How to Pay Your CEO

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Can we call it corruption?

In other words, the very firm that helps Verizon’s directors decide what to pay its executives has a long and lucrative relationship with the company, maintained at the behest of the executives whose pay it recommends.

No, we’ll call it corporate capitalism. The New York Times has a fantastic story today looking into the process by which corporations pay their CEOs. Arrangements like the above are hardly uncommon. And executive compensation often bears no relation to the actual performance of the company. Among other things, the story cites one study identifying 11 major companies “whose shareholder returns had been negative for five years, but whose chief executives’ pay had exceeded $15 million during the last two years combined.” Lucky them.

MORE: See this story for more. “The average pay for a chief executive increased 27 percent last year, to $11.3 million.” This at a time when median wages have stagnated.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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