Bring Back Huey Long

The Great Huey Long: His fist ever pounding the invisible hand of the market's giant invisible balls...

Let me preface: I know I could be the poster boy for what conservatives see in their minds whenever they pinch their noses and use the word 'progressive'. I'm an unreconstructed hater of inequality who's not ashamed to list Huey Long as a personal hero. Hell, I'd even say Marx and Engels were dead-on in their analysis of the class system as rigged to benefit the 'bourgeoisie' and screw over everyone else... So a story that makes corporate CEOs look like c*nts? Big whoopty doo. Just more liberal grist:

A new report concludes that chief executives of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers at other large U.S. companies... Each of the 50 companies examined in the report laid off at least 3,000 workers between November 2008 and April 2010.

Those CEOs include HP’s [Mark] Hurd, who slashed 6,400 jobs in 2009 — a year when his compensation amounted to $24.2 million.

Hurd made headlines last month when he suddenly resigned after an investigation into a sexual harassment claim against him found he had falsified expense reports related to meetings with a female contractor. Despite the findings, he walked away with a severance package that reportedly could be worth more than $40 million.

It's very easy for me to get angry about this story because I'm not one of those 50 CEOs. But how could anyone else in their right mind not get angry? How could a conservative process this information without wanting to push people like Mark Hurd ass-first into an industrial meat grinder? You'd need an almost Zen-like capacity to transcend anger. But that's not it... As a 'progressive' at the sharp end of conservative opprobrium, I know only too well that the kind of people who'd be cool with this aren't good at anger management.

So this is not even a political question, it's more psychological... hell, it might be anthro-f*cking-pological: What makes conservatives OK with this???