CEO earnings continue to increase

In yet another sign of a completely dysfunctional economic system, public company CEO pay has gone up yet again. They will argue that the reason is because profits are up, which is accurate. At the same time, there's a problem when the financial upside is always about the select few. What ever happened to thinking about a company as a whole rather than just the CEO or his close network?
For all of the griping by Baby Boomers about how narcissistic today's youth can be, they should step back and look at this culture of greed and selfishness. The problem has been growing since the Gordon Gekko 1980s Wall Street days. Each decade it gets worse and corporate culture becomes more self-centered and all about greed.

This trend has to stop if we're to have a future. It's not just about a handful of people yet that's what we see year after year from public companies. Why is it so socially acceptable to fire by the thousands (ahem, Meg Whitman) yet when companies keep employees, the executives make less?

There continues to be something profoundly wrong with the modern corporate world. If this is the best modern capitalism can offer, we have no future.

Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.

The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.