Some good letters from the New York Times:

Nice Work, if I Can Get It (2 Letters)

To the Editor:
Re "The Wages of Failure on Wall Street" (editorial, July 13):
I believe that I can muster the requisite skills to run a company into the ground. Since the compensation seems to be so very good, I think that just may be my next career move.
Fran Martone
Chicago, July 13, 2005

To the Editor:
A July 13 editorial rightly condemns Morgan Stanley for paying a departing co-president, Stephen S. Crawford, $32 million in compensation for three months of subpar work.
But an even greater outrage is how Morgan Stanley and like-minded companies finance lobbying campaigns to oppose increases in the federal minimum wage, arguing, with straight faces, that increasing a worker's pay to, say, $12,000 from $11,000 for a year of full-time work would somehow hamper their competitiveness.
If Morgan Stanley were to forgo paying Mr. Crawford his bonus for failure, the savings from that one small gesture alone could be used to give such modest wage increases to 32,000 workers.
Joel Berg
Executive Director, New York City
Coalition Against Hunger
New York, July 13, 2005

Around the same time a judge decided that Disney's board did not betray the trust of the shareholders when it paid Ovitz $132 million for 14 months of mediocre work. Apparently the decision is not meant to comfort board members or CEOs across the country, because the judge also said that past excesses might be forgiven, but that things are different in the 21st century. I don't see that: certain things are wrong no matter how, or when, you look at them, and a salary that exorbitant is surely one such thing. It's funny, isn't it, that the judge accepted the lame defense, "We grew up in a strange decade, we hung out with the wrong crowd; it's not our fault if we didn't know better."