Alternet Posts on Dick E Dauch: The Greedy Ass

Okay, the Greedy Ass part is mine, but it fits, I think.

I was noticing that I'd gottena couple of hits off alternet and didn't know why...so I looked, and wouldn't you know it, they've linked to a post I had up on that piece of shit Dauch. Highly recommend you head over and read it yourself, but as a teaser:

Smart societies understand this dynamic and work, through tax laws and cultural norms, to keep rewards within reason. Here in the United States, we used to have many such laws and norms. We no longer do. We have swept away the restraints that once kept our society's rewards relatively reasonable.

And now we're paying the price. Our smart and talented today regularly do dumb things -- and cause great damage.

Our latest exhibit A: the career of Richard E. Dauch, Corporate America's latest superstar executive turned scourge of the late great American middle class.

Dauch currently serves as the CEO of American Axle and Manufacturing, an auto parts giant carved out of General Motors 14 years ago. Late this past May, after threatening to outsource "all of our business to other locations around the world," Dauch forced 3,600 striking workers at his company's five original American plants to accept a contract that cuts wages from $28 an hour down to as low as $14.35 and slices the company's U.S. workforce by half.

One month later, in June, Dauch pocketed his reward: a $8.5 million bonus from the American Axle board of directors for his "leadership role" in "the structural transformation achieved under our new labor agreements."

Dauch has now collected, over the last decade, over $258 million in compensation from American Axle -- and, in the process, tossed thousands of U.S. worker families out of the middle class.

Auto workers, ironically, once symbolized that middle class, and for good reason. Precedent-setting union contracts at GM and other U.S. automakers after World War II helped give birth to the first mass middle class in world history.

And the executives who signed those contracts? They did well, too, but not too well. In 1950, for instance, General Motors president Charlie Wilson pulled in $586,100 in income, a bit over $5 million in current dollars. Today, someone at that $5 million level will usually clear, after taxes, around $4 million. Wilson cleared the equivalent of only $1.25 million. He paid nearly three-quarters of his income in taxes.

They've linked to my posting on Dick E Dauch's entitlement mentality. Right now, I'd rather the strike had been more successful for the AAM workers. I'd much rather that than a link on alternet.

All in all, there's little more to say about Dick E Dauch except he's a greedy bastard. Yep, that about sums it up.