The insanity of the Wall Street ethos

To these guys, you're not human.
Unless you own stock. On Friday, I did something I had never done before: I attended a shareholder meeting of a publicly traded corporation. Technically speaking, I was a proxy for an account that held exactly one share of Occidental Petroleum. My official proxy form entitled me to attend the shareholder breakfast at a posh beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, as well as the shareholder meeting that followed it.

The official order of business for the shareholder meeting was the election of the board of directors, official approval of the compensation package for corporate executives, and appointment of an auditing firm. Technically, all of these were up for a vote of the shareholders, to be either affirmed or rejected at the meeting. In practice, however, the decisions had already been made: interests holding over 90 percent of the stock of Occidental Petroleum had already voted in favor of all packages, leaving the individual ballots we cast for our individual shares at the meeting worth less than a vote against the premier in Soviet Russia (though admittedly, slightly less risky). And although I did get the chance to cast my one share's worth of vote against the executive compensation package, that's not the reason I was there.

Rather, I was there as part of a "mic check" organized by Good Jobs LA to protest the company's practices regarding taxation and executive compensation. At a designated point in the shareholder meeting, the organizers of the event'who also had shareholder proxies entitling them to speak'interrupted the proceedings with the well-known "people's microphone" technique that has become the hallmark of the occupy movement. The chant highlighted the roughly $50 million of compensation paid to Executive Chairman Ray Irani, who was chairing the meeting at the time, while California's education system continues to suffer budget cuts and our streets fall increasingly into disrepair. At the end, the dozens of protesters took up the traditional refrain of "we are the 99 percent" before being escorted out of the room.

After the interruption had ceased, Mr. Irani resumed the scripted meeting. But before doing so, he said something very telling. No cameras or recording equipment were permitted in the meeting room, so this quote is entirely from memory; while not every word may be in precise order, however, the meaning is clear:

They say they're the 99 percent, but over 90 percent of the shareholders have already voted for the proposals. So they're the 99 percent, but of what, I'm not sure.

This statement drew a chuckle from the remaining crowd'mostly corporate types in suits who were there to marvel at the magnificence of the company's annual dividend increase. But Mr. Imani's statement about the 99 percent is telling, not just for its callousness, but about the particular worldview it seems to convey.

In Irani's worldview, entities only matter to the degree to which they own stock. The people who voiced their opinion of protest at the shareholder meeting were indeed shareholders and were part of the lower 99th percentile of annual income in the United States, but since they weren't 90 percent of the stock, their opinions and feelings were not only an irrelevant afterthought. Rather, they literally did not exist.

The idea that someone could be an American citizen and be counted on that basis, to say nothing of being a shareholder in the public entity known as the human race, never occurred to Mr. Irani. Instead, the only world he knows is the world of the corporate boardroom. It is a world where men are not created equal, but shares are; and unlike a functioning democracy, where the rich and the poor have one vote alike, each share is a vote. The wealthier you are and the more shares you own, the more votes you have.

The lack of empathy and for an understanding of common humanity displayed by Mr. Irani was tragic and stunning. The only thing left to wonder is what came first.Does it take a total lack of empathy to become a CEO who gets paid $50 million per year and thinks of nothing but stock prices, or does being a CEO with that sort of compensation generate a total lack of empathy? Hard to say. But at that point, does it really matter?