The 10 Greediest People of the Year

[Joanne98]

Hard times can be good times -- for the aggressively avaricious. Where others see pain, they see opportunity. In desperation, they delight. The grimmer the economic outlook, the more ghastly their grabbing.

And who grabbed the most outrageously in 2010? We offer below our annual take on America's ten greediest of the year.

10/ Nick Saban: A coach's fabulous crimson ride

America’s college football coaches seem to have made an end run around the Great Recession. In 2006, only 10 of the about 120 big-time college football coaches took home at least $2 million a year. The 2010 total: 38.

The king of them all: the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban, with a 2010 takehome at $6,087,349, six times the college football coaching average. Only five coaches in all of professional sports will this year make more than Saban.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/149273/the_10_greediest_people_of_the_year/

[CurtEastPoint]

1. No shame, no humility, no embarrassment... no conscience.

Hell yes I'm jealous but omigod enough is enough. How much money does one person need for God's sake?

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I remember saying almost 40 years ago, that we did not need to fear Russia, that greed

would destroy the USA. Guess I'm on track to being right.

[stray cat]

3. who in the US gave the least to help others on a percentage basis

greed is not what you earn but what you hoard

[progressoid]

4. Makes me ill.

[mudplanet]

5. all i can say is, fuck a bunch of football

There are only about a half dozen universities which actually make football pay for itself - the rest of them use tuition money to float the salaries of professional athletes. Which might be alright if they were honest about it, but they aren't. If you ask them about it they'll obfuscate, deny, and outright lie, meanwhile spouting all kinds of bullshit about "football building character." You can't train a snake to fly.

[pscot]

6. These guys faces should be up on the walls

of every post office in the country, along with their home addresses.

[CrispyQ]

7. Agreed.

This one is particularly vile.

snip...

7/ Don Blankenship: Dirty business as usual

Outside the nation’s coal fields, few Americans knew Don Blankenship, the CEO at Massey Energy, before last April. But that all changed after an explosion that month left 29 Massey miners dead. Reporters would soon grill Blankenship about the mine’s long history of safety violations, over 500 in 2009 alone.

“Violations,” the Massey chief coldheartedly retorted, “are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”

Almost as normal as windfall paychecks for Don Blankenship. The Massey CEO took home nearly $34 million in 2005, about quadruple the industry standard. Over the last three years, he has waltzed away from his office with another $38.2 million. But the real waltzing is only now beginning.

The 60-year-old Blankenship is retiring at the end of this year with a pension valued at $5.7 million, another $12 million in severance, still another $27.2 million in deferred pay, title to a company-owned house, and a two-year consulting agreement that pays $5,000 a month for no more than 32 hours work.

Blankenship may even exit, once all this year's stats have come in, with a 2010 “performance” bonus that factors in safety.

How can a coal company CEO with 29 dead miners get a safety bonus? Massey’s flagship safety standard, “Non-Fatal Days Lost,” merely multiplies “the number of employee work-related accidents times 200,000 hours, divided by the total employee hours worked.” Death doesn’t factor in.

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emphasis added