Obama Caps Executive Salary at $500,000 Wall Street Whines

So the executives who ran their companies into the ground get $100,000 more than the president. It's a start. But Wall Street is already complaining. Heidi Moore at the Wall Street Journal says Americans just don't understand, that's not the way that Wall Street execs get paid.

But now there are little to no profits, and Wall Street bonuses are being called into question by everyone from Joe Six Pack to President Obama. So this year’s scuffles could easily escalate into a fight to the finish, with the infighting highlighting tensions among fiefs fighting for the long-time survival of their payouts.

I think we understand perfectly. If Wall Street doesn't like it, DON'T TAKE THE MONEY:

CNBC: The proposals drew a mixed reaction, from Washington to Wall Street to Corporate America..

“Golden parachutes and limits on pay fundamentally tie into whether you’ll be able to hire and recruit people to work at these large troubled companies. These new rules may make it difficult to recruit quality candidates in the future ," said Claudia Allen, who chairs the corporate governance group at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg, a Chicago-based law firm." However, this move is symbolic in that it sends a strong message to all companies, not just those receiving bailout funds. Obama is sending the message that companies need to focus on pay for performance." Obama's move comes amid public outcry over $18.4 billion in bonuses paid out in 2008 at a time when taxpayer money was shoring up the financial system.

Read the White House release on executive compensation.
Obama's statement.

Financial services industry pay in perspective from the Economic Policy Institute:

The financial services industry pays its chief executive officers (CEOs) more than any other industry, averaging $18,876,000 in 2007. The oil and gas industry, however, is a close second with average CEO pay of $18,406.000. Financial services is also the highest paid sector for CEOs if one examines the pay of the median CEO in each sector—the one whose compensation is greater than half but less than half of the other CEOs: the median CEO pay in financial services was $16,433,000 in 2007.

Read more.

Biden Appoints Jared Bernstein Economic Adviser

MA: Jared Bernstein is a highly qualified economist; he is affiliated with the Economic Policy Institute. If that doesn't ring any bells, well... KLANG KLANG KLANG. The EPI one of the nation's premiere left-leaning economics enterprises and is funded in part by labor unions. Bernstein served in the Clinton administration under Robert Reich. Bernstein, who has written academic tractates and popular works on the middle class squeeze, blogged regularly at Talking Points Memo.com.

His Bio:

JARED BERNSTEIN
Director of the Living Standards program

Areas of expertise
Labor markets • Economic Inequality • Poverty • Productivity • Technology • Policy Analysis

Biography
Jared Bernstein joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1992. His latest book is "Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)," which follows "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy." His areas of research include income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets and poverty, international comparisons, and the analysis of federal and state economic policies. He is the co-author of eight editions of the book The State of Working America and has published extensively in popular and academic venues, including The New York Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, and Research in Economics and Statistics. He is also a contributor to the financial news station CNBC.

Education
Ph.D. Social Welfare, Columbia University

What the Washington Post says about Bernstein:

Bernstein is a well-known skeptic on free trade and has worked for years as a senior official at EPI, a labor-funded think tank which advocates for low and middle-income workers.

On its website, the group writes that "The story of international trade for the American economy is not win-win, but rather good news, bad news. The good news is that some Americans will reap large rewards, and these rewards will actually be so large as to raise the average income of the entire American economy."

Some of Bernstein's diaries at DKos
The announcement from the Obama team:

Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor to the Vice President
Jared Bernstein is an expert in the areas of federal, state and international economic policies, specifically the middle-class squeeze, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets, poverty, and international comparisons. Bernstein has been an economist at the Economic Policy Institute since 1992 and is a renowned author of several books and academic treatises on the economy and the middle class. From 1995-1996, he served as Deputy Chief Economist for the Department of Labor under Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Bernstein is on the Congressional Budget Office's advisory committee and has been a contributor to the financial news station CNBC. He has also taught at Howard University, Columbia University and New York University. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from the Manhattan School of Music; a Masters Degree in Social Work from the Hunter School of Social Work; a Masters Degree in Philosophy and Ph.D. in Social Welfare from Columbia University.