This is true. In 2006, Steve Jobs made nearly $650 million dollars, due largely to vested stock. Jobs’ earnings more than doubled the earnings of America’s next-highest-paid CEO, Ray R. Irani from Occidental Petroleum. (Jobs’ declared annual salary of $1 was cute and all, but it was essentially a tax-cutting maneuver.)
In 2010, Jobs was still among the five highest-paid CEOs in America.
This is not to say that Jobs was not a brilliant, innovative man; this is not to demean the memory of Steve Jobs in any way. This is to say that, when you’re gathered on Wall Street in New York, or at City Hall in Los Angeles, and you’re protesting “Corporate Greed,” and then you take a brief time-out to publicly deify a man who made twice as much as any other CEO in America in 2006, well, there is some hypocrisy there, no?
If we’re viewing earnings comparatively (and that seems to be the closest the Occupy Movement can come to a mission statement: “The Wealthy Have Everything, The Workers Have Nothing”) then let’s do that. Have a look at the average yearly earnings for Apple employees, from Apple Store Mac Specialist ($11.67/hr), to Senior Software Engineer ($123,537/yr). Compare those salaries to the $749 million Jobs earned in 2010. It would seem that, as much as any other Evil CEO, Jobs had Everything while His Worker Bees had Nothing, comparatively.
I am in no way an apologist for “Corporate Greed,” whatever that means. But protesting vague concepts, openly stating that you have “no goal,” clamoring for more coverage from the New York Times, and engaging in what I consider to be massive hypocrisy doesn’t sit well with me. It is not the public dissent I disagree with (didn’t some sorely missed knowitall say, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”?), it is the lack of organization and absence of stated goals outside of “More Jobs! More Money!” that irk me. The Occupy Movement is not protest; it is a tantrum. You are protesting for The Workers in the places where The Workers work. That does not make sense to me. Stock brokers are not responsible for the lack of financial parity between classes in America; Los Angeles city officials are not responsible for controlling the minimum wage, or the price of tuition in America. To my mind, you are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts you claim to Love and/or Hate. That is disheartening to me because protest can affect change; protest has affected change. But in order to be effective, you must be more than vocal and visible. You must be versed in the language of the Ideas you’re defending. It will not be good enough to be louder than They are; we must be smarter than They are.
