Dick Parsons

Now here is a guy that really represents the absolute best in Corporate America.  Dick has made a long and prosperous career out of playing corporate musical chairs.

He somehow found a way to cash in as chairman of some of the largest least successful corporate behemoths ever produced in this country.  He was not only Chairman of Time Warner AOL corporation—a business merger that will live in infamy, but he also plopped his fannie down into the chairmanship of Citigroup just as the bailout music was reaching a crescendo in 2009.

He is retiring as chairman of  Citigroup at the end of this year and who knows where the music will take the musical chair master next.

He did have a bit of an embarrassment at the end though, when Citigroup shareholders voted against a $15,000,000 executive pay package he and his board had approved for Vikram Pandit, the badass genetic scientist behind Citigroupasaurus Rex.

Now perhaps the shareholders voted this package down because their shares have lost 90% of their value or perhaps it was the fact that Citigroup was the only major Wall Street bank to fail the stress test conducted by the Fed this Spring.

The true answer came when a reporter asked Dick straight out “why did shareholders reject the obscene compensation package for Pandit and other top Citigroup execs?”

Dick’s answer was classic:  He said it was “a communication problem.”

And while the rejection may have been surprising and actually made for a news story, Dick got the last laugh. Because that vote on executive pay cast by the shareholders, the true owners of that company, that vote was non-binding.  So it isn’t like the shareholders can actually stop us from getting paid what we want, when we want it, no matter how badly we screw up the company—especially when we have the true master of musical chairmanship solving our ‘Communication Problems.”