed, Lee Raymond of Exxon earned about $23 million in 2003 and $25 million in 2004, but this year he was handed $51 million—a raise of more than 100 percent—even before the retirement package. Of course, we shouldn’t begrudge him a penny. After all, Raymond is being rewarded for the company’s stock surge and immense profit that took place under his (surely) careful and ethical, consumer-minded tenure.

Lee Raymond: F
Oil profiteering: B (maybe higher prices will teach people not to drive SUVs)
Half-a-billion dollars: yes please!

Time Discovers the Interweb

Time has an interesting and amusing article about people who get famous via online videos. (Note, this does not count the patented Paris Hilton Internet Salaciousness Technique or PHIST®). No, the Time story is about the silly people who (by design or by horribly embarrassing accident) post videos of themselves being REALLY dorky, or of their java-animated dorky cartoons on the World Wide Web…you know… that place where practically everybody spends at least 12 hours a day wasting time looking for silly people who have aired out humiliating videos of themselves. Anyhow, they seem to have left out descriptions of (or at least links to) some of the most comprehensive sources of this kind of amusement—sites like eBaum’s World and Weebls Stuff. So there you go. Also, though they mention the Numa-Numa guy and the cupcake rap, they left out my personal favorite. Without further ado, I give you Star Wars Kid. Enjoy.

Star Wars Kid: A++++
Sadistic internet voyeurism: C :-\
Nerding out on harmless stuff like this: A

Angry Young, Man!

Bart: “Mom, who’s Neil Young?” Marge: “He was a singer in the sixties, like the Archies and the Banana Splits.” Perhaps shaken by this declaration of irrelevancy on a recent Simpsons, Neil Young is reportedly coming back with a vengeance. Young—who slammed Nixon over Kent State ; then turned right and supported Reagan; then went anti-corporate and smacked his fellow artists for making cola commercials; and more recently has been emphasizing his softer side—has now rush-recorded and wants to rush-release a collection called "Living With War.” According to the NY Times, “titles on the album include ‘Let’s Impeach the President,’ which features Mr. Bush’s voice overlaid above a 100-voice choir singing, ‘Flip flop.’ Another title is ‘Lookin’ for a Leader.’” Presumably fearing a Dixie Chicks-like boycott/sales backlash, Young’s long, long-time manager, Elliot Roberts, spun, "It’s not a political, Democratic versus Republican feel." Actually, we agree with Elliot – opposition to this Administration’s failed policies and abysmal record should transcend party, ideology, even taste in aging rockers. Long may you run. This note’s for you. etc.

Marge Simpson: A
Neil Young on records like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, On The Beach, Tonight’s The Night, Zuma, Decade: A
The Bush record: D
Estimated pre-review of actual merit of this rushed album by a cranky old guy: C
Fact that, due to schedule conflicts, I didn’t insert the hyperlinks for all these old refs, leaving you born-in-the-80’s folks to Google them yourself: Fine

Submitted by David Halperin, Campus Progress

Surely They’ll Change Their Minds Once We Show Them More Evidence

Working in Ethiopia, a team of scientists headed by famed UC Berkeley anthropologist Tim White has smoothed the jagged evolutionary continuum between Ardipithecus ramidus (ape thingy) and Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) by discovering “the most primitive Australopithecus, known as adamensis.” In science world, this is the sort of discovery that’s great because it was elusive but predictable. But if you’ve totally lost touch with reality you might contradict yourself by bringing up “the previously paltry state of fossil evidence for evolution,” and then adding that “the newly discovered fossil evidence provides paltry evidence for the evolutionary transitions in question,” in the same paragraph. By the way, since the Intelligent Design folks are such big fans of “evidence”, I should mention to them that the word “evidence” “evolved” from the Latin word “evidens” or “obvious” as in, “they’re obviously all bat-shit insane.”

Latin: A
Science: A+
ID adherents, who, because of their rejection of science believe that, at 3000 years old, Latin is almost half the age of the universe: F

Got an item you’ve graded and want to submit it for the next wrap-up? Send your submissions to cpwebmaster@campusprogress.org.

 
Brian Beutler graduated from UC Berkeley in 2004 and has interned at The Washington Monthly and the Brookings Institution. He writes for the Washington City Paper.

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