What Color is Your Parachute, Carly?
It is intensely irritating when Republicans - like McCain and Palin, for instance - pretend to be the champions of working-class interests. And when they do, the inevitable result is this sort of totally unsurprising hypocrisy:
In a speech on the economy today in Scranton, PA, John McCain spat populist fire as he railed at the high executive compensation and golden parachutes enjoyed by top Wall Street executives. From the prepared remarks:
“The firms we help need accountability too. We cannot have taxpayers footing the bill forbloated golden parachutes like we see in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, where the top executives are asking for $2.5 billion in bonuses after they ran the company into the ground. The senior executives of any firm that is bailed out by treasury should not be making more than the highest paid government official.”
Only hours earlier, however, McCain was on MSNBC, where he displayed a notable lack of concern — and a lack of awareness of the details — about the golden parachute enjoyed by former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, one of his own leading economic advisers.
Asked if he viewed Fiorina and her $45 million golden parachute as an example of the sort of person that’s the problem on Wall Street, McCain said: “I don’t think so.”
Asked to square her golden parachute with his pledge to crack down on such compensation, McCain responded: “I think she did a good job as CEO in many respects. I don’t know the details of her compensation package but she’s one of many advisers that I have.”
Pressed further, McCain claimed: “I do not know the details of what happened.”
He does not know the details of what happened. He also appears not to know who the Prime Minister of Spain is, or that Iraq doesn’t border Pakistan…
