American corporations today are like the great European monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the rules under which they function and to direct the allocation of public resources. This is not a prediction of what’s to come; this is a simple statement of the present state of affairs. Corporations have effectively captured the United States: its judiciary, its political system, and its national wealth, without assuming any of the responsibilities of dominion. Evidence is everywhere.

The “smoking gun” is CEO pay. Compensation is an expression of concentrated power — of enterprise power concentrated in the chief executive officer and of national power concentrated in corporations. Median US CEO pay for 2010 was up 35 percent in the midst of a lingering recession, while CEO pay over the last decade has doubled as a percentage of pre-tax corporate income. Yet there has been no justification for current levels of CEO pay based on economic value added.

When Lee Raymond retired as CEO of ExxonMobil at the end of 2005, after six years at the helm of the merged firm and another six as head of Exxon before that, he walked away with more than a quarter billion dollars in realizable equity. In his final year alone, Raymond received in excess of $70 million in total compensation — an hourly wage of about $34,500 calculated at 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. No metric can justify such a raid on the corporate treasury and shareholder equity, but Raymond is only a particularly egregious and early example of what has since become common practice. Little wonder that the driving concern of banks receiving TARP “bailout” money was to pay it back so as to escape any restriction on executive pay.

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